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The New Yorker	[ "college admissions", "scams", "celebrity", "elizabeth holmes" ]	# The College-Admissions Scandal and the Banality of Scamming By Naomi Fry March 13th, 2019 07:38 PM --- On Monday night, HBO will air Alex Gibney's investigative documentary "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley." The film, which will also be released in theatres, focusses on the health-care startup Theranos and its founder and C.E.O., Elizabeth Holmes, who, for more than a decade, defrauded investors, board members, and the public, when she falsely claimed that her company's blood-testing technology—largely nonexistent, it turned out—would revolutionize the medical industry. With her spookily unblinking blue eyes, sonorous, apparently fake baritone, and uniform of Steve Jobs-like black turtlenecks, Holmes is the kind of character whose rise-and-fall story is made especially riveting by her eccentricities, and Gibney's splashy documentary is widely anticipated. "9 day countdown for the Theranos documentary," a friend posted on Twitter, on Sunday, followed by a series of emojis, including a bloody syringe and a heart-eyed face. Two days later, the same friend tweeted, "Elizabeth Holmes is pissed she didn't think of this college admissions scam first." As my colleague Jia Tolentino wrote last June—after the publication of "Bad Blood," John Carreyrou's book about the Holmes affair—grifter season comes irregularly but often in America. Its recurring arrival is marked by the appearance of fraudsters whose flagrant dishonesty captures the public imagination. Their stories allow us to vicariously live out our worst urges, but they also present us with open-and-shut arcs that show crime doesn't pay (in a world that, more often than not, suggests that it does). Our hunger for scam stories has lately seemed endless. In the past twelve months, we've had not only Holmes but also Anna Delvey, the young Russian woman who scammed her way through New York's trendy and moneyed downtown circles, and Billy McFarland, the bro-ish entrepreneur whose Fyre Fest fraud held so much public fascination that it was portrayed in not one but two documentaries this winter. The latest scandal—the one that my friend was tweeting about—emerged on Tuesday, almost as if it were timed to serve as part of a viral-marketing strategy leading up to the Gibney documentary. (The tagline, if there was one, might have been, "You like scams, remember?") This time, the target in question wasn't health care but college admissions. In a government investigation that began in 2011, and went by the appealingly retro name "Operation Varsity Blues," more than thirty wealthy parents were charged with buying entry to a series of more or less selective schools for their academically middling children. Among the parents were C.E.O.s, a top lawyer, finance bigwigs, and even two Hollywood actors: Felicity Huffman, of the mid-two-thousands nighttime soap "Desperate Housewives," and Lori Loughlin, of the popular nineties sitcom "Full House." (Many of the parents have not yet entered pleas.) The people involved weren't odd birds, like Holmes, nor did they cloak their scamming, as she did, in lofty talk about the good of humanity. But, like the Theranos hoaxster, they were plenty wealthy, and appeared very comfortable with lying without compunction to get their way, and with throwing around hundreds of thousands of dollars in their quest to buy status. They were immediately fascinating characters to me: vulgar, entitled, and un-self-aware, they seemed to embody the latest version of the showy American id, not unlike Bravo's Real Housewives, or the Kardashians, or, for that matter, the Trump family. Along with the indictment, the Department of Justice released a two-hundred-and-four-page affidavit, which contains the facts pertaining to the criminal complaint, including detailed records of communications between the accused parents and William Singer, who ran the scheme. As the owner of a college-admissions-consulting business in moneyed Newport Beach, California, Singer provided his clients with proctors and test administrators who helped falsify their usually unsuspecting children's SAT and ACT scores, and he bribed college officials to recommend that prospective students be admitted to their institutions as athletes, even though they were nothing of the sort. In 2018, Singer became a witness for the government, and agreed to wear a wire; many of the conversations that are documented in the affidavit were recorded with his knowledge, after he was turned. (He is referred to in the document as "CW-1," or "Cooperating Witness 1.") As I read the documents, I wondered why perusing the minute interactions between Singer and his clients gave me so much pleasure. The people whose words are in the affidavit—save for Singer, post-flip—thought they were doing something that would remain private. Part of what I was experiencing was the slightly gross excitement one feels when sneakily reading a diary: fulfilling the prurient fantasy of observing people behaving despicably, as they really are. But what captured my attention even more was the sheer everydayness of the documented conversations, whose polite blandness, in the context of their apparent criminality, often led to high comedy. In one moment, Loughlin expresses her happiness at her younger daughter's fraudulent acceptance at the University of Southern California by texting Singer a high-five emoji. (Loughlin and her husband, the designer Mossimo Giannulli, allegedly paid Singer half a million dollars to help recruit their two daughters to U.S.C. as crew coxswains, though it is doubtful whether either had ever set foot in a rowboat.) Elsewhere, Huffman responds "aw" when Singer tells her that the crooked proctor who allegedly took the SATs for one of her daughters, in exchange for fifteen thousand dollars, had just had a baby; in another e-mail, she notifies Singer of a possible snag to the scheme, and writes, "Ruh Ro!" A marketing C.E.O. provides Singer with a spidery handwriting sample from her son so that a proctor can ape it on the ACT, writing, dryly, "Good luck with this." At one point, Singer has the face of a client's child crudely Photoshopped onto the body of a football player to convince an admissions committee that he is a worthy recruit. (He doesn't even play the sport.) When Singer tells two other clients—one an impact investor at a private-equity firm, the other a casino-industry executive—of some of the finer tricks of his scheme, they respond, repetitively, "I love it." For years, it's been known that the college-admissions process itself is a kind of scam. In his book "The Price of Admission," from 2006, the investigative journalist Daniel Golden reveals the ways in which wealthy parents secure their children's acceptance to prestigious colleges through hefty donations. In one example, he describes how Charles and Seryl Kushner used a two-and-a-half-million-dollar donation to obtain an admission to Harvard for their son, Jared, who is now the President's son-in-law. (The Kushners have denied that the gift was related to Jared's admission.) In an interview with my colleague Isaac Chotiner, on Tuesday, Golden noted that, although participating in allegedly criminal activities, the parents involved in the current scandal were simply pushing an already corrupt system to its logical conclusion. There is no doubt of the continuity between the two types of admission schemes, and that the technically legal one isn't any more ethical than the other. This week's exposure of the college-admissions scam is significant exactly because, in its trite ordinariness, it makes granular and concrete what is usually abstract and difficult to pin down. The parents who responded "I love it" to Singer's criminal propositions reminded me, viscerally, of Donald Trump, Jr.,'s breezy e-mail reply when, in 2016, he was told of a Russian source's ability to share dirt on Hillary Clinton: "If it's what you say I love it." When the e-mail was revealed, in 2017, I felt a similar satisfaction. In both cases, casual corruption, usually obscured by several layers of secrecy and legal trickery, was finally laid bare. The people involved were so self-satisfied and secure in their power that they greeted unethical, perhaps felonious proposals with complete nonchalance. A memorable passage in Carreyrou's "Bad Blood" describes how Tyler Shultz, a young employee at Theranos who ended up being one of the whistleblowers who brought down the company, finally gets to see what is inside the company's newfangled Edison device—touted by Holmes as a miracle machine that will transform blood testing: What's inside the sleek machine is ugly and dumb and workaday. But the moment when the façade is torn away from what lies beneath is also the moment when, one hopes, real change can begin.
Wired	[ "trolls", "politics", "texting", "national affairs", "campaigns", "2018 election" ]	# Fake Beto O'Rourke Texts Expose New Playground for Trolls By Issie Lapowsky September 7th, 2018 03:45 PM --- Someone hijacked a volunteer tool to make it look like Beto O'Rourke encouraged voter fraud—and that could just be the beginning. A screenshot of the suspicious text message began making the rounds on social media Wednesday. "Hi, it's Patsy here w/Beto for Texas. Our records indicate that you're a supporter," the text message read, purportedly coming from a volunteer for Texas Senate hopeful Beto O'Rourke's campaign. "We are in search of volunteers to help transport undocumented immigrants to polling booths so that they will be able to vote. Would you be able to support this grassroots effort?" The text did originate from a service called Relay, which O'Rourke's volunteers use to contact potential voters. But the message itself—promoting overt voter fraud—wasn't sanctioned by the campaign. "It was sent by an impostor," O'Rourke's communications director Chris Evans said in a statement. The opposing Ted Cruz campaign has said they had nothing to do with it either. Within a day, Relay shut down the account behind the phony solicitation. The hoax was short-lived, and, Relay CEO Daniel Souweine assures WIRED, is "a total outlier," among the millions of texts that have been sent through the platform this cycle. And yet, the entire ordeal reveals a new and largely undiscussed battleground in the information war being fought on just about every digital front. Ironically, the text began circulating online just as top executives from both Facebook and Twitter appeared before Congress, laying out their plans to prevent trolls and propagandists from using their platforms to spread disinformation. They spoke of using artificial intelligence and legions of human moderators to root out bad behavior, while lawmakers promised regulation to keep the companies accountable. Meanwhile, a growing number of campaigns and political groups are relying on texting tools that have virtually no guardrails at all. They allow any campaign volunteer to access a list of phone numbers, and send whatever message they please. Because volunteers send each message individually, and have the freedom to edit what each one says, these so-called peer-to-peer texts circumvent the regulatory restrictions the Federal Communications Commission places on robotexts. During the 2016 election, both the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders campaigns demonstrated the effectiveness of the approach, leading to a spike in activity in the run up to the midterm elections this fall. Despite their sudden growth, these young companies have failed to prepare for the type of manipulation that has plagued other, larger tech platforms. Instead, they leave it to the campaigns to thoroughly vet their volunteers, just as they would a phone-banker or in-person canvasser. "The more barriers to entry you have, the less likely trolls are to jump through them," says Souweine, who founded Relay after leading Sanders' national texting program in 2016. He found out about the phony O'Rourke text the way most people did: On Twitter. Relay quickly shut down the account, but Souweine declined to share details about the perpetrator, saying it's up to the campaign to investigate who the person was and how much damage they did. According to Evans, "not a large amount of messages," were sent, but the communications director declined to provide a specific number, and didn't respond to repeated requests for comment about whether and how the campaign monitors volunteers' texts. All it takes to sign up as a texter for O'Rourke is filling out a form on his webpage. You then receive an email with instructions for setting up a Slack and Relay account, and a link to a site where you can sign up for a shift. The email comes with instructional YouTube videos, which explain how it all works. Volunteers log into Relay, where the campaign issues them a preloaded script and list of people to contact. It takes about 30 minutes to click send on each individual text, and volunteers are free to edit the message as they see fit. About 10 to 15 percent of voters reply, according to the video, and when they do, the campaign offers up a list of scripted responses about, for example, where voters can secure a yard sign. After the texts are sent, campaigns can check what's gone out for any irregularities. But in the case of the O'Rourke text, the damage was already done. Souweine emphasizes that what happened to O'Rourke's campaign is incredibly rare. "There's a scant few times where this has ever become an issue. You don't build software for the edge cases," he says. Practitioners in the field argue that what happened to O'Rourke is the risk you take when you enlist volunteers to spread your message, no matter the medium. "Anyone can pass a smell test, become a door-knocker for a campaign, and say something crazy," says Gerrit Lansing, former chief digital officer for the Republican National Committee who cofounded the peer-to-peer texting company Opn Sesame. At least texts leave a digital trail behind, he adds. True enough, but texters also operate on a much larger scale than the average door-knocker. The O'Rourke campaign's training videos say texters typically contact 500 to 800 potential voters in a 30-minute period. In the time it takes to catch a problematic message, hundreds or thousands of people could have been misled. And in a tight race like O'Rourke's, that matters. Some platforms have developed tools to alert their clients to anomalies after the fact. Left-leaning campaigns and organizations have used a tool called Hustle to send and receive 17.5 million political messages this year alone. Hustle uses automated triggers that let its staffers know if, for instance, a given message drives an unusually high number of people to opt-out of text messages altogether. "Our client success managers would investigate in real-time," says Roddy Lindsay, CEO of Hustle. Still, even that safeguard comes after the fact. These risks have been top of mind lately for Sangeeth Peruri, CEO of another texting company called VoterCircle. Unlike Hustle, Relay, or Opn Sesame, VoterCircle is a friend-to-friend service, meaning that volunteers first upload their own contact lists to see which of their friends a given campaign might want to reach. Then, they're free to contact them by email or text. This tool has been used to send hundreds of thousands of messages during the Virginia gubernatorial elections and the special election in Alabama, among other key races. During the Virginia race, Peruri says he was afraid that some of the neo-Nazis who rallied in Charlottesville just months before might try to co-opt the Democrats' message. So VoterCircle set up an approval system on its email service: Any time someone changed the given script, the campaign would have to give the OK before it went out. Though campaigns had the option to turn this off, VoterCircle made it the default setting, meaning most left it in place. "We never saw any nefarious activity, but we were protected," Peruri says. In a few cases, he says, it helped campaigns better understand the kind of message their volunteers thought would resonate most. For now, peer-to-peer texting remains a regulatory gray area. While the FCC has strict rules around robocalls and texts, it hasn't tried to rein in this new class of companies. The industry is hoping to keep it that way. Earlier this year, a lobbying group called P2P Alliance, of which Opn Sesame is a member, issued a petition asking the FCC to clarify that peer-to-peer texting is exempt from regulations laid out in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which restricts automated dialing and texting. In the absence of federal guidelines, it's up to the companies, and the campaigns themselves, to prevent misleading messages from being sent in their name. Lucky for O'Rourke, the message the rogue texter sent was outrageous enough to be easily dismissed as a troll. But what if a slightly savvier bad actor tweaked the message in a way the average voter could believe? And what if they weren't the only ones? Right now, it's not at all clear these platforms would be prepared to do much about it. Sure, this text may be an outlier today. But sometimes an outlier is really just a warning sign.
Associated Press News	[ "Colleges and universities", "Education", "Madison" ]	# Enrollment inches upward in Universities of Wisconsin system October 29th, 2024 05:25 PM --- MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Overall enrollment in the Universities of Wisconsin system's four-year schools ticked upward this fall compared with last year, data released Tuesday shows. The system released enrollment numbers as of the 10th day of the 2024 fall semester. They show overall enrollment stood at 164,431 students, up 1.2% from the 10th day of the 2023 fall semester. UW-Green Bay saw 975 new students for a 10.5% increase in enrollment, the largest percentage jump among the 13 four-year schools. Enrollment at UW-Madison, the system's flagship university, increased nearly 3%. UW-Superior, the most remote campus, in Douglas County in far northwestern Wisconsin, saw a 3.6% increase. Five schools saw their enrollment shrink, including Eau Claire, Oshkosh, Parkside, Platteville and Stout. Overall enrollment at the system's two-year branch campuses fell 22%. The most dramatic drop-off was at UW-Stevens Point's Marshfield campus, where enrollment plunged nearly 45% compared with fall 2023. UW officials have blamed declining numbers of high school graduates and more graduates eschewing college for the workforce for faltering enrollment.
The New Yorker	[ "fox news", "tucker carlson", "tv" ]	# Can Tucker Carlson Be Shamed? By Andrew Marantz March 13th, 2019 05:08 PM --- On his prime-time Fox News show, the most popular cable-news program in its time slot, Tucker Carlson presents himself as an ideological maverick and a crusader for freedom. He often speaks, fervently and at great length, about how the left is trying to stifle his speech. "They seek power, and they plan to win it, whatever it takes," he said in his opening monologue on Monday night. "If that includes getting you fired, or silencing you, or threatening your family at home, or throwing you in prison, O.K." He went on in this vein for six and a half minutes. At no point was he interrupted or arrested by jackbooted thugs. After concluding his unapologetic apologia, instead of turning to any number of momentous issues facing the country, he devoted more time to "the left's crackdown on dissent." The "dissent," in this case, was a decade-old cache of audio recordings of Carlson speaking on a morning radio show, based in Tampa, hosted by a shock jock known as Bubba the Love Sponge. Carlson's comments, which were recently unearthed by the left-wing watchdog organization Media Matters, range from inappropriate to deeply troubling. (Carlson calls women "extremely primitive" and expresses contrarian opinions about a polygamist religious sect that are too much even for the Love Sponge.) This is not the only recent scandal involving Carlson; again and again and again, he has espoused views that sound uncannily similar to white-nationalist propaganda. (At least the white nationalists seem to think so.) Fox News—which, like Carlson, has become less fair and balanced with each passing month of Donald Trump's Presidency—has stood by its host. Lately, though, Carlson's show has been losing advertisers. This, apparently, is cause for concern. On Wednesday morning, Fox News hosted advertising executives at the network's headquarters, on Sixth Avenue. Outside, Media Matters held a demonstration. "They're in there trying to reassure the advertisers that everything is fine, that it's business as usual," Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters, said, shivering in the cold. "Obviously, the people here don't think that everything's fine." Behind him were a few dozen protesters holding up picket signs ("Fox News is Toxic"; "Don't Be a Sucker for Tucker"). Carusone addressed the crowd, followed by the comedian and activist Lizz Winstead. "I've spent my career calling out the right-wing media," Winstead, the co-creator of "The Daily Show" and a former Air America radio host, said. "The lies they tell create a toxic environment, and it has real consequences." A few more activists spoke, leading the crowd in some chants. Winstead moved to the edge of the crowd. "Nobody has a constitutional right to a TV show," she said. "If you're standing on a street corner shouting racist shit, then, fine, say whatever you like. But, the second it passes your lips, everyone else gets a chance to respond to it. That's actually how free speech works." "I'm sympathetic to the idea that we shouldn't shut down every opinion just because we don't like it, that that creates a chilling effect," Carusone said. "But I do think it's acceptable to say that you shouldn't get to have the biggest advertisers in the world paying you hundreds of millions of dollars to project racism and bigotry. I think that's a place to draw a line." Carusone's critics have accused him of trying to shame his targets into submission, and he seemed to concede the criticism. "Sometimes shaming is how we impose norms as a society," he said. "Nobody likes the hall monitor, but sometimes you need one."
Associated Press News	[]	# Trudeau dice que Canadá permitirá menos inmigrantes, admite que su política falló By ROB GILLIES October 24th, 2024 06:08 PM --- TORONTO (AP) — El primer ministro canadiense, Justin Trudeau, dijo el jueves que su país reducirá de manera importante la cantidad de nuevos inmigrantes que pueden entrar al país, tras reconocer que su gobierno no logró un buen equilibrio tras la pandemia. El gobierno liberal de Trudeau fue criticado por su plan de permitir la entrada de 500.000 nuevos residentes permanentes en el país durante cada uno de los siguientes dos años. El jueves, señaló que el objetivo para el próximo año sería de 395.000, y que la cifra se reducirá a 380.000 en 2026 y a 365.000 en 2027. "En los tumultuosos tiempos, mientras salíamos de la pandemia, no logramos un buen equilibrio entre abordar las necesidades de trabajo y mantener el crecimiento de la población", dijo Trudeau. "La inmigración es esencial para el futuro de Canadá, pero se debe controlar y debe ser sostenible". Trudeau, que enfrenta llamados de miembros de su propio partido para no buscar un cuarto mandato, ha sido criticado por sus políticas migratorias y el impacto negativo que el crecimiento poblacional ha tenido en los precios de la vivienda. Señaló que su gobierno reducirá el número de inmigrantes admitidos por Canadá en los próximos tres años, y que esto congelará el crecimiento poblacional en los próximos dos años. Canadá alcanzó los 41 millones de habitantes en abril. La población era de 37,5 millones en 2019. Trudeau dijo que Canadá necesita estabilizar su crecimiento poblacional para permitir que todos los niveles del gobierno realicen los cambios necesarios a la atención sanitaria, la vivienda y los servicios sociales, de manera que pueda albergar a más personas en el futuro. El ministro de Inmigración, Marc Miller, dijo que la reducción en las cifras de inmigración ayudará a resolver la escasez de vivienda en el país. También reconoció el cambio en la opinión pública con respecto a la inmigración. "El volumen que hemos presentado es preocupante", dijo Miller. Señaló que el gobierno se da cuenta de la presión que enfrentan los canadienses, y de que debe adaptar sus políticas en consecuencia. Afirmó que los líderes del gobierno han escuchado y seguirán protegiendo la integridad del sistema de inmigración y harán crecer la población de Canadá de forma responsable.
Wired	[ "movies", "internet" ]	# How 'Searching' Nails Our Online Anxieties By Brian Raftery September 7th, 2018 03:11 PM --- John Cho's new movie gets at the heart of the everyday unease of being online in 2018. One of the more charming slices of '90s-era web-culture ephemera is Pizza.net, the fake pie-delivery site frequented by Sandra Bullock's hacker in 1995's The Net. Though glimpsed only briefly in the movie, Pizza.net was clearly among the chillest faux-online services of the Clinton era. Check out its easy-clicking interface, its friction-free payment plan! The experience of using Pizza.net is so mellow, it will inspire you to throw on a flannel and cue up some Annie Lennox. The Net was released back when Hollywood was still trying to combine high drama with high baud rates, resulting in movies like Hackers, Masterminds, the still-quite-charming Sneakers. Twenty years later, these films—and the technology they employed—are amusing for all sorts of reasons: Their clunkiness, their design, their forced edginess. And while these films were supposed to be thrillers, they make being online back then seem positively quaint. Granted, hacking into a police database from atop the Empire State Building probably felt dangerous in the '90s. But that's nothing compared to the everyday anxiety of being online in 2018. Searching, the low-budget screen-gem that became one of the summer's box-office surprises, might be the first movie to capture the ambient stress that comes with being constantly connected. It's a two-tiered drama, one that unfolds largely among a series of desktop apps and websites. The initial focus of attention is David Kim (John Cho), a widowed father trying to track down Margot, his missing teenage daughter by commandeering her computer and social accounts and using them to piece together why she disappeared. It's a thriller in which the shocks are delivered not by slowly opening closet doors, but by a series of quickly clicked-open windows. Had Searching director Aneesh Chaganty been trying to create suspense in the same way 20 years ago, it likely would've felt as clunky as a teen's Livejournal—and probably wouldn't have made sense to half the audience. But in 2018 it feels all too real now that almost everyone is hyperconnected. "People who are making movies now grew up with tech in a way that has pervaded our lives," Chaganty says. "We have grown up with it around us so much that it would be wrong for us to do it any less than accurately." But beyond its realism, there's another source of unease in Searching—one that becomes all the more pronounced on second viewing. Sitting in the theater, you're essentially watching a giant computer monitor, one full of ongoing applications and conversations. All of them demand David's attention—and yours. As Searching continues, David's desktop grows more crowded and anxious, until it becomes a character in its own right—a bright grid of unopened emails, event-cluttered calendars, time-devouring text messages, callous YouTube comments, and blinking cursors. Such digital-gridlock isn't all that different from what's on most desktops, of course. And after an hour or so of Searching, watching from afar as David deals with a flood of information, it's hard not to transfer your own tech anxiety onto the big screen: Is he going to let all of those emails pile up? When will he answer that incoming call? And just how easily could my parents break into my Facebook account? Depending upon where your eyes fall on the screen, you'll see either an affirming tale of how technology can aid us, or an unsettling reminder of how crowded and needy and potentially ruinous our computers have become since the low-bandwidth heyday of Pizza.net. Or maybe both. What's most remarkable about Searching is the way it takes one of the oldest, most ineffective movie tropes of the last 25 years—that of a lone figure sitting at a computer, desperately awaiting information—and manages to make it compelling not just for a few seconds, but for an entire film. Part of its appeal is the way David's online behavior mimics our own: The way we type out a long, venting text before re-considering and erasing it altogether; the way we catch our strange expression in a FaceTime video, and quickly correct ourselves. But maybe the real reason the movie works so effectively is that, while watching David struggle through a dense and semi-menacing online world, we're also quietly searching for ourselves.
The New Yorker	[ "music", "drummers", "postscript" ]	# The Drummer Hal Blaine Provided the Beat for American Music By Amanda Petrusich March 13th, 2019 04:24 PM --- It seems likely that the drummer Hal Blaine—who died on Monday, at age ninety, of natural causes, at his home, in Palm Desert, California—has done more to quicken my heartbeat than any other American musician. By his own estimation, he played on more than six thousand songs as a member of the Wrecking Crew, a Los Angeles-based cabal of studio professionals who began as the producer Phil Spector's house band but ended up appearing on hundreds of Top Forty hits. The odd, nervous titters in the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations," that eager on-the-four snare at the start of the Ronettes' "Be My Baby," the drums on Elvis Presley's "Return to Sender," the theme from "Batman," Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night," Sam Cooke's "Another Saturday Night," The Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man," The Monkees' "Mary, Mary," and Barbra Streisand's "The Way We Were"—it's all Blaine. Brian Wilson recently called him "the greatest drummer ever." He is so unquestionably essential to the last half century of American popular music—to the national condition—that it almost feels as though his face should be on currency. My favorite Blaine beat isn't really a beat at all but an intrusion, almost a pox: those enormous, echoing whomps right in the middle of Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer." Blaine was going for what he later called a "cannonball-like" sound, something to bruise the song, which he felt was too sweet, too much like a lullaby. The producer Roy Halee had an idea—set up some of Blaine's drums in an empty elevator shaft. "I could hear when the music got to the 'Lie-la-lie' part, where I hit the drums as hard as I could," Blaine later told Robert Hilburn, Paul Simon's biographer. Blaine's drums sound, to me, like a million doors slamming shut in my face. Every time I hear the song, I think again about how a definitive "no" can sometimes be a gift: gather yourself and go do something different. "I am leaving, I am leaving, but the fighter still remains," Simon sang. Lie-la-lie. Whomp. Like the best and most storied session bands, the Wrecking Crew never messed up the track; they were the gang to call when you required dexterousness, ease. It's easy to be dismissive of studio musicians and accompanists in a "Those who can't, teach" way—to presume that there's not much creativity inherent to the work and that they exist merely to elevate and support the star. Blaine's acumen was not in showiness but in capability. "I was never a soloist, I was an accompanist. That was my forte. I never had Buddy Rich chops," he told Modern Drummer, in 2005. Yet his versatility—an almost uncanny ability to instantly adapt to nearly any style—is, in the end, what made him so peerless. He always knew what a song needed, and he always knew how to play it. When I was first starting out as a music journalist, I remember absorbing a bit of advice—cribbed, I believe, from the Rolling Stone writer Jancee Dunn's memoir, "But Enough About Me"—about the often unnerving process of interviewing rock bands, especially when all four or five or six members are glaring at you, each trying to one-up the other in a cool display of total indifference. "Pay attention only to the drummer," Dunn writes. Nobody talks to the drummer! The drummer is often wearing shorts when nobody else is wearing shorts. The drummer spends a lot of time in a soundproof, windowless basement. Nobody can even see the drummer at the back of the stage, manically swinging away a few feet behind everybody else, sweating and dutifully keeping time. The other members of the band will be so thoroughly bewildered and perturbed by your interest in the drummer that they'll start talking over each other, trying to recapture your attention. (I'll only say that the strategy is worth trying.) Despite a decades-long career, Blaine was never as recognizable as Elvis or Sinatra. Session musicians often feel like ghosts in that way—present, but invisible. Still, it is impossible to imagine those songs working in the same way without him. And Blaine was hardly suffering for it; by all accounts, the dude lived well. In interviews, Blaine always appeared tan, and he often wore enormous, expensive-looking sunglasses—little things that suggest a person may have recently spent time on a yacht. "I literally had Hollywood by the old balls," he told Rolling Stone, in 2017. Blaine had an estate and a Rolls-Royce. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, in 2000. Last year, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys. He frequently compared his success to "falling into a vat of chocolate." He especially enjoyed telling a story about Bruce Gary, of the Knack, who was once disappointed, Blaine said, to find out that "a dozen of his favorite drummers were me."
Wired	[ "neural networks", "artificial intelligence", "machine learning" ]	# AI Can Recognize Images, But Text Has Been Tricky—Until Now By Gregory Barber September 7th, 2018 01:55 PM --- New approaches foster hope that computers can comprehend paragraphs, classify email as spam, or generate a satisfying end to a short story. In 2012, artificial intelligence researchers revealed a big improvement in computers' ability to recognize images by feeding a neural network millions of labeled images from a database called ImageNet. It ushered in an exciting phase for computer vision, as it became clear that a model trained using ImageNet could help tackle all sorts of image-recognition problems. Six years later, that's helped pave the way for self-driving cars to navigate city streets and Facebook to automatically tag people in your photos. In other arenas of AI research, like understanding language, similar models have proved elusive. But recent research from fast.ai, OpenAI, and the Allen Institute for AI suggests a potential breakthrough, with more robust language models that can help researchers tackle a range of unsolved problems. Sebastian Ruder, a researcher behind one of the new models, calls it his field's "ImageNet moment." The improvements can be dramatic. The most widely tested model, so far, is called Embeddings from Language Models, or ELMo. When it was released by the Allen Institute this spring, ELMo swiftly toppled previous bests on a variety of challenging tasks---like reading comprehension, where an AI answers SAT-style questions about a passage, and sentiment analysis. In a field where progress tends to be incremental, adding ELMo improved results by as much as 25 percent. In June, it was awarded best paper at a major conference. Dan Klein, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, was among the early adopters. He and a student were at work on a constituency parser, a bread-and-butter tool that involves mapping the grammatical structure of a sentence. By adding ELMo, Klein suddenly had the best system in the world, the most accurate by a surprisingly wide margin. "If you'd asked me a few years ago if it was possible to hit a level that high, I wouldn't have been sure," he says. Models like ELMo address a core issue for AI-wielding linguists: lack of labeled data. In order to train a neural network to make decisions, many language problems require data that's been meticulously labeled by hand. But producing that data takes time and money, and even a lot of it can't capture the unpredictable ways that we speak and write. For languages other than English, researchers often don't have enough labeled data to accomplish even basic tasks. "We're never going to be able to get enough labeled data," says Matthew Peters, a research scientist at the Allen Institute who led the ELMo team. "We really need to develop models that take messy, unlabeled data and learn as much from it as possible." Luckily, thanks to the internet, researchers have plenty of messy data from sources like Wikipedia, books, and social media. The strategy is to feed those words to a neural network and allow it to discern patterns on its own, a so-called "unsupervised" approach. The hope is that those patterns will capture some general aspects of language---a sense of what words are, perhaps, or the basic contours of grammar. As with a model trained using ImageNet, such a language model could then be fine-tuned to master more specific tasks---like summarizing a scientific article, classifying an email as spam, or even generating a satisfying end to a short story. That basic intuition isn't new. In recent years, researchers have delved into unlabeled data using a technique called word embeddings, which maps how words relate to each other based on how they appear in large amounts of text. The new models aim to go deeper than that, capturing information that scales up from words up to higher-level concepts of language. Ruder, who has written about the potential for those deeper models to be useful for a variety of language problems, hopes they will become a simple replacement for word embeddings. ELMo, for example, improves on word embeddings by incorporating more context, looking at language on a scale of sentences rather than words. That extra context makes the model good at parsing the difference between, say, "May" the month and "may" the verb, but also means it learns about syntax. ELMo gets an additional boost by gaining an understanding of subunits of words, like prefixes and suffixes. Feed a neural network a billion words, as Peters' team did, and this approach turns out to be quite effective. It's still unclear what the model actually learns in the process of analyzing all those words. Because of the opaque ways in which deep neural networks work, it's a tricky question to answer. Researchers still have only a hazy understanding of why image-recognition systems work so well. In a new paper to appear at a conference in October, Peters took an empirical approach, experimenting with ELMo in various software designs and across different linguistic tasks. "We found that these models learn fundamental properties of language," Peters says. But he cautions other researchers will need to test ELMo to determine just how robust the model is across different tasks, and also what hidden surprises it may contain. One risk: encoding biases from the data used to train them, so doctors are labeled as men, and nurses as women, for example, as word embeddings have previously done. And while the initial results generated by tapping ELMo and other models are exciting, says Klein, it's unclear how far the results can be pushed, perhaps by using more data to train the models, or by adding constraints that force the neural network to learn more effectively. In the long run, AI that reads and talks as fluently as we do may require a new approach entirely.
Wired	[ "antibiotic", "bacterium", "animal", "infection", "strain" ]	# The Hidden Link Between Farm Antibiotics and Human Illness By Maryn McKenna September 7th, 2018 01:10 PM --- For decades, researchers sought evidence that antibiotics fed to farm animals transferred super bacteria to humans. Now a single study has provided a much needed smoking gun. For almost seven decades, we've routinely fed antibiotics to the animals we eat. That's just a few years less than we've taken antibiotics ourselves. And for just about as long, it's been clear that those antibiotic doses have been creating drug-resistant bacteria that pass from meat animals to make humans sick. The first outbreaks of drug-resistant foodborne illness were spotted as early as the mid 1950s, when an epidemic of resistant salmonella swept through southeastern England. That was the first of waves of outbreaks that occurred over decades, some small and some very large and widespread. One of the largest foodborne outbreaks in US history, which made 634 people in 29 states and Puerto Rico sick in 2013-14, was tracked back to chickens that had been given antibiotics in their feed. The connection isn't universally accepted, of course. Most of the studies linking farm antibiotic use and human illness have been observational, not experimental — and that's given ag and pharma room to insist that the case against farm antibiotic overuse isn't solid. The argument has been that the bacterial traffic from animals to meat to humans isn't proven — and until it can be established with 100 percent certainty, the practice of giving livestock preventative antibiotics should continue. Now a new study, years in the making, goes further than any other to demonstrate that resistant bacteria can move from animals to humans via the meat they become. It also provides a model of how new surveillance systems might reduce that bacterial flow at its source on farms. It's just one study, but it possesses outsize significance, because it eliminates the uncertainty at the center of that bacterial flow. Outside of experimental conditions, it's never been possible to prove that this antibiotic given to that animal gave rise to this bacterium that ended up in that human. But this new work dives so deeply into the genomics of bacterial adaptation in food animals and humans, it proves the link that ag would rather deny. The study was led by Cindy Liu and Lance Price, the chief medical officer and the director of the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center at George Washington University. They began the research in previous roles at the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Flagstaff. That the work was done in Flagstaff is important: It's a small city without much migration in and out, which made it a self-contained natural laboratory. Every two weeks for a year, they bought meat in Flagstaff's supermarkets; at the same time, they collected bacteria from the blood and urine of patients in Flagstaff hospitals, and analysed both sets of samples for the presence of resistant bacteria. The idea was to capture the bacteria's prevalence and create a timeline of when strains arrived and how they spread across the city. If possible, they hoped to prove the strains' origin and the direction of any spread. There's an important nuance in the samples Liu and Price chose to collect. Foodborne bacteria — salmonella, campylobacter, shigella — have a self-evident connection to food and farms. But over about two decades, some researchers have become concerned about another bacterial threat that has a less obvious connection to food and a significant public health impact: a specific subset of the vast range of E. coli that have come to be called EXPEC — "extra-intestinal" pathogenic E. coli — because they can escape the gut and cause infections in other parts of the body. The bladder is often the entry portal for EXPECs, so urinary tract infections are often one of the first signs of infection. Untreated UTIs can climb up the urinary tract to the kidneys, and pass from them into the bloodstream — and drug-resistant UTIs are effectively untreated because they don't respond to the antibiotics given to cure them. EXPECs can also cause more serious illness than foodborne infections, all the way up to septic shock and death. The team took the meat samples and the bacterial isolates back to their lab and looked for organisms that were shared across both sets of samples. They found E. coli, which is a ubiquitous gut-dwelling pathogen, on almost 82 percent of the meat samples and 72 percent of the samples from patients. Among the many strains they found was one known as H22, which was present on chicken meat and in people, and carried genetic markers indicating it had occupied the guts of poultry first, and then adapted to humans. This is what earlier studies of EXPECs on meat and in humans lacked: evidence that meat strains and human infections were linked, not just in time and location, but in movement from animal to person. "I think this is the first time that we can truly establish the direction of transmission," Price told me. "This shows clearly that people are getting UTIs from E. coli that originate in poultry." Backing that up, the E. coli strains that crossed from birds to people were more likely than other strains in the samples to be resistant to the antibiotics tetracycline and gentamicin, which are used in poultry production. That affirms the observation, made in hundreds of studies at this point, that antibiotic use on farms creates resistant bacteria that cross to humans. The H22 strains were a tiny subset, about half a percent, of all the strains the team found. Scaled up to the US population, half a percent represents 30,000 to 40,000 cases per year of UTIs and kidney infections — but "the total number is almost certainly much higher," according to Price, given the other strains that remain to be analyzed. There's another key detail buried in Liu and Price's work. They proved the animal-human link by diving deep into the genomics of the strains they recovered; the H22 strains were within a larger group of E. coli strains that aren't usually associated with animals. Yet outside of academic labs, analyses of foodborne bacteria don't usually go that deep. They're not used in the most important federal analysis conducted every year in the United States by the CDC, FDA and USDA, a joint project called the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System or NARMS. The NARMS project looks for foodborne bacteria that have become antibiotic-resistant affecting humans, traveling on meat, and present in animals when they come to slaughterhouses. Every year it shows which types of meat are more likely to be carrying resistant bacteria and how multi-drug resistant the bacteria are. Because the meat is bought in retail stores, the labels on the packages can link the meat back to the processors it came from; in fact, those labels have been used in the past to solve foodborne outbreaks that stretched country-wide. As it stands, the NARMS system does a certain amount to identify where foodborne threats to health are coming from — but that data begins at the point at which animals enter the system to become the meat that processors sell. NARMS' access to slaughterhouses is limited, and the USDA has fought unsuccessfully for years to be allowed to sample meat animals while they're still on the farms where they were grown. If that access were expanded, and combined with both the existing label data and the fine-grained analysis that Liu and Price conducted in their labs, the result could be a monitoring system that would do much more to protect our food. Currently, surveillance illuminates the threats that are headed toward American consumers from the meat that is about to land on their plates. But a higher-resolution surveillance system could give us a view that goes from the plate all the way back to the farm, and maybe even to individual flocks that are harboring hazardous strains of bacteria. A system that fine-grained is a hope, not a present reality — but it's the direction we should move in, if we want our meals to be safe.
Voice Of America	[ "USA" ]	# Convicting Police of Murder Remains Rare in US By Masood Farivar April 20th, 2021 01:49 AM --- It took just three days after the April 11 killing of a young Black man by a white police officer in Minnesota for local prosecutors to announce charges in the case. Former Brooklyn Center police officer Kim Potter was charged on Wednesday with second-degree manslaughter in the shooting and killing of 20-year-old Daunte Wright during a traffic stop, Washington County Attorney Pete Orput announced. Potter's chief said Potter intended to use her Taser electroshock weapon but instead accidentally fired her gun. "We will vigorously prosecute this case and intend to prove that Officer Potter abrogated her responsibility to protect the public when she used her firearm rather than her Taser," Imran Ali, a prosecutor in Orput's office, said in a statement. While Wright's family is calling for murder charges against Potter, the alacrity with which Orput acted marks a shift from just a few years ago, when investigators would routinely spend months on a police shooting case only to decide against bringing charges. "That doesn't usually happen anymore. People won't put up with it," said David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who teaches about police behavior. The killing coincided with the final days of the trial of Derek Chauvin, the white former Minneapolis police officer charged with murder in the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died after Chauvin pinned Floyd's neck with his knee for more than nine minutes. Potter, a 26-year veteran of the Brooklyn Center Police Department, has pleaded not guilty. If convicted, she faces up to 10 years in prison. The fact that Potter was charged in the shooting just three days after the tragic incident "is a big, big change," Harris said, albeit "just not enough." The 2014 shooting of Michael Brown Jr., an 18-year-old Black man, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, coupled with Floyd's death, has helped spawn a nationwide protest movement against police brutality. In response, prosecutors have been much quicker to charge police officers for misconduct. Not only are they charging more officers but they're bringing cases more rapidly, Harris noted. But relative to total police shootings in the country, the number of such prosecutions remains infinitesimal. In 2020, American police killed 1,127 people, making the U.S. an outlier in fatal police shootings among Western democracies, according to a tally by Mapping Police Violence. Not a single police officer was convicted of murder or manslaughter last year. In Minnesota, prior to Floyd's death, only one police officer had been convicted of murder, for an on-duty shooting in 2017. Police work is often dangerous and even deadly, and law enforcement advocates say a large majority of fatal police shootings involve officers killing armed criminals. "Most of the police-involved shootings are lawful exercises of deadly force," said Cully Stimson, a former state and federal prosecutor and now the deputy director of the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation. The executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations was not available to comment before publication of this article. The recent outcry over deadly police shootings has stemmed from the killing of unarmed suspects, often African Americans killed by white police officers. While whites account for a little more than half of the victims of fatal police shootings, Blacks, who represent about 13% of the U.S. population, made up about 28% of those killed by police last year, according to Mapping Police Violence. In recent years, public outcry over the racial disparity in killings by police has led local and state prosecutors to charge more police officers involved in fatal shootings. Since the beginning of 2005, 140 police officers have been charged with murder or manslaughter in on-duty fatal shootings, resulting in 44 convictions, often for lesser offenses, according to a tally by Philip Stinson, a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University. Only seven have been convicted of murder. Prior to Brown's killing in Ferguson, an average of five police officers were charged with murder or manslaughter per year between 2005 and 2014, according to Stinson's data. But since 2015, the number has increased to about 13 per year. What is more, since June 1 last year, shortly after Floyd's death, 25 police officers have been charged with murder or manslaughter, including former Atlanta police officer Garrett Rolfe in the killing of Rayshard Brooks, according to Stinson's tally. That is as many as 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 combined. Still, Stinson says the increase is statistically insignificant. "If you think about it, with the ubiquity of video recordings, we still are not seeing more officers charged in these cases, which is really fascinating to me," Stinson said. And it's not for lack of trying by prosecutors, he said. In the United States, prosecution of a felony crime such as murder or manslaughter begins with a grand jury indictment. To obtain an indictment, prosecutors must first present the charges to a secret grand jury, typically made up of up to 23 citizens. "From what I hear, at least anecdotally, the prosecutors who have reached out to me from across the country have expressed their difficulties in getting grand juries to return indictments," Stinson said. There are several reasons grand juries refuse to indict officers involved in fatal shootings and prosecutors don't bring charges in the first place, according to legal experts. A key factor is the 1989 United States Supreme Court decision in a case known as Graham v. Connor. The justices held that claims of excessive force against police must be evaluated from the perspective of an "objectively reasonable" police officer, according to legal experts. "That standard favors the police because it tells jurors that they should look at the case through the eyes of a police officer, not with hindsight, and not only with their own experience but through the eyes of a police officer," Harris said. Unlike in most other countries, the United States elects rather than appoints local prosecutors, making them less willing to bring cases that they know they can't win. "They're going to hesitate," Harris said. Another reason is that jurors, drawn from the general population, tend to be sympathetic to police officers. In keeping with the Supreme Court ruling, they're instructed to bear in mind that police shootings occur in dangerous, fast-developing situations. "Juries are very reluctant to second-guess the split-second decisions of the police officers in potentially violent street encounters," Stinson said. "And we actually see the same result when judges are sitting as the trier of fact in bench trials where there are no juries." But while juries continue to give police officers the benefit of the doubt, Harris said that there are indications that attitudes are changing over the past year. "I wouldn't be surprised to look back three years from now and see that there were more convictions on a percentage basis than we have now," Harris said. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the NAPO did not respond to repeated requests for an interview with its executive director. The association did respond but was unable to make the director available.
The New Yorker	[ "paul manafort", "mueller investigation" ]	# Sentencing Is Not the End of the Paul Manafort Story By Eric Lach March 13th, 2019 02:08 PM --- If you couldn't get to the Washington, D.C., courtroom where Paul Manafort, the longtime D.C. lobbyist and onetime Donald Trump campaign chairman, was sentenced on Wednesday, one way to follow along was on Twitter, where reporters covering the case relayed the proceedings in short bursts of narration. Much of it turned on the question of who Manafort is at heart. "Manafort says he is 'a different person' than who he was when he first appeared before the court," HuffPost's Ryan Reilly wrote, describing Manafort's statement to the court. "Repeats 'power of prayer' line from last sentencing." Last week, in Virginia, Manafort had been sentenced to about four years in prison, for tax and bank fraud. (He had asked the judge in that case to be "compassionate," and it was a sentence he was fortunate to get—he was facing up to a quarter of a century behind bars.) The two cases—in Washington and Virginia—both emerged from the special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, though neither concerned collusion or meddling directly. In the Washington case, Manafort faced charges of foreign-lobbying violations, money laundering, and obstruction of justice, mostly stemming from his pre-Trump work on behalf of the Ukrainian government. Manafort had struck a plea deal with Mueller in the case—a sign that Mueller believed Manafort had some information he might want—but the deal fell apart last month, after Manafort lied to prosecutors. At Wednesday's hearing, Andrew Weissmann, a prosecutor on Mueller's team, argued that Manafort, despite his upbringing, means, and opportunities, had "served to undermine, not promote, American ideals." Manafort's lawyer, Kevin Downing, said that his client was remorseful and portrayed him as a kind of media victim. "If not for a short stint as a campaign manager in a presidential election, I don't think we'd be here today," he said, according to The Atlantic's Natasha Bertrand. (It's a banner week for quotes about what society does and doesn't let the powerful get away with. On Tuesday, while announcing charges in a sprawling college-admissions-conspiracy case, the U.S. Attorney in Massachusetts, Andrew Lelling, declared, "We're not talking about donating a building so that a school is more likely to take your son or daughter; we are talking about deception and fraud.") The judge in the Washington case, Amy Berman Jackson, sounded unmoved. At last week's sentencing, in Virginia, Judge T. S. Ellis had said that, apart from the numerous federal charges he had brought on himself, Manafort had "lived an otherwise blameless life." Jackson had a different read on the man before her. "The criminal conduct in this case was not an isolated, single incident," she said, according to Bertrand. "A significant portion of [Manafort's] career has been spent gaming the system." Then she imposed a sentence that adds forty-three months to Manafort's prison time, bringing his total sentence to seven and a half years. Manafort is sixty-nine years old, and will likely spend a good portion of the next decade incarcerated. He has kept quiet as his cases moved toward their conclusions, like a man waiting out a storm. Has the storm passed now, though? It's unlikely. Mueller's investigation continues, and House Democrats investigating the President have already asked Manafort for documents. Trump, meanwhile, has not ruled out a pardon. ("He'll make a decision when he is ready," Sarah Huckabee Sanders said of the President this week, when asked about Manafort.) Manafort's legal troubles, at least, will continue. Just after Jackson declared her sentence, the Manhattan District Attorney's office announced a new indictment against him.
Voice Of America	[ "USA" ]	# Bigger Than 2014: US Calls Out Russian Military Buildup Along Ukraine Border By Jeff Seldin April 20th, 2021 01:38 AM --- The United States renewed concerns about Russian military maneuvers along its border with Ukraine, charging that Moscow has now massed more troops in the area than when it invaded and seized Crimea seven years ago. "It is certainly bigger than that," Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters Monday, calling the ongoing buildup of Russian forces "very seriously concerning." "In general, we have continued to see this buildup increase," he said. "We certainly heard the Russians proclaim that this is all about training. It's not completely clear to us that that's exactly the purpose." The Pentagon's assertion is a slight change from previous statements, when it categorized the Russian troop buildup as merely the largest since the 2014 invasion of Crimea. And it follows similar intelligence assessments by European Union officials, who alleged there are now more than 100,000 Russian troops in the area. "It is the highest military deployment of the Russian army in Ukrainian borders ever," EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said earlier Monday. "The risk of further escalation is evident," Borrell added, accusing Russia of "deploying campaign hospitals and all kinds of warfare" to the region. Last week, Air Force General Tod Wolters, the top U.S. military commander for Europe, told U.S. lawmakers it appeared activity along the Russian supply lines "has plateaued," calling the risk of a Russian incursion over the next week and a half as "low to medium." The U.S. and its Western allies, however, continue to call on Russia to "cease their provocations" and de-escalate. They have also been critical of Russian plans to limit access later this month to the Black Sea and the Kerch Strait, with the Kremlin citing ongoing military exercises. In response, the U.S. called Moscow's move "just the latest example" of the Kremlin's aggression and said it would continue to operate warships in the Black Sea as it saw fit. The Sunday Times, citing British naval sources, reported that Britain plans to send two vessels to the Black Sea sometime next month. Information from Reuters was used in this report.
Wired	[ "museums", "archives", "languages" ]	# Brazil's National Museum Fire Proves Cultural Memory Needs a Backup By Emily Dreyfuss September 7th, 2018 10:07 AM --- The devastating fire at the National Museum of Brazil shows the importance of digitizing the world's knowledge. Fire doesn't heed history. It doesn't care about posterity or culture or memory. Fire consumes everything and anything, even if that thing is the last of its kind. On Sunday night, it came for the National Museum of Brazil, burning for six hours and leaving behind ashes where there had been dinosaur fossils, the oldest human remains ever found in Brazil, and audio recordings and documents of indigenous languages. Many of those languages, already extinct, may now be lost forever. It's the kind of loss that's almost impossible to quantify. For the researchers who worked in the museum, the conflagration sent their life's work up in smoke. "It is very difficult to react to reality and try to return to life," linguist Bruna Franchetta, whose office burned down in the fire, told WIRED in an email. "At the moment we do not know the extent of the destruction of the Documentation Center of Indigenous Languages in the National Museum. We have to wait a long time for a survey of what is left in the middle of the rubble. At the moment I can say nothing about what has not turned to ashes, but I hear colleagues saying that it was all lost." It didn't have to be this way. All of these artifacts could have been systematically backed up over the years with photographs, scans, audio files. The failure to do so speaks to a vital truth about the limits of technology: Just because the means to do something exists technologically doesn't mean it will be done. And it underscores that the academic community has not yet fully embraced the importance of archiving importance of archiving—not just in Brazil, but around the world. Though Franchetta says work had begun recently to digitalize the CELIN archive, she has no idea how far it had gotten, and it focused on only a part of the collection. "The loss is immense, and much of what has been destroyed by the flames can never be recovered," she says. In 2018, when an iPhone automatically backs up every photo you take, you might think knowledge is safer today than it was in the days of the Library at Alexandria. The fire in Brazil puts the lie to that assumption. To undertake the archiving of so vast a collection—the National Museum of Brazil reportedly lost 20 million artifacts in all—requires time, money, and a sense of urgency. As museum staff and researchers try to pick up their lives, find a new offices to work in, and figure out how to continue their work, there's plenty of blame to go around. Much of it belongs at the feet of the Brazilian government, which had slashed the budget for the National Museum and the University of Rio De Janeiro, which runs it. The museum was so strapped for money that last year, after termites destroyed a wooden base holding a 42-foot dinosaur skeleton, it started a crowdfunding campaign to raise $15,000 to replace it. The building had no sprinkler system. Government cuts are also why, when firefighters arrived to fight the flames Sunday night, they reportedly found no water in the hydrants, having instead to get water from a nearby lake. All this austerity both made the fire more likely and made it burn more fiercely and longer than it needed to. Brazil's cultural minister said that before the fire struck the museum, it had been poised to receive $5 million from the government for upgrades, including adding a fire suppression system. But the lack of a backup archive goes beyond governments. Certainly funding played a huge part, but even scholars who spend their lives studying history and loss, researching how cultures end, can fall for the notion that there will always be more time. "I think people just had the idea that, well it can be done someday, what's the urgency?" says Andrew Nevins, a linguist affiliated with the National Museum. "The idea of digitizing as an urgent priority wasn't in the air...Instead there was lots of funding and sources for going into the field and finding the last speakers right now of [a given language]." That's obviously important work, but without a plan for how to safely back up and keep those records, much of it is now lost. That loss is not merely to science, or to future museum visitors, but to those cultures who entrusted their histories to the museum. An estimated 500 indigenous tribes currently live in the Amazon, speaking around 330 languages, about 50 of which are estimated to be endangered—but before colonization there were likely as many as 2,000 tribes. The CELIN archive contained research into roughly 160 of these languages, estimates Franchetta. Linguist Colleen Fitzgerald, who heads the United States' National Science Foundation's project on protecting endangered languages, notes that field work of the type that created the collection in Brazil involves deep collaboration with the communities being studied. Often over the course of many years, researchers gain access to people's lives, stories, and customs. The responsibility to protect what they share is a solemn one. "Brazil [does not have] a diffuse culture of file safeguarding, especially through scanning and storing in various backups and in different secure locations," says Franchetta. She notes that their academic community rarely discusses best practices in how to create digital archives. Nevins agrees. Though students and professors labor to collect everything they can about endangered languages, he sees far less emphasis on protecting what they gather. "The first reaction that many of us had was indignation: How could this happen, how could there be no sprinkler system? But I think as the dust started to settle there's also some indignation at the state of library science in Brazil," says Nevins. "Why isn't library science in Brazil at a place where digitizing existing materials is as important as going out and collecting stuff?" Brazil is no outlier. Troves of important linguistic and anthropological collections exist in museums small and large, in institutes and universities in every nation, each with different budgets and practices around digital archiving. In fact, so many collections are at risk of loss due to catastrophes like fire or floods that just last month the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property held a simulation to train people in how to save precious artifacts after a crisis. Though the ephemerality of material knowledge concerned researchers for years, only recently have international standards for digital archiving emerged. Fitzgerald notes that the NSF only instituted archiving data management requirements for work it funds in 2011. The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in Nijmegen, Germany, created a group that runs a central digital archive in 2000 into which researchers can upload their linguistic field work. The group also funds archival work around the world; Franchetta says the National Museum in Brazil had received funding from them for some of its digitization work. And in 2003, different linguistic groups concerned with endangered languages formed the Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archives Network, a consortium dedicated to digitizing the diffuse linguistics archives around the world. Though it has a handful of member organizations across the world, none are in South America. Even when the decision does get made to archive a language, it comes at a tremendous cost. Just this year, the Archive for Indigenous Languages of Latin America, a DELAMAN member run by the University of Texas at Austin, finally digitized a collection of proto-languages from Latin America—among them Mayan, Mixe-Zoquean, and Uto-Aztecan—based on more than 100,000 documents, 900 CDs of audio recordings, and hundreds of boxes of field notes taken by renowned Mesoamericanist Terrence Kaufman. The project took six years, with full time work from professors and graduate students, and specialized equipment. It was only possible through a $302,627.00 NSF grant awarded in 2012. That figure is more than twice the reported annual maintenance budget of the entire National Museum, which was reportedly $128,000—though this year it only had received $13,000, total, according to National Geographic. The collection in the linguistics wing of the museum alone was far larger than 100,000 documents. To digitize it all properly would have required not just buy-in from the powers that be, but also expensive specialized tools, like noninvasive scanners than can salvage audio recordings from the wax cylinders used a century ago to gather interviews. And that's just the equipment. Someone has to watch the tape to make sure it doesn't skip. Someone has to mark the metadata that makes it possible to search through a digital archive. "Someone's got to sit there while it's being digitized. There's human labor just in that process." says Fitzgerald. That can be a graduate student or undergrad, notes Nevins, though some specialized equipment requires technicians with specific skills. Fitzgerald recently awarded a grant to a team in Hawaii that will work to make more advanced automated archival tools that might make this process easier—and, crucially, cheaper. Much of the work digitizing cultural artifacts has always been a labor of love undertaken by dedicated individuals in their free time. A group like this had worked for years scanning small parts of the most important collection that burned on Sunday, known as the Curt Nimuendajú collection. Nimuendaju was a German linguist at the turn of the 20th century who recorded hundred of hours of Amazonian languages that are now extinct. Two linguists in Brazil run the group Etnolinguistica as an homage to his work. Though their website contains some scans of his documents, it is far from a comprehensive archive of his primary sources. "They're an impressive group that scans stuff all the time but it's not institutional at all," says Nevins. "It's just a bunch of people, a bunch of web denizens who go scanning stuff." In the aftermath of the fire, many crowdsourced campaigns have sprung up. Franchetta says the CELIN department has put out a call to any researchers and students who ever photocopied anything from the collection to please send copies back to the National Museum. "But that's a drop in the ocean," she says. Academics from all over the world have been amplifying calls to share any photographs or recordings taken inside the museum in an effort to rebuild. Wikipedia put out a similar call. The spirit of collaboration and a sense of the community coming together in a time of crisis is palpable. But it can't replace what's been lost. "My will, with the anger that we are all feeling, is to leave that ruin as memento mori, as memory of the dead, of the dead things, of the dead people, of the archives, destroyed in that fire," Brazil's most famous anthropologist, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who was affiliated with the museum, told a newspaper in Portugal this week. The global academic community, and the researchers in Brazil, hope that memento mori provokes an awakening about the urgent need to digitize the world's knowledge. If fire comes for another historically important collection, maybe then it won't take the world's knowledge with it.
Associated Press News	[]	# Estación de bomberos de Alemania que se quemó no tenía sistema de alarma contra incendios October 17th, 2024 06:46 PM --- BERLÍN (AP) — Una nueva estación de bomberos en el centro de Alemania que fue arrasada en un incendio no tenía un sistema de alarma contra fuego, reportaron el jueves medios de comunicación locales. El incendio ocurrió la madrugada del miércoles en la estación de bomberos de Stadtallendorf, en Hesse, en el centro de Alemania. Causó millones de euros en daños y destruyó entre otras cosas la sala de equipos y casi una decena de vehículos de emergencia, informó la agencia de noticias alemana dpa. Las primeras estimaciones cifran los daños entre 20 millones y 24 millones de euros (entre 21 y 26 millones de dólares). No hubo heridos. El incendio se declaró en un vehículo de emergencia perteneciente al cuerpo de bomberos, que contenía baterías de iones de litio y una conexión de alimentación externa. Funcionarios locales dijeron a dpa que no se había instalado ningún sistema de alarma contra incendios en el edificio porque los expertos lo habían considerado innecesario, para asombro de muchos ahora que la estación fue engullida por un incendio. La estación se inauguró hace menos de un año, informaron los medios locales. "Creo que lo ocurrido hará reflexionar y actuar a mucha gente" sobre la mejora de los requisitos de protección contra incendios en las estaciones de bomberos, dijo a dpa Norbert Fischer, jefe de la Asociación Estatal de Bomberos del estado de Hesse. Precisamente porque hay mucha tecnología en las estaciones de bomberos y las baterías se cargan, tendría sentido equiparlos con sistemas de alarma contra incendios, dijo Fischer, señalando que no estaba claro si un sistema de este tipo podría haber evitado lo peor en Stadtallendorf. "Este incendio se propagó a una velocidad vertiginosa", afirmó.
Voice Of America	[ "USA" ]	# Walter Mondale, Carter's Vice President, Dies at Age 93 By Associated Press April 20th, 2021 01:30 AM --- Former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, a liberal icon who lost the most lopsided presidential elections after bluntly telling voters to expect a tax increase if he won, died Monday. He was 93. The death of the former U.S. senator, ambassador and Minnesota attorney general was announced in a statement from his family. No cause was cited. Mondale followed the trail blazed by his political mentor, Hubert H. Humphrey, from Minnesota politics to the U.S. Senate and the vice presidency, serving under Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981. His own try for the White House, in 1984, came at the zenith of Ronald Reagan's popularity. Mondale's selection of Rep. Geraldine Ferraro of New York as his running mate made him the first major-party presidential nominee to put a woman on the ticket, but his declaration that he would raise taxes helped define the race. On Election Day, he carried only his home state and the District of Columbia. The electoral vote was 525-13 for Reagan — the biggest landslide in the Electoral College since Franklin Roosevelt defeated Alf Landon in 1936. (Sen. George McGovern got 17 electoral votes in his 1972 defeat, winning Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.) "I did my best," Mondale said the day after the election and blamed no one but himself. "I think you know I've never really warmed up to television," he said. "In fairness to television, it never really warmed up to me." Years later, Mondale said his campaign message had proved to be the right one. "History has vindicated me, that we would have to raise taxes," he said. "It was very unpopular, but it was undeniably correct." In 2002, state and national Democrats looked to Mondale when Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., was killed in a plane crash less than two weeks before Election Day. Mondale agreed to stand in for Wellstone, and early polls showed him with a lead over the Republican candidate, Norm Coleman. But the 53-year-old Coleman, emphasizing his youth and vigor, out-hustled the then-74-year-old Mondale in an intense six-day campaign. Mondale was also hurt by a partisan memorial service for Wellstone, in which thousands of Democrats booed Republican politicians in attendance. One speaker pleaded: "We are begging you to help us win this election for Paul Wellstone." Polls showed the service put off independents and cost Mondale votes. Coleman won by 3 percentage points. "The eulogizers were the ones hurt the most," Mondale said after the election. "It doesn't justify it, but we all make mistakes. Can't we now find it in our hearts to forgive them and go on?" It was a particularly bitter defeat for Mondale, who even after his loss to Reagan had taken solace in his perfect record in Minnesota. "One of the things I'm most proud of," he said in 1987, "is that not once in my public career did I ever lose an election in Minnesota." Years after the 2002 defeat, Mondale returned to the Senate to stand beside Democrat Al Franken in 2009 when he was sworn in to replace Coleman after a drawn-out recount and court battle. Mondale started his career in Washington in 1964, when he was appointed to the Senate to replace Humphrey, who had resigned to become vice president. Mondale was elected to a full six-year term with about 54% of the vote in 1966, although Democrats lost the governorship and suffered other election setbacks. In 1972, Mondale won another Senate term with nearly 57% of the vote. His Senate career was marked by advocacy of social issues such as education, housing, migrant workers and child nutrition. Like Humphrey, he was an outspoken supporter of civil rights. Mondale tested the waters for a presidential bid in 1974 but ultimately decided against it. "Basically I found I did not have the overwhelming desire to be president, which is essential for the kind of campaign that is required," he said in November 1974. In 1976, Carter chose Mondale as No. 2 on his ticket and went on to unseat Gerald Ford. As vice president, Mondale had a close relationship with Carter. He was the first vice president to occupy an office in the White House, rather than in a building across the street. Mondale traveled extensively on Carter's behalf and advised him on domestic and foreign affairs. While he lacked Humphrey's charisma, Mondale had a droll sense of humor. When he dropped out of the 1976 presidential sweepstakes, he said, "I don't want to spend the next two years in Holiday Inns." Reminded of that shortly before he was picked as Carter's running mate, Mondale said, "I've checked and found that they're all redecorated, and they're marvelous places to stay." Mondale never backed away from his liberal principles. "I think that the country more than ever needs progressive values," Mondale said in 1989. The son of a Methodist minister and a music teacher, Walter Frederick Mondale was born Jan. 5, 1928, in tiny Ceylon, Minnesota, and grew up in several small southern Minnesota towns. He was only 20 when he served as a congressional district manager for Humphrey's successful Senate campaign in 1948. His education, interrupted by a two-year stint in the Army, culminated with a law degree from the University of Minnesota in 1956. Mondale began a law practice in Minneapolis and ran the successful 1958 gubernatorial campaign of Democrat Orville Freeman, who appointed Mondale state attorney general in 1960. Mondale was elected attorney general in the fall of 1960 and was reelected in 1962. As attorney general, Mondale moved quickly into civil rights, antitrust and consumer protection cases. He was the first Minnesota attorney general to make consumer protection a campaign issue. After his White House years, Mondale served from 1993-96 as President Bill Clinton's ambassador to Japan, fighting for U.S. access to markets ranging from cars to cellular phones. He helped avert a trade war in June 1995 over autos and auto parts, persuading Japanese officials to give American automakers more access to Japanese dealers and pushing Japanese carmakers to buy U.S. parts. Mondale kept his ties to the Clintons. In 2008, he endorsed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for president, switching his allegiance only after Barack Obama sealed the nomination. Mondale and his wife, Joan Adams Mondale, were married in 1955. During his vice presidency, she pushed for more government support of the arts and gained the nickname "Joan of Art." She had minored in art in college and worked at museums in Boston and Minneapolis. The couple had two sons, Ted and William, and a daughter, Eleanor. Eleanor Mondale became a broadcast journalist and TV host, with credits including "CBS This Morning" and programs with E! Entertainment Television. Ted Mondale served six years in the Minnesota Senate and made an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for governor in 1998. William Mondale served for a time as an assistant attorney general. Joan Mondale died in 2014 at age 83 after an extended illness.
The New Yorker	[ "higher education", "college admissions", "cheating", "standardized tests" ]	# How I Would Cover the College-Admissions Scandal as a Foreign Correspondent By Masha Gessen March 13th, 2019 11:30 AM --- The college-admissions scandal—in which fifty people have been indicted for scheming to get the children of wealthy parents into top schools—makes for perfect cocktail chatter. It involves a couple of celebrities among those who, prosecutors allege, bribed and cheated their kids' way into college. It includes bizarre details, like the Photoshopping of photographs of said children's faces onto the bodies of outstanding young athletes. It bears savoring and retelling, because it says something intuitively obvious but barely articulated about American society: its entire education system is a scam, perpetrated by a few upon the many. It's not just that higher education is literally prohibitively expensive (and at the end of it most college graduates still don't know how to use the word "literally" correctly, as I am here). It's not just that admission to an élite college—more than the education a student receives there—provides the foundation of future wealth by creating or, more often, reinforcing social connections. It's not just that every college in the country, including public schools, makes decisions about infrastructure, curriculum development, hiring, and its very existence on the basis of fund-raising and money-making logic. It's not just that the process of getting into college grows more stressful—and, consequently, more expensive—with every passing year. It's not just that the process itself is fundamentally rigged and everyone knows this. It's all of it. There is an adage of journalism that holds that every story should be written as if by a foreign correspondent. I generally like this idea: coverage of many issues could benefit from a naïve but informed view. I now find myself imagining applying it to the college-scandal story. I would, of course, begin by explaining that fifty people in six states are accused of conspiring to game the college-admissions system. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars each to have other people take standardized tests in place of their children, to insure that the administration of the test itself would be fixed, and to bribe coaches and falsify their children's athletic records. Here, the story would get complicated. A reader in any country can understand the concept of a standardized test—in some countries, in fact, standardized tests have been a tool to fight corruption in admissions. But what does athletic ability have to do with college, especially a college considered academically challenging? Soon, I would find myself explaining the exotic customs of American college admissions. As the parent of two young adults—one recently went through the application process and the other is in its beginning stages—I have accumulated some experience explaining the system to my friends in other countries. (A Canadian academic's recent incredulous response: "In Canada, people just go to university!") I would have to explain the concept of legacy admissions: the positively pre-modern concept that the right to an élite education is heritable. I would have to explain that colleges depend heavily on financial donors, whom they cultivate through generations. I would have to explain the growing part of softer criteria like extracurriculars—the race to be not only better-educated than your peers but also better at being a good person in the world—as if education and an initiation into adult civic life were not what college itself is for. I would have to note that it's essential for parents to be able to afford to pay for their children's extracurriculars and sponsor their volunteerism. I would have to explain all that before I even got to the standardized tests. Then I would note that an SAT/ACT tutor in New York City charges between three hundred and four hundred and fifty dollars an hour. I would note that, to make parents feel better about parting with that sort of money, many programs guarantee a precise bump in test scores for their students: about a hundred and eighty points, out of a possible total of sixteen hundred, for the SAT; about four, out of thirty-six, for the ACT. I would note that gaming the test legally is such a well-established practice that children whose parents can't afford thousands of dollars in test-prep fees will score more than ten per cent lower than those who get tutored. Granted, the test results aren't everything. Every college will tell you that it takes a "holistic approach" to admissions. There are essays, for which there is also coaching, and editing, and a formula; the hourly rate for these services can exceed that of the test tutors. There is also additional college counselling, because a guidance counsellor even at the best public school can't give an aspiring college student the kind of individual attention, or the kinds of connection, that money can buy. And then there are the connections that money buys indirectly: the parents' friends who teach, or who work in admissions, or who have generous tips on what colleges are looking for in an essay or an applicant's list of extracurriculars. One of those things is interest in the particular college—an immeasurable quality, to be sure, but colleges like to see that an applicant has visited the campus. Yes, in most of the world, young people go to university in the city where they grew up, but in the United States, I would explain, most young people aspire to "go away" to college, and that means that even a pre-application tour is a costly and time-consuming proposition. I might mention that the dormitory system, a major source of revenue for the colleges, is also a giant expense for the families, but, these days, even colleges that used to be known as commuter schools require first- and often second-year students to live in the dorms, even if their families live in the same city. This is but an incomplete list of reasons that many low-income students don't even try to apply to selective colleges. The wealthy compete with the even wealthier. I would explain that many American colleges have made a concerted effort to admit students from more varied backgrounds, but have failed even to keep up with the changing demographics of the country. The top colleges and universities continue, overwhelmingly, to educate the wealthy and white. The proportional representation of African-Americans and Latinos in the population of top colleges has been dropping, with a few exceptions, which are, in turn, determined largely by wealth: only the wealthiest colleges can admit a lot of students whose parents can't afford tuition. And if they want to keep these students, they have to invest in revamping their curricula and training faculty and allocating additional teaching and counselling resources to help students for whom the culture of élite colleges is alien and alienating. Explaining why these additional resources would be necessary would in turn require an explanation of how education is funded in this country, how school districts are drawn, how middle-class parents invest in a house in the right neighborhood, where public schools will give their kids a chance at a decent college. The best public primary schools, I would explain, enable graduates to compete with kids who went to expensive private schools. For the socially and economically hopeful, I would explain, raising a child in America is an eighteen-year process of investing in the college-admissions system. All this, I would hope, would serve to elucidate how a corruption scheme like the college-admissions conspiracy could come to be. But it would also raise the question: Why are these ridiculous crooks the only people who might be punished for perpetuating—by gaming—a bizarre, Byzantine, and profoundly unmeritocratic education system? Why is such a clearly and unabashedly immoral system legal at all?
The New Yorker	[ "food" ]	# My Five Desert-Island Foods: A Culinary Thought Experiment By Charlotte Mendelson March 13th, 2019 11:09 AM --- There are almost eight billion humans in the world, and one needs a way of working out whom to like. It can't be as simple as whether they are right- or left-wing, dog or cat people, or even that fail-safe, Have They Suffered? No. There is only one valid litmus test for friendship, romance, or affinity, and that is the Five Desert-Island Foodstuffs. The Five Desert-Island Foodstuffs are the dishes one can't live without. If you could eat only these few items, forever, which would you choose? This exercise reveals everything one wants to know about a person. Are you sufficiently interested in food to give this exercise your time? Do you have the attention to imaginary detail that the subject requires? If not, please find your own desert island; mine's full. After enormous consideration, I believe the wisest Desert-Island Foodstuffs to be roast chicken; apples (preferably Cox's Orange Pippins); good bread; violently mature cheddar cheese; and eighty-five-per-cent-dark chocolate. I've toyed with alternatives—bacon, kale, raspberries, simple greens in lieu of bread—but have realized that, in my isolated island home, these are the five simple pleasures that I could not sanely live without. We're not finished. There is a separate but equally important category that must be considered: Five Desert-Island Ingredients, the raw culinary materials that are more essential than all the rest. Presupposing the existence, on our island, of fish, sea salt, a convenient coconut palm, and airborne yeasts, what would you bring along, both to enhance these things and to provide simple gastronomic pastimes? (Tragically, in this scenario, you do not have the Desert-Island Foodstuffs.) Be careful; you can't say "sugar" without a plan for how you will use it. (On the coconut? Really?) Yes, you love basil, but could you genuinely not survive without it? Major questions must be considered: Quite how isolated is the island? If there's the slightest possibility of saving a goat from the putative wreckage, for example, or smuggling coffee beans in one's garment hems, or capturing a pregnant bee, then the options expand. But, if one assumes not, even more intense and serious analysis is required. Luckily, I've done it for you. You'll need chilis. Without the endorphin rush, you would die of boredom. Chili will perk up the fish, make coconut into sambal, probably render the palm leaves edible. Oats are essential: for puddings, for side dishes, for fermenting into alcohol and, best of all, for laboriously grinding into flour in order to make bread; whether biblically flat or excitingly puffy will depend on those airborne yeasts, which you will cultivate like children. Garlic is a must; my kitchen smells wrong until a few cloves are cooking, and I assume the same will go for my desert island. At this point, things grow complicated. Ideally, one would have an infinitely useful grapevine, seasonally offering not only leaves, for pickling and a fairly desperate salad, but also tiny sour fruit, with which to make verjuice, and ripe grapes, for jam production, wine, and simple scoffing. (On the other hand, might not olives be more multipurpose?) Last, milk, for yogurt: my lifeblood, my reason for existence. I've solicited lists of Desert-Island Foodstuffs and Ingredients from dozens, maybe hundreds, of people, and last year I found myself face to face with the best person imaginable to ask: Nigella Lawson. We were onstage before hundreds of delighted fans—hers, not mine—all absolutely jazzed to be in the presence of the Queen of Us All. Our interview was going quite well; the audience members were wriggling like adoring puppies. Then I opened questions to the floor. Homage was offered; interesting inquiries were made. Out in the gloaming of the tiered seating, pale arms waved desperately for attention, held ever higher, like pupils eager to impress their teacher crush. "Nigella," I said into my Bluetooth microphone, ignoring them all. "We've only time for one final question, and it's this absolutely vital one: What are your Five Desert-Island Foodstuffs?" "Well, I suppose—" "Wait." The crowd exhaled angrily. "Also your Desert-Island Ingredients. It's a very important issue, and you mustn't confuse the two." Nigella, I love you, but your answers were all mixed up. For foodstuffs: bread, butter, olive oil, My Mother's Praised Chicken, Tuscan kale, chocolate, Vegemite, blue cheese, anchovies. For ingredients: chili, garlic, ginger, thyme, cumin, shallots, lemons. Hello, Nigella, five? And why bring anchovies when you could make your own sun-dried fish? Had she thought nothing through? She may be my food hero, but this is plainly unacceptable. Let her sit sadly on her island, discovering the limitations of cumin. Maybe, if she's lucky, I'll lend her my pregnant bee.
Associated Press News	[ "Espectaculos", "Arts and entertainment" ]	# Lo que se sabe de la muerte de Liam Payne y las dudas por resolver By KAITLYN HUAMANI and ISABEL DEBRE October 17th, 2024 11:07 PM --- BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — Las autoridades argentinas continúan investigando la muerte del ex cantante de One Direction Liam Payne, quien falleció el miércoles a los 31 años tras caer tres pisos desde el balcón de un hotel en Buenos Aires. Payne era un integrante muy querido del grupo, que se formó en 2010 después de que sus miembros: Payne, Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson y Zayn Malik, hicieron audición para el reality de canto "The X-Factor" como solistas y fueron reunidos por el juez Simon Cowell para formar la banda. Se convirtieron en una de las boy band más exitosas de todos los tiempos, con una base de fans leales llamadas "Directioners" y un ascenso meteórico a la fama similar a la Beatlemanía. A continuación, algunos puntos clave sobre la prematura muerte del astro. ## La policía respondió a una llamada al 911 del personal del hotel minutos antes de la caída de Payne El personal del hotel Casa Sur en el elegante barrio de Palermo de la capital de Argentina, donde se hospedaba Payne, llamó a la policía el miércoles por la noche por temores sobre un huésped que, según dicen, estaba "sobrepasado de droga y alcohol". La policía acudió rápidamente al hotel y respondió a la llamada justo después de las 5 p.m. hora local, y luego confirmaron que llegaron minutos antes de la caída. En una llamada al 911 obtenida por The Associated Press, se puede escuchar al gerente del hotel diciendo que el huésped estaba "rompiendo toda la habitación" y agregó: "Necesitamos que envíen a alguien, por favor". La voz del gerente se volvió más ansiosa a medida que avanzaba la llamada, señalando que la habitación tenía un balcón. ## Los fiscales categorizan la muerte de Payne como "sospechosa" Las autoridades dijeron que las lesiones por caída de Payne por sí solas fueron suficientes para causar su muerte, pero los fiscales describieron el caso de Payne como "sospechoso", citando la probabilidad de que la estrella hubiera estado bebiendo alcohol y consumiendo drogas. La oficina también confirmó que todas las señales apuntaban a que Payne estaba solo en el momento del incidente y las autoridades han ordenado un informe toxicológico. Se desconoce si la caída fue intencional o accidental, pero el fiscal dijo que la falta de lesiones defensivas en las manos de Payne indicaba que "no adoptó una postura reflexiva para protegerse y que podría haber caído en un estado de inconsciencia parcial o total". ## Policía: La habitación de hotel de Payne fue encontrada en "completo desorden" La policía de Buenos Aires dijo que encontró la habitación de Payne "en completo desorden". Vieron "varios artículos rotos" y recuperaron paquetes de clonazepam, un depresor del sistema nervioso central, suplementos energéticos y otros medicamentos de venta libre esparcidos entre sus pertenencias. Los equipos forenses también informaron que las autoridades recuperaron una botella de whisky, un encendedor y un teléfono celular del patio interno donde se encontró el cuerpo de Payne. La evidencia recolectada en la escena, agregó un comunicado de las autoridades argentinas, sugirió que Payne "estaba pasando por algún tipo de episodio de abuso de sustancias". En los últimos años, Payne había reconocido que luchaba contra el alcoholismo, diciendo en un video de YouTube publicado en julio de 2023 que había estado sobrio durante seis meses después de recibir tratamiento. ## Las autoridades continúan investigando la muerte de Payne Mientras la policía y los fiscales esperan los resultados del informe toxicológico, continúan la investigación y tratan de reconstruir los últimos momentos de Payne. Las autoridades dijeron que tomaron declaraciones de tres empleados del hotel y dos mujeres que habían visitado a Payne en su habitación de hotel horas antes de su caída. Las dos mujeres habían abandonado el hotel en el momento del incidente, dijo la fiscalía. ## La muerte de Payne desató cuestionamientos de ética en los medios de comunicación y publicaciones falsas TMZ, un sitio de noticias de celebridades conocido por sus primicias y sensibilidades sensacionalistas, incluyó inicialmente fotos recortadas del cuerpo de Payne después de la caída, que presentaban sus tatuajes característicos en sus primeros informes del miércoles. Después de recibir una rápida reacción, el sitio retiró las fotos. En la versión actualizada de la historia, el medio escribió: "TMZ ha visto una foto que muestra el cuerpo de Liam en la terraza del hotel con mesas y sillas cerca" y describió los tatuajes y cómo la imagen ayudó a confirmar los primeros informes de la muerte de Payne. Los fanáticos recurrieron a las redes sociales para expresar su indignación con el medio por su decisión de compartir las fotos. TMZ no respondió de inmediato a las solicitudes de comentarios. Las fotos siguen circulando en las redes sociales, así como un video de un hombre saltando de un edificio en llamas que los usuarios están tomando erróneamente como un video de la caída de Payne. También han circulado otros videos de caídas o saltos desde balcones. La función de "notas de la comunidad" de X, donde los lectores pueden proporcionar contexto y, en este caso, desacreditar el contenido falsamente representado, está presente en varias publicaciones, pero no en todas. ## La reacción de One Direction a la muerte de Payne Los miembros sobrevivientes de One Direction, Horan, Tomlinson, Styles y Malik, emitieron un comunicado el jueves diciendo que están "completamente devastados" por la muerte de Payne. "Con el tiempo, y cuando todos puedan, habrá más que decir. Pero por ahora, nos tomaremos un tiempo para llorar y procesar la pérdida de nuestro hermano, a quien amábamos mucho. Los recuerdos que compartimos con él serán un tesoro para siempre", concluyó su comunicado. Malik y Tomlinson también compartieron homenajes individuales en sus páginas de Instagram el jueves, cada uno escribiendo nuevamente que Payne era un hermano para ellos.
Wired	[]	# Henry Cavill Joins Netflix's 'The Witcher' and the Rest of the Week in Games By Julie Muncy September 7th, 2018 09:00 AM --- Netflix's adaptation of the popular saga will star Henry Cavill as Geralt—no word yet on that mustache, though. This week, we're witching, we're selling, and we're preserving the past. Things are going pretty nice this week on Replay, as massively multiplayer games get their due and so does Henry Cavill, who was totally underrated as Superman and also has a magical shirt and beard . Let's get to it. Geralt, the protagonist of Anrzej Sapkowski's Witcher novels, made most popular by the novels' videogame adaptations by CD Projekt Red, is generally portrayed as a crotchety, wizened sort—a noir hero stuck in a fantasy realm. Now, now, I know what you're thinking: Henry Cavill. Yes? Yes? No? Well, weird news for you, then: Henry Cavill, former Superman and current pretty, broody man, will play Geralt of Rivia in the upcoming Netflix adaptation of The Witcher, which is set to air at an ambiguous time in the future, with Lauren S. Hissrich as showrunner. This show isn't a videogame adaptation, per se, but it's also not not that; the videogames are, at this point, the most iconic and popular leg of the franchise. So it'll be interesting to see how Cavill does, and doesn't, live up to the stellar precedent set by CD Projekt Red and voice actor Doug Cockle. Eve: Online, probably the most notable cult success in all of gaming, might be going through some changes in the future. And even if it doesn't, its parent studio, CCP Games, certainly is: this week they were purchased by Pearl Abyss, the Korean company behind the successful MMO Black Desert Online. CCP, based originally in Reykjavik, will operate independently, according to Pearl Abyss, though promises like that often become complicated as the relationship between a parent company and a subsidiary studio deepens over time. I'm not sure what to make of this news. Neither company is huge, though Pearl Abyss has a much stronger foothold in Korea than it does in the West; and while CCP is not necessarily successful by the measure of a mainstream developer, Eve: Online is wildly beloved by its devoted, specialized fanbase. It's a game known as more of a career, more of an entirely different existence space, than it is as a game, and any change coming down the pipe from corporate overlords is going to be met with hostility by fans. Here's hoping Pearl Abyss is ready for that. Do you remember RuneScape? Back in middle school and high school, all my friends loved it. The simplistic, free-to-play Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game was far from a polished experience, but it was a compulsively playable one. And it's an experience that has survived since the mid-'00s, with developer Jagex maintaining both a new version and a classic version, called Old School RuneScape. Now, impressively, the classic MMO experience will be hitting mobile platforms, coming to iOS and Android on October 30. RuneScape is a playable piece of gaming history, the world-record holder for the most users in any MMO, and quietly an incredibly influential title. Game preservation is not always what it should be, but, if nothing else, you can play RuneScape just about anywhere. And that rules. Honestly, this definitive collective of the first four Halo games has gotten a bad rap. Launching with a bug-ridden, incredibly uneven multiplayer mode, The Master Chief Collection has a reputation as a disappointment, a victim of industry hubris and bad testing. But quite a few updates later, the multiplayer is much more stable than it used to be—and even if it wasn't, this is the definitive way to experience the singleplayer Halo experience. Mix and match any level in any campaign, in a slick, cohesive package. Halo is one of the best shooter franchises ever made. And this is the best way to play Halo. (Even better: it got added to the Xbox Game Pass library this month, making it free to subscribers.) Geralt by CD Projekt Red; Cavill by James Devaney/Getty Images
Wired	[ "malware", "apple", "app store" ]	# Popular Mac App Adware Doctor Actually Acts Like Spyware By Lily Hay Newman September 7th, 2018 08:00 AM --- Adware Doctor has long been one of the top-selling apps in the Mac App Store. But researchers say it harvested browsing data, and sent it to China. Apple prides itself on prioritizing user security and privacy. It counts the iOS and Mac App Stores, where customers can download an array of trusted, vetted software, as cornerstones of that initiative. But while the approach does minimize situations where users get tricked into downloading something nasty on the open web, malware inevitably slips through. In this case, that appears to include one of the most popular offerings in the Mac App Store. Security-scanning app Adware Doctor currently sits fourth on the Mac App Store's list of top paid apps. But after a researcher who goes by Privacy 1st released a proof-of-concept video detailing suspicious behavior in the app, Mac security researchers Patrick Wardle of Digita Security and Thomas Reed of Malwarebytes independently investigated it as well. The researchers found that Adware Doctor collects data about its users, particularly browsing history and a list of other software and processes running on a machine, stores that data in a locked file, and periodically sends it out to a server that appears to be located in China. (For what it's worth, they say it's also not a very good adware scanner.) All of these actions seem to violate the App Store's developer guidelines, but while Privacy 1st notified Apple about the concerns weeks ago, the app remains. (Update: A few hours after this story was published—and several weeks after security researchers first contacted it—Apple removed Adware Doctor from the Mac App Store.1) "Unfortunately the App Store is really not the safe haven that Apple would like people to think it is," Reed says. "We detect and track a number of different suspicious apps in the App Store. Some of those have been removed quickly, and others have taken as much as six months to get removed. It's not outright malware, but this junk software that's stealing your data is pretty bad." Apple and Adware Doctor did not return multiple requests from WIRED for comment. When a user downloads Adware Doctor, it requests permission to access the macOS "Home" folder. Because it's a top app from the Mac App store, people likely grant that permission, assuming trustworthiness. But Wardle found that once the app has this permission, it quickly starts trying to collect user data in a way that violates both their privacy and Apple's rules. Mac apps are siloed from each other, and from the operating system, in containers called "sandboxes," which keep programs from being able to access more than they need to function. But Adware Doctor uses the permissions users grant it to collect data, and then finds ways to get around some sandbox protections. Particularly, Wardle says the program tries different tactics to get information about the other software running on a user's computer. Some programs, like trustworthy antivirus scanners, use this capability safely and legitimately, but App Store apps aren't supposed to be able to access it from inside their sandboxes. And while macOS already has built-in defenses to defeat some of Adware Doctor's attempts, the app can ultimately gather a list of running programs and processes through a system application programming interface. To make matters worse, Wardle says the code Adware Doctor uses to build its list of running processes—which an attacker could use to gain information about a target's activities and network—is taken from examples Apple publishes as part of its documentation materials. "This app is horrible, it just blatantly violates so many Apple App Store guidelines," Wardle says. "And the reviews are just glowing, which is usually a sign that they're fake. Apple exudes this hubris that 'hey, we have this all figured out, you can trust us.' But the reality is there's this really shady, really popular app and they haven't done anything." Adware Doctor also turns out to have pushed the boundaries for years. Reed says that Malwarebytes originally started tracking it in 2015, when it was called Adware Medic, which was also the name of a legitimate scanner Reed had developed. Malwarebytes notified Apple and the company removed the app, but Reed says it resurfaced in the App Store within days as Adware Doctor. Malwarebytes continued to track the app over the years and found it suspect, because the app's functionality was limited—its protections are based on generic, open-source offerings rather than effective, tailored tools. But the new findings from Privacy 1st indicate that the app may have recently added expanded suspicious functionality through an update. "It's been scammy for awhile, but that was new behavior that we hadn't observed before," Reed says. Adware Doctor also rides on a common strategy of posing as a security product to seem more trustworthy and gain the deeper system permissions that come with being a scanning tool. Apple doesn't allow most legitimate antivirus scanners into the App Store, though, because they require too much system access and can't comply with the App Store's more restrictive sandbox requirements. And this is likely confusing for users, who might naturally assume that the App Store is the best place to download security tools. Wardle and Reed both say that they support the general concept and mission of the Mac App Store, and they appreciate Apple's efforts to vet apps. But they both note that Apple may not audit app updates as thoroughly as they do initial app submissions, and they note that Apple could improve the App Store simply by responding more quickly to researcher concerns. For now, Wardle says that since Privacy 1st publicized his findings on Adware Doctor last week, the app has shifted to take the server that was receiving user data offline. But the app still tries to send it out, and the app's developer could easily bring the server back online if scrutiny dies down. Wardle notes that Apple's lack of responsiveness is a particularly bad look in this situation, since Adware Doctor is a top-selling app in the App Store, and Apple gets a cut of every app's earnings. "I don't assume that Apple is being malicious, it's probably just that they overlooked this." Wardle says. "But this app is presumably making Apple tons of money. If they pulled the app and then refunded customers' money that would help to illustrate their commitment to safety in the App Store." Though malicious apps aren't unprecedented in the App Store, it's unusual for such a widely-downloaded app to come under scrutiny. And it's an important reminder that there's always some risk in downloading new software. 1 This story has been updated to reflect that Apple removed Adware Doctor several hours after this story was published.
The New Yorker	[ "brexit", "theresa may", "jeremy corbyn" ]	# Britain's Agonizing National Humiliation Over Brexit Continues By John Cassidy March 13th, 2019 10:16 AM --- The British House of Commons has witnessed some remarkable performances over the centuries, but rarely one as forlorn as the speech that Theresa May, the Conservative Prime Minister, delivered on Tuesday afternoon, before a second vote was taken on the agreement she has negotiated for Britain to leave the European Union. At the best of times, May is no great orator, and this was far from the best of times. Her voice was raspy and strained. Still, she managed to carry on for more than an hour, appealing in vain for support. "Ultimately, you have to practice the art of the possible," she said at one point. "And I am certain that we have secured the very best changes which were available." As May spoke, she must have known that she was facing another humiliating defeat. The previous night, she had returned to London from Strasbourg wielding a set of documents that she claimed included some important concessions from the E.U., especially on the "backstop"—a controversial part of the Brexit agreement which would keep Northern Ireland tied to the E.U., forcing Britain to carry on abiding by many of the Union's rules, if the two sides can't reach a long-term trade agreement at the end of a twenty-one-month transition period . The new agreement, which May reached with Jean-Claude Juncker, the head of the European Commission, included a joint statement that the E.U. couldn't deliberately try to keep the backstop in place by negotiating in bad faith during the transition. To Brexit hard-liners in the Conservative Party, and to the ten M.P.s from Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party, who hold the balance of power in a closely divided chamber, the backstop—which was designed to prevent the reëmergence of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, an E.U. member—has emerged as a key reason for their opposition to May's deal. The Tory hard-liners claim that the backstop would prevent a clean break with Europe; the D.U.P. is worried about the future status of Northern Ireland within the U.K. On Tuesday morning, the Prime Minister had been hoping that the concessions she had obtained would win over enough of the skeptics to pull off a surprise victory. But much hinged on an opinion from the chief legal adviser to her government, the Attorney General, Geoffrey Cox. In a closely reasoned opinion that he read out to the Commons shortly after noon, Cox said that some of the E.U.'s concessions were significant. He also said "it is highly unlikely" that the two sides would be unable to reach a final agreement to avoid triggering the backstop. But he added that this was "a political judgment." And he went on to say that the "legal risk" of Northern Ireland—and, by extension, the rest of the U.K.—getting stuck in the backstop "remains unchanged." If that happened, he added, the U.K. would have "no internationally lawful means of exiting the [backstop's] arrangements, save by agreement" with the E.U. Shortly after Cox issued his opinion, the D.U.P. cited it in a statement saying it would vote against May's revised deal. "It is clear that the risks remain that the UK would be unable to lawfully exit the backstop were it to be executed," the statement said. Later in the afternoon, there was a meeting of the European Research Group, an ardently anti-E.U. faction of the Conservative Party that helped to sink the original version of May's deal, and most of the M.P.s present indicated that they intended to defy the Prime Minister again. That was that. With all but three members of the opposition Labour Party also opposing May's deal, it went down by three hundred and ninety-one votes to two hundred and forty-two. The margin of defeat—a hundred and forty-nine votes—was smaller than the margin of two hundred and thirty in January's vote, but it was another historic rout of a sitting government. Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, immediately called on May to resign. Instead, she issued a statement saying that she profoundly regretted the result of the vote. She also confirmed a prior commitment to allow M.P.s to vote on Wednesday, on a motion ruling out a no-deal Brexit, and on Thursday, on a motion to put back Britain's departure from the current date of March 29th. And so, two years and nine months after the Brexit referendum, there is still no end to the gridlock and chaos it has induced. At this stage, May isn't so much a busted flush as a deck of cards that has been shredded and stomped into the dust. But there is plenty of blame to go around: for David Cameron, the former Prime Minister, who cavalierly called the 2016 vote, thinking he would be able to breeze through it; for the plutocrat-owned Fleet Street newspapers that have demagogued Brexit from start to finish; for Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the European Research Group, who, in the words of the Independent's Matthew Norman, "is cocooned within the demented fantasy bubble of a post-Brexit imperial renaissance"; and even for Corbyn, who has tried to straddle the pro-Brexit sentiments of many of Labour's working-class voters and the anti-Brexit sentiments of many of the Party's members and M.P.s. (Corbyn's current position is that he supports a soft Brexit, as well as a second referendum. Most of all, it appears, he wants a general election.) What is sorely needed is some genuine leadership and a cross-party alliance to drag the country out of the mess it finds itself in. More immediately, as an editorial in Wednesday's Financial Times pointed out, "MPs must stabilise the political situation and create the space for a Brexit rethink," by passing the motions ruling out a no-deal Brexit and calling for an extension of Article 50. With March 29th just two weeks away, failure to do this could lead to economic chaos, gyrations in the financial markets, and a dangerous political vacuum. "Enough is enough. This must be the last day of failed politics," Carolyn Fairbairn, the head of Britain's largest business group, the C.B.I., said after Tuesday night's vote. "A new approach is needed by all parties. Jobs and livelihoods depend on it." More than that: the future of Britain depends on it.
The BBC	[ "Domestic abuse", "Haltwhistle", "Hexham" ]	# Holly Newton: Domestic violence age looked at after family's call By Pamela Bilalova November 4th, 2024 07:48 AM --- The age that domestic abuse victims are recognised by law is to be looked at after the murder of 15-year-old Holly Newton, the home secretary has told the BBC. The teenager was stalked and then stabbed to death by her ex-boyfriend Logan MacPhail in Hexham, Northumberland, last January. Holly's mother, Micala Trussler, has been campaigning for the age a person can be legally recognised as a domestic abuse victim to be lowered. Yvette Cooper told BBC Radio 4's Today programme it was an "extremely important issue" and that the government would "take seriously the points" Holly's family had made. Currently the abuser and the victim must be over 16 for it to be considered a domestic abuse crime. "We will specifically look at this, because we need to make sure that we have got the right ways of recording this kind of violence in teenage relationships," Cooper said. "I do think that this is an extremely important issue and we have to take seriously the points that they have made." The age limit used to be 18, but after a public consultation it was lowered in 2012 to recognise young people can experience abuse in relationships. A government domestic abuse consultation in 2018 gained strong support for keeping the limit because of concerns the lines between domestic and child abuse could be blurred. Samantha Neil, of the charity Harbour Support Services, which supports victims of domestic abuse, said a change in the law would be welcome. "We see a high number of referrals that are coming to our service from young people from the age of 12 or over, who are already in relationships themselves which are abusive," she said. "In terms of the law being 16 at the moment, it doesn't really do justice to our young people who are under that age." MacPhail was detained for at least 17 years for Holly's murder on Friday at Newcastle Crown Court. Her parents said no sentence would ever be enough to ease their pain. Ms Tussler added that more needed to be done to educate people about domestic abuse. "Children are getting into relationships much younger, they can be victims of domestic abuse," she said. "We need more education, not just for children but for teachers and parents. "We talk about safe relationships but often about being abused by family members, but don't talk about when they [children] are in a relationship and looking out for red flags." The young couple had been together for 18 months after meeting at army cadets. MacPhail, then 16, stalked his victim for almost an hour before he launched the ferocious attack. Now 17, he admitted manslaughter but was found guilty of murdering Holly and intentionally wounding another youth who tried to stop the attack. Holly's step father, Lee Trussler, said: "I think if Holly had known what to look out for, the relationship would have ended a lot sooner than it did." He urged young people to talk to and support each other. "Don't be afraid to tell parents what's going on, or adult or your carers," he said. "If you are afraid to say what's going on, it could end up really bad." The family has also been raising money to install bleed boxes - to help deal with critical bleeds - in public areas. The home secretary added that she had sympathy for Holly's family and it was a "truly awful case". The government has pledged to halve the amount of violence against girls and women within 10 years, Cooper added.
Associated Press News	[ "Puerto Rico", "Opioids", "Latin America", "Pain management", "Health" ]	# Puerto Rico police investigate multiple deaths and overdoses in small town October 15th, 2024 06:51 PM --- SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — At least eight people have died in a town on Puerto Rico's north coast in recent days after around two dozen suffered from suspected overdoses linked to drugs likely contaminated with fentanyl, police said Tuesday. The eighth victim was a 26-year-old man who died at a hospital where he was being treated, police said in a statement. The first victims were discovered Thursday at a public housing project and other areas in the coastal town of Arecibo. Puerto Rico's Health Department has announced a public health emergency and dispatched crews to the area to try and identify those with overdose symptoms to prevent additional deaths. The U.S. Caribbean territory's police chief ordered operations at two public housing projects in Arecibo late last week, with local officers and federal agents detaining at least six people for allegedly possessing and selling drugs. The investigation is ongoing. In 2022, there were 590 reported deaths on the island of 3.2 million people linked to fentanyl, a number that rose to 635 last year.
The New Yorker	[ "tv", "tv reviews", "netflix", "amazon", "grief", "ricky gervais" ]	# Review: How Amazon's Kate Beckinsale Series, "The Widow," and Netflix's New Ricky Gervais Show, "After Life," Get Grief All Wrong By Troy Patterson March 12th, 2019 06:41 PM --- Grief is a mainstay of much recent television, via the Gothic bathos of "The Haunting of Hill House," the destabilizing absurdity of "Kidding" and the rich meditations of "Sorry for Your Loss," and also the third season of "True Detective" and the forthcoming, final season of "Catastrophe." "The Widow" (Amazon) and "After Life" (Netflix) are less explorations of grief than tepid exploitations—both shows treat bereavement as an easy way to raise the dramatic stakes but only cheapen the lives of their grieving protagonists. These are dirges arranged for easy listening. "The Widow" stars Kate Beckinsale as the poshly bereaved Georgia, whose mourning dress involves many layers of tasteful woollens. We first spot Georgia suffering comfortably (Barbour coat, Land Rover) in gloomiest Wales (rocks, clouds), three years after her dear husband went to the airport on the morning of their anniversary (golden light, thoughtful gift) and died in a plane crash in the Congo (green trees, black faces). Doomed to suffer, Georgia slips on one of the Welsh rocks and cuts her leg on another, ruining a fine pair of trousers. Watching TV in the emergency room, Georgia thinks she sees her husband in news footage of sub-Saharan unrest and bolts to Africa in pursuit. We shuffle among various locales and mosey along an asynchronous time line, and it is fortunate that frequent onscreen titles identify the time and place of the action, because it is difficult to sort out, when taking in the bland gray glossiness of the whole, the difference between Kinshasa and, like, Heathrow Airport. Or, for that matter, Rotterdam, where we meet a man who claims he lost his sight in the crash. "I—I could have lost much more," he says. "I know that. Many others did. Much more. Much more." The introduction of the Netherlands as a locale may inspire viewers to start puzzling out a connection between "The Widow" and "Heart of Darkness," but the show cannot withstand that level of scrutiny. Nor do I recommend searching for coherence in its post-colonial politics, what with the servant-like assistance Georgia receives from a Congolese friend who helps with investigation and exposition. The show must be received as a thin melodrama sweatily elevated to a respectable brow height by its pretensions—its undertones of "Lost" and of John le Carré. "The Widow" is to international thrillers what "The First" (on Hulu, with Sean Penn as an astronaut mooning after his expired bride) is to science fiction. The shows share a slow pace, a soft light, and an air of designer melancholy. The qualities are, on the bright side, soothing, where the first season of "After Life" (Netflix) offers agitating feints at reckoning with bereavement. It's a six-episode comedy written and directed by Ricky Gervais, who stars as a prickly widower in a cozy English town. The character, Tony, has treated his wife's death—from cancer, at age forty-five—as a license to unleash a tart tongue. At work, as the editor of fuzzy feature stories at a small newspaper, he casually crushes the dreams of cub reporters and optimistic bosses. Around town, he is just plain rude. "You want to punish the world as a result of your loss," his therapist says, in a statement too obvious to qualify as analysis. A main problem for "After Life" is that Tony's surge of misanthropy isn't especially funny or smart. An outburst directed at a waiter is merely a slip of basic observational comedy about ordering off the children's menu. An atheistic riff has the tepid flavor of a tween's impersonation of a twenty-year-old Bill Maher bit. "After Life" plays as if Gervais had gathered material that was not quite sharp enough to earn a place in his standup act and repurposed it for scripts as tidy as store-bought condolence cards. The viewer's most acute feelings of loss apply to Stephen Merchant, Gervais's collaborator on "The Office" and "Extras," whose wit is sorely missed. "After Life" posits that confronting the loss of a loved one is equivalent to shaking off a case of the grumps. Tony is supposed to be suicidally devastated by the death of his wife, but Gervais doesn't seem terribly committed to the gravity of the characterization. His occasional flashes of anger are stirring, as when Tony, feeling that he has nothing left to lose, slugs a mugger with a can of food intended for a dog. I liked the moment when Tony connects with a sex worker: she'll do anything for fifty quid, so he hires her as a cleaning lady. But Gervais's play-acting of despair is fundamentally trifling, as is his development from a nihilist who thinks that "there's no advantage to being nice and thoughtful and caring" to a nice, thoughtful, caring guy. A dark comedy this superficial only reads as light gray, on account of the sham sunlight glaring at the end of its tunnel.
Wired	[ "genetics", "23andme", "privacy", "dna", "data" ]	# 23andMe Cuts Off the DNA App Ecosystem It Created By Megan Molteni September 7th, 2018 08:00 AM --- Fearing pseudoscience and privacy breaches, 23andMe is shutting down access to the third-party diet, fitness and other apps that relied on its data. Amy Mitchell started getting sick in 2012. Dizzy spells and fatigue became a part of her daily life, followed by numbness in her limbs and painful muscle spasms. After half a dozen doctors over two years couldn't tell her what was wrong, she sent away for a 23andMe kit. At the time, the consumer DNA-testing company was only giving ancestry reports—the Federal Drug Administration had recently shut down 23andMe's health information ambitions. But a new doctor had recommended that Mitchell send in her spit anyway, and link her genetic profile to a third-party app that would analyze her DNA for clues. It wasn't an FDA-approved test or a genetic panel that her insurance would cover. The app interpreted variations in her MTHFR gene, which were once thought to be linked to hundreds of conditions, before being mostly discarded by mainstream science. But Mitchell was desperate. The $100 she paid for the kit plus $50 for the app seemed a reasonable price under the circumstances. She brought the results to her first appointment with the new doctor and after taking a look, he suggested she switch up her supplements and stop eating gluten. Within days her headaches and dizziness went away, and her energy rebounded. It wasn't a miracle cure; the 37-year-old Mitchell still has pain and numbness and trouble clearing infections from her body. But she credits the app, and half a dozen others she's used over the years, with leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for her to follow. And now, she's worried other people like her won't have the same opportunity. This week, 23andMe shut down external apps' access to its anonymized genomic data through its application programming interface. 23andMe was the first DNA testing company to open an API, back in 2012, and the idea at the time was to "allow authorized developers to build a broad range of new applications and tools for the 23andMe community." But a lot has changed since then, pushing the company to rethink how its genetic, behavioral, and health data gets used. For one thing, pharmaceutical giants are now willing to pay 23andMe hundreds of millions of dollars for exclusive access to its stockpile of data, to help with drug discovery. Meanwhile, the dangers of loose data practices forced their way into the public consciousness earlier this year when it was exposed that a third-party app harvested, and then sold, the personal Facebook data of up to 87 million Americans. At-home genetic testing companies have themselves been cast into a maelstrom of privacy concerns, with the news that detectives cracked the case of the Golden State Killer using genetic profiles uploaded to a publicly available genealogy website. Beyond privacy considerations, 23andMe is also concerned about the prevalence of diet and fitness apps of dubious scientific merit. "While we have had some great API partners, there are others that do not meet our scientific standards and lack rigorous privacy policies," a 23andMe spokesperson wrote in an email to WIRED. Going forward, app developers will only be able to access data from the reports 23andMe generates for customers, such as ancestry composition or risk probabilities for genetic diseases like Parkinson's. In the coming weeks, 23andMe plans to publish new criteria for developers, outlining what sorts of privacy measures and scientific validation are required for future participation. Notably, all apps must return results consistent with what 23andMe itself claims, limiting those apps' utility. The company says qualified researchers will still have access to raw genetic data, provided that customers have consented to share their information through the API. And customers will still have the option to download all their data and manually share it with outside apps or services, an action that has its own security risks (computers can get lost, stolen, hacked). 23andMe declined to say how many apps are currently connected to the API, or how many will be disabled by the change. "We have seen customers choose to share their data with a wide variety of 23andMe's API partners—and found that some of these partners lacked strict privacy policies—making the risks and potential for nefarious activity increase significantly," 23andMe global privacy officer Kate Black told WIRED in an interview last week. "In this case, putting that data firmly in the hands of customers to mediate and control is a more responsible approach." APIs themselves are not a risky technology; secure transfer protocols are the reason billions of people can safely use credit card information to buy things on the internet everyday. But the ease with which APIs make the automated transfer happen can mask the risks of giving snippets, or even whole copies, of your genetic code to third parties. In 2015, one coder even used the 23andMe API to block people from certain websites based on their race and sex. "That raw genetic data might be anonymous, but third parties with access to other databases can easily cross-reference them to reidentify individuals," says Simon Lin, chief research information officer for Nationwide Children's Hospital and a professor of pediatrics and bioinformatics at The Ohio State University. He studies how clinical and consumer genetic information might be securely integrated into electronic health records systems. "A 23andMe report inherently carries much less risk than the raw genetic file because it's just much less information. It's hard to reidentify someone from just knowing their ancestry is Finnish." As soon as genetic data is transferred to a third-party app, it becomes subject to that developer's privacy policies. Which means it's on customers to read all the fine print to get a sense of how their data might be used. Since releasing its API, 23andMe has warned customers of this fact, but ultimately left the choice in their hands. Now, in a sense, the company is walling off its rapidly growing genetic garden. Lin says the move is indicative of personal genomics' increasing maturity. When 23andMe launched, there wasn't a lot of standardization in the field; the same genetic data points might be interpreted differently by different algorithms. Now there's a lot more consensus on what evidence constitutes a valid scientific claim. The small startup was also amassing too much information for it to interpret alone. By releasing the first genetics-based API, 23andMe kicked off an ecosystem of services that could each bite off a little piece of the genome. The more customers could do with their data, the more likely they were to send in their spit to 23andMe. "At that moment it truly was a pioneer, and the API served its purpose," says Lin. Now those motivations are less compelling to the company. 23andMe has always billed itself as empowering people with their own health data. But as the field—and privacy concerns—have evolved, what that means in practice is changing too. Still, Amy Mitchell worries that something has been lost in the process. "I'm lucky that I already got to use all these apps to look deeply into my genetic data," she says. "But what about everyone else who hasn't?" Time perhaps to invest in some cloud storage, or a few good hard drives.
Wired	[ "environment" ]	# Ocean Cleanup's Plastic Catcher Heads to Sea, but Scientists Are Skeptical By Matt Simon September 7th, 2018 07:00 AM --- Ocean Cleanup has raised $40 million to deploy a massive device to capture plastic pollution. But many scientists don't think the plan holds water. This weekend, a project of staggering ambition will sail past San Francisco and out to sea through the Golden Gate. The invention of an organization called the Ocean Cleanup, it consists of a 600-meter-long plastic tube with a dangling screen that a ship will tow 240 nautical miles out to sea for testing. If that pans out, it'll head another 1,000 miles out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where the U-shaped system will autonomously gather floating plastic for a vessel to come along and scoop up every six weeks or so, like a garbage truck. The Ocean Cleanup says it aims to cut the amount of plastic in the patch in half in five years. The oceans have a major plastic problem—over 5 trillion pieces of plastic taint the seas, and the Garbage Patch is only growing. Accordingly, Ocean Cleanup has raised $40 million from donors and companies. But many scientists don't think Ocean Cleanup's plan holds water. In June, Southern Fried Science, a marine science website, did a survey of 15 ocean-plastic pollution experts. More than half had serious concerns about the project, and a quarter thought it was just a bad idea. "It's certainly ambitious," oceanographer Kim Martini, who has studied the Ocean Cleanup campaign, tells WIRED. "It oversimplifies a very complicated problem that people have thought a lot about." One issue is that we don't yet know how ocean plastic is distributed in the water column. "The fact is, a lot of plastic isn't at the surface," Martini s ays. "There's a lot of research showing that it's sinking." A plastic bottle, for instance, will fill with water and sink to the seafloor. And tiny bits of degraded plastic can swirl up and down the water column. The free-floating Ocean Cleanup system may well snag the bits at the surface, but with a screen made of woven polyurethane that hangs down 3 meters at its lengthiest, it's limited in what it can reach. "There's also the fact that you're collecting and aggregating plastics, and so that's actually going to attract more animals to it," says Martini. "All this marine debris, things rest on it, things like to grow on it—it's kind of a marine desert out there. It's amazing what a fish will do for a little bit of shade." Another concern is that organisms such as bacteria and algae will start to grow on the device itself, which could increase drag and the weight of the structure and potentially change how the dangling screens behave. Ocean Cleanup, though, says it designed the system to be as smooth as possible, to discourage such growth. And while the organization admits the device might attract curious sea life, it insists the system poses no threat. "We designed the system such that there is basically no risk of entanglement," says Arjen Tjallema, technology manager at Ocean Cleanup. "So if a fish or a whale or another animal would come close to the system, then it's relatively harmless." Yet rogue fishing nets—which Ocean Cleanup's research says make up perhaps half of the trash mass in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—could float into the piping, get stuck, and ensnare turtles and other ocean life. Still, doing nothing about the plastic problem isn't helping marine life either. Then there's the issue of the open ocean beating the hell out of the system and turning it into part of the problem it's trying to solve. Because the tube, after all, is made of 600 meters of plastic. Even UV light may be a problem, as it can bombard plastic and cause it to shed tiny bits. Ocean Cleanup, though, says its high-density polyethylene plastic can reflect UV radiation. "I sort of wonder what kinds of microplastics this thing is going to be generating on its own, assuming that it's even functioning exactly as designed," says oceanographer Kara Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association. Worse yet, the thing could snap in a storm. "If it's shedding nano-size particles and then gets smashed into 200-meter-long pieces, you're really covering the whole size range there." Ocean Cleanup says it has done hundreds of scale model tests of the system and tested prototypes in the North Sea. It adds that the system is designed to weather the waves of a once-in-a-century storm. If the device happens to wander out of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch gyre, Ocean Cleanup says it will dispatch a boat to tow it back into place. Given the concerns about Ocean Cleanup's plan, Law wonders whether it might not be better for (lowercase) ocean cleanups to tackle other, safer targets. "Why not focus your efforts much closer to rivers or places we suspect most of this debris is originating?" she suggests. This is the approach taken by the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore. It has deployed giant trash wheels complete with googly eyes known as ... Mr. Trash Wheel and Professor Trash Wheel, which use the river's own current to power a wheel that lifts trash out of the water and into a dumpster barge. (If the river is running too slowly, solar power kicks in to get the wheel going.) Together, the devices have pulled 900 tons of trash from the waters around Baltimore. Ocean Cleanup's plan is more ambitious. If the first system checks out over the next few weeks, it'll head farther out to sea to get to work. The end goal? Sixty giant pipes floating out there. "It's a grand experiment that they're conducting," Law says. "It would not be my first choice for an intervention, especially out in the middle of the ocean, but we'll see what happens."
Wired	[ "hacking", "security" ]	# The British Airways hack is impressively bad By Matt Burgess September 7th, 2018 04:30 AM --- BA is the latest company to be hit by hackers. We chart the biggest data breaches of 2018 The consequences of a major data beach have never been greater. Since May 25 the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been in force and data breaches could now result in huge fines. We're charting the biggest data breaches and privacy flaws, and the fines resulting from them throughout the year. The latest firm to admit it has been hacked is British Airways, which was hit by a major breach leading to customer data being stolen. On this page we'll be tracking the year's biggest hacks. As the year goes on, we'll be updating it with new issues you should be aware of. ## Data breach: British Airways When?: August 21 to September 5 What happened?: For more than two weeks this summer, hackers were inside the systems of British Airways. They took the personal and financial details of customers who made, or changed, bookings on ba.com or its app during that time. Names, email addresses and credit card information were stolen – including card numbers, expiration dates and the three digit CVC code required to authorise payments. Around 380,000 transactions were affected. BA blamed a "sophisticated" group of cybercriminals but didn't give any more details. A post on its website says people should contact their banks, people will be reimbursed and it will pay for a credit checking service. ## Data breach: Reddit When?: June How many people: Reddit won't say What happened?: Reddit's systems were accessed in June, the site announced in a blog post. As Reddit staff were trying to login to their systems using text messages sent via two-factor authentication, the messages were intercepted. Using the staff members' accounts the unknown hackers were able to take email addresses of current Reddit users and a 2007 database. Reddit hasn't admitted how many email addresses were compromised. The worry for users is that email addresses will be leaked and it will be possible to link anonymous accounts to real people. ## Data breach: Timehop When?: July How many people: 21 million What happened?: Timehop connects to social networks and surfaces nostalgic posts from the past. On Facebook it shows users their previously popular posts in a bid to help people rekindle previous memories. However, the company detected an ongoing cyberattack in July and found names, email addresses and "keys" allowing access to previous posts had been taken. It delayed the tokens for accessing historic posts, it said. ## Data breach: Polar Flow When?: July What happened?: The fitness app Polar Flow revealed the locations of military personal inside secret bases around the world. In similarity with the Strava data privacy issue in January, researchers found it has been possible to monitor the movements of soldiers. Changing a URL let anyone see a person's workouts. ## Data breach: MyHeritage When?: February - June How many people: 92 million What happened?: DNA testing firm MyHeritage suffered a huge data breach affecting 92 million people. While DNA data wasn't made public, emails and some password information were. The data was stored on a private server and whoever obtained it sent it to third-party security researchers. ## Data breach: Ticketmaster When?: February - June How many people: 40,000 What happened?: Ticketmaster revealed that the login information, payment data, addresses, name and telephone numbers of 40,000 people was at risk. The data breach was first spotted by digital bank Monzo, which told Ticketmaster about the insecurities. ## Data breach: Typeform When?: May – June How many people: millions What happened?: Data collected through Typeform surveys was left unsecured and was taken by hackers. As a result, adidas, Monzo, Revolut, England's Shavington-cum-Gresty Parish Council, Fortnum and Mason's and more were forced to admit that data had been compromised. ## Data breach: Dixons Carphone When?: July 2017 How many people: 5.9 million payment cardsWhat happened?: Dixons Carphone revealed 5.9 million payment cards and 1.2 million personal data records were stolen in 2017. The cards haven't been used maliciously as most of them were protected by chip and PIN. Names, addresses and email addresses of more than one million people were also taken in the breach. ## Fined: University of Greenwich When?: 2004 How much: £120,000 What happened?: The UK's University of Greenwich exposed 19,500 student details – including names, addresses, phone numbers, signatures, health conditions, and dates of birth – through an insecure training website. The details were first published in 2004 but the Information Commissioner's Office hit the university with a £120,000 fine. ## Fined: Yahoo! When?: April – June How much: $35m What happened?: Following Yahoo!'s colossal data breach in 2014 where billions of usernames, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdates, passwords, security questions were taken, regulators have hit the firm with fines. The US Securities and Exchange Commission slapped the firm, now called Altaba, with a $35 million fine in April. The UK's data protection watchdog also fined it £250,000. ## Data breach: MyFitnessPal When?: February 2018 How many people: 150 millionWhat happened?: In March, sports retailer Under Armour revealed its fitness app MyFitnessPal had lost the usernames, email addresses, and passwords of 150 million people were stolen from its systems. Although, the passwords were encrypted. ## Data breach: Equifax When?: 2017 What's new?: More victims What happened?: In one of the worst data breaches of all time, Equifax lost the data of 145 million US citizens. It's since emerged that another 2.4 million Americans also lost their data. Equifax said the data breach cost it $114m and separate investigations are still ongoing. ## Data breach: Facebook When?: 2014 Who's responsible: Cambridge Analytica What happened?: The birth of Facebook's biggest scandal. The Guardian reported more than 50 million people (this later rose to more than 100 million) had data harvested for data profiling company Cambridge Analytica. Facebook found out in 2015 but the details didn't fully come to light until this year. The data was harvested through a quiz app that collected people's personal information, it was then shared beyond the original researchers who had created the app. ## Data breach: OnePlus When?: Between mid-November 2017 and January 11, 2018 How many?: 40,000 peopleWhat happened?: Chinese smartphone manufacturer admitted in January that 40,000 of its customers had data lost after a "malicious script was injected into the payment page code" of its website. The script collected people's payment data and returned it to unknown attackers. Credit card numbers, expiry dates, and security codes entered at oneplus.net may have been compromised, the company said. ## Data breach: Strava When?: January What happened?: The huge public map of workouts from fitness company Strava revealed the locations of military personal and their movements. In rural locations heatmap data could show how people operated around military bases, plus it was possible to discover the names and heart-rates of individuals inside highly secretive bases. ## Fined: Carphone Warehouse When: August 2015 How much?: £400,000 What happened?: The UK's data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), hit Carphone Warehouse with a £400,000 fine after the details of three million customers were access in 2015. The ICO said there were "rudimentary" security flaws that allowed information to be accessed. ## Data breach: US Homeland Security When?: Between 2002-2014 Who's responsible?: Unknown, but not a "cyber attack by external actors" What happened?: On January 3, 2018, the US department of Homeland Security told 247,167 of its employees there had been a "privacy incident" with one of its databases for those that worked there in 2014. During the period of 2002-2014, an undisclosed number of people who were being investigated were also affected by the data loss. The lost information includes names, social security numbers and staff job roles. Officials first discovered the breach in May 2017 but took time to confirm it. ## Data breach: Aadhaar When?: January 3, 2018 Who's responsible?: Former employees What happened?: India's giant one billion person public database has been compromised. The Tribune newspaper reported former staff members provided access to names, email addresses and phone numbers. This article was originally published by WIRED UK
The BBC	[ "High Wycombe", "Thames Valley Police" ]	# Man charged with attempted murder after stabbing in High Wycombe By Mariam Issimdar November 4th, 2024 07:40 AM --- A man has been charged with attempted murder after a woman was stabbed at a business park, police said. Calvin Cranley, aged 21, of Conifer Rise, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, also faces one count of possession of a bladed article. It follows an incident at Cressex Business Park, High Wycombe, on Thursday, which left the woman needing hospital treatment. Thames Valley Police said her injuries are not thought to be life threatening. The force said six other assaults reported to officers between Wednesday and Thursday were still under investigation. Mr Cranley has been remanded in custody and is expected to appear at High Wycombe Magistrates' Court on Monday, police said.
Voice Of America	[ "East Asia", "Science & Health", "China News", "COVID-19 Pandemic" ]	# Beijing Pushing for Vaccine Passport for Those Inoculated With Chinese Vaccines By Joyce Huang April 20th, 2021 12:36 AM --- After exporting COVID-19 vaccines to almost 70 countries, China is gearing up to push for its own vaccine passport to ease entry to foreigners and foreign residents of China inoculated with China-made vaccines. Beijing hopes the vaccine passport will be an incentive for businesspeople, including Taiwanese citizens who travel frequently to and from China, to get Beijing-approved jabs. But many eligible for the program worry about the lower efficacy of Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines compared with that of vaccines made outside China, and they feel pressured to use Chinese vaccines to obtain entry to China. The Sinovac vaccine's efficacy rate is slightly higher than 50%, while the Sinopharm vaccine's efficacy rate is 79%, far lower than that of Moderna, Pfizer and even the Russian-made Sputnik vaccine, all of which are above 90%, according to a Bloomberg report citing experimental data from researchers outside China. China launched full-scale registration of China-made vaccines for foreigners in Beijing and Shanghai at the end of March. Similar provincial-level programs began in April for foreigners concentrated in the cities of Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Hangzhou and Chongqing. In addition, the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council announced on April 14 that Taiwanese citizens who live in China will be allowed to register for a vaccination at their places of residence using their residence permits or a certificate of Chinese health insurance coverage. Before the current push, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs had announced as of March 15 that further "visa facilitation" would be provided to foreign nationals inoculated with China-made vaccines. However, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at that day's press briefing. that visitors to China would still need to have negative results from both nucleic acid tests and serology tests before boarding a flight to China. After entering China, the visitors would be required to check in for weeks-long quarantine at a government-designated hotel at their own expense. Foreign vaccines Zhao also said that China is willing to undertake mutual recognition of vaccinations with other countries. But he declined to comment on whether China would consider accepting and facilitating the WHO-approved Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines in the future. Zhao did not mention the Moderna vaccine. Anticipating that the vaccine passport will lead to further relaxation of travel restrictions, Vincent Hsu, a Taiwanese citizen who does business in China, said that he and many of his counterparts are open to getting the China-made vaccines. Hsu told VOA Mandarin, "Because we can get vaccine passports, even if the passports do not apply to the whole world, at least we don't have to quarantine in China. I think that is the biggest incentive. A lot of people want to get vaccinated." However, due to doubts about the safety and efficacy of China-made vaccines, Hsu said many of his foreign friends in China are willing to pay for the option of getting non-Chinese-made vaccines once they are available in China. Three Westerners who live in China who were unwilling to reveal their names for fear of upsetting authorities told VOA Mandarin that they were holding off on getting Chinese vaccines and hoping other options would become available soon. An American citizen told VOA Mandarin that he might wait for a truly quarantine-free vaccine passport to be introduced before considering getting vaccinated. He hoped that China and the U.S. would have mutual recognition of vaccines as soon as possible. All the Westerners told VOA Mandarin that traveling without quarantine restrictions would be an incentive for businesspeople to obtain Chinese-made vaccines. She added she would evaluate the safety and efficacy of any vaccine before getting inoculated. She said she preferred to wait for Beijing to import the Pfizer vaccine and would then pay for the shots herself. She added that she was in no hurry to get inoculated because of the lack of data on all the vaccines. In China, Hong Kong is the only region that offers vaccines from both Pfizer and Sinovac. But after a month of vaccinations, Chief Executive Carrie Lam said last week that only about 500,000 people, or 7.5% of Hong Kong's population, have been vaccinated, half of them with Chinese-made Sinovac doses. According to statistics from the Hong Kong Department of Health, as of April 16, 16 people have died after being vaccinated. Of those, 14 died after being inoculated with Sinovac vaccines. The other two people died after getting the Pfizer vaccine. The Sinovac number includes older people for whom vaccinations were not recommended. A Taiwanese citizen living in Hong Kong, who did not want to be named for fear of attracting the attention of local authorities, told VOA Mandarin that in Hong Kong, Chinese-made vaccines are popular among people who want to visit family in China or foreigners who travel to China for business. According to the Associated Press, the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, immunologist Gao Fu, said on April 10 that the current Chinese-made vaccines have low efficacy rates, and mixing doses is among strategies being considered to boost their effectiveness. The next day, Gao told the Global Times, a Chinese state-run newspaper, that some media and foreign social media platforms had misunderstood his remarks.= His remarks reignited discussions about the effectiveness of China-made vaccines, especially as Gao has not provided data showing how effective the Chinese-made vaccines are against the virus. Tao Lina of the Shanghai Center for Disease Control and Prevention described the Sinopharm vaccine as " the world's most unsafe vaccine" via Weibo in early January. The post that said the Sinopharm vaccine could cause 73 local or systemic adverse reactions was deleted the next day. In an interview with VOA Mandarin, Lo Chun-hsuan, deputy secretary-general of the Taiwan Medical Association, said that as a major exporter of vaccines, China has a responsibility to make clear the safety and efficacy of its vaccines and to produce empirical clinical data, including laboratory data from phase III, for scientific certification. Risk of COVID-19 variants Lo said China should neither politicize its epidemic prevention efforts nor block other countries' highly effective vaccines to promote its own vaccines or vaccine nationalism. He said that if the same 70 countries that have imported vaccines from China increase their vaccination rates, it may not help prevent the disease and instead may lead to variants of the virus due to the ineffectiveness of the Chinese-made vaccines. Lo said, "There are two things to think about, the first is that mass vaccination using low efficacy vaccines will cause the variant virus to spread because the virus is not killed under immune pressure. It's like taking a bottle of insecticide and spraying cockroaches, but the bugs are not killed; instead, they become more resistant to the poison. Less-powerful immune pressure will generate more variants of the virus. (Second), these populous countries will in the future become some of the most difficult regions in the world to prevent COVID-19." Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report, which was originated by VOA Mandarin.
Wired	[ "elon musk", "tesla" ]	# Ousting Elon Musk From Tesla Will Take More Than Lawsuits and Twitter Fights By Aarian Marshall and Jack Stewart September 7th, 2018 03:12 AM --- Wild tweets, an inquisitive SEC, fights with reporters—none of it's anywhere close to ending Musk's control of the electric automaker. Reported SEC probes. Snowballing shareholder lawsuits. Email fights with reporters, a possible libel suit in the offing, a brow-furrowing interview with The New York Times. Smoking a blunt on a podcast. Yes, you could say Tesla's Elon Musk has had quite the summer. And despite Thursday night's multi-hour, congenial, and far-ranging conversation on Joe Rogan's podcast—covering AI, the Boring Company's tunnels, the nature of evil, Instagram, and Musk's new idea for an electric, vertical takeoff and landing supersonic airplane—there's no reason to think those worried about Musk's state of mind have been eased. The CEO has won legions of fans for his refusal to do public company-ing like everyone else. Tesla has long refused to spend money on marketing, and it has no reason to: Musk's gleeful, whimsical, sometimes downright bizarre public persona makes plenty of news, at no charge. But after a wild few months, observers have been pushed to ask: At what point does that personality become too much? At what point does Tesla the company decide it's better off without the man who has led it for the past decade? That question came into even sharper focus Friday morning, after Elon's marijuana moment and the departure of two top executives sent Tesla stock into a tailspin. To be clear: This is not an imminent hypothetical. Elon isn't going anywhere soon. "Musk appears to be central to Tesla's success," says Joseph Grundfest, who teaches corporate law and governance at Stanford Law School and is a former commissioner of the US Securities and Exchange Commission. "What are you going to say? 'Why don't we get rid of John, Paul, and George of the Beatles and we'll just have Ringo on the drums? We'll have Ringo on the drums, we'll call it the Beatles, and we'll just move forward?' Case in point: Musk's new compensation package, approved by shareholders in March, places huge bets on the company's long-term future and the CEO's long-term future with it. Musk gets a minimum wage salary, but stands to make $55 billion if he can hit a series of ambitious goals over the next decade—indicating his Tesla co-owners would really like him to stick around. Further: In June, the man defeated a shareholder's push to force him to officially split the roles of company chairman and chief executive, and retain just the latter title, with 16.2 percent voting in support. To top it off: The six independent members of the company's board put out a supportive statement of the leader this month, even after the electric carmaker backtracked on Musk's announcement that he was considering taking the company private, sparking lawsuits and a reported SEC investigation. "The Board and the entire company remain focused on ensuring Tesla's operational success, and we fully support Elon as he continues to lead the company moving forward," they wrote. Still, one need only look at another boyish Silicon Valley king to see how quickly fortunes change. Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick had packed his board with upbeat investors, his leadership seemed unassailable. But six months into that company's spate of terrible press, brought on by a toxic corporate culture that Kalanick had fostered, the CEO found himself on the outs with his own people. (The sudden and traumatic death of his mother in a boating accident last spring also complicated issues.) By July, the folks at venture firm Benchmark Capital—a major, though not majority, stakeholder in the company—demanded his exit, The New York Times reported last summer. After a night of intense negotiations, Kalanick agreed to step down. Which is to say: even a friendly board can turn on its own should the proper emergencies arise. And at Tesla, Musk's 22 percent stake isn't enough to negate the possibility of his ouster by his board, if a majority of its eight members decided they'd had enough of him. (Musk is also on the board. The ninth member, venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, has been on leave for eight months.) But there are ways to right this semi-autonomous electric ship without tossing Musk overboard. Namely: shoring him up. The current leadership structure might have provided the company with an effective leadership strategy in its earliest stages. But rumors have flown that the board has picked up its search for a number two. A right hand human, who can steer Tesla as it scales up and faces increasing competition in a rapidly changing industry. Bloomberg reports no such search is underway, but that doesn't mean it's a bad idea. "It's time. As companies grow, they outgrow the capacity of any one person to mastermind the show, and now is the time for Tesla to recruit a strong number two, not to replace the founder but to multiply the founder's leadership," says Michael Useem, director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management at the Wharton School, of the University of Pennsylvania. "The value of that model has been evident at many companies, including Apple and Facebook," Umseen says. "The Tesla CEO and board would be wise to find the right multiplier now." Hey, maybe Joe Rogan's looking for a new gig.
Associated Press News	[ "Israel government", "Israel-Hamas war", "Israel", "War and unrest", "Iran", "Middle East", "Hezbollah", "Yoav Gallant", "Joe Biden", "Gaza Strip", "Politics", "Benjamin Netanyahu", "Lebanon" ]	# Israeli defense minister warns an attack on Iran would be 'lethal' and 'surprising' By SAMY MAGDY, TIA GOLDENBERG, and WAFAA SHURAFA October 9th, 2024 09:10 AM --- JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel's defense minister warned on Wednesday that his country's retaliation for a recent Iranian missile attack will be "lethal" and "surprising," while the Israeli military pushed ahead with a large-scale operation in northern Gaza and a ground offensive in Lebanon against Hezbollah militants. On the diplomatic front, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Joe Biden held their first call in seven weeks, with a White House press secretary saying the call included discussions on Israel's deliberations over how it will respond to Iran's attack. The continuing cycle of destruction and death in Gaza, unleashed by Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, comes as Israel expands a weeklong ground offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon and considers a major retaliatory strike on Iran following Iran's Oct. 1 missile barrage. "Our strike will be lethal, precise and above all, surprising. They won't understand what happened and how. They will see the results," Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said during a speech to troops. "Whoever strikes us will be harmed and pay a price." Iran fired dozens of missiles at Israel on Oct. 1 which the United States helped fend off. Biden has said he would not support a retaliatory strike on sites related to Tehran's nuclear program. On Wednesday, Hezbollah claimed a rocket attack that killed two people in the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona. The town's acting mayor, Ofir Yehezkeli, said the two killed were a couple walking their dogs. ## Dozens killed in Gaza and survivors fear displacement In northern Gaza, there was heavy fighting in Jabaliya, an urban refugee camp dating back to the 1948 war surrounding Israel's creation, where Israeli forces have carried out several major operations over the course of the war and then returned as militants regroup. The entire north, including Gaza City, has suffered heavy destruction and has been largely isolated by Israeli forces since late last year. In Gaza, Jabaliya residents said thousands of people have been trapped in their homes since the operation began Sunday, as Israeli jets and drones buzz overhead and troops battle militants in the streets. "It's like hell. We can't get out," said Mohamed Awda, who lives with his parents and six siblings. He said there were three bodies in the street outside his home that could not be retrieved because of the fighting. "The quadcopters are everywhere, and they fire at anyone. You can't even open the window," he told The Associated Press by phone, speaking over the sound of explosions. Gaza's Health Ministry said it recovered 40 bodies from Jabaliya from Sunday until Tuesday, and another 14 from communities farther north. There are likely more bodies under rubble and in areas that can't be accessed, it said. Jabaliya residents fear Israel aims to depopulate the north and turn it into a closed military zone or a Jewish settlement. Israel has blocked all roads except for the main highway leading south from Jabaliya, according to residents. "People here say clearly that they will die here in northern Gaza and won't go to southern Gaza," Ahmed Qamar, who lives in Jabaliya with his wife, children and parents, said in a text message. ## Hospitals are under threat Fadel Naeem, the director of Al-Ahly Hospital in Gaza City, said it had received dozens of wounded people and bodies from the north. "We declared a state of emergency, suspended scheduled surgeries, and discharged patients whose conditions are stable," he told AP in a text message. Israel's offensive has gutted Gaza's health sector, forcing most hospitals to shut down and leaving the rest only partially functioning. Naeem said three hospitals farther north — Kamal Adwan, Awda and the Indonesian Hospital - have become almost inaccessible because of the fighting. The Gaza Health Ministry says the Israeli army has ordered all three to evacuate staff and patients. Meanwhile, no humanitarian aid has entered the north since Oct. 1, according to U.N. data. Israel's authority coordinating humanitarian affairs in Palestinian territories said Israel "has not halted the entry or coordination of humanitarian aid entering from its territory into the northern Gaza Strip." Israel says it only targets militants and blames civilian deaths on Hamas because it fights in residential areas. Israel ordered the wholesale evacuation of northern Gaza, including Gaza City, in the opening weeks of the war, but hundreds of thousands of people are believed to have remained there. Israel reiterated those instructions over the weekend, telling people to flee south to a humanitarian zone where hundreds of thousands are already crammed into squalid tent camps. The war began just over a year ago, when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250. They still hold around 100 hostages, a third of whom are believed to be dead. Israel's offensive has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not say how many were fighters. It has said women and children make up over half of the dead. The offensive has also caused staggering destruction across the territory and displaced around 90% of the population of 2.3 million people, often multiple times. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to keep fighting until "total victory" over Hamas and the return of all hostages. ## Israel warns Lebanon it could end up like Gaza On Tuesday, Netanyahu said Lebanon would meet the same fate as Gaza if its people did not rise up against Hezbollah. In recent weeks Israel has waged a heavy air campaign across large parts of Lebanon, targeting what it says are Hezbollah rocket launchers and other militant sites. A series of strikes had killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and most of his top commanders. An Israeli airstrike on Wednesday hit a Lebanese Civil Defense center in the town of Dardghaya in southern Lebanon, killing five members who were stationed there, civil defense spokesperson Elie Khairallah told The Associated Press. Among the victims was Abdullah Al-Moussawi, head of the Tyre Regional Center in the Lebanese Civil Defense, Khairallah said. Just last week, Al-Moussawi spoke with the Associated Press, saying the Israeli airstrikes had made his team increasingly nervous, but that they were hopeful that the international protection guaranteed to medics will extend to them as well. There was no immediate statement from the Israeli military. As of last Thursday, the Lebanese Health Ministry reported that over 100 paramedics had been killed by Israeli airstrikes. Another strike on Wednesday killed four people and wounded another 10 at a hotel sheltering displaced people in the southern Lebanese town of Wardaniyeh, Lebanon's Health Ministry said. An Associated Press reporter in a nearby town heard two sonic booms from Israeli jets before the strike. Plumes of smoke rose from the building after the explosion. The Israeli military said Wednesday that Hezbollah has fired more than 12,000 rockets, missiles and drones at Israel in the past year. Video verified by The Associated Press also shows what appears to be a group of Israeli soldiers raising an Israeli flag in a village in southern Lebanon. In the video, which appears to have been filmed in Maroun A-Ras, three soldiers are seen hoisting up a flag atop a pile of debris. A soldier off camera speaks in Hebrew and refers to the nearby Israeli village of Avivim. The date it was filmed wasn't immediately known. The video follows other similar acts that took place throughout Israel's ground offensive in Gaza. The Israeli military had no immediate comment. Magdy reported from Cairo and Shurafa from Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip. Associated Press writers Sarah El Deeb, Sally Abou AlJoud and Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut, and Natalie Melzer in Tel Aviv, Israel, contributed to this report.
The New Yorker	[ "prisons", "health care", "immigrants" ]	# A New Study Uncovers Troubling Information About Immigrant-Only Prisons By Jonathan Blitzer March 13th, 2019 05:00 AM --- On the morning of December 12, 2008, two inmates at the Reeves County Detention Center, in Pecos, Texas, set a mattress on fire and started a riot. For months, prisoners at the facility, which housed twenty-four hundred male inmates, had been complaining about poor food, abuse in solitary confinement, and inadequate health care. That morning, Jesus Manuel Galindo, a thirty-two-year-old epileptic inmate, was found dead from a seizure brought on by a lack of medication. Galindo was from Mexico, though he had lived in the United States since he was thirteen, and was serving a thirty-month sentence for "illegal reëntry" into the country, after a previous deportation, which is a federal felony offense. Guards had left Galindo in solitary confinement, where his pleas for medical attention were ignored. The insurrection spread throughout the facility but ended the next day. Six weeks later, though, when guards reportedly moved an inmate named Ramon García into solitary confinement after he said that he was ill, another riot broke out; it lasted five days and caused twenty million dollars' worth of damage. "We spoke with the warden and we told him to take our countryman out of the punishment cell and take him to the hospital," an inmate later said, according to an account by the Texas Observer. "We told them that if they were not going to do it, then we would do it." The Reeves County Detention Center was then the largest private prison in the world, and the "insurrection at Pecos," as the riots became known, brought national attention to the people who were incarcerated there. It was a population that, until then, had been mostly overlooked by politicians, journalists, and the general public. The inmates were not U.S. citizens, and they would eventually be deported, but first they were serving criminal sentences. Some had committed immigration offenses, and others had been convicted of drug possession, burglary, or assault; a few had been found guilty of violent crimes, including homicide. In Galindo's case, it was his illegal-reëntry sentence that landed him in federal custody, but a judge "enhanced" his prison term, based on additional charges that Galindo had written a fake check and contacted his ex-wife in violation of a restraining order. No one understood exactly how the process worked, but, at some point after the men were sentenced, federal prison authorities had segregated them from the general prison population. The logic appeared to be that, because these inmates would eventually be deported, the government need not expend additional resources on them or provide services such as access to drug-treatment programs and literacy courses that were typically given to citizen inmates. Normally, federal rules mandate that inmates be housed within five hundred miles of their families, but, even though many of these men had family members in the United States, they were thousands of miles from them. Although the facility was under the charge of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, it was administered by the GEO Group, a private-prison company that, in 2008, reported a billion dollars in profits that came largely from contracts with the federal government. The inmates' medical care had been subcontracted to a private health-care provider whose practices had previously been investigated by the Department of Justice. There are currently close to nineteen thousand noncitizen inmates being held in ten privately run prisons in seven states. Immigration detention is the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.), which detains about forty thousand undocumented immigrants on any given day. But many immigrants who've been convicted of crimes, like Galindo, are under the supervision of a different branch of the federal bureaucracy, the Bureau of Prisons (B.O.P.). As the legal scholar Emma Kaufman notes, in a new article in the Harvard Law Review, inmates in foreign-only, or Criminal Alien Requirement (C.A.R.), facilities make up ten per cent of the over-all population in federal prisons, and they have far fewer protections. Kaufman writes, "All foreign prisons are not only places where foreigners are separated from the rest of the penal population. They are also stripped-down institutions with fewer services than other federal prisons." Because the inmates will be deported at the end of their terms, they have become a "distinct class of prisoners" whose status has led "prison officials to funnel foreign nationals into remote prisons with fewer resources." At the Reeves County Detention Center, according to a 2014 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, inmates who were mentally or physically ill were placed in solitary confinement because an infirmary was still under construction. There were complaints, both at Reeves and at other C.A.R. facilities, that inmates were routinely put into solitary for no reason. At Reeves, a quota written into the contract with the GEO Group stipulated that at least ten per cent of the bed space in the facility needed to be reserved for isolation cells. That was double the space allocated at federal facilities run by the B.O.P., and the result, the A.C.L.U. noted, was a "contractual" incentive for putting prisoners "in extreme isolation whenever the prison is filled to capacity." In 2017, after further complaints, the federal government closed the prison and transferred the inmates to other facilities across the country. There they found vermin infestations, spoiled food, a shortage of medical staff, and cells that were routinely flooded with raw sewage. Kaufman's research is the result of years of public-record requests, interviews, and archival work, and her article, titled "Segregation by Citizenship," is one of the most comprehensive accounts to date of this largely invisible population. According to government figures Kaufman obtained, fifty-three per cent of inmates in these facilities are convicted of drug crimes, thirty-two per cent are convicted of immigration-related infractions, and eight per cent are convicted of violent offenses. The average length of their sentences is six years; a quarter are serving terms of ten years or longer. They come from a hundred and thirty-one countries, though nearly ninety per cent are from Mexico, Central America, Ecuador, Colombia, Cuba, or the Dominican Republic. (The largest group, about seventy per cent of the total, is from Mexico.) The government began documenting the nationalities of federal inmates in the mid-nineteenth century, but the idea of opening noncitizen prisons did not take root until 1980. That year, two immigration crises collided: thousands of Haitian refugees, most of them headed for Florida, were fleeing the regime of Jean-Claude Duvalier just as, in April, Fidel Castro announced that any Cubans who wanted to leave the country were free to do so. Over the next six months, in what became known as the Mariel boatlift, a hundred and twenty-five thousand Cubans arrived in Florida. Castro also opened Cuba's mental facilities and prisons, and, by initial U.S. government estimates, more than two thousand patients and convicts were among the Mariel Cubans. Police departments across the country claimed that the "Marielitos" were responsible for a disproportionate share of rising local crime, and special task forces were set up to deal with them. Further contributing to the sense of national alarm, local law-enforcement authorities insisted that previous estimates were wrong and that as many as forty thousand criminals had come to the U.S. in the Mariel boatlift. Federal officials disputed those figures but could never disprove them. The concern about immigrant criminals coincided with the start of a period of harsher drug-offense and sentencing laws, which led to a rapid growth of the prison population. Local law enforcement began coördinating with federal immigration authorities, Kaufman writes, and, by the middle of the decade, they were routinely entering prisons in search of deportable inmates. Throughout the nineteen-nineties, new laws also vastly expanded the range of crimes that could trigger deportation, even for immigrants with green cards and other forms of legal status. Federal prosecutions for immigration crimes also started to increase, as did the harshness of the penalties. As a result, the foreign population in federal prisons exploded, from about seven thousand, in 1989, to more than twenty thousand, in 1994. In 1996, the B.O.P. and the Immigration and Naturalization Service stationed immigration agents at eleven installations inside federal prisons. These installations were "targeted at the Mexicans," an assistant director at the B.O.P. said at the time. In 1999, the B.O.P. announced the first all-foreign prison to house "the criminal alien population," and, in June, it took bids from private companies to construct two facilities, in California and New Mexico. Three corporations now run ten of the extant noncitizen prisons: Corrections Corporation of America (now called CoreCivic), the GEO Group, and the Management and Training Corporation. In January, 2016, Seth Freed Wessler published an investigation in The Nation on medical neglect in the facilities, where more than a hundred inmates died between the late nineteen-nineties and 2014. Through a series of public-record requests, he obtained from the B.O.P. more than nine thousand pages of inmates' medical records from eleven prisons. (One has since closed.) At the time, Wessler reported, there were nearly twenty-three thousand noncitizen inmates in the bureau's custody, the majority of whom were in prisons run by the GEO Group. "These prisons operate without the same systems of accountability as regular Bureau of Prisons facilities, and prisoners suffer," Carl Takei, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Wessler. In August of 2016, the Justice Department announced that it would phase out the use of private prisons, and it appeared that the noncitizen facilities would cease to operate. Once Donald Trump entered office, however, he reversed that decision, and the stock prices of the two largest private-prison companies, the Geo Group and CoreCivic, soared. In May of 2017, the Justice Department solicited a round of new bids. The Trump Administration has been a particular boon for the success of these companies, as they operate not only correctional facilities for the B.O.P. but also immigration jails for the D.H.S. When I spoke to Emma Kaufman recently by phone, she stressed the potential implications of the data she uncovered showing that nearly all of the noncitizen inmates in these segregated prisons are Latinos. This is way out of proportion with the makeup of the general federal-prison population, where Latinos comprise about thirty per cent of all inmates. "There's a clear overrepresentation of Latinos, and the question is why," Kaufman said. She is concerned that, if someone looks Latino, prison authorities might just assume that he isn't a U.S. citizen. In theory, the process would seem relatively straightforward—when authorities book an individual into custody, they should be able to determine from government databases whether that person is a citizen or a legal resident—but, in practice, errors occur and are extremely difficult to correct. A database could contain outdated or inaccurate information. Consider the context of immigration enforcement: according to a study published in 2011 by Jacqueline Stevens, a professor of political science at Northwestern University, more than twenty thousand U.S. citizens were arrested or deported by immigration agents between 2003 and 2010—a figure that, Stevens wrote, "may strike some as so high as to lack credibility." Kaufman has spent years trying to get the government to supply more information about the segregated facilities. And yet significant questions persist. "We don't really know the answers, because the B.O.P. designation process is a black box," she told me. "We popped the lid. Now we need to look inside."
The New Yorker	[ "podcasts", "history", "boxing", "criminal justice", "racism" ]	# "The Hurricane Tapes": Will a British Podcast Solve the Hurricane Carter Case? By Sarah Larson March 13th, 2019 05:00 AM --- "The story of the Hurricane," as Bob Dylan once sang, has been told before. It is the tale of Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, the famous middleweight boxer who was convicted and reprieved—twice—of a 1966 triple murder at a bar in Paterson, New Jersey. His wrongful-conviction story was immortalized in Dylan's song "Hurricane," from 1975—"All of Rubin's cards were marked in advance / The trial was a pig-circus, he never had a chance"—and a movie starring Denzel Washington, from 1999, with similarly righteous tones. In 1985, a federal judge overturned Carter's convictions, and also those of his co-defendant, John Artis; both men had served long sentences. But the ruling didn't mean that the murder case was solved. Publicly revealing what actually happened that night could bring solace to many—and, possibly, open a huge can of worms. "Nobody wanted the truth of my findings to come out—not the prosecution and not the defense," an older man's voice says in a clip at the beginning of the podcast "The Hurricane Tapes." The series, produced for the BBC World Service by Steve Crossman and Joel Hammer—"just two sports journalists who love a good story," Crossman says, in his northern British accent—hopes to solve the case, or at least to offer a plausible counter-theory. (It concludes on April 1st.) "Neither of us have investigated a murder before," Crossman says, brightly, at the outset. He and Hammer are not podcast veterans, either. They reported "The Hurricane Tapes" for a year, interviewing some thirty people, including the appealing Artis. (Carter died in 2014.) Their freshness of perspective and zeal for the scoop are evident, but the result doesn't sound like an overambitious whodunit by novices—the podcast is fairly hubris-free, and its narrative scope extends beyond crime-solving. It's built on a foundation of riveting audio that tells a larger story about the complex and tortured relationship between race, violence, and justice in America. On the night in question, in 1966, two black men entered the Lafayette Bar & Grill and shot four white people, three of whom died. It was quick and astonishingly bloody. That night, Carter and Artis were stopped while driving home from a club. The shooting's sole survivor said that Carter and Artis weren't the shooters, but a petty criminal claimed to have seen them at the scene of the crime. It was a particularly intense moment of racial anxiety in Paterson, Crossman says, and in the country; the murder had shocked the community, and Carter and Artis were ultimately convicted by an all-white jury. The rest has been a decades-long melodrama featuring everyone from Muhammad Ali to Dylan to "a small army of Canadian zealots" that was "beavering away on the case," Crossman says. After watching the 1999 movie, Crossman set out to make a documentary about the case. In the research process, he and Hammer met the writer Ken Klonsky, who had published a book about Carter's spiritual journey, in 2011. This led to the unearthing of a forgotten trove of Klonsky's cassette recordings of Carter—forty hours' worth. The excerpts we hear don't sound like traditional interviews. Mostly we hear Carter talking, and he sounds natural, the sentences pouring out of him with ease, like someone sitting down and dictating a memoir. His manner of speaking is urgent, smart, fierce, with hints of dark poetry. We might not love him as a person, but we like listening to him speak. "I've been in prison all my life," Carter says. "I was born with a severe stutter that was a prison. It was my stumbling, bumbling tongue that wouldn't allow me to participate with groups of people." If people laughed at him, he says, "the only sound they would hear would be the sound of my fist whistling through the air." There were other prisons, too. Carter's childhood, in Clifton, New Jersey, was shaped by poverty and violence. He spent time in a home for juvenile delinquents, joined a gang, joined the Army, discovered boxing. Crossman and Hammer skillfully show how the violence central to Carter's meandering life led to a boxing career—and how quickly boxing took him from pariah to hero and back again. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, he fought a Cuban boxer at Madison Square Garden and swiftly knocked him out; it was a moment of national glory. But, as his fame grew, so did his notoriety, because of his fury in and out of the ring. He was righteously angry about institutional racism, in the U.S. and in South Africa, where he travelled for a fight. "I couldn't see myself throwing sticks and rocks at people when people were shooting me with guns," he says. He admired Malcolm X; in interviews in the sixties, Carter said that black people should defend themselves with firearms. He also kept getting arrested—"for assault in a bar, or some kind of foolishness like that," he says. "Just like these young jitterbugs doin' today." Were you actually doing those things? Klonsky asks. "Of course I was!" Carter says. But the foolishness wasn't a big deal, he said—he was a target, persecuted unjustly by cops. The podcast is mainly about the murder investigation and the people connected to it, but it feels evident that its resolution matters both for justice's sake and for the public's understanding of a story that has come to embody a pervasive form of racial discrimination. (And one that's been well documented in podcasts.) It doggedly plunges into the nitty-gritty details, contextualizing in a near-literary manner through colorful interview quotes, and it includes welcome moments of whimsy. When an investigator is compared to Javert in "Les Misérables," they play a little Schoenberg; before a revelatory conversation in a diner, Crossman provides a "listener note" about upcoming sounds of cutlery and chewing. They seem to be having fun with the form: at one point, when Artis is describing being pulled over with Carter, they cut to Carter delivering his own line of dialogue, which is taken from his version of the story in the tapes. And the Dylan song keeps kicking in, like an anthem. (The more we learn, the more we might imagine revisions to its lyrics.) The producers don't feel the need to idealize Carter, or themselves. They're proud of the work they've done and sell it pretty hard: "These grainy old cassettes were sitting untouched in a Boston basement," Crossman says, of interviews from a decade or so ago; he also says that they talked to everyone important to the case except Carter, which seems generous. But I don't especially care about such hype, because Crossman sounds much more fired up about getting to the bottom of things than he does about claiming credit for what he finds. After ten episodes, I don't detect the needy reporter-as-hero quality that mars so many investigative podcasts and distracts the listener from the subject at hand. To what extent Carter was a target and a victim is a key question. A related question is the role of a parallel story about that night in Paterson, long underexamined and possibly suppressed, which Crossman and Hammer seem to be piecing together in real time. I'm anxious to hear what follows. It could unlock this case; it could reveal ugly truths about the justice system; it could further complicate our understanding of Carter. And the story of the Hurricane, told in a protest song, in 1975, and a movie drama, in 1999, could take its definitive form in a podcast, in 2019—both because of the skill of the producers and because the world is ready to hear it.
Associated Press News	[ "Minnesota", "Law enforcement", "Lawsuits", "Black experience", "George Floyd", "Legal proceedings", "Shootings" ]	# A lawsuit filed by the family of a man killed by a state trooper has been dismissed October 31st, 2024 04:02 PM --- MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A federal judge has dismissed a civil rights lawsuit against a white Minnesota state trooper who shot and killed a Black man during a traffic stop last year, ruling that the trooper's actions did not violate the law. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel granted Trooper Ryan Londregan's motion to dismiss the suit filed against him by the family of Ricky Cobb II. Brasel found that Londregan did not act unreasonably when he fired his weapon at Cobb as the man's vehicle began moving forward with another state trooper partly inside. A suit against a second trooper, Brett Seide, remains pending. Seide and a third trooper pulled the 33-year-old Cobb over on Interstate 94 on July 31, 2023, because the lights were out on his car. They found that the Spring Lake Park man was wanted for violating a domestic no-contact order in neighboring Ramsey County. Londregan arrived to assist. While the troopers were telling Cobb to get out of the car, he shifted into drive and took his foot off the brake. When Cobb's car began to slowly move forward, Londregan reached for his gun. Cobb stopped. Londregan pointed his gun at Cobb and yelled at him to get out. Cobb took his foot off the brake again while another trooper's torso was at least partially in the car. Londregan then fired twice at Cobb, striking him both times in the chest. In January, the Hennepin County Attorney's Office charged Londregan with murder. It became a politically charged case in the city where the killing of George Floyd by police in 2020 sparked global protests demanding racial justice. Then in June, the County Attorney reluctantly dropped the charges against Londregan, arguing that new evidence would have made the case difficult to prove. Cobb's family filed its lawsuit in April accusing Londregan and Seide of excessive use of force and unreasonable search and seizure. Following the lawsuit's dismissal, Londregan's attorney, Chris Madel, told the Minnesota Star Tribune that it's been a "long, grueling journey to justice" for Londregan. Bakari Sellers, an attorney representing Cobb's family, said the family is considering appealing the decision or amending their complaint against Londregan.
Wired	[ "wired awake" ]	# Friday briefing: North Korean hacker charged over WannaCry By WIRED Insider September 7th, 2018 03:10 AM --- Today, a North Korean hacker is charged for WannaCry, Apple gets approval for its Shazam acquisition, British Airways admits a major customer data breach and more Your WIRED daily briefing. Today, a North Korean hacker is charged for WannaCry, Apple gets approval for its Shazam acquisition, British Airways admits a major customer data breach and more. Get WIRED's daily briefing in your inbox. Sign up here ## 1. North Korean hacker charged with WannaCry and Sony attacks The US government has charged a North Korean man with the WannaCry hack that crippled computer systems worldwide in 2017 (The Washington Post). Park Jin Hyok, who worked as part of a team of hackers known as the Lazarus Group, was also charged and sanctioned by US officials in connection with the 2014 cyberattack against Sony. The attack on Sony, which has long been linked to North Korean hackers, was launched in response to the movie The Interview, which portrayed the assassination of a North Korean leader styled like Kim Jong Un. US officials said both attacks had been "sponsored" by the North Korean government. ## 2. EU approves Apple's acquisition of Shazam The European Union has found that Apple's proposed acquisition of Shazam will not harm competition (Reuters). The deal, announced in December last year, is seen as a move by Apple to better compete with Spotify and Google in the music streaming business. In its ruling, the EU's antitrust body found that Apple and Shazam offer complementary services and that combining sensitive customer data would not damage competition in the EU bloc. It's thought Apple paid in the region of $400 million to acquire Shazam. ## 3. British Airways customer data stolen in security breach BA has confirmed that the personal and financial details of certain customers have been compromised (TechCrunch). In a statement, the airline said those who made bookings on its site between August 21 and September 5 had been affected, but that travel and passport details had not been stolen. BA said around 380,000 card payments had been compromised, adding that the breach had now been resolved and its website was "working normally". Under GDPR, the airline could face a fine of up to four per cent of its global annual revenue if it is charged by regulators in relation to the breach. ## 4. Could airport security have done more to catch the Salisbury novichok suspects? Now that we know how Russia attempted to assassinate Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia on British soil, could we have done anything to stop it? One surprising detail to emerge is the seemingly sloppy nature with which the deadly vial of novichok was handled (WIRED). It's likely a fake perfume bottle connected with the case was used to hide the poison as it was carried into the UK onboard an Aeroflot flight from Moscow. So why wasn't it detected? We asked a number of security experts for their take. ## 5. Probiotics are mostly useless, potentially harmful Supplements containing apparently "friendly" bacteria don't improve our gut microbiota and could actually be harmful if someone is taking antibiotics, according to the most in-depth study yet into the area (New Scientist). The research, conducted by immunologists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, found that while some people accept the probiotics in their gut, others pass them straight from one end to the other. The researchers said that their findings showed that the notion of everyone benefiting from a universal probiotics bought from a supermarket was scientifically bogus. ## Popular on WIRED Most of the world-building games of the past were all about using up natural resources in service of some end goal – like building a metropolis in SimCity or raising an empire in Civilization – usually destroying the natural world in the process. The ends justified the means and saving the planet wasn't much of a priority. But what if it were? ## WIRED 09.18 – on sale now WIRED 09.18 is out now. Elon Musk's friends, family and colleagues reveal what drives him to transform transportation, empower clean energy and develop colonies on Mars. Yuval Noah Harari explains how AI will give us new ways to hack learning, and we take a look at the nuts and bolts of Formula 1's big-money reinvention. Subscribe now and save. ## Podcast 383: Netflix's plan for global entertainment domination Listen now, subscribe via RSS or add to iTunes. Get WIRED Awake sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning by 8am. Click here to sign up to the WIRED Awake newsletter. Follow WIRED on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. This article was originally published by WIRED UK
The BBC	[ "Kamala Harris", "US election 2024", "Donald Trump" ]	# 10 reasons both Harris and Trump can be hopeful of victory By Ben Bevington November 4th, 2024 07:35 AM --- With just one day to go, the race for the White House is deadlocked - both at the national level and in the all-important battleground states. The polls are so close, within the margin of error, that either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris could actually be two or three points better off - enough to win comfortably. There is a compelling case to make for why each may have the edge when it comes to building a coalition of voters in the right places, and then ensuring they actually turn out. Let's start with the history-making possibility that a defeated president might be re-elected for the first time in 130 years. ## 1. He's not in power The economy is the number one issue for voters, and while unemployment is low and the stock market is booming, most Americans say they are struggling with higher prices every day. Inflation hit levels not seen since the 1970s in the aftermath of the pandemic, giving Trump the chance to ask "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" In 2024, voters around the world have several times thrown out the party in power, partly due to the high, post-Covid, cost of living. US voters also seem hungry for change. Only a quarter of Americans say they are satisfied with the direction the country is going in and two-thirds have a poor economic outlook. Harris has tried to be the so-called change candidate, but as vice-president has struggled to distance herself from an unpopular Joe Biden. ## 2. He seems impervious to bad news Despite the fallout from the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol, a string of indictments and an unprecedented criminal conviction, Trump's support has remained stable all year at 40% or above. While Democrats and "Never-Trump" conservatives say he is unfit for office, most Republicans agree when Trump says he's the victim of a political witch-hunt. With both sides so dug in, he just needs to win over enough of the small slice of undecided voters without a fixed view of him. ## 3. His warnings on illegal immigration resonate Beyond the state of the economy, elections are often decided by an issue with an emotional pull. Democrats will hope it's abortion, while Trump is betting it's immigration. After encounters at the border hit record levels under Biden, and the influx impacted states far from the border, polls suggest voters trust Trump more on the immigration - and that he's doing much better with Latinos than in previous elections. ## 4. A lot more people don't have a degree than do Trump's appeal to voters who feel forgotten and left behind has transformed US politics by turning traditional Democratic constituencies like union workers into Republicans and making the protection of American industry by tariffs almost the norm. If he drives up turnout in rural and suburban parts of swing states this can offset the loss of moderate, college-educated Republicans. ## 5. He's seen as a strong man in an unstable world Trump's detractors say he undermines America's alliances by cosying up to authoritarian leaders. The former president sees his unpredictability as a strength, however, and points out that no major wars started when he was in the White House. Many Americans are angry, for different reasons, with the US sending billions to Ukraine and Israel - and think America is weaker under Biden. A majority of voters, especially men who Trump has courted through podcasts like Joe Rogan's, see Trump as a stronger leader than Harris. ## 1. She's not Trump Despite Trump's advantages, he remains a deeply polarising figure. In 2020, he won a record number of votes for a Republican candidate, but was defeated because seven million more Americans turned out to support Biden. This time, Harris is playing up the fear factor about a Trump return. She's called him a "fascist" and a threat to democracy, while vowing to move on from "drama and conflict". A Reuters/Ipsos poll in July indicated that four in five Americans felt the country was spiralling out of control. Harris will be hoping voters - especially moderate Republicans and independents - see her as a candidate of stability. ## 2. She's also not Biden Democrats were facing near-certain defeat at the point Biden dropped out of the race. United in their desire to beat Trump, the party quickly rallied around Harris. With impressive speed from a standing start, she delivered a more forward-looking message that excited the base. While Republicans have tied her to Biden's more unpopular policies, Harris has rendered some of their Biden-specific attack lines redundant. The clearest of these is age - polls consistently suggested voters had real concerns about Biden's fitness for office. Now the race has flipped, and it is Trump who's vying to become the oldest person to ever win the White House. ## 3. She's championed women's rights This is the first presidential election since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and the constitutional right to an abortion. Voters concerned about protecting abortion rights overwhelmingly back Harris, and we've seen in past elections - notably the 2022 midterms - that the issue can drive turnout and have a real impact on the result. This time around, 10 states, including the swing state Arizona, will have ballot initiatives asking voters how abortion should be regulated. This could boost turnout in Harris's favour. The historic nature of her bid to become the first female president may also strengthen her significant lead among women voters. ## 4. Her voters are more likely to show up The groups Harris is polling more strongly with, such as the college-educated and older people, are more likely to vote. Democrats ultimately perform better with high-turnout groups, while Trump has made gains with relatively low-turnout groups such as young men and those without college degrees. Trump, for example, holds a huge lead among those who were registered but didn't vote in 2020, according to a New York Times/Siena poll. A key question, then, is whether they will show up this time. ## 5. She's raised - and spent - more money It's no secret that American elections are expensive, and 2024 is on track to be the most expensive ever. But when it comes to spending power - Harris is on top. She's raised more since becoming the candidate in July than Trump has in the entire period since January 2023, according to a recent Financial Times analysis, which also noted that her campaign has spent almost twice as much on advertising. This could play a role in a razor-tight race that will ultimately be decided by voters in swing states currently being bombarded by political ads. SIMPLE GUIDE: How to win the electoral college EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power GLOBAL: How this election could change the world IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House? North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his twice weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. 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The New Yorker	[ "interviews", "college admissions", "ivy league" ]	# An Investigative Journalist on How Parents Buy College Admissions By Isaac Chotiner March 12th, 2019 08:29 PM --- On Tuesday, the Department of Justice charged fifty people in the largest college-admissions scandal in recent memory. According to the indictments, dozens of rich and well-connected parents, including two television stars, participated in a criminal scheme run by William Singer, the founder of a college preparatory and counselling business. Singer allegedly helped his clients to insure their children's admission to selective colleges by bribing university staff and coaches to misrepresent their children as athletes or by recruiting administrators and proctors to help falsify their children's scores on admissions tests. The schools targeted included Yale, Stanford, U.S.C., U.C.L.A., and more; the uproar over the story, and the lengths that the government claims the parents went to, suggest that college admissions, especially at élite schools, continue to be a topic of immense interest and angst. To discuss the scandal, I spoke by phone with Daniel Golden, the author of the 2006 book "The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates." Currently a senior editor at ProPublica, Golden showed how the wealthiest parents, including Jared Kushner's, have wheeled and dealed their way into gaining admission for their children, often via large gifts to their university of choice. My conversation with Golden about today's blockbuster story and its larger meaning, which has been edited for clarity and length, is below. How does this scandal change, if it does change, your understanding of the larger issue that your book addresses? I think that it's kind of a logical outgrowth of the scandal that my book exposed. What my book showed was that the rich and famous exploit the college-admissions system by using private college counsellors who serve as conduits for donations, by benefitting from the various admissions preferences, like the preference for athletes, because there are so many patrician sports in which their kids participate, like crew or sailing or fencing or equestrian events. In this case, they take it to the extreme, through pretense. Normally, students from rich families benefit from athletic preference because they actually row crew or sail or fence, which is a preference in itself, because those sports are not played at most inner-city high schools. But here the kids did not even engage in those activities. Instead, it was a sham. Similarly, the private college counsellor here went beyond all the bounds of accepted behavior, if we can believe the allegations. He didn't just facilitate the admission by hinting to college officials that the family might be inclined to be philanthropic if the kid was accepted. Instead, he appears to have flat-out bribed test administrators and college coaches and the like. They pushed, to the fullest extent, an unfair system that has been in place for a long time. It's the fantasy, extreme version of an endemic problem. When you say that it's been in place for a long time, does that mean since American colleges were founded, or was there a golden era when this stuff was not going on? I don't think there was ever a golden era. College admissions has evolved over the years. Initially, back before there were standardized-test scores, and when élite schools, like Harvard, mostly recruited from their own areas, they just straightforwardly preferred candidates from wealthy, well-established families. But then there were various efforts towards meritocracy, like standardized tests, and the system we have now. And there was also entry by high-achieving groups, like Jews, that the colleges didn't want to let in, in perhaps the numbers that they deserved. So, in response to the pressure for meritocracy, this crazy-quilt complicated system developed, which appears, on the surface, to be merit-based but actually includes quite a few hidden boosts for the wealthy. And that system has been in place for some decades. But it's post-World War II. Do you have reason to think that this sort of thing we saw with the indictments today has been going on for a long time, and, if it is increasing, why might it be increasing? I don't know if this kind of criminal activity is widespread. There are widespread practices that are unfair and benefit the wealthy. One of the puzzles of this case is: Why did these families bother to go to this extreme? Why did they pay so much money to fake their kids having athletic preference, or have somebody else take their tests? Why didn't they simply contribute a lot of money to the university? Maybe their kids were so far underqualified that they couldn't get in no matter how much was donated. Or, possibly, it was less expensive for them to pay these kinds of bribes. But there are so many advantages anyway, and giving money usually meets such a receptive audience, that it is a little puzzling why they would have to engage in this kind of criminal activity. Colleges obviously still rely a lot on legacy admissions. Are they relying on it less than a decade or two ago, and might this lessening be causing legacy admissions or the rich and famous to be more desperate to get their kids in by any means necessary? Actually, regarding legacy admissions, what's happened in the last couple decades is two contrasting things. The first is that, yes, the percentage of legacies admitted has declined. It's less of a guarantee of admission than it used to be. On the other hand, the over-all acceptance rate at these élite schools has declined even more. So legacy, proportionally, is a bigger advantage than it once was. If you take a typical Ivy League school, maybe twenty or thirty years ago, they might admit two-thirds of legacy applicants. Now they might admit one-third of legacy applicants. But, at the same time, their over-all acceptance rate has probably gone down from between twenty and twenty-five per cent to between five and ten per cent. So, proportionally, being a legacy is even more of an advantage. But, in any particular case, a legacy is less likely to get in than they used to. Now, the pressures over all are generally working a little bit the other way. They are working for the benefit of donors rather than to their detriment. What's happened is that other sources of income for universities have stayed level or declined. The percentage of small, grassroots donors—alumni who give a little bit—has declined, and universities are more dependent on big donations, the kind that often carry a kind of admissions tit for tat. Similarly, there hasn't been big growth in terms of federal funding for research and other sources of income for universities. So universities are actually more dependent on big gifts than ever before, or at least in recent memory, and, as a result, donors are even more in the driver's seat. Did you have any other takeaways from the story today? The other thing that is interesting is that, in my book, I wrote about preferences not just for the rich but for celebrities—how Brown University had gained buzz by admitting the kids of celebrities. I assume celebrities are rich? It's sort of a separate preference. It's an additional benefit. They might not be hugely rich, but they have a kind of cachet. There might be someone at Goldman Sachs who is worth ten times as much as a television personality. But there is a cachet to having the kid of a television personality. I thought it was interesting, in that regard, that this case involved both the traditionally rich—chief executives and securities investors—and television actresses. My book focussed on those groups as somewhat separate, overlapping but distinct. Is there anything you think your book got wrong or understated? I think the general themes were right on point, and I don't think it's because I was so brilliant. I think it's because this was a system that was hidden in plain view and was in front of your nose if only you looked, and also because it was so offensive to most people's idea of what America is about. The fundamental ethos of America is equal opportunity and upward mobility and everybody gets a chance. The people who perform the best are supposed to rise to the top, and college education is supposed to be the driving force in upward mobility. So the idea that the wealthy can perpetuate their own privileged status through college admissions, that it's not an equal gateway for everybody but a way to perpetuate American aristocracy, is a real affront to people. And that's the resonance a case like this has. The Times' Ross Douthat had a long Twitter thread about this, in which he wrote, in part, "This is not proof that meritocracy is somehow 'broken.' Quite the reverse: It shows that the desire to claim some measured 'merit' to legitimize success extends to parents who by merely financial measures don't need the Ivy stamp to ensure their kids' success. Like 'James Gatz' becoming 'Jay Gatsby' in the Main Line/social-register dispensation, a CEO or TV star buying an Ivy admission and even a fake test score for their lackluster scion is the homage that mere money plays to the gods of the resume and the SAT." What do you think of that? I think it's nicely written. And I also think that he is correct in saying that the perceived value of an Ivy League degree goes beyond money. It does have to do with social status and bragging rights and an aristocratic identification. So I think that's true. Also, there are a lot of debates about how much an Ivy League degree affects financial gain in future years, and I don't pretend to know or even understand the math on which those debates are based. All I can say is that some people are extremely desirous of an Ivy League degree. It's easy for people on the outside to say, "What does it matter if your kid went to the Ivy League or School X?," but it does seem to matter an awful lot to an awful lot of people. If you look at the hallways of power in our society—the U.S. Senate, the Supreme Court, places like that—you will find a lot of people with undergraduate or graduate degrees from élite schools. I also think that, often in our society, the great entrepreneurs, the great originators of success, are not necessarily Ivy League graduates. They may be dropouts like Bill Gates or people who didn't go to college at all, or went to a school that doesn't have as high a reputation. But then they often want to cement that status by making their family a permanent part of whatever passes for aristocracy in America, and they often see the Ivy League degree that they didn't get themselves as the imprimatur for their children or grandchildren. You will often see at these Ivy League the second or third generations of a great business family rather than the first generation.
The BBC	[ "Poole", "Dorset" ]	# Poole: Fire at recycling centre near Tower Park By Curtis Lancaster November 4th, 2024 07:34 AM --- Twenty firefighters have tackled a large fire at a recycling centre, close to a leisure and retail park. Dorset and Wiltshire Fire and Rescue service received a call at 05:00 GMT to a waste fire at Ling Road in Poole, near Tower Park. Breathing apparatus, eight fire engines and a water carrier were required on the scene after reports mattresses and furniture were ablaze. Crews have extinguished the flames but members of the public have been advised to avoid the area and local residents have been told to keep windows closed. Firefighters remain in the area to dampen down and assist site staff.
The New Yorker	[ "nancy pelosi", "donald trump", "impeachment", "washington post" ]	# What Pelosi Meant When She Said, of Impeaching Trump, "He's Just Not Worth It" By Amy Davidson Sorkin March 12th, 2019 05:27 PM --- "I'm not for impeachment. This is news," Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, told the Washington Post's Joe Heim in an interview published on Monday. Previously, she had not been entirely clear about her position, she said. "But since you asked, and I've been thinking about this: Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there's something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don't think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he's just not worth it." The not-worth-it "he" is, of course, President Donald J. Trump. Pelosi was not advocating complacency in the face of what she said she saw as Trump's "unconstitutional" actions as President. Instead, she argued for the need to beat him at the polls in the 2020 election—which is not that far away. (She also said that she wanted to win the Senate and hold the House—"the whole thing.") What Pelosi thinks here is critical, because any bill of impeachment would have to pass in the House, after which the Senate would hold a trial. Although Pelosi didn't lay out the process in the interview, a danger for the Democrats is that they might waste the opportunities that control of the House has given them on a political process that would only end with the Republican-controlled Senate acquitting Trump. Democrats who favor impeachment, including some members of Pelosi's House caucus, might note, however, that she did not entirely dismiss the possibility, leaving it open in the event that "something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan" emerges in whatever report the special counsel, Robert Mueller, is writing. Of the three qualities, "bipartisan" is almost certainly the most elusive. But, in deeming Trump "not worth it," Pelosi was saying a number of things. She was effectively diminishing him; he is not so historically powerful that only impeachment can stop him. Taking him on in legislative fights, as notably happened in the government-shutdown fight, earlier this year, can be very effective. So can elections. (Of the midterms, she said, "Thank God, because we now have a lever; we have leverage against this assault on the Constitution.") Asked if Trump was fit to be President, she said, "No. I don't think he is. I mean, ethically unfit. Intellectually unfit. Curiosity-wise unfit. No, I don't think he's fit to be president of the United States. And that's up to us to make the contrast." She wanted the voters to join in dismissing him, which would be all the more humiliating. "Not worth it," in that sense, is a corollary to the argument that James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, has made against impeachment: that it would let voters "off the hook." And it is another way of expressing an idea that Adam Gopnik discusses in this week's Comment: that impeachment might be "too good" for Trump. "Not worth it" expresses a different strain of confidence, too, namely, the belief that the Democrats will, indeed, win the Presidency in 2020. That prospect has drawn a double-digit number of Democrats to enter the race, and that number provokes another question: What about the Republicans? Only one reasonably serious figure, Bill Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts, has put his name down as a primary challenger to Trump. It would be worth it for a few more to try, and to at least confront the President in the primaries when he campaigns, as he undoubtedly will, on bigotry, bitterness, lies, and fantasies. Pelosi touched on this point in the interview, in addressing the question of whether the country is as divided as she has ever seen it. She had witnessed plenty of partisanship in her time, she said. What was distinct about this moment was "that we don't see a commensurate—I don't want to say reaction, just action—on the part of Republicans to the statements and actions the president is taking." A Republican Party that was a bit more divided, in other words, might help the country to become less so. Want even more insight and analysis from Amy Davidson Sorkin? Sign up for her newsletter.
The BBC	[ "Metropolitan Police Service", "London", "Nottingham", "Chalk Farm" ]	# Sarah Cunningham: Body found in search for missing artist By Jess Warren November 4th, 2024 07:34 AM --- A body thought to be that of Sarah Cunningham has been found, after the artist went missing in north London in the early hours of Saturday. Ms Cunningham, 31, was last seen at about 03:00 GMT on Jamestown Road in Camden wearing a black vest top, skirt and Converse trainers. In a post on X, Camden Police said emergency services were called to Chalk Farm Underground station in the early hours of Monday where they found "a casualty on the tracks". The death "is being treated as unexpected but at this time it is not thought to be suspicious", the post said, adding Ms Cunningham's family had been informed and had requested privacy. The force said formal identification was yet to take place. Officers from the Met Police are working with the British Transport Police to look into the circumstances. Jamie Klingler, co-founder of women's safety group Reclaim These Streets, posted on X after the announcement, saying: "Thank you to everyone that helped spread the word. Please respect her family's privacy at this time." London's Lisson Gallery, where Ms Cunningham has exhibited, had posted on Instagram appealing for anyone with information to contact the Met, while her brother Anthony also posted on social media in an appeal for information. Ms Cunningham was born in Nottingham and attended Loughborough University. Her work has featured in exhibitions in Germany, Canada the United States.
Associated Press News	[ "Venezuela government", "Panama", "Migration", "Latin America", "Venezuela", "Human rights", "Nicolas Maduro", "Panama City", "Immigration", "Colombia", "Politics" ]	# Migration through Darien Gap increased in September, government records show By JUAN ZAMORANO October 11th, 2024 04:14 AM --- PANAMA CITY, Panama (AP) — The number of migrants crossing the Darien Gap — a rugged jungle passage between Colombia and Panama — increased sharply in September, according to Panamanian government data, and a human rights organization says there's less capacity to assist migrants. Venezuelans have led mass migration through the Darien since 2022, and make up much of the increase since that country's recent controversial presidential election. "The crackdown in the wake of the July 28, 2024 elections in Venezuela has led to an increase in immigration," Refugees International said in a report published Friday. The report was based on dozens of interviews with migrants at reception stations in Panama and Costa Rica. More than half a million migrants, a record number, crossed the Darien in 2023. More than 65% of them were Venezuelan. Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino, who took office on July 1, promised to curb migration by closing several access points. He also said he would implement a repatriation program with the help of the United States, which has so far added flights to Colombia, Ecuador, and India. The U.S. government agreed to pay for deportation flights for those migrants deemed inadmissible. The plan has not been applied to Venezuelan migrants because Panama, like neighboring Costa Rica, suspended its relations with Caracas after refusing to recognize the electoral victory claimed by Nicolás Maduro. Flights between the two nations are paralyzed. As of Oct. 7, the number of migrants who had crossed through the Darien this year was 277,939 or 36% less than the same period in 2023, according to the Panamanian Ministry of Security. However, the same data showed a sharp increase in September compared to August. Records show that 25,111 migrants crossed last month, 51% more than in August with more than 80% of them Venezuelans. The numbers also included Colombians, Ecuadorians, Chinese and dozens of other nationalities. "The (migratory) measures and the rhetoric from the Panamanian government could have temporarily discouraged migration, but not in the long-term," said the organization. "When they exit Darien, migrants encounter less humanitarian aid in Panama," the report said. "For those who aren't Venezuelan they encounter the threat of deportation." Refugees International said this is due in part to the suspension of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in early March by the previous Panamanian administration. The organization provided humanitarian aid to migrants, but was suspended because of an expired agreement with the country's Ministry of Health. MSF had suggested that the suspension was in retaliation for multiple accusations made against Panamanian authorities for not addressing unprecedented rates of sexual violence in the Darien during the first months of 2024, according to the report. MSF informed the AP on Thursday that it has resumed its activities since last week at the Lajas Blancas reception station after Panamanian authorities approved a three-month medical intervention. MSF said that from January 2023 to February 2024 it provided more than 72,700 migrants with medical care.
The BBC	[ "North Hykeham", "North Kesteven District Council" ]	# North Hykeham: Children lose access to 'unsafe' football pitch By Harry Parkhill November 4th, 2024 07:32 AM --- More than 500 children have been left with nowhere to play football after an artificial pitch was closed last week. Greenbank FC, which runs 46 youth football teams in North Hykeham, said they were told at short notice the surface they use at One NK Leisure Centre was "unsafe". The team's chairman said "from the kids' perspectives, we're failing them". North Kesteven District Council said it was working to "ensure the pitch can reopen as soon as possible." Lincolnshire FA said it was working with the club, which is the biggest youth team in the county, to try and arrange alternatives. The football club said it had raised concerns over the quality and maintenance of the 10-year-old artificial pitch to North Kesteven District Council over the past two seasons. "The pitch has been left to deteriorate for so long it's now unplayable with questions being asked how this has been allowed to happen," Greenbank FC said in a statement. Chairman of Greenbank FC, Adam Leeder said it was "causing some real problems". "Having to try and find 540 users plus an adult's team somewhere else to go and play football is not an easy task." "The leisure facilities in Lincoln aren't massive and they're already up to capacity." Mr Leeder said he felt he was letting hundreds of children down. "I think from the kids' perspectives, we're failing them. I think we're failing them from a social and mental wellbeing perspective and I think we're failing the families," he said. North Kesteven District Council said it "supports the regular maintenance" of the pitch and was working with North Kesteven Academy and other partners to "help ensure the pitch can reopen again as soon as possible." The council said it hoped repairs could take place "in the next few weeks". Lincolnshire FA said it was told the site had been closed suddenly because it was "deemed unsafe and therefore closed with immediate effect". It said it was trying to mitigate the "substantial effect on Greenbank FC" and was working to find "short term, interim measures" to allow children to continue playing football. The BBC contacted GLL, a company responsible for day to day running of the pitch and leisure centre One NK, they refused to comment. Follow BBC Lincolnshire on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Send your story ideas to [email protected]
The New Yorker	[ "photography", "lgbtq", "fashion models", "transgender" ]	# A Counterculture Portraitist's Chronicle of New York's Youth By Michael Schulman March 12th, 2019 03:50 PM --- They come to New York City every week, in buses and trains and cars, carrying bags, carrying ambitions, carrying the fabulous clothes on their backs. They're the fashion kids, the art kids, the theatre kids, the who-knows-what kids—creative renegades of nineteen or twenty or twenty-five. They've heard what we've all heard: that downtown is dead, that the rent is too damn high, that someone has paved paradise and put up a Duane Reade. Still, they keep coming, against all odds, tricked out in spangles, torn shirts, and tattoos, seeking a place where they can find themselves, and one another. Ethan James Green, a photographer and former model, was one of them. Then he became one of their more stylish chroniclers. Born in 1990, Green is a counterculture portraitist, alive to a New York that still feels, somehow, like a freewheeling Wild West. His subjects—musicians and designers and all manner of "creatives"—are emissaries from a generation that has bushwhacked new expanses of gender expression and been reared on the self-curating powers of social media. When Green began his project—which is collected in the new book from Aperture "Young New York"—he was a self-described lone wolf, looking for friends. He found them at clubs, at fashion shows, and online. He would invite them to pose for portraits, usually at Corlears Hook Park, where the Lower East Side meets the East River. Green's subjects are often in states of transition, whether the transition from youth to adulthood or a gender transition, visible in top-surgery scars or budding breasts. Transitions render people vulnerable, but Green's subjects are confidently beautiful, masters of style and attitude. Androgyny has become something of a trend in the fashion industry, which has sought to capitalize on transgender visibility. While Green has a solid foot in the fashion world, having worked as a photographer for brands such as Fendi and Prada, his portraits are neither exploitative nor self-consciously hip. Rather, Green democratizes the glamour of fashion photography, just as his subjects have learned to take what they like from the pages of Vogue and repurpose it on Instagram. Almost as a side effect, his pictures reveal what queer identity looks like in the twenty-first century: multiracial, gender-fluid, and empowered. Green grew up in Caledonia, Michigan, a small town outside of Grand Rapids. Adolescence was isolating, as it often is for queer kids. The first day of middle school, in band class, each student had to pick a musical instrument to learn. The boys all chose percussion or brass; the girls chose woodwinds. When Green said "flute," the entire class turned and stared at him. "It was the beginning of being the 'different' one," he told me. "Being the loner." Fashion provided a means of escape. As a teen-ager, Green would frequent the Macy's in Grand Rapids, and the girls at the cash register would tell him that he should be a model. Rail-thin, he didn't consider himself a masculine ideal, but, browsing Models.com, he came across bodies like his own. His style was emo and "anti-Abercrombie," and he'd embellish outfits from chain stores with his grandmother's scrap fabric. Through his art teacher, he made a new friend named Lexi, who introduced him to another girl, Saira. "Every day after school, we'd drive to an orchard and take pictures, or be in the driveway of one of our houses," he says. "We were always taking pictures." In 2007, when Green was seventeen, his father took him to New York to meet with modelling agencies, and he signed with Ford Models. He moved to the city the following year and booked gigs with the likes of Calvin Klein. He found his way back to photography through the mentorship of David Armstrong, who had captured the sexy and seedy subcultures of disco-era New York, populated by gay men and artists and drug addicts. Armstrong, who was in his fifties at the time, was working on a collection of portraits of young men and found Green through modelling channels. Green soon became Armstrong's assistant, and Armstrong invited Green to use his place, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, as a testing ground for Green's own photography. "He believed in me before he even knew what I was doing," Green told me. When Armstrong decided to relocate to Massachusetts, Green organized a sale of Armstrong's prints. Spending day after day rooting through Armstrong's archives was a revelation. Green decided he wanted to shoot "real people"—meaning the people he found beautiful, not who the fashion world dictated—just like the social circle that Armstrong had captured in his book "The Silver Cord," published in 1997. "I thought I would look for the equivalents of the people in David's pictures, but today," Green said. Armstrong died in 2014. That year, Green was at Up & Down, a nightclub in the Meatpacking District. He went outside to smoke a cigarette and spotted an arresting-looking stranger named Hari Nef, who would go on to become the first openly transgender model to sign a worldwide contract with IMG. "I went up to her and I asked if I could take her picture, and she said yes," Green said. The next time they met, Green asked Nef to bring her friend Ser Brandon-Castro Serpas, an artist. Serpas brought three friends, and those friends had friends, and soon Green found himself capturing not just individuals but a community. Green's work is frequently compared to that of Diane Arbus: both are drawn to parks, to gender nonconformists, and to a certain directness of gaze. But their differences are perhaps more telling. Whereas Arbus brought out her subjects' strangeness—their otherness—Green emphasizes his subjects' beauty and self-possession, treating them not as specimens but as collaborators and co-conspirators. "The kids I photograph really, truly believe that they're the ones that are making New York New York again," Green told me. "They're what's important right now. They're always going to be important, but, right now, it's their time." On a sunny day last spring, I met Green at the downtown apartment he uses as a work space. Rows of portraits were tacked up on a bulletin board under a skylight. Green, in sandals, a striped T-shirt, and a denim jacket, sat by a window and blew cigarette smoke through a fraying screen as he waited for three of his newest muses. The first to arrive was the trans model and musician Torraine Futurum, who was dressed in tuxedo pants, a floral crop top, and rhinestone boots. She was followed by Mica, a trans woman in a blue Prada top, who had moved from Atlanta two years earlier and was between a job in P.R. and helping a friend sell vintage clothing. The last to arrive was Jameel Mohammed, a twenty-three-year-old from Chicago who cut a striking figure: six and a half feet tall, with a bleached Afro, jewelry that he had designed himself, and a mohair jacket. A trained dancer, Mohammed had e-mailed Green two weeks earlier with a photo of himself in an acrobatic pose. This was their first time meeting in person. The group walked to a shaded lawn at a nearby housing project. There were few residents walking around, and the ones who passed paid them little mind. Futurum went first. Green cleared away a plastic bag and placed her in front of a brick wall. She put one hand on her hip and fixed her eyes on the camera with a look of confident serenity. "Gorgeous," Green told her, straddling his legs wide. He wasn't necessarily looking for candid moments. He shaped and coaxed his subject, feeding her rapid-fire suggestions and compliments: "nice," "beautiful," "major." "Do something crazy with the arms—make a shape," he told her. Futurum linked her lithe arms above her head like a serpent. "Gorgeous," Green said. "Hold that." This piece was drawn from "Ethan James Green: Young New York," which will be out in April from Aperture.
Wired	[ "crime", "security" ]	# Salisbury Novichok suspects: why didn't airport security catch them? By Matt Burgess September 7th, 2018 02:00 AM --- The Salisbury novichok suspects Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov easily walked into the UK. Once people land in the country there are few security checks Now that we know how Russia attempted to assassinate Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia on British soil, could we have done anything to stop it? One surprising detail to emerge is the seemingly sloppy nature with which the deadly vial of novichok was handled. Traces of the nerve agent were found in the hotel room where Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov stayed in London. "These things are incredibly toxic so it's kind of surprising you can find traces because it probably means they've been sloppy with it," says Gary Stephens, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Reading. Testing of the samples in the City Stay hotel, in Bow, found they were not serious enough to cause concern to the health of people who stayed there afterwards, the Met Police said. "You would expect under normal conditions if it was kept in a properly sealed container that you shouldn't be able to find traces of it," Stephens adds. He says the counterfeit perfume bottle found by police doesn't appear to that well sealed or contained. While types of novichok have been around since the 1970s, little is known about them outside of intelligence agencies. It is believed they can be sticky, liquid-like substances, which are easily turned to gas. This could explain why traces may have been found in the hotel room but there is no official explanation at present. "If you were transporting this thing for military purpose and weren't crossing state borders, you wouldn't take a highly toxic substance around in a container like that," Stephens says. "You would take it around in a sealed container." The movements of the pair – both believed to be officers in Russia's secretive GRU military intelligence unit – have unraveled by the UK government and police. On Friday, March 2, Petrov and Boshirov got off Aeroflot flight SU2588, from Moscow, passed through Gatwick's passport control carrying hand luggage and caught the train to London's Victoria station. The next few hours saw them travel across London to the low-key, red-brick hotel. Over the next two days, until they left the UK on March 4 at 22:30 from Heathrow, the men travelled to and from Salisbury twice. On the second visit, they smeared a version of the deadly nerve agent novichok on the front door of the Skripal's home. The nerve agent was likely transported in the grey rucksack carried by Petrov and Boshirov. Police have confirmed the novichok was contained in a faked Nina Ricci Premier Jour perfume bottle, which was later found in the house of Charlie Rowley, the partner of Dawn Sturgess who died from the poison. The three-inch tall glass bottle had a modified nozzle and was contained in an authentic-looking box. After scouring through thousands of hours of CCTV footage, British police managed to piece together the movements of Petrov and Boshirov. The Salisbury case has echoes of the killing of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, after it emerged he was being paid by MI6. Litvinenko was killed by polonium-210 and it is believed to have been inserted into a cup of tea. Traces of the polonium were found across London. In 2004, journalist Anna Politkovskaya claimed to have been poisoned when drinking tea on a internal Karat Russian flight. It's likely the perfume bottle was used to hide the poison as it was carried into the UK onboard the Aeroflot flight from Moscow. So why wasn't it detected? When entering the UK it's unlikely Petrov and Boshirov would have been checked by any security systems. "We don't routinely interview people for security risks on arrival," says Thomas Ormerod a professor of psychology in the Crime Research Centre at the University of Sussex. Some people may have baggage checked upon arrival as well as departure, he says, but this is rare and only if there is intelligence against a certain person. However, the technology behind airport scanners is improving quickly. In recent years the medical imaging technology computed tomography has been miniaturised to the scale that it's now being trialled for scanning hand luggage at major airports around the world, including Heathrow. Despite this, most security checks are designed to check for explosive ingredients that may be used during flights. It's unlikely systems would be able to detect complex poisons through imaging systems alone. Ormerod says introducing more interviews could be one way to improve airport security for arrivals. During an eight-month trial he conducted, 162 people were passed through airport security using false stories about their lives. As they went through the security process, along with regular passengers, they were asked about their trips by staff who were trained to identify lies. The airport security staff assessing passengers on what they said rather than how they acted detected deceptive passengers 66 per cent of the time. Those purely assessing behaviour spotted the fake passengers in five per cent of cases. "You could argue that is a missed opportunity," Ormerod says. The US, France, German and Canadian governments have agreed with the UK government's assessment that the Russian government "almost certainly" approved the poisoning by Petrov and Boshirov. The Kremlin has said it is "unacceptable" to make accusations against its leadership. However, Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow on Russia and Eurasia, with Chatham House, says the country has the chance to prove it had nothing to do with the poisoning. "If it wants to suggest the Russian state was not involved or it was a rogue operation they can then produce these individuals even if they just want to exonerate them," he says. "If Russia continues to bluster, ridicule, condemn and deny everything then that strongly supports the suggestion it was not a rogue operation and was in fact ordered by the Russian state." For Giles, Russia has also proven adept in its digital handling of the international situation. "It has very successfully convinced a lot of people in this country that the British government is concealing evidence because it doesn't have evidence and this is just a fiction," he says. "Anything they can do to erode the willingness of this country or international community to take action is a win in terms of how Russia is concerned." This article was originally published by WIRED UK
Associated Press News	[ "Artificial intelligence", "Colleges and universities", "California", "NVIDIA Corp.", "San Jose", "Technology", "Education", "San Francisco" ]	# California students want careers in AI. Here's how colleges are meeting that demand By DELILAH BRUMER and JEREMY GARZA/CalMatters October 29th, 2024 04:35 PM --- Nathan Lim, a student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, recently spent the summer working on an artificial intelligence tool to help students evaluate their senior project ideas for ethical and social justice implications. He is one of many California college students choosing to learn about AI theory and its emerging applications while preparing to enter an ever-changing workforce. Simultaneously, colleges and universities across the state are working to expand and develop AI courses and degrees to keep up with demand. With hopes of bolstering these efforts, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently announced the first statewide partnership with a tech firm to bring AI curriculum, resources and opportunities to California's public higher education institutions. The partnership with Nvidia, a leading AI software development company, will bring AI tools to community colleges first. In the future, the hope is to add partnerships for the California State University and University of California systems as well, according to the governor's press release. As colleges and universities are developing AI programs, these partnerships will give students more access to the technology that tech companies use while teaching students how to use it, said Alex Stack, a deputy communications director for Newsom. Lim is a junior studying music and computer science, with a concentration in AI. He sees the potential for AI in both learning how to play instruments and making music more accessible. "What if there was an AI private teacher to answer questions and provide feedback on playing?" Lim said. "This could make it available to so many more people that can't afford $50 to $100 an hour for private lessons." Lim learned to play the violin, guitar and piano with help from a middle school teacher and YouTube tutorials. He said his family could not afford private lessons, so he is mostly self-taught. While the internet helped him evolve as a musician, he thinks AI will drive society's next revolution in technology. "It almost feels like, obviously I wasn't around for it, but the creation of the internet," Lim said. "People were like, 'Oh, I don't want to use that.' Now if you don't use it, I mean, what are you doing? So I feel like it's going to get to a point like that with AI, if not already." In Lim's data science course this quarter, the program that he uses to complete homework assignments, Google Colab, has AI embedded that will generate the needed code for him if prompted correctly. "Learning is much less about what we can remember and memorize, and much more about asking the right questions because that's what AI is," Lim said. Lim's dad also studied computer science in college and encouraged Lim to explore coding from a young age; the rapid growth of AI focused Lim's career path. "Someone asked me a question about why I want to specialize in AI in the computer science field," Lim said. "I told him, 'I feel like if I don't, then my job is gonna get replaced by someone who does.'" ## Developing paths to AI careers Many California colleges and universities are racing to prepare students for high-paying AI engineering jobs, although the path to these careers often require a master's or doctoral degree. Community colleges and universities are working to lay the groundwork for students to pursue those more advanced degrees, while also finding ways to get students involved in AI at the undergraduate level. Over the next decade, computer and mathematical jobs, which include AI, are projected to grow by 12.9 percent, the second-fastest of any industry, according to a report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. At tech companies such as Meta and Google, postings for AI-related jobs list six-figure salaries, with many reaching above $200,000 annually. "The growth of computer and mathematical occupations is expected to stem from demand for upgraded computer services, continued development of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, and an increasing amount of data available for analysis," the labor report states. Angel Fuentes, the dean of business and workforce development at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose, is pushing for community colleges to foster AI literacy, so that students across disciplines understand the basic terminology, uses and ethics of AI, even if they aren't pursuing a tech career. He said AI literacy is important because AI is starting to impact fields from medicine to the humanities to business. Fuentes also said he's started to see more "blue-collar AI" opportunities popping up — jobs that work with AI, but don't necessarily develop or innovate with it, and that typically don't require master's degrees. One example is a prompt engineer, which is someone who writes the inputs that companies use to get responses from AI platforms such as ChatGPT. Prompt engineers may use AI to help create presentations or streamline a company's internal processes, for example. In part to prepare students for those more accessible AI jobs, eight California community colleges now have AI degrees or certificates, with more in the works, Fuentes said. These programs focus on skills such as computer programming and entrepreneurship. "The world is changing so fast and we want our students to be prepared," Fuentes said. The California partnership with Nvidia aims to create AI programs, software and dedicated AI spaces for community college students, educators and workers. Louis Stewart, the head of strategic initiatives at Nvidia, said the partnership will initially last three years, allowing students to get "AI-enabled." Stewart emphasized the importance of "reskilling and upskilling" workers, including people who are returning to school to switch careers, by teaching them about AI. Nvidia is not being paid by the state, and the company is covering the costs of teaching students and faculty about AI, Stewart said. "The community colleges are a great starting point because it is a great way to get tools and resources into these classrooms that might have a harder time accessing it," said Stack, with the governor's office. Even though only 1 in 5 community college students transfer to a four-year university, officials hope to equip and inspire students to continue their AI studies beyond community college, or enter the workforce in AI-adjacent roles. A key point for some administrators and faculty in the community college system is ensuring students understand the ethical and unethical uses of AI, as well as the terminology and real-world applications. Some efforts to integrate AI in education have gone wrong. The volatility of a tech startup led to Los Angeles Unified shelving one AI tool, while school board members for San Diego Unified were in the dark about AI technology they had approved in a broader contract. In both of these districts, problems arose when clear communication and expectations surrounding AI were not established. Experts have warned that it's crucial for decision makers to vet AI solutions, and be thoughtful when it comes to implementation of AI in education. The idea behind the AI literacy push is that "AI is here to stay" and various sectors, not just tech, "should embrace it," said Nasreen Rahim, a professor at Evergreen Valley College who trains teachers on how to best use technology. "You can't just shut your mind to AI and have that be your mindset," Rahim said. "It's about having an open mind." The California community college system has a new set of academic integrity guidelines for AI, which aim to ensure "expectations are clear" for students in terms of what is considered responsible use of AI, and what isn't. Brian Sawaya, a biomedical engineering student at Foothill College in Santa Clara County, has found a network of peers at the community college level who, like him, are dedicated to exploring tech fields, including AI. "Community college students are some of the most driven and most ambitious people you'll meet," Sawaya said. "Because community college students are underrepresented in terms of access to opportunities, and companies are trying to diversify their workforce, it's important to have opportunities for community college students." Sawaya is the president of his college's robotics team, and he said he uses AI to help his club's robots better detect objects and avoid obstacles. Sawaya said he is excited to transfer to a four-year university next year to continue his studies in the field of wearable technology, which includes prosthetics. ## How four-year universities are adding AI programs As Newsom pointed out, the UC and Cal State systems will also benefit from AI industry partnerships in the future. The Cal State Board of Trustees announced in September that the university system is seeking $7 million in its 2025-26 budget request to fund AI infrastructure for students and faculty. Four universities in the Cal State system have AI programs: Cal State East Bay, San Francisco State, San Jose State and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. The CSU Generative AI Committee convened for the first time this fall in response to some CSU campuses' demand for systemwide guidance on developing AI programs and managing AI use. At Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, students in the Computer Science and AI Club meet every Sunday afternoon in a large lecture hall. On a recent Sunday, 80 students, mostly computer science freshmen, sat in front of two projectors to learn about AI basics from club leaders. "As the president this year, I'm trying to champion a place where people who know more about AI come to teach people who know less and are very interested," said Leo Horwitz, a computer science senior at Cal Poly. The club offers workshops to teach the foundations of AI to students and is working on original AI application projects – for example, one that will research and generate code and another that will automate and referee games of red light, green light. The club partners with local companies to raise funds, and it gets money from the student government, which sponsors clubs, Horwitz said. Horwitz is excited about the possibility of Cal Poly working with a leading AI developer in the future. "A direct partnership with a company in the industry is productive because it's easy for academia to fall behind," Horwitz said. "No matter what (the partnership) is, we're interacting with them. This is a way for us to force ourselves to be in the thick of it with the cutting edge stuff." Horwitz's professor, Franz Kurfess, offers opportunities for his students to work with companies as part of his courses. He is also leading the project that Cal Poly junior Lim is working on to use AI in evaluating students' senior projects. "Working with an external company is an excellent opportunity for students to learn about practical applications of AI in a context that they might experience later in their career," Kurfess said. "It also exposes them to professional work practices where they may not be able to get away with things that they are doing for class assignments because they have other people depending on their work." In another partnership with this news organization, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo faculty and students recently worked with CalMatters to build Digital Democracy – an AI-powered website that tracks lawmakers, legislation, campaign contributions, and congressional hearings and sessions. Across the UC system, leaders are working to incorporate AI across disciplines, while balancing the potential pitfalls of the technology. A UC presidential working group chose a list of "responsible AI principles," which include transparency about AI use, safety and privacy. For Chris Mattmann, the chief data and artificial intelligence officer at UCLA, ongoing developments in the world of generative AI mean it's crucial to "innovate and experiment," but to do so with the guidance of "responsible and ethical principles." Mattmann began at UCLA earlier this year, and his role is the first of its kind at any UC. Mattmann works to oversee AI strategy across UCLA, including how the technology is used by faculty, students, staff and researchers. He emphasized the importance of developing AI literacy across disciplines. UCLA recently became the first California college to offer ChatGPT enterprise accounts, allowing a limited number of student groups and faculty to use the technology through the university. "(Our goal) is to hopefully demystify AI, so people really understand what's coming, what's here, the opportunity, but also the need to really be guided by ethics," Mattmann said. Beyond the public higher education systems in California, private universities are also working to create AI opportunities for students. While some private universities such as Stanford have added concentrations or minors in AI, USC is developing a new AI major in response to the immense demand for AI instruction, said Nenad Medvidović, the computer science department chair at USC. Medvidović says that some students are driven by an academic curiosity of how AI works, but others are driven by making sure they are employable after they graduate. "I've seen many waves of technology that have kind of come along and matured," Medvidović said. "Nothing has come close to what we're seeing right now with AI and machine learning and large language models."
Wired	[ "gaming", "culture", "art", "magazine", "september/october 2018 issue" ]	# A groundswell of indie games is tackling issues AAA titles won't By Phoebe Braithwaite September 7th, 2018 02:00 AM --- A new V&A exhibition shines a light on diversity and innovation on the margins Modern computer code is generally built out of the ASCII character set, which is based on English and uses the Latin alphabet – meaning that almost all programming is effectively in English. Almost all, that is, except قلب ("qalb"), a programming language created entirely in Arabic by computer scientist and games designer Ramsey Nassar. Nassar built قلب as part of a project exploring code as a medium of self-expression, and aimed to shine a light on some of the cultural biases and assumptions inherent in game design and wider technological innovation. He used the language to create his own version of Pong, the great-grandfather of arcade games, called بون ("būn"). Nassar's work is one of many pieces of recent gaming history to be included in a new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt opens on September 8 and aims to capture the last ten years of innovation in the medium. Lead curator Marie Foulston says we are in a "radical period of change within games," with an upsurge of new voices, talent and perspectives changing the landscape in new and exciting ways. "Sometimes the misconception with video games is that there's this one big homogenous sense of 'everybody's playing this game,'" she says. "But what we wanted to show in the exhibition is that, no, this is a field that's as eclectic as any other art form." The exhibition includes major AAA games like World of Warcraft and The Last of Us, but also smaller, independent games that are pushing the envelope – such as Nina Freeman's how do you Do It?, in which a young girl explores ideas about sex by making her Barbie dolls hump each other; and Molleindustria's Phone Story, which gamifies the dark side of smartphone production, including dramatising the life-threatening conditions of coltan mining in the Congo. (Phone Story was made in response to a wave of suicides at Apple manufacturer Foxconn in China in 2010; Apple banned it from its app store four days after its release, citing violations of developer guidelines.) Examples like these are testament to the wealth and diversity of talent piling into gaming as well as the subtlety with which games can explore political and social issues. Freeman, who comes to gaming from a background in poetry, says she takes a confessional approach to game design, and based how do you Do It? on her own childhood experiences. "It's all about that personal story and wanting to show these ordinary life scenarios," she says. This is a common theme in gaming over the past decade, as new designers bring voice to experiences that are unlikely to feature in mainstream titles, often focusing on marginalised identities and unexceptional events. "Life doesn't always happen through these big epic narratives," says Foulston. "How do you tell stories through these very small spaces?" Gareth Damian Martin, a games designer and founder of the gaming journal Heterotopias, says that this indie groundswell has been gaining steam over the past decade. His view is that a process of polarisation is taking place within gaming, with bigger studios making fewer games but on a larger scale, paving the way for "an upsurge of smaller, independent projects to fill the gap that those games are leaving." A main reason for this influx of talent is the lower barriers to entry as design tools become easier and cheaper to use. Whereas game-making technology was once incredibly expensive, says games lecturer David Farrell at Glasgow Caledonian University, "nowadays the stuff you can get for free is the same stuff that people used to make the big commercial games." From titles that have reached millions to those with a more niche focus, the V&A's exhibition represents recognition of the medium as an art form. "Every work is groundbreaking in a different way," says Foulston. "Games are definitely at a cultural tipping point." Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt opens at the V&A museum in London on September 8 This article was originally published by WIRED UK
The New Yorker	[ "russia", "vladimir putin" ]	# When a Russian Dissident Becomes a Collaborator By Masha Gessen March 12th, 2019 03:33 PM --- What makes a person collaborate with a repressive, hateful, or criminal government? There are simple answers: Greed, vanity, the lack of a moral compass. But I am interested in the more complicated answers, which have to do with the desire to do good when all available options are bad. A well-known Russian opposition figure disclosed recently that she was accepting a senior position with RT, the state propaganda conglomerate. (Its foreign-language operation had been known as Russia Today.) Maria Baronova, who is thirty-four, was active in the anti-government protests of 2011 and 2012. In June, 2012, she was charged with inciting a mass disturbance—she was one of a dozen people whom the government chose to punish, in order to frighten people from protesting again. In December, 2013, while her trial was under way and on the eve of the Olympic Games in Sochi, Baronova, like the members of the art-protest group Pussy Riot, who were then in prison, was given amnesty. During the following five years, Baronova worked primarily as an organizer on behalf of political prisoners in Russia. I know Baronova well. We met during the 2011-2012 protests, and I wrote about her when she faced charges. Later, I made her one of the four main characters in my book "The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia." In the course of about eighteen months, from 2014 to 2016, I spent roughly thirty hours interviewing her. To be honest, she was my favorite character in the book, because she was the most complicated and, in some ways, the most self-aware. As a kid, she had wanted to be a military officer, and by thirty she very nearly ended up a political prisoner. She was keenly aware of her need to be a part of something great and her desire to act together with others; she saw both her childhood patriotism and adult activism as functions of these desires. But as much as I might have thought of Baronova as a character, she was an actual person, whose story continued after my book was published. I asked Baronova, on Facebook Messenger, if the decision to work for RT had been morally difficult. "I didn't have pangs of conscience," she responded. "Or I did, but only because I knew I would upset people whose opinion is important to me." I knew that she meant me, among others. Baronova was educated as a chemist and had worked in the medical-imports business, where she made a very good living thanks to profits from corruption. She had quit that line of work some time before she joined the protests, in order to focus on her son's learning difficulties. She had been divorced. In the protest movement, she was fearless. She recited the Russian constitution to a platoon of soldiers. She staged a one-woman protest, in a church, in support of the imprisoned members of Pussy Riot. Most memorably for me, in June of 2013, she tried to get the police to explain why they had released a man who had beaten up an L.G.B.T. activist. For this, she was physically attacked and had to be hospitalized. Baronova was loud and confrontational, even by protest standards; she made a lot of people very uncomfortable. I had seen Baronova act more bravely—act more, period—than almost anyone I know. The problem with Russia is that it is becoming more and more difficult to act with others in any way. Baronova's second profession was journalism—she did some groundbreaking reporting from Ukraine during the revolution there, in 2014—but TV Rain, the independent television channel where she was working, came under attack from the authorities and has since been reduced to a primarily Web-based operation. Most independent media outlets have disappeared, and a few outlets remain as bare shadows of their past selves. Most of my former journalism colleagues have gone into other fields: edutainment, museum work, charitable projects. A distinct kind of charity has taken shape in Russia: professional journalists will report online on people or families in trouble or about projects that need funding, and readers are encouraged to donate to the cause. This kind of direct assistance has become a lifeline in a country where the welfare state has been virtually destroyed and civil society is under extreme pressure. The Russian state fights civil society in at least two distinct ways. One is direct pressure: organizations are raided and shut down; leaders are threatened and some are even arrested. The other strategy is imitation. For almost any kind of civil-society group—from a movement to document potholes and demand road repair to human-rights defense—there is a government-funded equivalent. This serves both to muddy the waters and to insure that everything remains under the Kremlin's control. It's an old totalitarian impulse: in the Soviet Union, even the trade unions were run by the state, which was also the sole employer in the country. In May, 2017, RT launched its own media-charity operation, complete with a legal-defense arm; this is the project that Baronova will lead. "It's 2019, and everything is dominated by the state," she wrote to me. "I'm never going to have another country. I'm not going to have another life, either. I want this country to be livable." In the past couple of years, after she had wrapped up a job at the exiled ex-oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky's Open Russia Foundation, Baronova had tried looking for other work. She told me that she received no fewer than twenty rejections—at least in part, she is sure, because she is known as being so loud and brash and because her personal style has made her many enemies. (I think she is right.) She needed money desperately. On top of everything else, her ex-husband and his current wife had a baby who became severely disabled as a result of trauma sustained at the hospital after birth. The two families are close—they are neighbors, and Baronova and her ex-husband are raising their older son together—so they pooled resources and efforts. Money had long since run out, and energy was running low when RT came knocking. "They asked me to join them in doing something I know how to do," she wrote. "Everyone likes to be treated nicely and to have the opportunity to do something they are good at. I started to feel better for the first time in many months." I'll probably never stop thinking of Baronova as a character in a book. She is still a gratifyingly complicated one, especially because she is given to self-reflection. And though her story is specific to Russia, it contains a universal lesson about collaboration: in a situation in which the choice is between abandoning hope and working for the state, some of the people who thrive on action—the kind of people who could probably do the most for their country—will become collaborators.
Voice Of America	[ "Middle East" ]	# Some Progress in Nuclear Talks, Interim Deal Possible, Iranian Officials Say By Reuters April 19th, 2021 11:46 PM --- Iran and world powers have made some progress on how to revive the 2015 nuclear accord later abandoned by the United States, and an interim deal could be a way to gain time for a lasting settlement, Iranian officials said on Monday. Tehran and the world powers have been meeting in Vienna since early April to work on steps that must be taken, touching on U.S. sanctions and Iran's breaches of the deal, to bring back Tehran and Washington into full compliance with the accord. "We are on the right track, and some progress has been made, but this does not mean that the talks in Vienna have reached the final stage," Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh told a weekly news conference in Tehran. "Practical solutions are still far away, but we have moved from general words to agreeing on specific steps towards the goal," Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia's ambassador to the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency (IAEA), tweeted on Monday. U.S. President Joe Biden's administration, which took office in January pledging to rejoin the deal, has said it is ready to remove "all sanctions that are inconsistent" with the accord, but it has not spelled out which measures it means. Iran's clerical establishment has said it will not return to strict observance of the 2015 agreement unless all sanctions reimposed or added by former President Donald Trump after he ditched the accord in 2018 are rescinded first. Diplomats say sequenced steps by each side may offer a solution, while Iranian officials told Reuters the high-stakes talks in Vienna might yield an interim deal to give space to diplomacy on a lasting settlement. "The May deadline is approaching. ... What is being discussed in Vienna for the near term is the main outlines of an interim deal to give all sides more time to resolve complicated technical issues," said an Iranian official. He referred to a law passed by Iran's hard-line-dominated Parliament that obliges the government to harden its nuclear stance if sanctions are not lifted. The law mandated an end to short-notice U.N. nuclear inspections from February 21, but Tehran and the IAEA agreed to keep up "necessary" monitoring for up to three months. Iran's top nuclear negotiator Abbas Araqchi told Iranian state media that "there is no discussion on an interim agreement or similar topics in the Vienna talks." However, another Iranian official said that if a political agreement was reached on technical steps to remove all sanctions, Tehran might suspend enrichment to 20% purity in return for a release of blocked Iranian funds in other countries. Iran says $20 billion of its oil revenue has been frozen in countries such as South Korea, Iraq and China under the U.S. sanctions regime since 2018. "Unblocking Iran's funds is a good start. An interim deal will give us time to work on removal of all sanctions on Iran," the second Iranian official said. Asked for comment, a U.S. State Department spokesman said talks were continuing in Vienna and that the U.S. team "has been exploring concrete approaches concerning the steps both Iran and the U.S. would need to take to return to mutual compliance." "The discussions have been thorough and thoughtful, if indirect. ... There have been no breakthroughs, but we did not expect this process to be easy or quick," he added, saying the delegations were expected to return home for consultations at some point, but he did not know when. Beyond the sanctions reimposed in 2018, Trump added new ones, including classifying Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist group and designating Iran's Central Bank over allegations of terrorist financing. EU sees goodwill to save 2015 deal The European Union's top diplomat, Josep Borrell, said he saw a willingness to save the 2015 deal, citing progress at the Vienna talks. "I think that both parties are really interested in reaching an agreement, and they have been moving from general to more focused issues, which are clearly, on one side sanction-lifting, and on the other side, nuclear implementation issues," he said. Iran has violated the deal's nuclear limits since Washington withdrew, recently raising uranium enrichment to 20% fissile purity, a significant step toward bomb-grade material. The 2015 pact capped the level of enrichment purity at 3.67% — suitable for generating civilian nuclear energy. Complicating Biden's aim of rejoining the deal, Tehran last week launched enrichment to 60% purity at its main Natanz plant after a damaging blast there that it blamed on sabotage by Israel, which opposes diplomacy with Iran. Around 90% fissile purity is needed for a nuclear explosive. Tehran has repeatedly denied seeking to weaponize enrichment, though Western intelligence services and the IAEA believe it once had a covert atom bomb program that was shelved in 2003.
Wired	[ "amazon", "taxes", "workers" ]	# Bernie Sanders and the Truth About Amazon, Food Stamps, and Tax Breaks By Louise Matsakis September 6th, 2018 07:27 PM --- Bernie Sanders wants companies like Amazon to pay when their employees rely on public benefits, but the retail giant benefits even more from economic incentives offered by local politicians. Since the early 2000s, Amazon has quietly received more than $1.5 billion in government subsidies, in exchange for bringing new jobs to cities and states across the country. At the same time, low-wage employees at Amazon's grueling warehouses have sometimes had to rely on a different kind of government benefit, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, to make ends meet. Now Senator Bernie Sanders is bringing renewed scrutiny to Amazon's reliance on taxpayer dollars to supplement wages. On Wednesday, the Vermont independent introduced the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act, which hits companies that have more than 500 employees with a 100 percent tax on some government benefits its workers receive, like public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps. For example: If the Stop BEZOS Act were to pass, McDonald's would be taxed $100 every time one of its cashiers collected $100 in food stamps. The bill is designed to force large corporations to increase wages, and to raise awareness about how companies benefit from public welfare, even in a healthy economy. The legislation would likely affect many large low-paying retailers, like Walmart and Home Depot, and also Amazon, which says it employs more than 125,000 full-time workers in its US fulfillment centers. The retail giant, which stayed silent amid President Trump's repeated criticisms of the company, has mounted a public relations offensive in response to Sanders. Amazon even recently began instructing full-time "ambassadors" to promote positive stories about working in its fulfillment centers via a fleet of nearly identical Twitter accounts. While Sanders is right to point out that many Amazon employees likely use public assistance to make ends meet, his new legislation doesn't address the other kind of lucrative government benefits the retail giant often receives. In negotiating to open a new warehouse or other outpost, Amazon often obtains hefty tax breaks and other economic incentives from local politicians, the details of which aren't always disclosed to taxpayers. In the lead-up to the introduction of the Bezos bill, Sanders repeatedly singled out Amazon, now valued close to $1 trillion, for paying "employees wages that are so low that they are forced to depend on taxpayer-funded programs such as food stamps, Medicaid, and subsidized housing to survive." He also invited Amazon warehouse workers to share their experiences with his office, some of which he later made public. The initiative provoked a rare response from the retail giant, which in a blog post accused the senator of making "inaccurate and misleading accusations against Amazon." In its response, Amazon took issue with Sanders' claim that thousands of its workers rely on food stamps, arguing there's no way to know if they're employees who deliberately chose to work part-time or were seasonally employed. The company declined further comment on the legislation. Amazon has a point. It's impossible to know exactly how many workers at companies like Amazon use public benefits like SNAP, because many states don't keep track, according to an investigation from news site The New Food Economy conducted by reporter Claire Brown. She found that in five states, Amazon ranked among the top 20 companies with the most employees living in households that receive food stamps, even in places where it's not a top employer. But she was unable to obtain data from 25 additional states where she sought public records, in part because they don't exist, at least not in a uniform manner. There's also no way to know how much the corporations that Sanders' legislation targets, like Walmart, benefit from SNAP recipients buying food at their stores. In fact, the US Department of Agriculture and food retailers have specifically fought to conceal data about which companies benefit the most from the estimated $70 billion doled out in SNAP benefits each year. A South Dakota newspaper has been suing the Department of Agriculture to make the information public since 2010, and the case may now go to the Supreme Court. "Not only can we not prove the first side of the equation, which is how many employees use SNAP, but also how much companies make off of it," says Brown, the New Food Economy reporter. "We can prove neither side of the coin." Sanders' legislation focuses on public welfare programs, ignoring how and why local governments dole out so much corporate welfare to companies like Amazon, Tesla, Apple, and Foxconn, long before a single employee is hired. Professional sports teams and car makers also have received enormous incentives from local governments, but experts say Amazon is unique in the amount and scope of public assistance it has sought. "Amazon is particularly adept at receiving incentives, including for their distribution centers," says Nathan Jensen, a government professor at the University of Texas Austin and coauthor of Incentives to Pander: How Politicians Use Corporate Welfare for Political Gain. He says some states, like Maryland, have allowed Amazon to collect some taxes that workers would otherwise pay to the state. In a rare move last year, Amazon publicly invited cities to submit proposals to be the site for a second headquarters, noting that "special incentive legislation" may be required. Meanwhile, taxpayers, and even some local politicians, aren't informed about the details of what companies like Amazon will get in exchange for coming to town. Unlike, say, a proposed tax increase to pay for a new school, few public hearings usually take place over how much a newly arrived employer should be allowed to forgo paying in taxes. Some municipalities submitted bids for HQ2, as the project is known, through their local chambers of commerce, shielding the proposed incentive packages from open-records laws. The final 20 cities, cut down from over 200, were also reportedly required to sign nondisclosure agreements with Amazon. In some cases, the retail giant has also argued that the discounts it receives on public utilities amount to a trade secret. Jensen says that economic incentives can come at the expense of public services like schools, and that evidence suggests firms will still bring jobs to new areas without them. "School districts are especially hit by many of the property tax abatements where they often struggle to finance schools or there have to be property tax increases to maintain the same level of services," he explains. "Most of the evidence suggests that incentives are rarely pivotal in attracting investment... Many of the things that really matter to firms, highways and workforce quality, are paid for through taxes." Despite the potential downsides, Greg LeRoy, the executive director of Good Jobs First, says companies often succeed in securing sweetheart deals because of the intense competition among cities, towns, and states to secure new jobs and foster economic growth. It creates a race to provide the biggest tax breaks for all sorts of companies, beyond Amazon. In the wake of the 2008 recession, "politicians are desperate to look aggressive on jobs and they have a lot fewer deals to compete for," says LeRoy, whose group compiled the total of Amazon's subsidies. "Amazon has completely played the system that it inherited like a fiddle." In 2006, the Supreme Court had the chance to decide whether such tax incentives are constitutional under the Commerce Clause, but the justices ultimately avoided directly confronting the issue. Economic incentive deals often last longer than the terms of politicians who broker them. But in the moment, the chance to stand next to a figure like Jeff Bezos at the unveiling of a new warehouse is often too valuable a political moment to pass up. "What governor doesn't want to stand next to Tim Cook and announce a new data center, even if it's only going to employ 50 people?" asks LeRoy. "The political power, the political 'juice' of associating yourself with a famous company is enormous." President Trump has sought to politically benefit from the same type of incentive package that Amazon has received, when he reportedly personally helped organize the eye-popping $4.8 billion Foxconn deal arranged to lure the iPhone manufacturer to Wisconsin. As a businessman, Trump also secured similar deals for his own properties. The Stop BEZOS Act ultimately only addresses one kind of public assistance that companies like Amazon stand to benefit from: welfare programs like food stamps. The legislation, were it to pass, would do little to stop local governments from competing in secret to attract companies, and jobs, to their cities. Implementing the legislation would also prove onerous, since information like what companies employ food stamp recipients isn't readily available. But Sanders may still succeed in putting pressure on local politicians to examine whether the deals they've made with the world's most wealthy corporations are fair. The stakes are high: Amazon is set to soon announce the final location of its second headquarters, and Apple is currently shopping for the site of another campus as well.
The New Yorker	[ "r. kelly", "sexual abuse", "sexual violence", "investigations", "department of homeland security" ]	# "He Tried to Break Me": Dominique Gardner, One of R. Kelly's Longtime Girlfriends, Speaks Out By Jim DeRogatis March 12th, 2019 12:20 PM --- Early last Thursday morning, I received the latest in a series of calls from Dominique Gardner, a former girlfriend of R. Kelly, who said she was eager, when we met that night, to "give my truth." For nine years, Gardner, who is twenty-seven, was one of Kelly's lovers. For part of that time, she says, she was one of six women living with the singer. In the documentary series "Surviving R. Kelly," Gardner appears in the final two episodes: we watch as her mother, Michelle Kramer, tracks her down to a Los Angeles hotel room and convinces her to leave the singer's "cult." Gardner told me that she has not watched any of these dramatic scenes, nor any part of the documentary. "What's the point of seeing it when I lived it?" she said. "People are using it as entertainment, when it wasn't entertainment for me, you know?" After being reunited with her mother last May, Gardner returned to Kelly's side three days later and stayed with him for about two more weeks, until she finally walked away for good. She is now living on the North Side of Chicago, working and saving money for a studio apartment of her own. "I would probably still be there if he would have let me go to my little brother's graduation," she said. "I'd still be there, but, when he told me no ... I'm, like, 'What is wrong with you?' You don't let people see their families, I guess, because we might realize how much freedom and happiness we have out there with our families." Family meant a lot to Gardner, who grew up in Chicago's southwestern suburbs—she was especially close to her younger brother, and missing other family gatherings while she was with Kelly bothered her. She had always been a good student. Kramer wanted her to be a dental hygienist; Gardner aspires to be a writer and a poet. Gardner looked healthier and happier than she did when we had last met, in July. At that point, she had left Kelly a month earlier, and was startlingly underweight. We had met in a bar in Chicago, where she spoke haltingly while looking out the big plate-glass windows, watching for any black S.U.V. that might stop and linger. "I wouldn't put it past him to have his guys following me," she'd said. On Thursday, as in the past, we started by talking about music—we are both big fans of Kendrick Lamar—and our tattoos; she said she admires how I am "all tatted up," with the logos of more than a dozen of my favorite bands clearly visible on my forearms. Only one of her tattoos, a lion's head, on the back of her right hand, can be readily seen, and I asked if she had others. She said that she also has two images of Kelly's face, one on her left leg and another on her rib cage—a particularly painful place to get a tattoo, she noted. For the final years of Gardner's time dating Kelly, the group of women also living with him included Joycelyn Savage and Azriel Clary, who are still with the singer. Last week, Savage and Clary defended Kelly in an interview with Gayle King, on "CBS This Morning." They told King that they love Kelly, and are living where they choose to live, but they also appeared scripted and defensive on camera. Later, King described how Kelly hovered in the background while Clary and Savage were interviewed; he coughed loudly at times, as if to remind the two women that he was within earshot. One of my first questions for Gardner was if she regrets spending a third of her life with Kelly. No, she said. "I loved him to death, you know what I'm sayin'? But he needs help. Who doesn't need help?" The word "cult" is one that Gardner rejects, and so is "brainwashed"—"I am not just about to spread lies about him," she said—but she struggles to find a better way to describe a situation that, according to her, people don't really understand, at least not the way she does. "I wouldn't even say 'mind games.' It was just the fact that he tried to break me," she said. "I couldn't be broken. He wanted that control over me, and I wouldn't give him that power. So, he figured, like, If I don't give her food, she'll come around. Nope. I'd rather die than come around and give you my soul." Keeping up with the news about Kelly in recent weeks has been dizzying. On February 21st, The New Yorker reported that the Department of Homeland Security is investigating him for sex trafficking and violations of the Mann Act. The next day, Kelly was indicted by the state of Illinois on ten counts of aggravated sexual abuse involving four victims, three of them minors. He spent three nights in jail before a woman who identified herself in court papers as "a friend" posted his hundred-thousand-dollar bond. On March 5th, King conducted an eighty-minute interview with Kelly at the Trump Tower in Chicago, where he now lives. Kelly spent the next three nights in jail for failing to pay a hundred and sixty-one thousand dollars in back child-support payments, until an anonymous donor paid the court. Kelly was released on Saturday night. In the interview with King, Kelly became histrionic, crying, standing up, and directly addressing the cameras, which prompted an avalanche of Internet memes and the cold open on last week's episode of "Saturday Night Live." The singer insisted that he was innocent of all the charges and accusations against him, and he branded all the women speaking out against him as liars. "I'm not Lucifer. I'm a man," he told King. "I make mistakes, but I'm not a devil. And by no means am I a monster." Although Gardner did not watch the full interview, she had seen that snippet. "That's not genuine. That's the devil talking," she said. "Talking about 'I'm not Lucifer.' Yes, you are." But she is clearly conflicted about Kelly; she also insisted that "he is a giver, because when everything between me and him was good—oh, my God, it was, like, perfect. But, as soon as he gets mad, he turns into a person like, oh, what up, the new Rob." "At the end of the day," Gardner said, "I am not playing victim. I done did some shit." Gardner said that she slept with two other men while she was one of Kelly's girlfriends. "Maybe he did hurt. Maybe he was in love with me. But I never gave him a fair chance," she said. The desire to convey her complex feelings about life with Kelly is what prompted Gardner to first e-mail me, in July of 2018, with the all-caps subject line "PRIVACY IS EVERYTHING!" We traded many texts and e-mails before she decided that it was time to meet again and tell her story publicly for the first time. Every time we talked, I asked her if she was in therapy. She was initially reluctant, but last Thursday she said she finally had her first session with a counsellor, in early March. Gardner met Kelly in mid-2009, after a friend and fellow-"superfan," Jerhonda Johnson, whom she'd met on MySpace, passed along his phone number. Johnson, now Jerhonda Pace, is one of the four victims in the current Illinois charges against Kelly; according to prosecutors, Pace had sexual contact with him starting at age sixteen. She broke the nondisclosure agreement that she signed with Kelly by talking to me, in August of 2017—part of the motivation, she said, was because she was concerned that Kelly was mistreating her friend Dominique. In the summer of 2009, Gardner, who had just graduated from Hillcrest High School, enrolled to study dental hygiene, per her mother's wishes. Gardner said that she first became intimate with Kelly at that time, when she was seventeen, the age of consent in Illinois. Kelly was then forty-two. Although she loved his music, Gardner said, "I was never starstruck with him, because I didn't see the R. Kelly side—I saw the Robert side." Gardner continued to live in her mother's house for the first few years that she dated Kelly; Kramer did not approve, but Gardner saw the singer often, visiting him at the mansion that he owned in the Chicago suburb of Olympia Fields. On June 14, 2009, the police visited the mansion in search of Gardner, after her family had called them concerned that the teen-ager was there with Kelly. Gardner wasn't there at the time—she was at a cousin's house, she said. Police did not have a search warrant, and they left without taking any action. In 2015, Gardner quit school and began living with Kelly, whom she calls "a musical genius," and five other steady girlfriends, in addition to other women who came and went. The women who lived with Kelly stayed in one of two homes he had rented in the Atlanta suburb of Johns Creek. "Atlanta is where he changed," Gardner said. "It was like something switched. [Before that] I used to go home on a regular basis. I was able to call my family. Then, all of a sudden, it was no." Sources have said that the women who live with Kelly have to follow what he calls his "rules." Gardner does not use that term, and says some of what Kelly's accusers are saying is wrong; for example, she was allowed to watch television and connect to the Internet, and there was "no lock on no doors ... If them two other girls, Joy and Azriel, wanna walk out, they can do that." However, Gardner said that Kelly did take away his girlfriends' phones, replacing them with new ones to be used only with him; he did not allow them to contact their parents, family members, or friends; he decreed that they should all wear baggy gym clothes, so other men could not admire their bodies; he did not want them to look at or speak to other men; and they had to ask for his permission to eat or go to the bathroom. "I couldn't even have a drink without his permission," Gardner said. "I'm a grown-ass woman, and I've gotta ask you if I want a drink? Everything you do, you have to ask him. That's not living, that's not normal. I've got to ask to use the fucking bathroom? Are you serious? I'm about to pee on myself if I can't get in contact with you. What the fuck is this?" Gardner said that she was the "tomboy" among Kelly's girlfriends, and the most rebellious. She often disobeyed him, and suffered what she called "consequences," including spankings, slappings, beatings, and being hit with an extension cord. Once, after she threw a carrot at Kelly, "he grabbed me and he pulled my hair out, and I had, like, patches torn from my hair," she said. The "consequences" came when Kelly "felt as [if] we disrespected him or disobeyed him. It's like a parent when your children go against your word." I have asked Gardner several times why she stayed with Kelly for nine years, and what she believes is the source of his hold over the women who live with him. In the past, she has struggled to answer both questions. Finally, during our most recent meeting, she called up an image of the star on her new cell phone; it was his most recent mug shot. "It's, like, I know them eyes," she said. "Every time I looked in his eyes, I knew he was sorry. Like, when he hit us, hit me, he was, like, he apologized. Like, he said, 'I done did some things, and I apologize for it.' I'm, like, you did, you did! But enough was enough. Yes, you did say, 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' O.K. But, then again, you do it again when shit don't go your way." Gardner said that Kelly would often discuss the sexual abuse that he claims he suffered, beginning at the age of eight, from an older female relative, and also his difficulties reading and writing. "At the end of the day, he's a victim, too, because he went through some shit, and people—they don't understand," she said. On the same day in March when Gardner had her first therapy session, she was visited at work by investigators from the Department of Homeland Security. "They're, like, 'We've been trying to reach you and talk to you,' " Gardner said. "I'm, like, 'About what?' ... They gave me a card. I just ripped it up. And I'm just—whatever. I'm not talking to you guys." Gardner has been stung by criticism that she should have spoken out against Kelly sooner, or that she should go to the authorities. When we spoke after "Surviving R. Kelly" aired, she told me, "I just want to heal. I just want my privacy." "People may disagree or hate me for what I'm saying," she continued. "That's the reason why I never wanted to come out. Because I'm not trying to defend him and what he has done, but, at the end of the day, you don't understand what he's been through, as a child." She said that she does not believe Kelly should be in jail. "I feel like he should be on house arrest in a studio, because, like I said, his music makes him get through the situations, what's he going through. Jail time, no. He needs to have a twenty-four-hour therapist at his house." And, she added, he needs to be honest about his behavior. Here, she addressed the man whom she claims to still love. "You can stop the cycle," she said. "Just be honest. People don't want you in jail."
Associated Press News	[ "Venezuela government", "Europe", "Maria Corina Machado", "European Union", "Latin America", "Venezuela", "Eurocopa 2024", "Edmundo Gonzalez", "European Parliament", "Politics", "Nicolas Maduro", "Elections", "Human rights" ]	# Venezuelan opposition leaders win the EU's top human rights prize October 24th, 2024 10:16 AM --- BRUSSELS (AP) — Venezuelan opposition leaders Maria Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia have won the European Union's top human rights honor, the Sakharov Prize, European Parliament President Roberta Metsola announced Thursday. Machado was set to run as the democratic opposition candidate against the incumbent president, Nicolás Maduro, in Venezuela's contested 2024 election, but she was disqualified by the government, so González took her place. He had never run for office before the presidential election. The lead-up to the poll saw widespread repression, including disqualifications, arrests, and human rights violations. Machado went into hiding, fearing for her life. A Venezuelan court issued an arrest warrant for González, who moved to Spain and was granted asylum. "In their quest for a fair, free and peaceful transition of power, they have fearlessly upheld values that millions of Venezuelans and the European Parliament hold so dear: justice, democracy and the rule of law," Metsola told EU lawmakers. "This parliament stands with the people of Venezeula and with Maria and Edmundo in their struggle for the democratic future of their country," she said, adding: "We are confident that Venezeula and democracy will ultimately prevail." Machado's group maintains that it has evidence that González won the July 28 presidential election by a wide margin, despite Maduro's claim to have won. Maduro's victory was contested by independent observers, including the United Nations. In a resolution last month, the EU parliament recognized González as Venezuela's legitimate president. In a post on X, González said that he was "honored and grateful" for the award. He thanked Machado, describing her as "an exceptional person who, with all her political talent, her absolute dedication and her indomitable spirit, paved the way that we are currently following, keeping the flame of freedom alive in our country." González also expressed his "gratitude, pride and admiration for my Venezuelan compatriots, who with the utmost civility, courage and determination have for years confronted, and continue to confront, a regime that systematically violates human rights." But he warned that "the struggle is not over. The regime persists in blocking political change, committing more and more human rights violations and crimes against humanity," and he urged supporters of democracy everywhere to help "enforce the sovereign mandate of the Venezuelan people." The EU award, named after Soviet dissident Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov, was created in 1988 to honor individuals or groups who defend human rights and basic freedoms. The winner is chosen by senior EU lawmakers from among candidates nominated by the European Parliament's various political groups. The assembly says the award is "the highest tribute paid by the European Union to human rights work." Two Middle East grassroots groups – Women Wage Peace and Women of the Sun – were on the shortlist for their efforts to bridge the divide between Israelis and Palestinians, as was Azerbaijan academic and anti-corruption activist Gubad Ibadoghlu. Several laureates, including Nelson Mandela, Malala Yousafzai, Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad, went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The annual award, with its 50,000-euro ($54,000) endowment, will be presented in a ceremony at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, in mid-December.
Wired	[ "autism spectrum", "education", "silicon valley" ]	# The Educational Tyranny of the Neurotypicals By Joi Ito September 6th, 2018 10:00 AM --- The current school system is too rigid, and it's designed for a different world anyway. Structured learning didn't serve me particularly well. I was kicked out of kindergarten for running away too many times, and I have the dubious distinction of having dropped out of two undergraduate programs and a doctoral business and administration program. I haven't been tested, but have come to think of myself as "neuroatypical" in some way. "Neurotypical" is a term used by the autism community to describe what society refers to as "normal." According to the Centers for Disease Control, one in 59 children, and one in 34 boys, are on the autism spectrum—in other words, neuroatypical. That's 3 percent of the male population. If you add ADHD—attention deficit hyperactivity disorder—and dyslexia, roughly one out of four people are not "neurotypicals." In NeuroTribes, Steve Silberman chronicles the history of such non-neurotypical conditions, including autism, which was described by the Viennese doctor Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner in Baltimore in the 1930s and 1940s. Asperger worked in Nazi-occupied Vienna, which was actively euthanizing institutionalized children, and he defined a broad spectrum of children who were socially awkward. Others had extraordinary abilities and a "fascination with rules, laws and schedules," to use Silberman's words. Leo Kanner, on the other hand, described children who were more disabled. Kanner's suggestion that the condition was activated by bad parenting made autism a source of stigma for parents and led to decades of work attempting to "cure" autism rather than developing ways for families, the educational system, and society to adapt to it. Our schools in particular have failed such neurodiverse students, in part because they've been designed to prepare our children for typical jobs in a mass-production-based white- and blue-collar environment created by the Industrial Revolution. Students acquire a standardized skillset and an obedient, organized, and reliable nature that served society well in the past—but not so much today. I suspect that the quarter of the population who are diagnosed as somehow non-neurotypical struggle with the structure and the method of modern education, and many others probably do as well. I often say that education is what others do to you and learning is what you do for yourself. But I think that even the broad notion of education may be outdated, and we need a completely new approach to empower learning: We need to revamp our notion of "education" and shake loose the ordered and linear metrics of the society of the past, when we were focused on scale and the mass production of stuff. Accepting and respecting neurodiversity is the key to surviving the transformation driven by the internet and AI, which is shattering the Newtonian predictability of the past and replacing it with a Heisenbergian world of complexity and uncertainty. In Life, Animated, Ron Suskind tells the story of his autistic son Owen, who lost his ability to speak around his third birthday. Owen had loved the Disney animated movies before his regression began, and a few years into his silence it became clear he'd memorized dozens of Disney classics in their entirety. He eventually developed an ability to communicate with his family by playing the role, and speaking in the voices, of the animated characters he so loved, and he learned to read by reading the film credits. Working with his family, Owen recently helped design a new kind of screen-sharing app, called Sidekicks, so other families can try the same technique. Owen's story tells us how autism can manifest in different ways and how, if caregivers can adapt rather than force kids to "be normal," many autistic children survive and thrive. Our institutions, however, are poorly designed to deliver individualized, adaptive programs to educate such kids. In addition to schools poorly designed for non-neurotypicals, our society traditionally has had scant tolerance or compassion for anyone lacking social skills or perceived as not "normal." Temple Grandin, the animal welfare advocate who is herself somewhere on the spectrum, contends that Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Mozart, and Nikola Tesla would have been diagnosed on the "autistic spectrum" if they were alive today. She also believes that autism has long contributed to human development and that "without autism traits we might still be living in caves." She is a prominent spokesperson for the neurodiversity movement, which argues that neurological differences must be respected in the same way that diversity of gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation is. Despite challenges with some of the things that neurotypicals find easy, people with Asperger's and other forms of autism often have unusual abilities. For example, the Israeli Defense Force's Special Intelligence Unit 9900, which focuses on analyzing aerial and satellite imagery, is partially staffed with people on the autism spectrum who have a preternatural ability to spot patterns. I believe at least some of Silicon Valley's phenomenal success is because its culture places little value on conventional social and corporate values that prize age-based experience and conformity that dominates most of society and most institutions on the East Coast. It celebrates nerdy, awkward youth and has turned their super-human, "abnormal" powers into a money-making machine that is the envy of the world. (This new culture is wonderfully inclusive from a neurodiversity perspective but white-dude centric and problematic from a gender and race perspective.) This sort of pattern recognition and many other unusual traits associated with autism are extremely well suited for science and engineering, often enabling a super-human ability to write computer code, understand complex ideas and elegantly solve difficult mathematical problems. Unfortunately, most schools struggle to integrate atypical learners, even though it's increasingly clear that interest-driven learning, project-based learning, and undirected learning seem better suited for the greater diversity of neural types we now know exist. Ben Draper, who runs the Macomber Center for Self Directed Learning, says that while the center is designed for all types of children, kids whose parents identify them as on the autism spectrum often thrive at the center when they've had difficulty in conventional schools. Ben is part of the so-called unschooling movement, which believes that not only should learning be self-directed, in fact we shouldn't even focus on guiding learning. Children will learn in the process of pursuing their passions, the reasoning goes, and so we just need to get out of their way, providing support as needed. Many, of course, argue that such an approach is much too unstructured and verges on irresponsibility. In retrospect, though, I feel I certainly would have thrived on "unschooling." In a recent paper, Ben and my colleague Andre Uhl, who first introduced me to unschooling, argue that it not only works for everyone, but that the current educational system, in addition to providing poor learning outcomes, impinges on the rights of children as individuals. MIT is among a small number of institutions that, in the pre-internet era, provided a place for non-neurotypical types with extraordinary skills to gather and form community and culture. Even MIT, however, is still trying to improve to give these kids the diversity and flexibility they need, especially in our undergraduate program. I'm not sure how I'd be diagnosed, but I was completely incapable of being traditionally educated. I love to learn, but I go about it almost exclusively through conversations and while working on projects. I somehow kludged together a world view and life with plenty of struggle, but also with many rewards. I recently wrote a PhD dissertation about my theory of the world and how I developed it. Not that anyone should generalize from my experience—one reader of my dissertation said that I'm so unusual, I should be considered a "human sub-species." While I take that as a compliment, I think there are others like me who weren't as lucky and ended up going through the traditional system and mostly suffering rather than flourishing. In fact, most kids probably aren't as lucky as me and while some types are more suited for success in the current configuration of society, a huge percentage of kids who fail in the current system have a tremendous amount to contribute that we aren't tapping into. In addition to equipping kids for basic literacy and civic engagement, industrial age schools were primarily focused on preparing kids to work in factories or perform repetitive white-collar jobs. It may have made sense to try to convert kids into (smart) robotlike individuals who could solve problems on standardized tests alone with no smartphone or the internet and just a No. 2 pencil. Sifting out non-neurotypical types or trying to remediate them with drugs or institutionalization may have seemed important for our industrial competitiveness. Also, the tools for instruction were also limited by the technology of the times. In a world where real robots are taking over many of those tasks, perhaps we need to embrace neurodiversity and encourage collaborative learning through passion, play, and projects, in other words, to start teaching kids to learn in ways that machines can't. We can also use modern technology for connected learning that supports diverse interests and abilities and is integrated into our lives and communities of interest. At the Media Lab, we have a research group called Lifelong Kindergarten, and the head of the group, Mitchel Resnick, recently wrote a book by the same name. The book is about the group's research on creative learning and the four Ps—Passion, Peers, Projects, and Play. The group believes, as I do, that we learn best when we are pursuing our passion and working with others in a project-based environment with a playful approach. My memory of school was "no cheating," "do your own work," "focus on the textbook, not on your hobbies or your projects," and "there's time to play at recess, be serious and study or you'll be shamed"—exactly the opposite of the four Ps. Many mental health issues, I believe, are caused by trying to "fix" some type of neurodiversity or by simply being insensitive or inappropriate for the person. Many mental "illnesses" can be "cured" by providing the appropriate interface to learning, living, or interacting for that person focusing on the four Ps. My experience with the educational system, both as its subject and, now, as part of it, is not so unique. I believe, in fact, that at least the one-quarter of people who are diagnosed as somehow non-neurotypical struggle with the structure and the method of modern education. People who are wired differently should be able to think of themselves as the rule, not as an exception.
The New Yorker	[ "drake", "rap", "music" ]	# A Peek Back at Early Drake on "So Far Gone" By Briana Younger March 12th, 2019 12:00 PM --- "Relatability" has long been a word deployed to both acknowledge and undercut the relationship between fans and the musicians they love. When Drake's début commercial mixtape, "So Far Gone," was released, in February, 2009, he was arguably at peak relatability, and it was still easy to believe in the Toronto rapper's Everyman shtick. In the opening verses, we get it all: a glossy-eyed Drake looking out over his future, collecting text messages from old flames—the cockiness leavened with humility. His aspirations made him admirable; his insecurities made him accessible. The conflict between those two elements made him seem real. At the time, Drake's up-and-coming status was high, and there was a palpable hunger underlining the tracks in "So Far Gone" that has never really returned. Back then, Drake really was the underdog that he still pretends to be, and he based entire songs—the opening track, "Lust for Life," and the eventual single "Successful"—around that premise. But, from the start, the most striking thing about Drake was the Shakespearean romances that shaped his music. Whether rapping in warm monotones or singing sweet nothings, he spoke of women as if he actually liked them or, rather, as if they wielded a very real power over him. Women, whether exes or interests, weren't sources of nasty disdain and suppressed hatred but rather deeply felt pain and unrequited affections. Drake was a rapper who had adopted the romantic posture of an R. & B. singer, but with a commitment to being extraordinarily regular. A decade later, he's still working this stance—dedicating half of his double album, "Scorpion," from last year, to exorcising his love demons. Throughout "So Far Gone," which became his tenth Top Ten album upon its re-release, last month, we see Drake honing these muscles time and time again, fashioning himself into a suave suitor and a nonchalant womanizer, sometimes in the course of a single track. Yet every boastful victory lap is shadowed by the success he loves just as much as his women. Songs such as the steamy "A Night Off," which features the singer Lloyd, and "Best I Ever Had" are pillow talk come to life. For the college-age listeners who then seemed to make up the majority of his fan base—the same adults who now lament the bygone days of the blog era—these felt like rhymes from reality. Lines like the ever-popular "Sweatpants, hair tied, chillin' with no makeup on / that's when you're the prettiest, I hope that you don't take it wrong" stand out as admirable in a sea of pop-music lyrics that equate glamour with a woman's beauty and, by extension, her worth. Drake knew what women wanted to hear and what men often didn't know how to say. Drake's quasi-feminism surfaced recently on his remix of Summer Walker's breakout track, "Girls Need Love." The song, in its original state, is a simmering longing for sexual interaction that hinges on a woman's satisfaction. "Girls can't never say they want it / Girls can't never say how," goes the hazy bridge, poking back at the default position of sex as a vehicle for male gratification. Drake appears, tough-guy persona intact, to echo the sentiment. "Guys get their way all the time / Besides, pleasure not meant for one side / You should just do what's best for your mind." In another rapper's hands, the gesture would seem like cringeworthy pandering, but here it's just another step of his steady grasping for women's affections. In 2009, "So Far Gone" painted Drake as a superficial friend of women, even as they appeared as foils to his ambition. "Nice for What," the chart-topping single on "Scorpion," from 2018, felt like his full-circle moment, the culmination of years of lost-and-found romance, of playing games and getting played. Up until this point, Drake was always at the center of the story: projecting his standards and his desires, trying to mold himself into the kind of man who could be worthy of a love story for the ages. But, on "Nice for What," he collapsed the fourth wall and faced the objects of his affections and finally told them that they don't need to hold space for him nor anyone else. And it only took him the better part of a decade to realize.
Associated Press News	[]	# Primer ministro de Australia se defiende de acusaciones sobre beneficios en vuelos de Qantas By ROD MCGUIRK October 29th, 2024 06:29 AM --- MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — El primer ministro de Australia, Anthony Albanese, dijo el martes que siempre ha "actuado de forma transparente y apropiada" luego de que un nuevo libro afirmó que había solicitado en repetidas ocasiones subidas de categoría gratuitas en vuelos personales con Qantas Airways. Albanese, que fungió como ministro de Transportes en un gobierno previo, fue acusado en un libro publicado el lunes de desarrollar una relación inapropiadamente estrecha con Alan Joyce, quien fue director ejecutivo de Qantas durante 15 años hasta 2023. Qantas es la mayor aerolínea del país y fue propiedad del Estado hasta la década de 1990. Por ley, la compañía con sede en Sydney debe ser propiedad australiana al menos en un 51%. "De acuerdo con fuentes internas de Qantas, Albanese se ponía en contacto directamente con Joyce sobre sus viajes personales", afirma un extracto del libro. No se identificó a las fuentes. Albanese dijo que había declarado 22 subidas de categoría gratuitas en Qantas en un registro de regalos valorados en más de 300 dólares australianos (197 dólares), y apuntó que el legislador de la oposición Paul Fletcher había declarado 69. "Lo he declarado todo de acuerdo con las normas", dijo Albanese a reporteros. "En todo momento — en todo momento — actué de forma transparente y apropiada". Albanese apuntó el martes que solo recuerda haber mantenido dos conversaciones con Joyce sobre vuelos promocionales. Esos vuelos no eran desplazamientos de carácter personal. El mandatario apuntó que el autor del libro "The Chairman's Lounge: The Inside Story of How Qantas Sold Us Out" ("La sala del presidente: La historia interna de cómo Qantas nos vendió"), Joe Aston, trabajó en un partido de la oposición y en Qantas. Joyce no pudo ser contactado de inmediato para realizar declaraciones. Qantas no respondió de inmediato una petición de comentarios. El líder de la oposición, Peter Dutton, acusó a Albanese de incumplir el código de conducta ministerial del gobierno durante su etapa como ministro de Transportes entre 2007 y 2013. El código prohibía de forma explícita que los ministros solicitasen o fomentasen cualquier tipo regalo a título personal.
Voice Of America	[ "Africa" ]	# Somalia President Calls for African Union Mediation By Harun Maruf April 19th, 2021 11:23 PM --- Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed said he was willing to negotiate with stakeholders in Somalia's political crisis in order to find a solution. Mohamed, known by his nickname Farmaajo, made the announcement Sunday night during an unannounced visit to Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he met with President Felix Tshisekedi, the current chair of the African Union (AU). Through his Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Farmaajo said the federal government of Somalia welcomes the AU to facilitate the talks. "With regards to #Somalia's efforts to hold peaceful, inclusive, and timely elections, (Farmaajo's) government would welcome the role of the AU in facilitating a Somali-led and Somali-owned engagement process that would lead to dialogue," The Ministry said on Twitter. Earlier, Tshisekedi's office made a similar announcement. The statement on Twitter said that after the two presidents met for two hours, Farmaajo requested Tshisekedi's involvement in his capacity as president of the AU to facilitate negotiations with all the stakeholders involved in the Somali crisis. The statement said the talks between the two focused on political and security situations in Somalia. Tshisekedi's office further said that the president of Congo welcomed Farmaajo's initiative. On April 12, the Somali Lower House of Parliament voted to extend the terms of the executive and the legislative branches of government, a move condemned and rejected by the Upper House, Somali opposition leaders, two regional administrations and most of the international community in Somalia. Somali opposition leaders argue that Farmaajo's term expired February 8, 2021, while Parliament's mandate ended on December 27, 2020, and therefore it does not have the power to extend the four-year mandate. Farmaajo's camp argues that because the two regional governments of Puntland and Jubaland are unwilling to negotiate holding elections, based on the September 17 agreement between the president and regional leaders, Parliament was forced to intervene. Leaders of Puntland and Jubaland deny this argument and accuse Farmaajo of dragging his feet on timely elections in order to extend his term. In the Twitter remarks by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday, Farmaajo did not mention how he intends to address the controversy over the extension. Following a meeting Saturday with Farmaajo in Mogadishu, the ambassadors of the United States and Britain and representatives from the United Nations, European Union and the AU told Farmaajo "there is no other solution but consensus-based agreement," according to a source familiar with the talks who asked not to be identified. The international community warned that a partnership with Somalia will be affected if Farmaajo doesn't change. Meanwhile, the term extension created tension in Mogadishu among members of the Somali security forces. Former commander of the Mogadishu police forces Sadik Omar Hassan, who was sacked last week after he opposed the extension, has camped in a neighborhood inhabited by his clan in the southwestern parts of Mogadishu. Lawmakers representing his clan urged the federal government not to attack him. Hassan Hundubey Jimale, security minister of the Somali federal government, told the media that the government has no plan to attack him. According to observers, the standoff between the security forces created fear among residents in the capital of a potential return to an armed rivalry between political stakeholders.
Wired	[ "alex jones", "twitter", "platforms", "social media" ]	# Twitter Finally Bans Alex Jones—Over a Publicity Stunt By Issie Lapowsky September 6th, 2018 06:43 PM --- After years of abuse and spreading conspiracy theories, Alex Jones finally went too far for Twitter with a relatively tame rant. Professional tragedy troll Alex Jones went to Washington Wednesday to claw back the attention he's lost since Facebook, Apple, YouTube, Spotify, and other tech giants booted him from their services last month. He stalked behind Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey as they testified to the Senate, accosted senator Marco Rubio during a post-hearing interview, berated a CNN reporter as he stood in the hallways, and broadcast it all on Twitter, the last platform that would have him. And it backfired. On Thursday, just a day after Jones brought his circus to Capitol Hill, Twitter announced it was finally banning Jones and his conspiracy site InfoWars, citing "new reports of Tweets and videos posted yesterday that violate our abusive behavior policy." That policy prohibits "excessively aggressive insults that target an individual, including content that contains slurs or similar language." Dorsey had previously defended Twitter's decision to allow Jones to continue operating on the platform, saying Jones hadn't violated Twitter's policies. But in early August, CNN reporter Oliver Darcy publicly pointed out a number of instances in which Jones had, in fact, violated those policies, leading Jones—or someone on his team—to delete the tweets in question. Days later, Twitter forced Jones to delete another offending tweet and put his account in read-only mode for a week. The time-out lifted, and Jones' account lived on. Ironically, it was the initial CNN story—or rather, Jones' unhinged response to it—that proved his eventual undoing. On Wednesday, just before Dorsey was set to testify at his second congressional hearing of the day, Jones approached Darcy as he waited in line with media colleagues to be let into the hearing room. Jones, flanked by his entourage, cornered Darcy, jabbed a phone in his face, and harassed the reporter for more than 10 minutes about his work, his employer, and his looks, saying he has the "eyes of a rat." The entire ordeal streamed on Periscope, which is owned by Twitter. That this particular broadside was the last straw for Twitter seems curious. Yes, Twitter had plenty of reason to suspend Jones on Thursday. But it had just as many reasons a week ago and the week before that, and in early August when all of its contemporaries jumped ship. Compared to Jones' long trail of misdeeds on Twitter—claiming that no one was killed in the Sandy Hook shooting, and comparing Parkland shooting survivors to Nazis, to name a few—his rant against Darcy seems tame. Certainly a CNN reporter who covers Jones for a living is better equipped to handle his ravings than a mass shooting victim would be, and insulting a person's looks hardly compares to claiming a parent's dead child never really existed. But ultimately, the tirade against Darcy was too public for Twitter to ignore. Standing there, in the halls of Congress, outside the room where Twitter's CEO sat, and in front of nearly every tech reporter in the industry, Jones tested the limits of what he could get away with until suddenly he couldn't get away with it anymore. Jones will surely try to capitalize on his ouster from Twitter, just as he tried to use his banishment from the rest of the tech giants as a rallying cry. But if history is any indication, it won't work. A recent report by The New York Times suggests that traffic to Jones' InfoWars webpage has been cut in half since the great de-platforming began. As for Twitter, taking this action was likely only a matter of time. Ever since the company broke with its peers to stand beside Jones, all eyes have been on the @realalexjones account, waiting for even the slightest infraction. And it was a relatively slight infraction, for Jones at least, that did it. Still, for Dorsey in particular, the timing was apt, if a little too late. On Wednesday, the CEO spent the day vowing to make Twitter a "healthy" place for its users, even if it comes at a price. "We're willing to take the hard path," he told members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. That path only starts with saying goodbye to Jones.
Wired	[ "politics", "twitter", "alex jones", "jack dorsey", "photography" ]	# How That Magical Jack Dorsey–Alex Jones Photo Happened By Laura Mallonee September 6th, 2018 05:40 PM --- M. Scott Mahaskey captured the scene in an unscripted backdoor moment after the Twitter–Facebook Senate hearings. The Facebook and Twitter hearings broadcast live from Capitol Hill Wednesday felt like theater. Partially spurred by misleading reports that Twitter had "shadow banned" conservative accounts, House and Senate members questioned Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg while a gaggle of conspiracy theorists and far-right extremists sat feet away in the front row. Included in that group was Infowars' Alex Jones, who earlier had used Periscope to live-stream his own dramatic entry to the hearing and harass members of the media. (The stunt would ultimately get him permanently barred from Twitter, as Dorsey's company announced today.) It was a spectacular convergence of two worlds, and would only get more spectacular directly after the hearing. A bizarre moment captured by Politico photography director M. Scott Mahaskey documents what seems to be a more spontaneous, unscripted encounter between Dorsey and Jones—with bonus cameos from a Google Glass and what appears to be an old-school Casio calculator watch. It's an image any photographer would hope for; obviously Mahaskey had planted himself in the perfect spot waiting for it, right? Not so much. "It was purely coincidental," Mahaskey says of the meeting. "Total chance." In anticipation of Dorsey and Sandberg's departure from the Dirksen Senate Office Building, a dozen or so TV cameras had staked out spots inside near the main entrance. Mahaskey, though, noticed Jones heckling reporters at an impromptu press stand near the back door. The Infowars host was so busy livestreaming his bravado that he missed Sandberg's exit, so he gave chase out the door but, realizing he was too late, reversed course just as Dorsey appeared. The #pizzagate peddler shouted something about censorship at Dorsey, but the Twitter CEO ignored him (unlike Marco Rubio). "That's about as close [to Dorsey] as he got," Mahaskey says. Since most press had stayed in the building, Mahaskey found himself beside a handful of smartphone-wielding civilians—the only credentialed still photographer to document the scene. That doesn't happen often on Capitol Hill, where any snap-worthy moment gets shot from every possible angle by a phalanx of cameras. "It's a rare thing to be alone on an island with such a dramatic scene developing in front of you," Mahaskey says. His photograph records a tight web of figures, their gestures and expressions so intense as to seem exaggerated, like those of characters in a play. A no-nonsense cop looks askance over his shoulder; Dorsey steels himself; the tall man at center juts his lower jaw out, apparently hindering Jones from getting any closer. It isn't a technically perfect photo: The most prominent figure is a bulwark against the brewing conflict. But it sucks you in. "It's a place to click in, like 'What the hell is going on here?'" says Karen Marshall, chair of the photojournalism program at the International Center of Photography. "It makes you want to keep clicking." And in doing so, it reminds you that, even amid today's always-streaming political theater, the weirdest moments still unfold just out of the spotlight.
The New Yorker	[ "instagram", "peter singer", "social media", "ethics", "philosophy" ]	# The Origin Story of Peter Singer's Instagram Account By Alessandra Bergamin March 12th, 2019 09:00 AM --- In the fall of 2017, Talitha Wisner was completing her assigned reading for Practical Ethics—one of Princeton University's most popular philosophy classes—when she decided to e-mail her professor. In the subject line, Wisner adopted the language of her lecturer, the utilitarian philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer, and typed, "What's the most good I can do? Using social media to strengthen the movement." Wisner, a post-millennial who became vegan for a time under the influence of YouTube videos and Instagram posts, had agreed with that week's reading—a report about lowering global meat consumption in response to climate change—but she didn't like the authors' dismissal of social media. As Wisner relayed to Singer, perhaps social media could be a way for broke college students to spread ethical awareness, through likes in lieu of dollars. At the time, Wisner used her Instagram account to advocate for plant-based living, but the outreach often felt silly. If Singer believed that it was a good idea, she wrote, then she would feel less conflicted. Before ending the e-mail, Wisner asked one last question: "Why don't you have a public Instagram or YouTube account?" Singer has long been active on Twitter and Facebook, and between those two platforms he has amassed more than a hundred and forty thousand followers. But, before Wisner suggested it, he hadn't given much thought to creating any new social-media accounts. "Time," Singer wrote to Wisner, a few days later, was the main problem, and he just didn't have any more of it to spare. Before signing off, he added, "Maybe I should look for someone else to organize it for me, though." Two e-mails and three hours later, Singer had exactly that. For more than a year, Wisner and her fellow Princeton student Sarah Hirschfield, who joined the effort soon afterward, were the team behind Peter Singer's Instagram account. (Wisner has since stepped away from the account, and Hirschfield now has full control.) United by their passion for veganism, Wisner, a political-science major from Texas, and Hirschfield, a philosophy major from New York City, have spent many afternoons discussing how to live more ethically. Managing Singer's Instagram account—an unpaid, invisible, and largely thankless task—is not only a way of "sharing the gospel," as Hirschfield said, but a logical extension of their ethical ambitions. Singer, whose key works include "Animal Liberation," "Practical Ethics," and "The Life You Can Save," told me that he "hadn't looked at Instagram very much, and I still haven't." He added, "If the students hadn't come to me with this suggestion, I may not have started it." To account for the professor's largely hands-off approach, Wisner and Hirschfield would send Singer a weekly Word document of draft posts—a sort of offline Instagram—for review. Sometimes, Singer will suggest a different excerpt of his work. Other times, he'll request a new image to better reflect the words. The latter, Wisner said, was the most challenging. While Twitter is a natural choice for academics—after all, words beget words—Instagram, a platform that demands compelling or even voyeuristic visuals, can be more of a stretch. Somewhat out of economic necessity, the account relies on open-source stock images to illustrate Singer's key ideas. Effective altruism—"doing the most good" with the resources you have, as Singer writes—is often represented by impoverished, non-Western children. Animal liberation, which led to Singer's standing as the founder of the modern animal-rights movement, is depicted by a floundering animal raised on a factory farm. There are also basic shout-outs to other scholars: a portrait of the fellow utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick, a bust of Karl Marx, and a sketch of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. "We're operating in this unclear market," Hirschfield said. "We're something like an academic-philosophy account, but we're also like a vegan-memes account." Then there's the subject matter itself. For a personal account, topics like poverty and animal cruelty are unusual Instagram fodder—Singer has been told that his account is "very heavy"—and it's not as if Instagram is spilling over with intellectual philosophers. Because of this, the account has become both an experiment in visualizing ethics and a counterpoint to status-conscious Instagram. There is something jarring and hilarious about scrolling through an Instagram feed of selfies, #sponsored posts, and advertisements, only to land on a stock photo of a pigeon drinking from a water faucet, accompanied by caption about the futility of spending money on things that you don't really need. Even for a philosopher, some Instagram rules hold true. Cute animal photos, albeit accompanied by quotes about animal welfare, typically do well. Unsurprisingly, the same goes for photos of Singer himself. There has only been one selfie to date, but Wisner and Hirschfield also posted portraits of their professor, often taken by the pair around campus. The most liked current post shows Singer seated on the Princeton lawn eating an orange beside one of his books. The portraits also align with Wisner's initial hope that the account would offer its followers an insight into an ethicist's everyday life. But the "world's most influential living philosopher," as Singer is often called, is a reluctant influencer. Although he believes in gaining followers to further the cause, he, unlike many on social media, is wary of his privacy. "I find it quite surprising what some people are prepared to make public through Instagram," Singer said. As Wisner and Hirschfield approach their last year of college, I asked them what would happen to the account after they graduate. Hirschfield cited a fear of the "second-generation curse"—if she passes the account onto a new group of students, those students may not be as invested in it as she presently is. Quoting the last line of George Eliot's "Middlemarch" (and clarifying that it inflates the work she does for the account), Hirschfield said that it is the significance of "unhistoric acts" that contributes to the greater good. Singer's account—with its cerebral captions and quirky stock images—shows, in a modest way, that ethical considerations can exist, and even thrive, on a platform that espouses so few. If Instagram is to its users what the pond was to Narcissus, then Singer's posts are pebbles that occasionally ripple its surface.
Wired	[ "cybersecurity", "hacking", "north korea" ]	# DoJ Charges North Korean Hacker for Sony, WannaCry, and More By Brian Barrett September 6th, 2018 03:12 PM --- The Department of Justice has taken its first legal action against North Korea's cybercrimes, in a massive complaint made public Thursday. On the Monday morning before the Thanksgiving holiday in 2014, employees at the Culver City headquarters of Sony Pictures Entertainment found their computer screens taken over by an image of a red skeleton, and a message: "We've already warned you, and this is just a beginning." It was the start of a months-long nightmare in which hackers, calling themselves "Guardians of Peace," made public the personal emails, salaries, and even medical records of Sony's workers. For years, the cybersecurity community has pinned the attack on North Korea. Thursday, the Justice Department made it official, issuing a sweeping complaint against a single Hermit Kingdom hacker for not just the Sony breach, but for 2017's devastating WannaCry ransomware strain, a brazen heist of $81 million from Bangladesh in 2016, and more. The complaint alleges that one programmer, Park Jin Hyok, was a sort of Zelig of North Korean hacking, having a hand in numerous offensive cyberoperations dating back to at least 2014. And while it highlights Sony, WannaCry, and the Bangladesh bank theft, it makes clear that the hacker's activity extended far beyond those blockbuster incidents—and that it continues today. "The scope and damage of the computer intrusions perpetrated and caused by the subjects of this investigation, including Park, is virtually unparalleled," reads the complaint. While the complaint singles out Park, prosecutors were also very clear that he did not act alone--an unsurprising fact given the magnitude of the operations. The DoJ says that Park worked for a company called Chosun Expo Joint Venture, an alleged front for the North Korean government. He spent two years working for CEJV in China, apparently fielding legitimate jobs for paying clients, but had returned to North Korea by the time of the Sony hack. "Park is the only individual charged in the criminal complaint, but the complaint makes very clear that he worked with other conspirators to effect all of these actions," said a senior official in the Justice Department, speaking on background. Officials noted also that the investigation is ongoing. As for why only Park was named in the complaint, the nature of cybersecurity investigations makes it challenging to build enough evidence to attribute attacks to a given group or country, much less an individual. Consider that US officials had already publicly condemned North Korea for most of the incidents the charges outline; getting from there to a specific name, backed by dozens of pages of evidence, takes time. Given that, it's likely that Park was merely the only conspirator the government has been able to get enough evidence on to name so far. "When you find this type of information, oftentimes it's via a mistake by the operator," says Ben Read, senior manager of cyberespionage analysis at security firm FireEye. "Being able to tie it back to an individual can be very difficult, depending on how fastidious the operators are." Park apparently wasn't quite fastidious enough. Investigators say they found multiple connections between an email account of Park's and that of an alias, "Kim Hyon Woo." The Kim email address "was used to subscribe or was accessed by the same computer as at least three other email or social media accounts that were each used to target multiple victims, including SPE and Bangladesh Bank," according to the complaint. The charges also provide more technical detail into North Korea's various hacking efforts, many of which started with by now all-too-familiar spear-phishing campaigns. But they also demonstrate the impressive breadth of digital tools at North Korea's disposal, something long appreciated among cybersecurity researchers, but seldom laid so bare. "What the wide variety of malware tells you about this is that they're making a significant investment in this. It takes people, it takes time, it takes money to create these custom tools," says Read. "They have the resources to develop this stuff custom. That doesn't necessarily make them unique, but it puts them in the top tier of nation states." It's hard to overstate the magnitude of North Korea's cyberactivity over the years. The Sony breach may seem almost quaint in an age of mega-breaches that have exposed the personal info of hundreds of millions of people. But while smaller in scale, the incredibly sensitive nature of the documents released publicly has not since been matched (the OPM hack was arguably more sensitive, but the information was never publicly released). Which makes sense, given the motive. While most hacks of this nature focus on intelligence gathering or financial gain, the Sony attack sought retribution, specifically for the planned release of The Interview, a Sony-produced Seth Rogen movie that depicted the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. The techniques remained fairly consistent between the attack of Sony, AMC Theaters, and other The Interview-related hacks and North Korea's assault on the SWIFT banking system. The complaint says that same email address, [email protected], researched contact information for actors in The Interview and sent spearphishing emails to employees of Bangladesh Bank. Some of the same malware was used in both campaigns as well. As ransomware, WannaCry had different characteristics than the Sony and SWIFT hacks, but investigators made the alleged connection using shared IP and email addresses. Similar to the Sony hack, the Bangladesh heist was just the most public of multiple attempted banking thefts; North Korea hit financial institutions in Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, and South America. Hackers attempted to take $1 billion off of Bangladesh Bank in all, but were stopped short. And had WannaCry not accidentally featured a built-in "kill switch" that severely limited its spread, it could have caused unparalleled damage around the world. While the US and its international partners have leveled numerous sanctions against North Korea, it's notable that this is the first legal action the DoJ has taken against its hackers. It comes on the heels of high-profile indictments against Russian misinformation and military intelligence agents, as well as Iranian hackers who had targeted US universities. "These activities run afoul of norms of acceptable, safe behavior in cyberspace, and the international community must address them when we can," said a senior Justice Department official. Still, the indictment will likely prove more symbolic than anything. North Korea is a notoriously isolated country; the idea that any of its elite hackers could somehow fall into the hands of US law enforcement is unlikely, to say the least. The complaint's real utility may come from the extent to which it details North Korea's efforts, better equipping the private sector to defend against future intrusions. "In general, more information is almost always better," says Read. "The insight into how an adversary like this works can help defenders plan on what they might be up to." The complaint also also comes at a delicate time in US-North Korean relationships. After months of belittling Kim Jong-un and threatening "fire and fury" in the event of nuclear escalation, President Trump has gotten to a détente with the Hermit Kingdom. But given North Korea's seeming, and predictable, unwillingness to actually denuclearize, it's unclear how long that will last. Just a few hours before the charges became public, Trump did issue a message directed at his North Korean counterpart. "Kim Jong Un of North Korea proclaims 'unwavering faith in President Trump,'" the president tweeted. "Thank you to Chairman Kim. We will get it done together!"
The New Yorker	[ "work", "factory workers", "technology", "software" ]	# The Software That Shapes Workers' Lives By Miriam Posner March 12th, 2019 05:00 AM --- This past December, the workers'-rights organization China Labor Watch published a report about conditions in Chinese toy factories. Photographs showed workers—who are forced to sign blank contracts, work overtime, and go without safety equipment—slumped over assembly lines and sleeping in hallways. One image showed the exact American Girl doll that I'd been considering buying as a Christmas present for my six-year-old daughter. I surveyed her toys, strewn jubilantly around the living room: a Cool Maker Sew N' Style machine, made in Vietnam; a Klutz Make Your Own Soap science kit, made in Taiwan; a pair of Kuxuan Doodle Design roller skates, made in China. The factories highlighted by China Labor Watch have made toys for many companies, including Hasbro, Disney, Lego, and Mattel. How could I know which had been made ethically and which hadn't? Answering this question can be surprisingly difficult. A few years ago, while teaching a class about global labor at the University of California, Los Angeles, I tried assigning my students the task of analyzing the "supply chain"—the vast network of factories, warehouses, and shipping conduits through which products flow—by tracing the components used in their electronic devices. Almost immediately, I hit a snag: it turns out that even companies that boast about "end-to-end visibility" and "supply-chain transparency" may not know exactly where their components come from. This ignorance is built into the way supply chains work. The housing of a television, say, might be built in a small factory employing only a few people; that factory interacts only with the suppliers and buyers immediately adjacent to it in the chain—a plastic supplier on one side, an assembly company on the other. This arrangement encourages modularity, since, if a company goes out of business, its immediate partners can replace it without consulting anyone. But it also makes it hard to identify individual links in the chain. The resilient, self-healing quality of supply chains derives, in part, from the fact that they are unsupervised. When people try to picture supply chains, they often focus on their physical infrastructure. In Allan Sekula's book "Fish Story," a volume of essays and photographs produced between 1989 and 1995, the writer and photographer trains his lens on ports, harbors, and the workers who pilot ships between them; he reveals dim shipboard workspaces and otherworldly industrial zones. In "The Forgotten Space," a documentary that Sekula made with the film theorist Noël Burch, in 2010, we see massive, gliding vessels, enormous machines, and people rummaging through the detritus around ports and harbors. Sekula's work suggests the degree to which our fantasy of friction-free procurement hides the real, often gruelling, work of global shipping and trade. But supply chains aren't purely physical. They're also made of information. Modern supply-chain management, or S.C.M., is done through software. The people who design and coördinate supply chains don't see warehouses or workers. They stare at screens filled with icons and tables. Their view of the supply chain is abstract. It may be the one that matters most. In the S.C.M. space, a German company called SAP is the market leader. Its name stands for Systeme, Anwendungen, und Produkte, or Systems, Applications, and Products. You can't download SAP from the app store; it's an enterprise-wide suite of software, which includes modules for accounting and human resources and needs to work in tandem with a large database. It's possible, though, to take a class online. A Texas-based company called LearnSAP offers an online training course, which includes access to demo software. The course takes forty hours and costs a thousand dollars. Last summer, I signed up. (SAP also offers free introductory training sessions on a platform called openSAP.) Before I logged in for the first time, I assumed that I'd be one of many students. In fact, the class was one on one. My instructor, Enugula Srinivasa Rao, lived in India, where he had a day job as a supply-chain manager for a large company. Every night for forty nights—8 P.M. for me, 9:30 A.M. for him—Rao and I met online. His manner, elaborately courteous and infallibly patient, inspired a similar politeness in me, so that we often performed a dance of apologies and thank-yous while navigating SAP's screens. The newest versions of SAP are sleek and colorful. But the version that I trained on—SAP SCM 7, the one that's most widely used—has a bare-bones interface, with a look and feel that evokes Microsoft Windows circa 1997. The main screen shows a cascade of file folders, each housing an array of "transactions"—individual tasks, such as ordering, manufacturing, packing, and shipping—that a manager can fit together to form a supply chain. Devising a chain is a multi-person process involving several different SAP "components." Into one component, a "demand specialist" enters information about past sales, seasonal variations, planned promotions, and the like; the software calculates how many products need to be made. In another, a "supply-chain specialist" uses information about shipping times, storage costs, factory capacities, and so on to create a "supply-network plan," which dictates when each gear in the manufacturing process must turn. This high-altitude plan is then transmitted to another specialist who works in a component called PP/DS, for Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling. The PP/DS component determines how the process will unfold on the ground, allowing for the scheduling of work shifts and product movements in intervals as small as a second. The PP/DS component looks as blandly institutional as the rest of SAP. It's more or less a series of spreadsheets, check boxes, and pop-up windows. Still, it's where forecasts and market predictions get translated into workers' marching orders. PP/DS features "heuristics"—built-in algorithms that distribute labor so that plants operate at their highest capacity. Running a heuristic entails clicking a button on the PP/DS interface that looks like a tiny magic wand. Click the wand, and a factory's schedule auto-fills. Despite such labor-saving shortcuts, using SAP is not easy. As the class proceeded, I felt as though I, too, were falling behind on an assembly line. Every task was more complicated than I'd imagined, with a seemingly endless variety of settings to configure; I struggled to keep the various interlocking systems arranged in my head. (It didn't help that I sometimes clicked through SAP with one hand while participating in my daughter's craft projects with the other.) Over time, though, I started to understand the dynamics of the system as a whole. Log in to PeopleSoft, or a similar human-resource management system, and you only have access to certain modules—the ones relevant to your particular job. The same is true in SAP. Most of the time, the work of supply-chain management is divided up, with handoffs where one specialist passes a package of data to another. No individual is liable to possess a detailed picture of the whole supply chain. Instead, each S.C.M. specialist knows only what her neighbors need. In such a system, a sense of inevitability takes hold. Data dictates a set of conditions which must be met, but there is no explanation of how that data was derived; meanwhile, the software takes an active role, tweaking the plan to meet the conditions as efficiently as possible. SAP's built-in optimizers work out how to meet production needs with the least "latency" and at the lowest possible costs. (The software even suggests how tightly a container should be packed, to save on shipping charges.) This entails that particular components become available at particular times. The consequences of this relentless optimization are well-documented. The corporations that commission products pass their computationally determined demands on to their subcontractors, who then put extraordinary pressure on their employees. Thus, China Labor Watch found that workers in Heyuan City, China, tasked with producing Disney's Princess Sing & Sparkle Ariel Bath Doll—retail price today, $26.40—work twenty-six days a month, assembling between eighteen hundred and twenty-five hundred dolls per day, and earning one cent for each doll they complete. From the beginning of my LearnSAP course, I looked forward to investigating the "Supply-Chain Cockpit," a display that features a graphic representation of a company's factory locations, shipping routes, and warehouses. I loved the idea of a manager strapping in like a fighter pilot to fly over a supply chain, watching it work. Rao quickly dampened my enthusiasm. "It's not dynamic," he explained. "It just shows the plan." The cockpit presents only a moment of the planning process, frozen in time. A central challenge in supply-chain management is the vast distance—spatial, temporal, and informational—that separates the S.C.M. process from the real world of manufacturing and consumption. Among the distance-based problems planners worry about is the "bullwhip effect." Suppose a store runs low on diapers. Observing this strong demand, a manager who normally needs fifty cases might put in an order for a hundred, just to be on the safe side. The diaper company, in turn, might order the production of two hundred cases, rather than a hundred, to insure that they have enough stock on hand. Just as a flick of the wrist creates waves which grow as they travel through a whip, so subtle signals sent by consumers can be amplified out of proportion as they travel through the supply chain. This inflation is dangerous for manufacturers—especially those that depend on the razor-thin inventory margins demanded by just-in-time planning—and yet it's also hard to avoid, since the manufacturing process is so distributed in time and space, with many junctures at which forecasts might grow. SAP's demand-forecasting component is designed to help companies avoid this fate. Still, from a worker's point of view, S.C.M. software can generate its own bullwhip effect. At the beginning of the planning process, product requirements are fairly high-level. But by the time these requirements reach workers, they have become more exacting, more punishing. Small reductions in "latency," for instance, can magnify in consequence, reducing a worker's time for eating her lunch, taking a breath, donning safety equipment, or seeing a loved one. Could S.C.M. software include a "workers'-rights" component—a counterpart to PP/DS, incorporating data on working conditions? Technically, it's possible. SAP could begin asking for input about worker welfare. But a component like that would be at cross-purposes with almost every other function of the system. On some level, it might even undermine the purpose of having a system in the first place. Supply chains create efficiency in part through the distribution of responsibility. If a supervisor at a toy factory objects to the production plan she's received, her boss can wield, in his defense, a PP/DS plan sent to him by someone else, who worked with data produced by yet another person. It will turn out that no one in particular is responsible for the pressures placed on the factory. They flow from the system—a system designed to be flexible in some ways and rigid in others.
Wired	[ "wired video", "art", "youtube" ]	# How a Master Domino Artist Builds 15,000-Piece Creations By Ryan Loughlin September 6th, 2018 12:56 PM --- Lily Hevesh sets 'em up to knock 'em down—in breathtakingly complicated arrangements. 19-year-old Lily Hevesh is obsessed with dominos—in particular, seeing the last one fall. "That's the best part," she says. "That's what I live for." In recent years, Hevesh has become one the most popular figures in the online domino art community (which, yes, is a thing). She's spent much of her free time over the past decade building increasingly elaborate arrangements of the little tiles, then knocking them down in artistic chain reactions. She also films the entire process, from conception to destruction, and posts edited clips to her YouTube Channel, where she goes by the name Hevesh5. Her video "Insane Domino Tricks,", a collaboration with another artist, has nearly 118 million views—several million more views than the latest Beyonce and Jay-Z music video. To start a project, Hevesh first decides which structures or "tricks" to build around. For example, she'll build a few pyramids or towers, and only then connect them a single line of dominos before knocking it all down. The idea is to create the more complicated structures in a vacuum, so if one of them falls it won't knock down the entire project. Sure, she's knocked down a number of her designs by accident, but she says that failure is just a part of the process. The key is to keep building even after losing hours of work, or even days, to a clumsy step. While her videos make the process look easy, a lot of painstaking work that goes into each 'setup.' For her favorite project, "The Amazing Triple Spiral," Hevesh spent 25 hours setting up 15,000 dominos. She also works with teams to build even more complicated and elaborate projects. She was one of two lead artists on this insane set, which took 19 builders a full week to build. So what sets her apart? Hevesh says it's her freeform style. "I like go all over the place with my setups," she says, so people "can always be surprised by what's going to come next." After her first viral video in 2013, Hevesh realized this was much more than just a hobby. Today she's an artist for hire, building logos out of dominos for companies like Gillette, Toyota, and Honda. While it's a dream job, she says her ultimate goal isn't simply financial: She wants to spread her love of domino art to new audiences around the world, and hopes her videos will inspire more kids to get involved in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math) related hobbies. But she's also quick to admit that she simply loves the feeling she gets while watching one of her projects come crashing down.
Wired	[ "frostbite", "north pole", "physiology", "women", "longreads" ]	# Inside the All-Female Trek to the North Pole By Jane C. Hu September 6th, 2018 09:24 AM --- A dozen women brave polar bears and frostbite to walk, ski, and trudge to the top of the world. It's a bonding exercise, yes, but also a unique chance to study the female body in extremis. Mariam Hamidaddin crawled into the tent shaking with cold. Her teammates knew she needed warmth, so they began melting ice on their gas stove to prepare hot soup. When Hamidaddin removed her gloves, there was a line dividing the frozen top third of her fingers and the healthy skin below: textbook frostbite. Hamidaddin's teammate Nataša Briški quaked as she pulled off her own gloves. "I looked at my fingers and saw that clear line," she recalls. "I was like, 'Oh my god.'" She wracked her memory for when the cold had crept into her fingers, but couldn't think of any particular moment she would've been susceptible to the elements. "I didn't feel cold at all," she says. "I mean, you're cold all the time, but it was nothing out of the ordinary." Granted, at -36 degrees Fahrenheit, even the briefest of exposure can freeze skin. Use your bare fingers to prime the stove, fiddle with a stuck zipper pull, or wipe after shitting, and you could end up with frostbite in a matter of minutes. Getting treatment would not be easy. Briški and her 10 teammates were skiing along a floe of sea ice at 89 degrees north, making a bid for the North Pole. The group of women were hand-selected for this this trek—the Women's Euro-Arabian North Pole Expedition—by the mission's creator, Felicity Aston, and as part of the mission the group allowed scientists to study their vitals to learn more about the effects of cold exposure on the female body. The women came from all corners of Europe and the Middle East—Qatar, Sweden, Oman, Iceland, France, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Cyprus, Slovenia, Kuwait, and the UK—and their ages ranged from 28 to 50. Besides science, Aston's hope was that a shared objective—reaching the North Pole—would bring European and Arabian women together, fostering a deeper understanding and appreciation of each other's cultures. In an interview before the expedition, Swedish team member Ida Olsson told the BBC that over the team's two training trips she'd gained a new understanding of why Middle Eastern women wear head coverings: "In my mind, it always felt forced—that men forced the women to do it. But when the girls here talk about it, it's something they actually want to do; they're not forced to do it. That was completely new to me." She also wanted to show girls and women that you didn't need to be a superhero to complete a big objective; while several members of the group were ultra-marathoners or worked as wilderness guides, others had never skied before signing on to the expedition. It was only the first day of the expedition. That day bled into the previous one, which had started 40 hours before and 550 miles away, in Longyearbyen, the northernmost human settlement in the world and base for most North Pole expeditions, located on a Norwegian archipelago called Svalbard. The team woke up that morning unsure of when they might leave for the pole, but by their 5 pm dinner, of moose burgers and fries, plans firmed up for an Antonov An-74 to ferry them up from the Longyearbyen Airport to Camp Barneo. Barneo—named by its Russian architects because it's "not Borneo"—is a makeshift landing strip on an ice floe at around 89 degrees north; every year, in late March, its keepers select a floe, build a small village of tents, construct a landing strip, and maintain it for around three weeks as flights bring in tourists seeking the opportunity to walk, ski, or be helicoptered to the pole. The team tried to rest before they were due at the airport in advance of their midnight flight, but the anticipation made it hard to get any quality shuteye. At 11 pm, they piled into two taxi vans that took them to a special hangar at the Longyearbyen airport. A few women called or texted their families one last time before their departure, while others snapped selfies. After a final round of tearful hugs, it was off to Barneo. Because Barneo drifts, its latitude changes. The team wanted to ski the last latitudinal degree to the pole, so they were picked up by an Mi-8 Russian cargo helicopter and deposited at exactly 89 degrees north. Despite the sleepless night of travel, at 6 am the women took off on skis, each pulling sledges filled with 90 pounds of food, clothing, and shelter they'd needed to survive on the ice over the next several days, during which they were to cover the 50 or so miles to the pole. That first day was rough. They were poorly rested, and the -36 degrees was markedly colder than comparably balmy 14 degrees they'd grown accustomed to in Longyearbyen. Pulling heavy sledges was awkward, and the team struggled to find a rhythm that suited everyone; slower skiers fell to the back of the pack, while faster skiers waited up ahead for them, trying to keep warm. The women knew they had to stay together—if they were to encounter a polar bear, there's safety in numbers—but they also needed to move quickly. Since the ice below them moves along the ocean, every moment not in motion could mean drifting further away from their goal. Running on adrenaline, the team knocked out 6 miles that first day. It's a lot to ask of the body. Extremely cold temperatures are known to trigger a host of bodily defenses; the heart beats faster as the body struggles to stay warm, and blood vessels constrict, which leads to lower blood pressure and leaves extremities more susceptible to frostbite. Adjusting to the cold also burns more calories; pair that with intense physical activity, like skiing for days at a time while pulling a heavy sledge, and the body quickly amasses a significant caloric deficit. The combination of physical demands and the emotional strain of an expedition—managing team dynamics, anxiety about frostbite and other injuries, the threat of encountering polar bears—cause the body's levels of the stress hormone cortisol to spike. And to top it all off the sun never sets this close to the pole; it just circles overhead, throwing off the body's internal clock and disrupting its natural sleep patterns, cortisol production, and blood sugar levels. These physiological responses were all targets of the researchers' scientific inquiry. Over the course of this first day, as Briški's thoughts flit from moving one ski in front of the next to panic about her frost-nipped fingers, a suite of gadgets record her vitals—the same array each of her team members is wearing. On her right wrist is a clunky device resembling a calculator watch, measuring her heart rate and sleep quality; on the other wrist, a cotton cuff holds a penny-sized temperature tracker against her skin. Under her clothes, there's another temperature tracker in her bra, and an accelerometer strapped around her waist tracking her every step and turn. A micro-needle patch sits high on her left arm, measuring her blood sugar. That morning, she'd spit into plastic test tubes, meant to serve as a record of her cortisol levels—a good proxy for how stressed she felt—and filled out a psychological questionnaire. Together, those measurements would tell scientists the story of her journey. Eleven days before the expedition, Briški is doing the opposite of skiing to the North Pole: She is laying as still as she can. For half an hour, she's muzzled by a plastic mask dispensing oxygen, making each of her breaths sound like Darth Vader's. The mask is connected to a hand-held machine measuring her resting oxygen consumption, which at the end of the session will print a read-out detailing each minute with a dizzying jumble of numbers. Until then, though, she's sternly been told she must relax: no moving, no talking, no coughing, no reading, and absolutely no sleeping. That proves harder than usual, given the early hour. It's 7:30 am, and Briški and four of her teammates have trundled over to the Longyearbyen hospital—or, as it's called in Norwegian, the Sykehus, a cognate for "sick house"—for physiological testing ahead of the expedition. Like many other public buildings in Longyearbyen, there's a taxidermied polar bear to greet visitors in the main lobby; the team is gathered in a suite of rooms just outside the surgical unit, which the head nurse says is rarely used by the town's 2,000 or so residents, aside from major accidents or routine vasectomies. "You're going to be spitting a lot, but it's a hell of a lot better than having you pee in the middle of the North Pole," Audrey Bergouignan says to another expeditioner. Bergouignan, a physiology researcher with a joint appointment at the University of Colorado at Denver and the French National Center for Scientific Research, is the mastermind behind all this testing. She's just explained the day's tasks—the resting oxygen consumption test Briški is laying down for, blood samples, medical interviews, weight and body composition measurements—and she moves into the laundry list of tasks the team will undertake on the ice. Bergouignan studies the human metabolism—how the body uses energy—and how physical activity (or lack thereof) affects it. Trailing a North Pole expedition team is hardly the strangest thing she's done in this line of work; she's paid women to lay motionless in bed for months at a time and worked with the European Space Agency to study what a stint on the International Space Station does to astronauts' bodies. From the moment she heard about the expedition, her mind reeled with hypotheses. The extreme arctic cold paired with days of grueling physical activity was a researcher's dream, promising a rare window into how the body adapts in the most demanding conditions. There just aren't many scientific studies of polar explorers' metabolisms. Previous studies focus on a very small number of participants, between two and five, and the methods used in that existing body of work are growing stale; the handful of papers published this century on energy expenditure of polar voyagers primarily use data collected between 1957 and 1996. Moreover, that data focuses exclusively on men. With expedition data already hard to come by, data on the comparatively few women who have voyaged to the poles is essentially nonexistent. After a trip to the North Pole Expedition Museum in Longyearbyen, Hamidaddin reported, with more than a hint of disdain in her voice, that there were no women mentioned. In a 2010 review of the past six decades' worth of data on long stays in Antarctica, physician Alistair Simpson noted the same thing, and suggests researchers seek out different participants. "Women are often resident in Antarctica now, and research investigating their response in terms of energy dynamics and aerobic fitness would be valuable," he says. So when the opportunity to study this expedition team presented itself, Bergouignan knew she had to take it. That opportunity was years in the making; the seed for the expedition was planted in 2009, after Aston, this expedition's leader, had led a different expedition of women to the opposite pole. Among her most memorable experiences on the way to the South Pole was learning about the backgrounds and cultures of her teammates, who came from Singapore, Brunei, India, New Zealand, and Cyprus. For years, she dreamed of putting together a team of women from the East and West, providing a more explicit opportunity for cultural dialogue and, in a world long on male explorers, to show that women are capable expeditioners. It wasn't until late 2015 that Aston announced she was seeking applications for a Euro-Arabian North Pole Expedition. "No experience necessary but passion, enthusiasm, and willingness to work hard are essential," she wrote in a Facebook post kicking off her recruitment efforts. That post somehow made it to Susan Gallon's feed, and her interest was piqued. A marine biologist, her research on seals led her to field work in Tasmania, Brazil, and Scotland, but she'd never undertaken an expedition like this. She didn't know it at the time, but she was already ahead of the game by knowing how to ski. Bergouignan, one of Gallon's close friends, encouraged her to apply. The two have had their share of adventures together: They met as young women at a summer research program in Slovenia, where they snuck out of their strict host family's house and hit the bars in their pajamas, and years later they went on to hitchhike from Hungary to France and drive through hurricane-force windstorms in Iceland. Bergouignan knew Gallon had the drive and athleticism to make it to the pole, and, she joked, on the off-chance Gallon was selected, what fantastic research she could do on the team. Gallon was one of roughly 1,000 applicants, and much to her delight, Aston sought her out for a Skype interview. After a couple calls with Aston, she got the official invitation to join the expedition while visiting her mom, Laure, in France. "Felicity said, 'Welcome to the team,' and Susan started crying," Laure says. "She said it was better than winning the lottery." Lucky for Bergouignan, the team was receptive to the idea of being studied while en route, so she set about making preparations for her studies. She dubbed the project the POWER study: Physiological adaptiOns in WomEn during a NoRth Pole expedition. A bit of a tortured acronym, perhaps, but she felt it captured the spirit of the expedition and the research, and she assembled an all-female team to collect and analyze the data. "We just have so little information on women, so this is a really great opportunity to see what the body does under these extreme conditions," says Jessica Devitt, a family medicine doctor at University of Colorado at Denver assisting Bergouignan with testing. Polar expeditions are just one of many niche areas in which women's data is sparse. "Even in routine drug trials—what we base medical decisions on—many focus on men," Devitt says. Men have long been used as the default in medical research, despite evidence that women's bodies often operate differently. This is especially true in the case of exercise and metabolism; women tend to have more body fat but also rely on those fat stores more for energy during physical activity. On any expedition—to one of earth's poles, into the desert, even to outer space—knowing what each expeditioners' body needs can be advantageous. To use an extreme example, consider taking food on a space mission. "It costs 10,000 euros to carry half a kilo of food to space," Bergouignan says. "If you overestimate the amount of food you need to bring, it's going to have a tremendous economic impact; on the other hand, if you don't bring enough, you may risk starvation of the crew. It's extremely important to be able to assess this with accuracy." There are also good reasons this research hasn't been done before. To put it mildly, it's a logistical nightmare, and expensive to boot. Just figuring out which country to ask for ethical oversight, a mandatory step for anyone running a study using human participants, took months; unsurprisingly, the North Pole doesn't have its own review board, so Bergouignan was left to figure out whether she'd have to ask the local Svalbard government, the EU, the US, or each expeditioner's home country for approval. (She went with the US.) Then, there's the gear. That tracker that looks like an '80s calculator watch is actually a research-grade heartrate and sleep monitor and runs $1,000 a pop. Bergouignan has also brought bottles of doubly labeled water, a special type of H20 in which the H and 0 have been lab-manufactured to contain atypical isotopes, which allows researchers to trace those elements once the water exits the body as urine. By analyzing that urine, Bergouignan can deduce each woman's baseline energy expenditure levels, but this carefully engineered water costs around $2,300 per person. Bergouignan estimates the sensors and testing equipment she brought were worth around $70,000, which she lugged around in a gargantuan suitcase weighing more than 175 pounds. Luckily, Bergouignan was not obliged to bring a centrifuge to spin blood samples; though she had initially considered bringing the machine, roughly the size and heft of a late '90s laser printer, she was relieved to find that the Longyearbyen hospital already had one. All these carefully laid plans are dependent on the expedition schedule, which, of course, can change at any moment. As Devitt sat in a Lyft taking her to the Denver airport, she received an email from Bergouignan saying that permit roadblocks had pushed the expedition dates by at least 10 days, and that there was a possibility it wouldn't happen at all. "Maybe it's better you know now?" counseled her Lyft driver, and for a moment Devitt debated whether to make the three-plane, 24-hour journey. "But Audrey's email was so upbeat—'We're going to have a grand adventure! Cheers!' So I got on the plane and figured we'd deal with it once we got there." (I received a similar email from Bergouignan, which I read at the baggage claim in the Longyearbyen airport—too late to consider making alternate plans.) That roll-with-the-punches attitude serves Bergouignan and Devitt well. Here at the hospital, they've hit some minor logistical snags with blood draws. While the first couple proceeded without incident, they're having trouble finding the right vein in expedition leader Felicity Aston's arm. "Perhaps it's a good thing that my body doesn't give up blood easily," she jokes after the third attempt. It's all relative; a few pricks are nothing compared with Aston's impressive record of enduring sufferfests. She was the first person to ski more than 1,000 miles across Antarctica alone, a feat that took 59 days in 2012. She also took part in the first all-female British expedition across Greenland and led a team to the South Pole, which landed her the honor of being a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. She has also completed a 156-mile ultramarathon in the Sahara Desert and is a new mom. As this expedition's leader, she has set the tone for the rest of the team to welcome all this guinea-pigging. "Comfort isn't an issue," she told Bergouignan and Devitt after the team's initial meeting with the research team. "We're all keen to get you the data you need." Briški, for one, is enjoying herself. Beaming, she exits the room where Bergouinan is measuring women's body mass, broken down into fat, bone, and water weight. The machine also spits out a judgment of each woman's metabolic age, and Briški is delighted by her results. "I just found out I'm 30 years old," she announces. A willowy Slovenian, Briški is in her forties but certainly has the levity and athleticism of someone younger—and with just a tinge of pink in her white-blonde pixie cut, she looks it, too. Later, during her blood draw, Devitt compliments her on having strong, easily locatable veins. "I feel so privileged to be told all this," she says, "that I'm 30 and have good-looking veins!" Once the blood draws, the oxygen tests, the body composition measurements, and the gear assignments are completed, Bergouignan, Devitt, and I grab burgers and beers, but it's clear that Bergouignan's brain is still moving a hundred miles a minute. The trip delay has torpedoed many of her plans, but luckily she is the queen of making things work. (One of the first times we spoke, she apologized that she'd forgotten I was going to call because her house had been robbed that week, and then her car stolen. But, she says, she'd just stolen back her own car, and all was fine.) She runs through a list of what she needs to coordinate to get the project back on track. First up are more test tubes, but she discovers that having them shipped to Svalbard will take weeks she doesn't have. Instead, she sets a new plan into motion: She texts her fiancé in Colorado asking him to mail a package of them to expedition team member Susan Gallon's mom, Laure, in France, so that Laure can fly with them when she visits her daughter in Svalbard the following week. It's convoluted, but it'll get the job done. Meanwhile, the team is trying to put on a good face about the expedition's delay. One night, as we're making pasta at the guesthouse where some team members are staying, Asma Al Thani plays us a 20-minute video of clips from dozens of people wishing her well on her journey. "Don't get eaten by a polar bear," her best friend's daughter warns. "When you come back, we should make an Asma Barbie with a sledge and kit, complete with a pee bottle accessory," suggests another friend. Al Thani, whose great-grandfather founded Qatar, is royalty in her country, and if she succeeds in reaching the pole she'd be the first Qatari to do so. Being the first comes with unanswered questions—like how to pray toward Mecca. "Technically, you can pray at any angle since it's all south," she says. "No one has written anything about this, and I asked elders but they all said they weren't sure. I think they're afraid to say anything because it's never been done before." After the video, she checks her phone and announces that a Qatar lifestyle Instagram account has reposted her most recent photo from Longyearbyen. "They have 65,000 followers," she says, smiling, but her face falls quickly to neutral and she stares blankly out the window. "I really hope we make it to the North Pole now." Compared with the harsh reality of the elements 50 miles from the top of the world, the memory of worrying about the expedition's start seems quaint. It's the eighth day of the expedition, and Briški's first task upon waking up, like the six mornings before it, is to spit into a tube. She's supposed to lie motionless in her sleeping bag for another 10 minutes before collecting a second sample, but she's antsy to get her day started; even in all her layers inside the sleeping bag, she's freezing, and she could be preparing her gear for the day's departure, melting ice into water for coffee and breakfast, or, more urgently, emptying her bladder. Since that first day, Hamidaddin was helicoptered back to base camp at Barneo, and the prognosis for her frostbite was good. "Not too serious," the camp doctor said. "No chop." To Briški's relief, her fingers have stayed fairly healthy, mostly through her obsessive focus on rotating among her pairs of gloves and a meticulous regime of applying healing balm. She's ready to go home, though; over the last few days, she's battled her sledge, which flipped at the slightest hint of uneven terrain. After the expedition, Briški posted on Facebook about her beloved sledge, which tipped over upwards of 30 times a day. "Kindly told him, 'Behave or be thrown out of the helicopter on our way back to Barneo.'" Sledges were even more of a pain while the team crossed mounds of ice rubble; often, they'd just form a line across the rubble and hand sledges through rather than tugging them. And the sledges were a real hazard at frozen water crossings, where an unlucky step could break the fragile ice, plunging skiier and sledge into the frigid sea. "In a few places, before we started, we joked about making our final goodbyes," Briški says. "The ice looks solid, but you never know. How fast would I actually be able to untie myself from the sledge?" Gallon said that before each crossing, she made sure to unscrew the gate on her caribiner connecting her harness to her sledge, just in case she fell in and needed to make a quick getaway. Taking measurements for Bergouignan's study was another added challenge. "Let's just say, politely, that we were cursing the whole time," Briški says. "It took an effort." Though Bergouignan made every effort to simplify the procedure, popping open small test tubes for saliva collection proved difficult with clunky gloves on, and removing buffs or balaclavas to free up the mouth for spitting was less than pleasant in the cold. Briški says her samples got a little gross. "I wasn't very good at spitting, so it usually ended up all around the tube." At 7 pm on that eighth day, the team's GPS finally reads out 90 degrees north. Aston puts her poles down to commemorate the spot, and for just a few minutes, that is the North Pole. Even after the ice drifts them south, that patch remains their North Pole. Each team member unfurls her nation's flag and poses for photos. They call Barneo for a helicopter and are delighted to find Hamidaddin has hitched a ride, rightfully joining her team at the pole after all. Once they return in Longyearbyen, Bergouignan and Devitt are long gone, so Gallon and Briški take over scientific duties themselves. All that skiing, sledge-pulling, shivering, and sled-pulling meant a big calorie deficit; preliminary results indicate that nearly everyone on the expedition gained muscle while losing fat, and, on average, dropped around four pounds over the week-long expedition. "Some of us got younger too," Briški grins, eager to share her metabolic age results. "Now I'm 29." It will take months for Bergouignan to pore over the specifics of the results, but she's already planning ahead: six months after the expedition, she's planning to send each team member a small research kit with instructions on how to measure their daily energy expenditure in a less extreme environment. (One exception is Russian team member Olga Rumyantseva, who's already alerted Bergouignan that she's running a four-day, 170 kilometer ultramarathon and will probably be in better shape in October than she was for the expedition.) I ask Briški what kind of data Bergouignan should expect from follow-up. She lays out her typical day: waking up around 7, working until 4 or 5 while trying to fit in a run during lunch hour, then going out for dinner or to the theater. "Oh, and I'll have a normal toilet," she adds, "and a shower." Reporting for this story was supported by the International Women's Media Foundation's Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists.
The BBC	[ "Rygbi", "Chwaraeon" ]	# Ateb y Galw: Lauren Jenkins By BBC Cymru Fyw November 4th, 2024 07:14 AM --- Y gyflwynwraig o Lanelli, Lauren Jenkins, sy'n ateb ein cwestiynau'r wythnos hon. Mae Lauren yn aml i'w gweld ar ein teledu wrth ochr caeau rygbi - gemau rhyngwladol a rhanbarthol - yn asesu'r gemau gyda chyn-chwaraewyr. Mae Lauren hefyd yn cyflwyno podlediad Scrum V ar hyn o bryd, sy'n trafod materion diweddaraf y byd rygbi yng Nghymru a thu hwnt. ## Beth yw eich atgof cyntaf? Mam-gu yn grac gyda Dad-cu oherwydd bod e wedi mynd a fi i'r fan hufen iâ ar ôl Meithrin cyn bo fi'n cael te. ## Beth yw eich hoff le yng Nghymru a pham? Ma' wastad dau le dwi'n hoffi mynd â ffrindiau. I'r gorllewin yn un - rwy'n mwynhau mynd i Drefdraeth a cherdded o bwll gwaelod, heibio Cwm Eglwys ar hyd llwybr yr arfordir a bennu 'da fish n chips yn y Golden Lion. Ac i Stadiwm y Principality i glywed yr anthem dan do. ## Beth yw'r noson orau i chi ei chael erioed? Ges i gymaint o nosweithiau grêt tra'n byw ym Mharis a Barcelona ar flwyddyn dramor... ond ddim yn cofio nhw'n ddigon da i ailadrodd! Felly beth am y pnawn gorau? Roedd gweld fy mhartner Andrew yn ennill y Cwpan Undydd gyda Morgannwg yn 2021, a chael ei enwi'n seren y gêm yn sbesial. Dwi wedi bod yn ddigon ffodus i brofi sawl achlysur arbennig ym myd chwaraeon Cymru ond fydd dim byd yn cymharu i'r pnawn yna. Y canu, cyffro'r gêm a'r ffaith mai dyma oedd tlws cynta'r clwb ers 17 mlynedd. Actually, falle cerdded mewn i far yn annisgwyl ar ein gwyliau yn Lake Tahoe, ac aros yna tan un y bore yn canu ac yfed rum gyda dau gerddor anhygoel odd 'di defnyddio'r bord fel llwyfan. Unwaith oedden nhw 'di clywed bo' ni'n Brydeinig, chwaraeon nhw mond y Beatles a Queen am tua dwy awr. ## Disgrifiwch eich hun mewn tri gair. Digymell (spontaneous), laid-back, hael ## Pa ddigwyddiad yn eich bywyd sydd o hyd yn gwneud i chi wenu neu chwerthin wrth feddwl 'nôl? Ciwio i gael llun gyda cardboard cut-out o Mark Owen achos o'n i'n dwli ar Take That. Ac wedyn bron yn rhy swil i fynd lan i gael y llun 'di tynnu pan gyrhaeddes i'r front. ## Beth oedd y digwyddiad a gododd y mwyaf o gywilydd arnoch chi erioed? Penderfynu bod fi eisiau bod yn rhan o'r gymdeithas cheerleading yn yr wythnos gyntaf yn y brifysgol ac wedyn ffaelu gwneud cartwheel yn yr audition. Dwi'n beio mam. Unrhyw bryd nes i drial neud forward roll fel plentyn bydde hi'n mynd 'watch you don't break your neck'. ## Pryd oedd y tro diwethaf i chi grio? Gan amlaf pan dwi'n clywed am gi rhywun yn marw, ac wedyn yn dechrau meddwl am fy nghi i'n marw. Morbid dwi'n gwybod! Ond mae'n gi unigryw - meddyliwch am y ffilm Marley and Me. Twp, hyderus, twyllodrus, class clown. ## Oes gennych chi unrhyw arferion drwg? Dwi'n rhy uchelgeisiol yn coginio (am rywun sy ddim rili'n grêt am goginio). Fydd ffrindie ar eu ffordd draw am fwyd a fydda' i dal yn rhedeg o gwmpas yn trial ffeindio ryw gynhwysyn anghyffredin fel preserved lemon harissa chi mond yn gallu cael yn Waitrose. ## Byw neu farw, gyda phwy fyddech chi'n cael diod a pham? Hwn yn hawdd. Bu farw Dad-cu yn 56 oed. 6 wythnos ar ôl cael diagnosis cancr pan o'n i'n dair oed. Rhywsut mae ei bresenoldeb wedi teimlo'n gryf yn fy mywyd ers hynny. Falle oherwydd y ffordd ma' Nain wastad wedi siarad amdano – arfer dwli coginio pysgod ar y barbie beth bynnag y tywydd, teithio'r byd tra oedd e'n gallu, dyn teulu go iawn. ## Dywedwch rywbeth amdanoch chi eich hun nad oes yna lawer o bobl yn ei wybod. O'n i'n real tomboy pan oeddwn i'n blentyn ac yn mad am Man United. Roedd 'na bosteri Man United ym mhobman yn fy stafell wely. Dwi'n cofio aros am oriau tu fas i Old Trafford yn gobeithio cael llofnodion y chwaraewyr. ## Ar eich diwrnod olaf ar y blaned, beth fyddech chi'n ei wneud? Bydde bwyd yn chwarae rhan bwysig. Dwi'r math o berson sy'n mynd i gysgu yn meddwl am frecwast, yn cynllunio cinio cyn bod wedi codi. Dwi ddim yn deall rheiny sy'n dweud 'anghofies i fwyta heddi'. Dwi'n anghofio bod fi wedi bwyta, ac yn bwyta eto! ## Pa lun sy'n bwysig i chi a pham? Does dim byd dwi'n mwynhau mwy neu sy'n cyfoethogi bywyd mwy na theithio. Dyma un o nifer galle fi wedi dewis. Dyw Andrew ddim rili'n involved yn yr ochr 'cynllunio' o wylie felly fel arfer mae'r diwrnod yn cychwyn gyda fe yn sylweddoli bod y daith i'r stop nesa' ddwywaith mor hir â beth odden ni wedi rhagweld. ## Petasech chi'n gallu bod yn rhywun arall am ddiwrnod, pwy fyddai ef/hi? Y dyfarnwr rygbi Alain Rolland yn ystod gêm gynderfynol Cwpan Byd 2011 (Cymru v Ffrainc)... byswn i wedi estyn am gerdyn melyn i Sam Warburton, nid coch.
Associated Press News	[ "Philadelphia", "Lawsuits", "Legal proceedings", "Sexual assault" ]	# Lawyers told to apologize for blasting recorded screams in a Philly neighborhood October 15th, 2024 05:09 PM --- PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Lawyers who blared a looped recording of a woman screaming as a test in their civil rights lawsuit against the city of Philadelphia must apologize in person and in writing to residents where the loud test took place, a federal judge ordered last week. U.S. Judge John F. Murphy on Thursday described the hour-long predawn test on Sept. 23 as lacking foresight and judgment, resulting in "a deeply disturbing and potentially dangerous situation." He gave the lawyers who oversaw the loudspeaker's recorded screaming in south Philadelphia until the end of October to apologize to people who live nearby, about a block from the South Broad Street and Passyunk Avenue intersection. "It was so jarring," neighbor Rachel Robbins told The Philadelphia Inquirer. "It was just really awful." The lawyers represent a man who is suing the city and several officers over his arrest, conviction and 19 years in prison for sexual assault before the conviction was vacated in 2020. The man was shot by police three times at the scene. At issue in the lawsuit is whether the man, who said he was trying to help the victim in the case, could have heard the woman's screams from two blocks away. The loudspeaker was set up near row homes and a day care center that was preparing to open for the day. Murphy wrote that neighbors were upset, with some watching children go into the day care facility while the recording was played. "Plaintiff counsel's disregard for community members fell short of the ethical standards by which all attorneys practicing in this district must abide," the judge wrote. The apology must explain "their transgression," Murphy wrote, and take "full responsibility for the repercussions of the scream test." A phone message seeking comment was left Tuesday for the lawyers who represent the man suing the city.
Wired	[ "music", "electronic music", "dj" ]	# Native Instruments Trakor Pro 3, Kontrol S2, and Kontrol S4: Specs, Price, Release Date By Michael Calore September 6th, 2018 10:00 AM --- Native Instruments refreshes its entire line of music creation and performance tools. But the really fun stuff is in the flagship DJ controller. If you've been to a club, festival, pool party, or bar mitzvah in the past few years and taken a peek at the DJ booth, you've seen somebody using Traktor. The widely beloved app, made by the Berlin company Native Instruments, lets a performer seamlessly mix together tracks from their MP3 library to make a non-stop, fluidly changing DJ set. Traktor can be used with hardware controllers too—when plugged into a laptop, these keyboard-like interfaces give a DJ all the same knobs and faders found on an analog mixer. By twisting, bumping, and tapping those hardware controls, the DJ can add some additional nuance and give the proceedings a human touch that software can't match. The only hang-up with Traktor is that it's almost four years old, and the rapid march of technological innovation—especially in touchsreen mobile apps—has led to similar tools that can out-match some of its key features. Today, Native Instruments is announcing a new version of its mega-popular Traktor suite for digital DJs. Traktor Pro 3 will be available next month, on October 18, for $99. Users of Traktor Pro 2 will be able to upgrade to the new version for $49. Along with the updates to the interface, functions, and audio quality of Traktor, NI is releasing newly redesigned versions of its popular hardware controllers to use with the software. The portable Kontrol S2 ($299) is a user-friendly controller for beginners and iPad DJs, and the less portable but more robust Kontrol S4 ($899) is designed with all of the pro-level features top-tier DJs would need. Both new controllers will ship later this fall. There are no updates to the huge Kontrol S8 controller. Today's Traktor updates are just part of a giant refresh NI is making to its many hardware and software tools. The company is updating its music creation hardware; the Komplete Kontrol 88-key keyboard gets a refresh today, and NI is debuting new entry-level Maschine and Kontrol hardware controllers. Aside from Traktor, there are gobs of updates coming in the software realm, with the Komplete 12 suite of virtual musical instruments, the Massive X software synth, and the Kontact 6 sampling platform all arriving in the coming weeks and months. The company's web services—Sounds.com, The Loop Loft, and Metapop—are also getting updates. Something for everyone. But I am a DJ and a hardware geek, so I want to tell you about the DJ hardware. The flagship of the Kontrol line, and the piece you'll want to fondle immediately if you're a digital mixmaster, is the larger Kontrol S4. The refresh adds some haptic feedback to the motorized jog wheels—those circular platters on the controller—to make them more closely mimic the feel of real turntables and to add some advanced touch controls. First, if you place your hand on one of the jog wheels when it's spinning, you can feel a pleasant momentum and weight, and it really does feel as if you're putting your hand on a moving turntable. You can nudge the wheels forward or apply a little friction to slow them down and do some old-school beat-matching. Squint just right and you'll think you're mixing vinyl singles instead of ephemeral MP3 files. It's neat. But of course the beauty of the digital world isn't in the analog emulation, it's in the expansion of capabilities that comes once you venture outside that domain. The wheels can be used to manually adjust a track's beat grid. Better, you can spin a jog wheel to scroll through your track's waveform on the S4's display screen and set cue points—places where you want to start a song, fire a sample, or engage a loop. Once you set that cue point, it's represented physically by a little haptic bump in the wheel's rotation. The feature lets you zero in on a split-second of music with just your fingertips, freeing your eyes and ears to tackle other tasks. All of this is powered by something NI is calling "Haptic Drive." During a hands-on demo with the Traktor team last month, the company reps hinted at some new unannounced features that will be added to the S4 and S2 later. Since the Haptic Drive in the jog wheels is controlled by software, the system can be improved with incremental downloads. The S4 has countless other features pros will love, like the ability to use outboard gear, plug in multiple mics, and to assign loops or custom audio effects to the various pads and knobs on the interface. You can find the long list of newness at the company's website. The redesign of the lower-priced Kontrol S2 (at only $299 compared to the S4's $899, it'll likely be the more attractive choice for beginners) doesn't have all the fun haptic voodoo of its big brother. But it's still a capable controller that's going to be a great choice for DJs who travel a ton or perform in nonconventional venues like basements, rooftops, beaches, and of course their own bedrooms. The S2 fits in a backpack. It's USB powered, so you can just plug it into a laptop and not worry about AC power in the DJ booth. And the jog wheels have a premium feel, just without the torque-drive response and haptic feedback of the S4. Both controllers come with a full version of Traktor Pro 3. The S4 will ship first, in November. The less expensive S2 is slated for "fall" of this year. As long as NI's release schedule doesn't slip, you'll be able to rock the company holiday party with the controller of your choice.
Wired	[ "dot physics", "gravity", "air resistance", "estimation", "python" ]	# Fall Is Here! Time to Learn the Physics of... Falling By Rhett Allain September 6th, 2018 09:00 AM --- Stuff is constantly falling—off tables, out of bags, from the sky. Let's explore the science of all things tumbling downward. Take a pencil, stretch out your arm, and let go. We all know that the pencil will fall. OK, but what about dropping a bowling ball? Is that the same thing? No wait! How about a watermelon dropped off a tall building? Why would you do that? I would do it to see it splat. Or maybe even more extreme, a human jumping out of an airplane. These examples could all be considered "falling," but not every fall is the same. So let's get to this. Here is all the physics you need to know about falling things. Hold on to your seats. This is probably going to be more than you asked for. Don't worry, the math will (mostly) be at a simple level. I'm going to talk about air resistance down below. However, I want to start with the simplest case of an object falling near the surface of the Earth that has a negligible air resistance force. Really, this simplification isn't just approximately true in many cases, it's also one of the key components of the nature of science. If we want to build a scientific model (science is all about building models), the best bet is to start off with something without extra complications. If you want to model a mass on a spring, assume the spring is massless. If you want to model a cow, you have to assume it's a sphere (mandatory spherical cow joke). These simplifications are the first step to building more complicated models. This is one thing that comes up quite a bit. People say that if you drop two objects of different mass, they have the same gravity. OK, the first problem is the word "gravity"—what does that mean? It can mean many different things. The two most common meanings are: the gravitational force or the gravitational field. Let's start with the gravitational field. This is a measure of the gravitational effect due to an object with mass. Since the gravitational interaction is force between two masses, you can think of this as "half" of that interaction (with just one mass). If you have an object near the surface of the Earth, then that object will have a gravitational interaction depending on the Earth's gravitational field. Near the surface of the Earth, the gravitational field is represented by the symbol g and has a value of about 9.8 newtons per kilogram. No. The value of g is not the acceleration due to gravity. Yes, it is true that 9.8 n/kg has the equivalent units of meters per second squared. It is also true that a free falling (no air resistance) object falls with an acceleration of 9.8 m/s2—but it's still just the gravitational field. It doesn't matter what object you put near the surface of the Earth, the gravitational field due to the Earth is constant and pointing towards the center of the Earth. Note: It's not actually constant. More on that below. What about the gravitational force? Here is a picture of two objects with different mass. If you hold these two objects up, it should be clear that the gravitational force pulling down is not the same. The big rock has a bigger mass and a bigger gravitational force. That small metal ball has a much, MUCH smaller mass and also a much smaller gravitational force. Yes, the gravitational force is also called the weight—those are the same things. But the mass is not the same as weight. Mass is a measure of how much "stuff" is in an object and weight is the gravitational force. Now to connect it all together. Here is the relationship between mass, weight, and gravitational field: Technically, this should be a vector equation—but I'm trying to keep it simple. However, you can see that since g is constant, an increase in mass increases the weight. OK, so you drop an object with mass. Once you let go, there is only one force acting on it—the gravitational force. What happens to an object with a force acting on it? The answer is that it accelerates. Oh, I know what you are thinking. You want to say that "it just falls," and maybe it falls fairly fast. That isn't completely wrong—but if you were to measure it carefully, you would see that it actually accelerates. That means that the objects downward speed increases with time. Let's forget about falling objects for a moment. What about a small car on a horizontal, frictionless track with a fan pushing it? Like this: If I turn on the fan and release the car, it accelerates. There are two ways I can change the acceleration of this car. I could increase the force from the fan or I could decrease the mass. With just a single force on an object in one dimension, I can write the following relationship. This is what a force (or a net force) does to an object—it makes it accelerate. Please don't say forces make objects move. "Move" is a four letter word (that means it's bad). Saying an object "moves" isn't wrong, but it doesn't really give enough of a description. Let's just stick with saying the object accelerates. There are many, many more things that could be said about force and motion, but this is enough for now. Now we can put together a bunch of stuff to explain falling objects. If you drop a bowling ball and a basketball from the same height, they will hit the ground at the same time. Oh, just in case you don't have ball experience—the bowling ball is MUCH more massive than the basketball. Maybe they hit the ground at the same time because they have the same gravitational force on them? Nope. First, they can't have the same gravitational force because they have different masses (see above). Second, let's assume that these two balls have the same force. With the same force, the less massive one will have a greater acceleration based on the force-motion model above. Here, you can see this with two fan carts. The closer one has a greater mass, but the forces from the fans are the same. In the end, the less massive one wins. No, the two objects with different mass hit the ground at the same time because they have different forces. If we put together the definition of the gravitational force (on the surface of the Earth) and the force-motion model, we get this: Since both the acceleration AND the gravitational force depend on the mass, the mass cancels. Objects fall with the same acceleration—if and only if the gravitational force is the only force. Yes. The gravitational field is not constant. I lied. Your textbook lied. We lied to protect you. We aren't bad. But now I think you can handle the truth. The gravitational force is an interaction between two objects with mass. For a falling ball, the two objects with mass are the Earth and the ball. The strength of this gravitational force is proportional to the product of the two masses, but inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the objects. As a scalar equation, it looks like this. A couple of important things to point out (since you can handle the truth now). The G is the universal gravitational constant. It's value is super tiny, so we don't really notice the gravitational interaction between everyday objects. The other thing to look at is the r in the denominator. This is the distance between the centers of the two objects. Since the Earth is mostly spherically uniform in density, the r for an object near the surface of the Earth will be equal to the radius of the Earth, with a value of 6,371 kilometers (huge). So, what happens if you move 1 km above the surface of the Earth? The r" goes from 6,371 km to 6,732 km—not a big change. Even if you go ALL the way up to the altitude of the International Space Station orbit (400 km), there isn't a crazy huge change. Here, I will show you with this plot of gravitational field vs. height above the surface. Oh, and here is the python code I used to make this—just in case you want it. For just about all "dropping object" situations, we can just assume the gravitational force is constant. OK, now we are getting into the fun stuff. What if you drop an object and you can't ignore the air resistance? Then we have a more complicated problem, because there are now TWO forces on the falling object. There is the gravitational force (see all the stuff above), and there is also an air resistance force. As an object moves through the air, there is a force pushing in the opposite direction of motion. This force depends on: The part that makes this complicated is the dependency of the air resistance on the speed of the object. Let's consider a falling object with significant air resistance. How about a ping-pong ball? When I let go of this ball, it is not moving. This means there is zero air resistance force and only the downward gravitational force. This force causes the ball to increase in speed (in the downward direction)—but once the ball is moving, there is now air resistance force pushing up. This makes the net force a little bit smaller, and thus you get a slighter increase in speed. Eventually the air drag and gravitational force have equal magnitudes. The ball then falls at a constant speed—this is called terminal velocity. Since the net force on a falling object with air resistance isn't constant, this is a pretty tough problem. Really, the only practical (OK, not really the only way) to model this is with a numerical calculation that breaks the motion into tiny steps during which the force is approximately constant. How about a model of a falling ping-pong ball? Here you go. Click the pencil icon to see and edit the code, and click Play to run it. You can see that the ping-pong ball almost reaches a constant speed after dropping a distance of 10 meters. I put a "no air" object in there for reference. If you want to see what happens if you change the mass---go ahead and change the code and re-run it. It's fun. Now we get to the interesting question. If I drop two objects from the same height, does the heavier one hit the ground first? The answer is "sometimes." Let's look at three examples. Drop 1: A basketball and bowling ball. Here is a slow-motion view of this actual thing. If you ignore air resistance, then these two objects have the same acceleration, because they have different masses (see above). But why can you ignore the air resistance in this case? Looking at the basketball, it has a significant mass and size. However, it is moving fairly slowly during the fall. Even at the fastest part of this drop the force from air on the ball is super tiny compared to the gravitational force. Now, if you dropped it from a much higher starting point, the ball would be able to get up to a speed where the air drag makes it fall slower than the bowling ball. Drop 2: A small ball and a cardboard box top. Just to be clear, the mass of the cardboard is WAY higher than the ball. Here is the drop. Sorry, the ball is hard to see since it's small. Does the more massive object fall faster? Nope. In fact it's the lower mass that hits the ground first. It's not just mass that matters; size matters too. Even though the cardboard has a greater mass, it's surface area is also GIANT. This produces a significant air resistance force to make it hit the ground later. Drop 3: Two pieces of paper. Two sheets of paper are pretty much the same, so they should have the same mass. However, they can hit the ground at different times. I tricked you. Both papers have the same mass, but I crumpled one up, so they have different surface areas. The crumpled-up paper hits the ground first. It seems like this could be a good party trick. But again, it's about more than just the mass of the object. Two people jump out of an airplane (with parachutes, because they aren't crazy). One person is large, and one person is small. Which one falls with the greatest terminal velocity? Yes, you can assume they are both in standard free fall position (same shape). I am going to invoke the "spherical cow" principle and look at two falling spherical humans instead. Human 1 is a sphere with a radius of 1 meter (yes, that would be huge), and human 2 has a radius twice as big, at 2 meters. How do the gravitational forces on these two spherical humans compare? Human 2 is obviously heavier. If the human density is constant, then the increase in gravitational force will be proportional to the increase in volume. If you double the radius of a sphere, you increase the volume by a factor of eight (volume is proportional to radius cubed). So human 2 has a weight eight times that of human 1. What about the air resistance on these two humans? Again, human 2 will have a bigger area and more air resistance. If you double the radius, the cross-sectional area will be four times as much (since area is proportional to radius squared). Now you see that the bigger human will have a greater terminal velocity. Human 2 has a weight that is eight times as much, but air drag that is only four times as much as the smaller human. Now let's take this to the extreme. An ant and an elephant jump out of a plane. The elephant is going to need a massive sized parachute, but the ant probably doesn't need anything. Since the weight-to-area ratio is super tiny for a super tiny object, the ant will have a very small terminal velocity. It can probably impact the ground with little injury. Note to my ant readers: Please be safe and don't try this in real life, in the unlikely event that I am wrong. But size matters—especially when falling with air resistance. I think this might be my longest blog post. Congratulations if you made it all the way to the end.
The New Yorker	[ "immigration", "border", "bonds", "incarceration" ]	# The Company Offering Detained Migrants Freedom—at a Price By Micah Hauser March 12th, 2019 05:00 AM --- The contours of the U.S. immigration crisis are shaped by public policy, but at its edges operate a startling array of private profit-making entities, both legal and illicit—the smugglers shuttling people across the border, the prison corporations building and staffing the detention centers, the venders providing telephone and commissary and health-care services inside those detention centers—the list goes on. One of these, a company called Libre by Nexus, springs free detained immigrants who can't afford their bond—with some conditions. The process is depicted in the video above. In the past five years, median bond amounts for immigration cases have increased by fifty per cent, to seventy-five hundred dollars. For those who can't afford to pay, Libre by Nexus acts as a sort of middleman, connecting detainees with licensed bond companies that front the money. The catch? Clients must rent from Libre a G.P.S.-enabled shackle, which costs four hundred and twenty dollars per month, and wear it for the duration of their case. As of 2019, the average immigration case lasts twenty-five months. Over that period, someone with a seventy-five-hundred-dollar bond would pay Libre nearly thirteen thousand dollars in rental and other fees. (The vast majority of the four hundred thousand people detained by ICE each year are deemed automatically ineligible for bond and remain in custody until they win their cases or get deported.) Critics accuse Libre, which, as its C.E.O., Mike Donovan, told the Washington Post, makes thirty million dollars per year, of preying on the vulnerable. Multiple states and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have probed its business practices amid allegations of fraud. (The company has denied any wrongdoing.) Hallie Ryan, a legal-aid attorney in Virginia, says that many detainees don't understand Libre's contract or its implications. As she sees it, the clients are "desperate to get out of detention to rejoin with their families. They'll agree to anything, and they do." The video follows two recent immigrants, Gerson and Sonia, both of whom wear a Libre shackle. The device is always there, when Gerson laces up his blue Converse sneakers in the morning or stops to itch his ankle while kicking a soccer ball. When Sonia plugs in its charger, it buzzes faintly, like the sound of an electric razor coming from another room, as she walks into her kitchen, carrying the cord in her hand. "One always feels like a prisoner to this thing," she says. In a cheery commercial for the company, a spokeswoman implores viewers to "call today and reunite your family tomorrow." In a clip recorded in a cozy living room with a fire crackling in the background, Donovan speaks of his "commitment to justice" and thanks clients "for the honor of being able to serve you." It's a startling contrast to the gloomy reality presented by Gerson and Sonia. Then again, wearing an ankle monitor certainly beats detention—Libre has reunited them with their families. The vast, complicated ecosystem of immigration enforcement grows increasingly overburdened and, for those churning through its gears, increasingly confusing. Though it is easy to vilify a company profiting in the process, it is perhaps wiser to interrogate the policies that create the demand for its services by forcing desperate people to choose between bad and worse.
The New Yorker	[ "jumaane williams", "new york city council", "new york city" ]	# Jumaane Williams's Breakthrough Victory Speech By Jennifer Gonnerman March 12th, 2019 05:00 AM --- In the same week that brought us the spectacle of Michael Cohen testifying before Congress and many of his interrogators peacocking for the cameras, a Brooklyn elected official named Jumaane Williams delivered a rare moment of emotional truth. The scene unfolded on February 26th, at an Election Night party inside a Caribbean-owned lounge in East Flatbush. Williams, who calls himself an "activist-elected official," has been a member of the New York City Council for nearly a decade. That day, New York City had held a special election for public advocate—an office that acts as a watchdog for residents—and Williams won, defeating sixteen other candidates. His victory speech started shortly before 11 P.M., and at first it followed the usual script. He thanked his family and girlfriend and campaign staff and supporters. He promised to keep fighting for the causes that have long consumed him, including fixing the "housing-and-homelessness crisis" and battling against "a system of injustice that criminalizes black and brown communities." After he finished reading his prepared speech, he remained behind the podium, sipping from a water bottle as the crowd chanted his name: "Jumaane! Jumaane!" A camera from the local television station Spectrum News NY1 stayed on him. Before leaving the stage, he decided to address the crowd one more time. "I want to speak out on this, because it's important," he said. "I've been in therapy for the past three years." He paused. "I want to say that publicly. I want to say that to black men who are listening." He spoke briefly about his struggle to hold on to his sense of self, and then his speech seemed to become even more personal. "I know there's a young black boy somewhere... . He is trying to find his space in the world. Nobody knows he cries himself to sleep sometimes," he said, and became so overcome with emotion that he had to pause again. "Nobody knows how much he misses his father. Nobody knows what he's going through. And the world tells you you have to hide it and you can't talk about it." I caught up with Williams by phone this week, while he was riding the Q train to his new office. On election night, he had felt like he was in a daze—"I'm a little bit in shock," he'd said when he took the stage—and only now were the events of that evening starting to sink in. He said that he had been thinking about speaking onstage about his therapy, but did not decide to "finally do it until right there." He explained, "Unfortunately, it's still very taboo in certain communities—and communities that I think really need it because of the trauma of daily life. People will talk about visiting the doctor or visiting the dentist, but they can't talk about therapy, they can't talk about mental health. And I want to break down that stigma." When he spoke about "a young black boy somewhere," Williams said, "I was trying to speak generally, but it was me." The son of immigrants from Grenada, Williams grew up in an apartment on the eastern edge of Brooklyn with his mother, Patricia, and his sister Jeanine. His mother raised him on her own, and on election night she stood beside him onstage, wearing a black hat and a campaign T-shirt. When he became emotional, she placed a hand on his shoulder; Jeanine stood on his other side, patting his back. "My intention was to drag it out a little longer and just try to give some more words of hope," Williams recalled, but, with tears filling his eyes, "I realized I was going to break down pretty rapidly, so I just wanted to get it out." I first wrote about Williams in 2013, near the end of his first term on the City Council. "I never did too well in school," he told me. Starting when he was a child, he had motor tics, and he was sometimes punished in school for his inability to control his body. It was not until he was in ninth grade, after his mother saw a "20/20" segment about Tourette's syndrome, that they realized what he had. He was also diagnosed with A.D.H.D. "I stayed in the dean's office, the principal's office, from first grade all the way up," he said. "I think it was a combination of a rambunctious young kid and Tourette's. It was a hell of a combination." At his Election Night party, he offered a long list of thank-yous, which included his fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Nedd. ("Having Ms. Nedd in my life—being able to see not just the bad kid that everybody knew, but there's somebody else there—was critically important," he told me. "If not for her, I would've gotten kicked out of school.") It took him seven years to get a four-year degree from Brooklyn College, and four years to earn a two-year master's degree. In his twenties, Williams worked as a community organizer, helping tenants band together to improve conditions in their buildings. After he was elected to the City Council, in 2009, he did not concern himself only with the needs of his district. When a young person was shot anywhere in New York City, he would often hurry to the scene. He attended the funeral of Lloyd Morgan, Jr., a four-year-old who was killed by gunfire on a Bronx playground, in 2012. The sight of the boy's tiny casket haunted him long afterward; when asked about the funeral months later, he had to shut his eyes to collect himself before speaking. He was a very early critic of the N.Y.P.D.'s use of stop-and-frisk, publicly attacking the practice long before most New Yorkers grasped how frequently police were stopping residents. (In 2011, the N.Y.P.D. made nearly seven hundred thousand such stops.) He often wore a pin on his lapel that said "STAY WOKE." Last year, Williams made the seemingly audacious decision to run for lieutenant governor, challenging Governor Andrew Cuomo's handpicked lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul, a former congresswoman. Even though Williams had never run for statewide office—and even though Hochul had held the position since 2015—he came very close to beating her, winning nearly forty-seven per cent of the vote in the Democratic primary. Last fall, when Letitia James, then the public advocate, won the election for state Attorney General, there was suddenly a citywide office that needed to be filled—and Williams's almost-victory helped make him the front-runner. Then, two days before the election for public advocate, the Daily News revealed that Williams had been arrested a decade earlier, after his then girlfriend called the police. Williams said that he threw down her pocketbook but denied any violence; the case was dismissed and sealed. Two of his opponents held a press conference to publicize the news about his past arrest. "They both know how easy it is for 'black man syndrome' to take hold," Williams told the Times. "If you want to have this discussion, there is a better way." Williams had won the Times' endorsement—"Shout-out to the New York Times!" he said, during his victory speech—and now his new position promises to elevate his profile even further. During the campaign, one of his opponents decried a "leadership vacuum" in the city under Mayor Bill de Blasio, and now Williams is positioned to fill it. As it happens, de Blasio's political career followed the same trajectory: he was a member of the City Council, and then was elected public advocate before becoming Mayor, in 2014. Williams is a frequent critic of de Blasio, and, during his victory speech, he did make a point of speaking directly to him: "I'm not running for your job," he said. Of course, de Blasio is in his second term, and in 2021 the field will be wide open. The crowd laughed.
Wired	[ "cities", "economics", "public transportation", "san francisco" ]	# Bay Area 2070: 3 Dire Visions, 1 Potentially Great Future By Aarian Marshall September 6th, 2018 09:00 AM --- A new report outlines how social and economic policies could shape the future of the wealthy and unequal region. The Bay Area is blessed; the Bay Area is cursed. This is how Gabriel Metcalf, the director of the urban policy think tank San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association—aka SPUR—puts it, more or less. "We really have everything we need to successfully solve our problems," he says. "What we're missing is a kind of civic will to act at the necessary scale." This month, SPUR embarks on a three-year project to create a regional strategy for the country's richest area—and its most unequal. The strategy goes far beyond the standard 5, 10, or 20 years for such plans. SPUR is projecting all the way to 2070. And this month, the group released a report on "future scenarios". They're an attempt to answer: What happens if nothing in the Bay Area changes over the next half century? What happens if everything does? "It's too easy to create a massive dystopian document, that the future is all going to be terrible," says Allison Arieff, SPUR's editorial director. "This is an effort, in earnest, to look for the positive." It's also an interesting way to get at the area's main gifts and problems, most of which can be summed up in a few statistics. The region, which stretches from Sonoma County in the north to San Mateo County in the south, and from Contra Costa and Alameda Counties in the east to San Francisco in the west, had a gross domestic product of $748 billion last year. Its economy is growing nearly twice as fast as the rest of the US. More than half of Bay Area residents have a bachelor's degree or more. The median home resold for $712,000 at the beginning of this year, up 11 percent from the year previous. Just 4 percent of the region's housing is subsidized. High fees and a tortuous permitting progress make it hard to build more. Thanks to increasing traffic congestion, commute times are now at record levels, while residents are taking far fewer public transit trips than they did 25 years ago. Projections show middle-wage jobs in the Bay Area will account for just 22 percent of the job growth in the area between 2010 and 2020—meaning the share of middle-wage jobs has declined compared to low- and high-wage ones. So you don't need a stack of paper to know that fixing the place by 2070 comes down to the economy. That, plus housing, transportation, and land use. Oh, and the variables that local policy alone cannot control: climate change, natural disasters, whatever the heck is going on in Washington. It's all very complicated, which is why SPUR's scenarios make for a useful rubric. Of course, it's pitched toward the organization's own policy views: that increased economic prosperity can be created hand-in-hand with the tech community, and that building market-rate housing is one path out of the affordability crunch. Let's start with what happens if nothing changes. SPUR calls this scenario "Gated Utopia." Service jobs are automated, and the people who used to do this work have moved away. Schools are good because there's only rich people here now. Public transit is OK, but only in the urban core, and most of the area's wealthy residents rely on private transportation, like personal autonomous vehicles. The area is packed with random millionaires—former middle-class folk who happened to buy homes when prices were low. Safe, but homogenous; successful, but only for some. "If the current trends continue, that's where we end up," says Metcalf. Scenario two: "Bunker Bay Area", a place marked by economic decline and social exclusion, meaning people are bereft of opportunities because of their income or education level, or because of the color of their skin. The gradual concentration of wealth in the hands of the few is masked, for a time, by the area's booming economy. But as homelessness becomes more and more common, money leaks out of the public safety net and away from job training programs. The gated community is the architectural signature, as the wealthy use their own resources to protect themselves. Low-income people rely on an informal economy to survive. Three: "Rust Belt West," a place dominated by anti-business sentiment, economic decline, and social inclusion, meaning politicians and institutions work hard to support workers, the middle class, and the poor. Informal co-ops have taken over for municipal garbage collection and public transit, while hospitals and pharmacies lay mostly fallow. "As companies left, there were no business leaders to contest the policy choices, which over time became more and more extreme," SPUR explains in its report. Finally, the best of all possible worlds: "A New Social Compact," a place where the economy booms and social inclusion thrives. A single regional transportation agency—right now, there are eight in the Bay Area—has extended service into lower-density areas, while reconfiguring roads for walking and scooters. Immigration continues unabated. Smaller, infill homes bloom. The terms are meant to be a starting point for a longer process, one that won't just be guided by SPUR's own staff. "Planners are in the middle of this shift in how decisions are made. It's less top-down, though not fully bottom-up," says Arieff, referencing Robert Moses' highway building by near fiat as the "old model" of city decision-making. "Organizations such as ours have to be wide open and receptive and inclusive of as many voices as possible." She notes that SPUR will hold three public listening sessions in San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, to get a sense for where many groups' priorities lie. 2070 feels far away, but knowing what residents really want it to look like is the first step in getting there.
Wired	[ "robotics", "medicine" ]	# This Hyper-Real Robot Will Cry and Bleed on Med Students By Matt Simon September 6th, 2018 08:00 AM --- A new robot named Hal is sending medical training straight into the uncanny valley. Hal the robot boy is convulsing. His head shakes back and forth so rapidly, it looks like he's vibrating. His eyelids droop over his blue eyes and his mouth is ajar. He makes no sound, other than the faint whirs of his motors. Hal was built to suffer. He is a medical training robot, the sort of invention that emerges when one of the most stressful jobs on Earth tumbles into the uncanny valley. No longer must nurses train on lifeless mannequins. Hal can shed tears, bleed, and urinate. If you shine a light in his eyes, his pupils shrink. You can wirelessly control him to go into anaphylactic shock or cardiac arrest. You can hook him up to real hospital machines, and even jolt him with a defibrillator. Hal—which is just now coming onto the market—is so realistic, and these scenarios so emotionally charged, that the instructors who run him in medical simulations have to be careful not to push things too far and upset trainees. "I've seen several nurses be like, 'Whoa it moves!'" says Marc Berg, medical director at the Revive Initiative for Resuscitation Excellence at Stanford. "I think that's kind of similar to the idea that if you've driven a car for 20 years and then you got a brand new car, you're kind of amazed initially." The company behind this $48,000 robot boy is Gaumard Scientific, which has been developing medical simulators since the 1940s, beginning with synthetic skeletons and anatomical figures. Now, though, the company's tech has become much more interactive with Hal's extended family of humanoid robots. Victoria is a robotic woman who gives birth to a baby robot. And Super Tory is a newborn that can help nurses learn to watch for signs of illness in real babies. Inside Hal, a combo mechanical-pneumatic system makes him breathe, and a cartridge in his leg allows him to exhale CO2. Hydraulic systems provide fake blood and tears. Servo motors tug on his face, helping him to look angry or scared, among other emotions. He even speaks, with a repertoire that includes shouting for his mother and telling you not touch him. If you like, you can even speak through the robot, with a system that turns your voice into that of a 5-year-old. One of the reasons for building Hal was to train medical workers on how to approach children, who may not be forthcoming about their symptoms. "They can often do that by facial expression," says James Archetto, Gaumard's vice president. To get the expressions right, the company's engineers worked with pediatricians to fine-tune how an angry or happy child's face really moves—muscles contracting here, brows furrowing there. To avoid a faceplant into the uncanny valley, Hal's designers decided not to give him blemishes or freckles—he has to convince trainees he's real enough to be an effective tool, but not so real that he becomes a distraction. What Hal does have, though, is a functioning nose and mouth. "In certain situations such as anaphylaxis, his tongue will swell, his throat will swell," says Archetto. Medical trainees can even cut a small slit in his throat to practice inserting a tracheal tube to re-establish an airway. Students can also hook him up to an EKG to monitor his "heart." He has a pulse too, which they can monitor with a blood pressure cuff. An instructor can manipulate these vital signs using a tablet, stringing certain symptoms together to simulate, say, cardiac arrest. "For so many years, the mannequins were really just rubber human likenesses with basically no interactivity at all," says Berg. "They're finally increasing exponentially in their realism." During an old-school simulation on a rubber dummy, the trainees would have to check with the instructors to get critical readings. They would answer back from another room through a microphone called the Voice of God: "You do not feel a pulse." Which tended to ruin the magic of it all and pull participants out of the simulation. Hal, on the other hand, automatically gives trainees a mountain of readings, thus keeping the wizardry alive. The concern, though, is that Hal's magic might seem too real, distressing participants during a tense scenario. Even when training on plain rubber dummies, folks can crack. "We can amp the stress level up so high for the participants that people will cry, essentially have to drop out of the scenario," says Berg. "I do think there's a good potential that we'll see more of that emotional type response when the mannequin is so realistic." As with any simulation technology, be it virtual reality or other advanced mannequins like a rather more gory dummy with realistic internal organs, the robot is a tool, not a teacher. In the end, machines can't teach us about the often overwhelming emotions and stress in medicine—our fellow humans can. "Maybe one day machines will be so sophisticated they'll be able to interpret our emotions and replicate our emotions," says Lillian Su, medical director for simulation at the Heart Center of Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. "But until then, we as the humans have to control that part and know how to use the machine so we can train people in that kind of environment." "I think that's going to add an emotional layer, a challenge that we as educators have to be prepared for," Su adds. Welcome to the uncanny valley, future physicians.
The BBC	[ "American Football" ]	# NFL results & week 9 round-up: Detroit Lions and Baltimore Ravens win again By Paul Higham November 4th, 2024 07:05 AM --- The Detroit Lions and Baltimore Ravens pressed their claims as two of the best teams in the NFL with impressive wins in week nine of the season. Rookie Jayden Daniels continued his dream debut season with the Washington Commanders and the Buffalo Bills pulled off late divisional victories to join the Lions and unbeaten Kansas City Chiefs on seven wins. Two of the worst teams in the league, the Carolina Panthers and Tennessee Titans, got only their second wins of the campaign, while the Dallas Cowboys' season continued to crumble. Another amazing one-handed touchdown and Saquon Barkley pulling off a stunning new move were two of the plays of the night on another entertaining Sunday. ## Lions show they are the real deal After falling a game short of last season's Super Bowl, the Lions have come back even stronger, with a 24-14 victory at the Green Bay Packers giving them a 7-1 start for the first time since 1956. Remarkably, it was Detroit's first outdoor game of the season, but, in wet and windy conditions at Lambeau Field, they claimed their third straight win at the home of their divisional rivals. Lions quarterback Jared Goff had only 145 yards and a touchdown, but his record-setting accuracy and efficiency is driving Detroit's six-game winning streak. Jordon Love threw a pick six in an error-strewn Packers performance as Detroit scored 24 unanswered points to take control of the game and the NFC North. ## Jackson and Henry run riot for Ravens After a stunning upset in Cleveland last week, Baltimore's top-ranked offence put the record straight with a dominant 41-10 battering of a previously stout Denver Broncos defence. Lamar Jackson furthered his case for back-to-back Most Valuable Player (MVP) awards with a fourth perfect passer rating game in his career, while Derrick Henry eclipsed 1,000 rushing yards for the season and 100 career rushing touchdowns. Henry has MVP claims of his own as the first player to lead the league in rushing attempts, yards, touchdowns and yards per run since the great Jim Brown in 1963. Baltimore are 6-3 with a couple of head-scratching losses on their record, but, with speedy receiver Zay Flowers also adding another two touchdowns, the top scorers in the NFL look unstoppable when on their game. ## Daniels and Allen lead seven-win teams Two more MVP candidates drove their teams to a 7-2 record, with rookie superstar Jayden Daniels steering Washington to their best start since 1996 with a 27-22 win at the New York Giants. After a stunning Hail Mary last week, this was a quieter Daniels display with 209 passing yards and two touchdowns, but the poise is spectacular for a rookie as he keeps his side marching towards the play-offs. The Giants' Jude McAtamney became the first Irish-born kicker to play a regular season NFL game since Neil O'Donoghue appeared for the 1985 St Louis Cardinals. Josh Allen threw three touchdowns to help Buffalo to a 13th win in the past 14 games against rivals Miami - but only just as Tyler Bass needed to boot a 61-yard field goal with five seconds left to finally sink the Dolphins. Tua Tagovailoa's return has certainly improved Miami, and he levelled the game with a touchdown pass to Jaylen Waddle with 98 seconds left, but Allen got the Bills close enough for Bass to win it. ## Highlight-reel plays in overtime thrillers Following Garrett Wilson's incredible catch for the New York Jets on Thursday, Demarcus Robinson produced another stunning one-handed touchdown grab in overtime to clinch a dramatic walk-off win for the Los Angeles Rams at the Seattle Seahawks. New England Patriots rookie quarterback Drake Maye also produced a magical final play of the game as he scrambled around for almost 12 seconds before finding Rhamondre Stevenson for a tying touchdown at Tennessee. Maye could not reproduce his heroics in overtime, though, with an interception sealing a welcome second win of the season for the Titans. ## Barkley's stunning play of the season The Philadelphia Eagles beat the Jacksonville Jaguars to make it four wins in a row, with Saquon Barkley again the catalyst with 199 total yards, two touchdowns and what is likely the play of the season. The one-man highlight reel produced a mesmerising backwards leap over a defender that almost defied the laws of physics. "It was the best play I've ever seen," said Eagles coach Nick Sirianni. "He's the only one in the world that can do that. I'm speechless. It was unbelievable." ## Prescott blow for Dallas Not only did the Cowboys lose at the Atlanta Falcons, but they lost quarterback Dak Prescott with injury and, at 3-5, have had as many defeats after eight games as they had in each of the past three full seasons. After stunning the Ravens last week, the Cleveland Browns were brought back down to earth by the Los Angeles Chargers, while Joe Burrow threw five touchdown passes to earn the Cincinnati Bengals their first home win of the season, against the Las Vegas Raiders. The Minnesota Vikings responded to successive defeats with a 21-13 win over the Indianapolis Colts, while Bryce Young helped Carolina to a first home win in 322 days, but it may not be enough to keep his job for the Panthers' trip to Germany next week. The Panthers became the first team in the Super Bowl era to win a game despite gaining under 250 yards, allowing more than 425 and not getting a turnover as the New Orleans Saints somehow managed to lose despite their statistical dominance. Saints starter Derek Carr also grabbed an unwanted record as the first quarterback to lose to 31 different teams. The improving Arizona Cardinals are a team to watch out for as they won 29-9 against the Chicago Bears, who had not allowed more than 21 points in their previous 13 games. ## NFL scores - week nine Miami Dolphins 27-30 Buffalo Bills Denver Broncos 10-41 Baltimore Ravens Los Angeles Chargers 27-10 Cleveland Browns New Orleans Saints 22-23 Carolina Panthers Las Vegas Raiders 24-41 Cincinnati Bengals Washington Commanders 27-22 New York Giants Dallas Cowboys 21-27 Atlanta Falcons New England Patriots 17-20 Tennessee Titans (OT) Jacksonville Jaguars 23-28 Philadelphia Eagles Chicago Bears 9-29 Arizona Cardinals Detroit Lions 24-14 Green Bay Packers Los Angeles Rams 26-20 Seattle Seahawks (OT) Indianapolis Colts 13-21 Minnesota Vikings Tampa Bay Buccaneers v Kansas City Chiefs (01:15 GMT Tuesday)
Associated Press News	[ "Michigan", "Voting", "Election 2024", "2024 United States presidential election", "Elections", "Politics", "Donald Trump", "Jocelyn Benson", "United States government", "China government" ]	# Michigan college student from China faces illegal voting charge By ISABELLA VOLMERT October 31st, 2024 05:34 PM --- LANSING, Mich. (AP) — A student from China at the University of Michigan faces criminal charges for casting an illegal ballot during early voting, a rare case of a non-U.S. citizen voting. The student faces charges of perjury and attempting to vote as an unauthorized elector, which is a felony, according to a joint statement by Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Washtenaw County Prosecutor Eli Savit. The latter charge carries a maximum penalty of up to four years in prison and a $2,000 fine. "Anyone who attempts to vote illegally faces significant consequences, including but not limited to arrest and prosecution," the statement said. The specter of noncitizens voting in large numbers has been a central part of Republican political messaging this year, as they seek to sow doubts about the election in case former President Donald Trump loses. Data, even from Republican-controlled states, shows how noncitizen voting is rare and nowhere near a large-scale problem. Only citizens can vote in federal elections and every voter must attest to U.S. citizenship when they register. Election offices have detailed process in place that help them catch any noncitizens who attempt to cast a ballot. "When it does happen, we take it extremely seriously," Benson and Savit said in their statement, issued Wednesday. "Our elections are secure and Michigan's state and local election officials carefully follow the law." There are over 7 million active registered voters in Michigan, according to the Michigan Secretary of State's office and over 2 million ballots have already been cast in Tuesday's election through absentee and early voting as of Thursday morning. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said in a statement that she has launched an "independent, parallel investigation." The student is a 19-year-old from China who is legally in the U.S. but not a citizen, according to Angela Benander, a Department of State spokesperson. He registered to vote on Sunday by using his University of Michigan student identification and documents establishing residency in Ann Arbor, according to Benander. The student signed a document identifying himself as a U.S. citizen and later contacted the local clerk's office requesting to get the ballot back, Benander said. "We are grateful for the swift action of the clerk in this case, who took the appropriate steps and referred the case to law enforcement," Benson and Savit said in the statement. The story was first reported by the Detroit News. Authorities have not named the student. It was not immediately clear if the student was arrested or was still being held Thursday. The Chinese Foreign Ministry provided a written statement to The Associated Press on Thursday saying the Chinese government asked citizens abroad to abide by local laws and regulations and to avoid engaging in illegal activities "in any form." "In the meantime, we urge the U.S. to fairly investigate and properly handle the case in accordance with law and earnestly safeguard the legitimate and lawful rights and interests of the Chinese national involved," the statement said. U.S. Rep. John Moolenaar, a Republican from Michigan, called for the university to expel the student. Moolenaar also chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. Request for comment to the University of Michigan were not immediately returned. ## __ Associated Press writer Didi Tang in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.
The New Yorker	[ "budget", "medicare", "medicaid", "social security", "the wall", "defense spending", "donald trump" ]	# The White House's New Budget Exposes Donald Trump's Lies About Protecting Medicare and Medicaid By John Cassidy March 11th, 2019 07:14 PM --- I've noted before that Donald Trump lives by a famous dictum from Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist: "When one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it." (Goebbels attributed this tactic to the English.) And the President has outdone himself with his Administration's new budget proposal for the 2020 fiscal year, which is entitled "A Budget for a Better America: Promises Kept. Taxpayers First." "Promises kept" has a particularly nice ring to it. Almost as nice as what Trump said on that fateful day, June 16, 2015, when he descended the escalator at Trump Tower. "Save Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security without cuts," he declared. "Have to do it." Throughout the Republican primary campaign, Trump repeated this pledge many times and also accused his G.O.P. opponents of wanting to slash the three big entitlement programs. In the general-election campaign, he stuck to the same mantra. A few days before Election Day, he suggested that Hillary Clinton wanted to "destroy" Medicare, the public health-care system for the elderly, which she had vowed to expand, and claimed that he alone would "protect" it. So how does the "Budget for a Better America" treat Medicare and the other programs that Trump vowed to safeguard at all costs? By calling for even larger cuts to them than the White House proposed this time last year, when it formally abandoned Trump's campaign pledges. The budget for the 2019 fiscal year called for five hundred and fifty billion dollars in cuts to Medicare over ten years. With the budget deficit skyrocketing as a consequence of the Trump-G.O.P. tax bill, the 2020 budget would reduce spending on Medicare by eight hundred and forty-five billion dollars over the next decade. Even in Washington, that's a lot of money. The cuts to Medicare would be imposed as the budget allots billions of dollars a year in extra spending to the Pentagon and another $8.6 billion for Trump's wall along the southern border. The economies would be achieved largely by reducing payments to doctors, hospitals, and other health-care providers, which could affect benefits and drive some providers to leave the program. Rather than spelling this out, the document adopts the language of Newspeak: "The Budget proposes to reduce wasteful spending and incentivize efficiency and quality of healthcare in Medicare, extending the solvency of the program for America's seniors consistent with the President's promise to protect Medicare." The budget treats Medicaid, the federal health program for poor people and children, in even more draconian fashion. Reflecting a long-standing priority of the Republican Party, the budget would convert Medicaid into a decentralized system administered by the states and financed by federal block grants. By indexing these grants to the rate of consumer-price inflation, which rises more slowly than inflation in the health-care sector, the budget would substantially reduce the federal spending commitment going forward. In addition, it would eliminate funding that the Affordable Care Act provided for individual states to expand Medicaid to more recipients—funding that more than thirty states have taken advantage of in recent years. Even for an ardently conservative Administration like this one, you might think that would be enough cuts to health-care spending. No. The budget also proposes to eliminate some federal subsidies that the A.C.A. provided for the purchase of private insurance plans by people who aren't quite poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. "The budget overall would cut funding for Medicaid and ACA subsidies by $777 billion over ten years, compared to current law," Hannah Katch, an analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, noted. It is true that, these days, White House budgets often don't amount to much. Effectively, they are extended wish lists, which the spending authorities on Capitol Hill often set aside, especially when the government is divided, as it is now. But even a White House wish list is a significant document, because it expresses the spending priorities of the Administration and the President. In this instance, those priorities run directly counter to the message that Trump conveyed on the campaign trail. No surprise there, you might say. It's been clear from the beginning that Trump was selling snake oil and that his pledge to protect the safety net was about as valuable as a certificate from Trump University. But it is instructive, nonetheless, to see his mendacity expressed in cold numbers, and it also raises an interesting political question. What will Trump do when the 2020 campaign heats up and the Democratic candidates hurl back at him the details of his spending proposals? On Monday, some Democrats were already doing this. Bernie Sanders tweeted, "This budget does the exact opposite of what Trump promised the American people." Kamala Harris tweeted, "This would hurt our seniors and is yet another piece of evidence for why we need a new president." My guess is that Trump might well end up disowning his own handiwork. Budgets? I had nothing to with them. I was too busy building the wall and hanging out with Little Rocket Man. Hopefully, the Democrats (and the voters) won't let him get away with it.
Voice Of America	[ "USA" ]	# US Jury Starts Deliberations in Trial of Officer Charged with Killing George Floyd By Ken Bredemeier April 19th, 2021 10:10 PM --- A U.S. jury in a Minnesota courtroom Monday heard sharply different claims of how George Floyd, a Black man, died last year, then began deliberations in the murder trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin, who is accused of killing Floyd in one of the country's highest profile cases in recent years. A prosecutor accused Chauvin of killing Floyd by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes. A defense attorney contended that Floyd died partly from drug use and that Chauvin was following his police training in the way he arrested Floyd last May on a Minneapolis street. Prosecutor Steve Schleicher summed up the case against Chauvin, 45, the white police officer who held down the handcuffed, 46-year-old Floyd, as he lay prone on a city street and gasped — 27 times, according to videos of his arrest — that he could not breathe. "He was trapped ... a knee to his neck," Schleicher said, with Chauvin's weight on him for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. "George Floyd was not a threat to anyone," Schleicher said. "All that was required was some compassion, and he got none." But defense attorney Eric Nelson, in more than 2½ hours of arguments before the racially diverse 12-member jury, contended that Chauvin followed his police training in restraining Floyd on the pavement of a Minneapolis city street after the suspect initially resisted police efforts to put him into a squad car. "No crime was committed if it was an authorized use of force," Nelson argued. "The state has not proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt," the legal standard for a conviction, the defense attorney concluded as he asked the jurors to acquit Chauvin of murder and manslaughter charges. The defense lawyer contended that rather than treating Floyd poorly, Chauvin told him to relax while he was on the ground and called for an emergency medical crew, although it arrived after Floyd had lost consciousness. Nelson dismissed the prosecution's claim that Chauvin asphyxiated Floyd, saying that Floyd's death was caused at least partly by his drug use and a sudden heart failure. WATCH: Video report on Derek Chauvin trial Floyd was suspected of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill at a nearby convenience store. But the routine police investigation of a minor case last May 25 and Floyd's subsequent death have resulted in one of the most consequential U.S. criminal trials in years. In the aftermath of the incident 11 months ago, Floyd's death triggered widespread street protests against police abuse of minorities across the U.S. and in major cities overseas. Schleicher argued that Chauvin, a 19-year police veteran before he was fired in the aftermath of Floyd's death, ignored his police training in the way he arrested Floyd and used excessive and unnecessary force in holding him down. Chauvin has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him in Floyd's death. If convicted, he faces up to 40 years in prison. Schleicher's closing argument lasted 1 hour and 43 minutes, with the prosecutor repeatedly contending that Floyd "didn't have to die," if only Chauvin had followed his police training and used appropriate force in apprehending Floyd or given him medical assistance when he said he could not breathe. "He violated police use of force. He did not provide emergency care. He did it on purpose," Schleicher argued. "He violated his training, and he killed a man." The prosecutor claimed that Chauvin was "consciously indifferent" to Floyd's life. Schleicher rhetorically asked the jury, "Was this authorized use of force? Was it justified? It was not." "This was murder," Schleicher concluded. Last week, Chauvin invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination and did not take the witness stand. Under U.S. law, the prosecution must prove the allegations against defendants, and defendants are assumed innocent until proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Trial judge Peter Cahill told the jury not to draw any inference on Chauvin's innocence or guilt from his declining to testify in the case, as was his right. Jurors will be sequestered until they reach a verdict. After dismissing the jury Monday, Cahill criticized Representative Maxine Waters, who is Black and a member of Congress since 1991, for her remarks over the weekend regarding the trial. Waters told protesters in Minnesota to "stay on the street" and to get "more active" and "more confrontational" if Chauvin is found not guilty. "I wish elected officials would stop talking about this case, especially in a manner that's disrespectful to the rule of law and to the judicial branch and our function," Cahill said. WATCH: US cities brace for unrest As the case nears the end, authorities in the Midwestern city of Minneapolis are braced for possible street protests after the verdict. Many stores are boarded up to prevent a recurrence of the damage and looting that took place after Floyd's death almost a year ago. Protests, some of them violent, broke out in many cities in the U.S. and throughout the world. The Black Lives Matter movement was at the forefront of the demonstrations, but thousands of people who had no previous connection to the Black-led protests joined in to condemn Chauvin's actions, and more broadly, police treatment of minorities. The same issues raised by Floyd's death came to the forefront in the community again when a now-resigned police officer in a Minneapolis suburb fatally shot a 20-year-old African American man during a traffic stop on April 11.
The New Yorker	[ "movie reviews", "films", "marvel", "superheroes" ]	# Movie Review: The Faux-Progressive Politics of "Captain Marvel" By Richard Brody March 11th, 2019 06:31 PM --- "Captain Marvel" is like a political commercial—it packs a worthy message, but it hardly counts as an aesthetic experience. The message of the film is conveyed less through the story than through its casting: women and people of color need to have starring roles in major Hollywood productions, which, at the moment, mainly mean big-budget superhero movies, the most profitable films in the industry. Its implicit subject is more than representation—it's also the redistribution of power in Hollywood. There are some secondary (but still significant) messages, too, but the movie itself is, for the most part, trivial. Its significance is what it promises for movies to come. Brie Larson plays Vers, a warrior from the Kree, a humanoid population from a distant galaxy, centered on the planet Hala, that is in age-old war with the shape-shifting Skrulls. Vers (pronounced "Veers") lost her memory in the battle that also gave her superpowers; she does not know who she is, and she tries to piece her identity together from disjointed recollections. (The theme is in the air—it's also the premise of "Alita: Battle Angel" and isn't handled any better here than there.) She's haunted by nightmares (urging her to "let go of the past"), but she's also remanded by her high-handed mentor, Yon-Rogg (Jude Law), to the authorities, an A.I. system called the Supreme Intelligence, where she's placed on a pod, surrounded by blue tentacles, and mentally teleported to virtual realms in which the woman haunting her dreams (a commanding character played by Annette Bening) orders her back into battle: "Put your people's needs before your own ... master yourself." Vers's main weapon is her hot-glowing fists, which issue explosive proton blasts. In her new battle with the Skrulls, she blasts a hole through the spaceship where she's being held and ends up crash-landing on Earth—right through the roof of a Blockbuster Video store. The action, it's soon revealed, is set in 1995, and the videotape-filled store (featuring a standing display for "True Lies," among other contemporaneous titles) inaugurates a skein of nineties-nostalgia objects that figure in the plot, including a RadioShack, a quaint AltaVista search engine, the foot-tappingly fitful loading of a CD-ROM, a pager, and also the soundtrack, which includes tracks by Nirvana, Heart, R.E.M., and others. Yet the most significant nostalgia element is cinematic, planted by the presence of Blockbuster: all of this action is set in an age of superhero innocence, prior to the big-bang birth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. "Captain Marvel" positions its protagonist as the virtual mother of it all. (Captain Marvel she may be, but, if memory serves, no one calls her by that name in the course of the film—only a title card does so.) In a parking-lot showdown outside the Blockbuster, Vers encounters the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, whose face is digitally de-aged), explains her battle against the Skrulls, and (after showing off her proton-blasting powers) soon follows him into official archives to read her case file and discover her identity: Carol Danvers, nicknamed "Avenger" (hint hint), who was part of a joint Air Force and NASA flight team that included Dr. Wendy Lawson (Bening). Fragments of Carol's identity appear to her throughout the film—scenes of frustration throughout childhood and adulthood, struggles at sports and military training, amplified by discouraging and insulting remarks by men. It's no spoiler to say that what she recovers of her memory is her will to pick herself up, fight on, and succeed—in a climactic, colossal battle in space. As in "Alita: Battle Angel," the recovery of identity in "Captain Marvel" is realized with little curiosity or interest. The movie reduces Carol to a half-human, half-Kree fighting machine whose range of remembered experience is limited to the disconnected moments of struggle and overcoming that made her a warrior to be reckoned with. It's a reductive conception of character that fits all too well with the mild political fiction on which the movie depends. Her ability to overcome her own failures and men's derision to become a fighter pilot (actually, a test pilot, because—as the movie makes clear—women weren't yet allowed to take part in combat) is all that's known of her, and, more significantly, all that she needs to know in order to know herself. (Yet for a tale that makes its protagonist's military service and training the core of her character, "Captain Marvel" delicately elides the killing part in favor of the rope-climbing part.) Carol discovers that the Kree's longtime battles were based on a false premise. The Skrulls, far from being evildoers (or, as one character calls them, terrorists), have been displaced from their homelands by the Kree; they describe themselves as "refugees" and are merely seeking a home. Carol comes to doubt the presumptive virtue of her own nation and to recognize the legitimate claims of its enemies; she decides to return to battle, not to win but to "end it"—to end "the wars, the lies." In this thread of themes, the Marvel overlords make the political positioning of the movie clear. The marker is made all the plainer when Lawson tells her that the Kree are fighting to defend their "borders." "Captain Marvel" wants to make clear that it is a Democratic movie. Carol's home-away-from-home on Earth is with her former military colleague, Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch), and Maria's young daughter, Monica (played, as an eleven-year-old, by Akira Akbar), who are black. Maria hosts Carol, along with Fury and a Skrull family, and the gathering is both symbolic and troubling. The humans living in the company of Skrulls—who are covered in green stripes—is a heavy-handed metaphor for the cliché of color blindness. (As in, "I don't care if she has green stripes, as long as she gets the job done.") But "Captain Marvel" offers a shallow vision of ethnic comity that even a Republican would have trouble arguing with. Nothing is known of Maria's character beside her military service alongside Carol. Their mutual regard is based in the solidarity of warriors; it's a professional recognition, not a personal one. In "Captain Marvel," the forward-looking liberalism has a conservative core; it's devised to extend the brand's reach without alienating its base. With its bombastic and boosterish view of the Air Force, "Captain Marvel" resembles a superheroic sequel to "Top Gun." Yon-Rogg warns Vers against her own temperament, telling her, "Nothing is more dangerous to a warrior than emotion." The movie proves otherwise: Vers comes to realize that her own emotions, far from inhibiting her as a warrior, are the very source both of her strength and of her virtue. But, far from endorsing and depicting emotion as such, "Captain Marvel" polices and filters its protagonists' emotions with a Stakhanovite rigor. The only feelings that Carol is allowed to have, in the course of the film, are constructive ones and productive ones—frustration at failure, anger at insult, determination to succeed, a generalized friendliness toward the like-minded, regret at injustice, and determination once more to overcome it. The movie celebrates the self-punishing efforts of a self-chosen few—and lines viewers up to follow them willingly into battle. Its calculated effect is to inspire an infantilizing hero worship, or, rather, heroine worship, albeit with a welcome new set of idols. The directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (who are also among the film's co-writers) display as little style here as they do in their lower-budget and live-action films. The inert direction is amped up by a rapid pace of editing, resulting in a jumpy mosaic that drops significant details with a carefully calculated offhandedness and invites repeated viewings to piece together the puzzle of its narrow drama. This narrative form without style invites and even rewards a mode of bad viewing, a fusion of academic detail-hunting and political sound-biting that masks the insipid and laborious simplicity of the experience at large. Yet "Captain Marvel," like most movies of any degree of popularity, packs within it a pure, classical idea. The one at work here is how someone who's good at something learns to become, simply, good—how a warrior learns to become virtuous without sacrificing her valor. The idea packs great dramatic potential, which makes its facile execution all the more disappointing. It's one more reminder that the problem with superhero movies has nothing to do with the genre or its source material. The problem is with the corporate anticulture that controls these productions—and the fandom-targeted demagogy that they're made to fulfill—which responsible casting can't overcome alone.
Wired	[]	# Chevy's Colorado ZR2 Bison Is the Pickup Truck for Armageddon By Jack Stewart September 6th, 2018 08:00 AM --- The latest performance variant of the Colorado pickup truck is clad in Boron steel, rides 31-inch tires, and will take you down any road. Or lack thereof. Of the growing numbers of US car buyers who go for SUVs and pickups, most do it because they look good, they have a nice high seating position, and they're handy for that odd weekend they hit up Home Depot. Their cars will never get really dirty or make use of their improved ground clearance and off-road capabilities. There exists, however, a smaller class of buyers who really need those capabilities—and then some. The drivers who demand a machine that can tackle any terrain, when they head off-grid for a week, up rocky riverbeds, through forests, into the desert. That's whom Chevrolet is targeting with its new Colorado ZR2 Bison pickup, a beast of a truck built to survive an apocalypse, or at least life lived among jagged rocks and tough terrain, without falling apart. "It's a growing trend, where people load up their trucks and go out for maybe six days and run through all kinds of terrain, where they need the ability to crawl up over stuff and go long distances across all kinds of varying terrain," says Mark Dickens, Chevrolet's director of engineering for performance variants. In what we'll now call the pre-Bison era, the butchest of the Colorados was the ZR2, which went on sale in May 2017. Demand exceeded production capacity, Chevy says, so the company didn't just make more—it made more that could do more. Of the ZR2's key strengths—on-road driving, rock crawling, and desert running—the Bison puts heavier emphasis on the second, for better go-anywhere abilities. Like the ZR2, the truck has an imposing presence, with front and rear tracks widened by 3.5 inches and suspension lifted 2 inches. Looks-wise, the truck definitely sends the message it's ready for anything. It carries large, standard, fog lamps and has a cut-out for a winch at the front. Customers can choose a "snorkel" high-level air intake and 31-inch knobbly tires housed in flared wheel arches. To birth this beast, Chevrolet partnered with American Expedition Vehicles, a company known for customizing off-roaders. AEV identified parts of the truck that would be most vulnerable off road and set about strengthening them. It developed five hot-stamped, boron-steel skid plates to protect the oil pan, transfer case, fuel tank, and differentials from bangs and scratches. Boron steel is super high strength, which meant the plates could be thinner and thus lighter, so they don't add too much weight. That's important for handling and range, which matters when you can't find a gas station in frontierland (or California's Rubicon trail). The optional 2.8L diesel engine helps with efficiency too, as well as bringing 186 horsepower and 369 pound-feet of torque to the party. AEV added a steel bumpers to the front and rear of the truck and replaced the bow-tie grille with a stamped Chevrolet name badge. "When you go off-roading, you're forced to use your bumpers—you have to rub against rocks," Dickens says. That means regular plastic doesn't cut it. But adding steel changes the way the bumpers behave in a crash. Plastic absorbs and deforms impacts differently, and that's how the truck was crash tested. Bolting on metal bumpers meant testing that again and making sure the complex electronics behind the bumper, like airbag impact sensors, still worked as designed. Dickens spends most of his time working with Chevy's track cars and Cadillac's V-series performance cars, so it's no surprise that one of his favorite features on the truck came from the world of racing: the spool valve suspension dampers, which are also available on the standard ZR2. "They're one of the most impressive things seen in my career," he says. It's a technology Red Bull used in Formula 1 races and features on the Camaro Z/28. The valve mechanisms in the dampers give engineers plenty of scope for tuning over a wide range of suspension motion, so they can make the truck handle well on pavement as well as on the trail. Chevrolet isn't ready to reveal the pricing for the ZR2 Bison yet, but expect a bump over the standard ZR2, which starts at $41,000. It goes on sale in January, so if you want to be sure you make it through your off-the-grid week, you might want to wait until next year before checking out of this crazy world.
Voice Of America	[ "USA" ]	# Former Texas Deputy Sought in Shooting Deaths of 3 Arrested By VOA News April 19th, 2021 10:06 PM --- A former Texas deputy wanted in the deaths of three people was arrested Monday after a 20-hour manhunt. Stephen Nicholas Broderick, 41, was arrested early Monday after deputies tracked him down following two 911 calls about a man walking down a road in an Austin suburb about 32 kilometers from the scene of the weekend attack. Broderick, who had a pistol in his waistband, was taken into custody without any further complications. "I'm truly heartbroken that a former Travis County Sheriff's Office Deputy is the suspect in such a horrific incident," Sheriff Sally Hernandez said in a statement. The shooting happened around noon Sunday at an apartment complex near a popular shopping area called the Arboretum. Authorities described the shooting as a "domestic situation," and Interim Austin Police Chief Joseph Chacon said that Broderick knew and targeted the victims — two females and a male who were pronounced dead at the scene. Broderick investigated property crimes with the office until he was arrested in June and charged with sexually assaulting a child, according to Kristen Dark, a spokeswoman for the sheriff's office. Broderick was placed on administrative leave and resigned later. Prosecutors have said they would pursue capital murder charges against Broderick, who is being held at the Travis County Jail without bail.
The New Yorker	[ "fox news", "donald trump", "rupert murdoch" ]	# Jane Mayer on the Revolving Door Between Fox News and the White House By The New Yorker March 11th, 2019 04:00 PM --- Donald Trump has made no secret of his great admiration for Fox News—he tweets praise of it constantly—and his disdain for other, "fake news" outlets, which he regards as "enemies of the people." But the closeness between Fox News and the White House is unprecedented, Jane Mayer tells David Remnick. In a recent article, Mayer, a New Yorker staff writer since 1995, analyzes a symbiotic relationship that boosts both Trump's poll numbers and Rupert Murdoch's bottom line. "I was trying to figure out who sets the tune that everybody plays during the course of the day," Mayer says. "If the news on Fox is all about some kind of caravan of immigrants supposedly invading America, whose idea is that? It turns out that it is this continual feedback loop." Mayer pays particular attention to the role of Bill Shine, a former Fox News co-president and now former White House deputy chief of staff for communications. Shine resigned from the Trump Administration days after Mayer spoke to Remnick. In his tenure in the Administration, Shine helped create a revolving door through which those who craft the Administration's political messaging and those who broadcast it regularly trade places. Mayer also discovered that Shine was linked to the network's practice of intimidating employees who alleged sexually harassment at work.
Wired	[ "uber", "dara khosrowshahi", "company", "driver", "lyft" ]	# One Year In, the Real Work Begins for Uber's CEO By Jessi Hempel September 6th, 2018 07:00 AM --- Dara Khosrowshahi has helped fix Uber's image, but now he must make the company competitive in a crowded market. Dara Khosrowshahi stands in the wings of an airy, modern corporate event space in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. It's the first anniversary of his taking the CEO reins at the iconic ride-sharing company, and he's celebrating like a Silicon Valley suit---with a set of product announcements. Men dressed in black are serving avocado toastettes, tiny scoops of salmon tartar, and caramelized-onion-and-cheese biscuits to a crowd of journalists filling in a dozen rows of blond oak chairs. At exactly 10:30, the thumping of the bass softens, and he springs up to the stage, looking like the most boring tech executive in the room. Jeans. Black wingtips. A suit jacket over a white button-down shirt, no tie. "I'm officially no longer a rookie CEO," he declares, "and there's no place I'd rather be!" Khosrowshahi has been perfecting his brand of boring for 365 days, and adhering to brand, he's using this anniversary to promote a new set of safety features. It's a bit like serving spinach and broccoli at a children's birthday party. To my right is is a "museum" of exhibits dedicated to them. There's the Ride Check feature, set to roll out in pilots later this year, which provides tools for Uber to check on riders and drivers when it detects an accident, and follow up afterward with a phone call, among other things. There's a hands-free feature that lets drivers accept rides and communicate with passengers with voice messaging. Uber has also added two-step verification for accounts, and expanded its 9-1-1 integration to several new cities. And it's taking steps to better protect passenger safety by concealing specific pickup and drop-off addresses, and providing approximations of locations to drivers. They're smart and necessary changes—changes, one Uber employee points out to me, "that Lyft hasn't made"—but none seem exceptional. These are the types of features one should expect of a ride-sharing company valued at $72 billion that aims to vault itself into everyone's subconscious as the definitive app for arranging all types of future transportation. The event, like most corporate product launches, is just more than 30 minutes. No one mentions #BoycottDidi, the social media hashtag that took off in China last week as people deleted the Chinese ride-hailing app after one of its drivers raped and murdered a young female passenger. (Uber owns 17.7 percent of Didi Chuxing.) No one brings up concerns about women's safety generally. Instead, they keep the conversation upbeat, focused on both accountability and privacy for riders and for drivers. Khosrowshahi has been on a first-anniversary media tour this week, and after the event we grab a few minutes to chat. Khosrowshahi understands implicitly that he is the best face of Uber's future—reliable and dependable, he's a guy who makes dad jokes and tends to stay on message. But as much as Khosrowshahi has cleaned up the company's culture and addressed some of its emergencies, Uber is far from the market leader it was two years ago. For Khosrowshahi to grow Uber into a company that is worth the figure at which it is valued, and that can make good on its promise to be the de facto transportation application for bikes, buses, scooters, and any other here-to-there alternative, he will need to confront some significant challenges in the year to come: Self-driving technology: After a fatal crash in March, Uber paused its self-driving program, and shuttered its Phoenix testing site, before resuming driving in manual mode (with human drivers) on public streets in Pittsburgh in mid-July. In late August, Toyota invested $500 million in Uber for a partnership that will combine the Toyota's carmaking expertise with Uber's autonomous tech and ride-hailing platform. The companies have announced plans to develop self-driving Toyota Sienna minivans and deploy them on Uber's network, starting in 2021. The company will continue to partner with other companies as well, Khosrowshahi tells me. But the—very expensive—question remains: what's Uber's endgame with self-driving technology? The longer it restricts its testing, the farther behind its peers, namely Google's Waymo, it falls. Khosrowshahi wants to make it clear he's committed to continuing to build the technology, rather than simply partnering with other companies. "There are very few companies---you can count them on one hand---that have the operational technology capabilities that we do," he says, "And we have the advantage of building self driving under the same roof. We know what it takes in terms of the skill sets of a human driver to operate our network, and we can translate that into a self-driving or a robot driver, so to speak, on our network as well." Liane Hornsey's Replacement: Uber's human resources chief resigned in July after concerns emerged that she'd systematically dismissed complaints of race-based discrimination. "We're actively looking for a chief people officer," Khosrowshahi says. "We're making sure that we look at a diverse slate, but you know, people are a huge part of what we do, and we need leadership there." Drivers: No matter how much Uber improves its app, and the safety features are part of that push, many of its drivers are still balancing many apps as they look to make the most income. There's a limited number of drivers. And they need to make a living. In early August, in Uber's first big lobbying setback, the New York City Council approved several bills that, in addition to a number of other things, put a cap on the number of ride-hailing vehicles for a year while the city studies their impact, and allow New York to set a minimum pay rate, further squeezing Uber and potentially setting a precedent for other cities. Uber fought aggressively against the measure, and a spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal after the fact that the company "will do whatever it takes to keep up with growing demand." Lyft: There was a time not so long ago that Lyft didn't factor on Uber's radar. In mid-2016, The New York Times reported that Lyft was searching for a buyer. But Uber's great stumble has become Lyft's good fortune. As analyst Ben Thompson wrote in his newsletter, Stratechery, "As long as drivers are independent contractors, Uber can't do anything to prevent them from multihoming, that is, being available on both Uber and Lyft's networks at the same time." Drivers often use multiple apps and will go where the riders go, and as the tumult of last year unfolded, riders went to Lyft. Writes Thompson: "Lyft was ready and able to absorb unhappy Uber riders, because they were effectively using Uber's drivers to accommodate them." Uber is slowly starting to shed its image as a toxic company run by an impulsive bellicose bro—but now it has problems unrelated to image and branding. It's trying to compete in a saturated market in the run-up to an initial public offering. Any misstep or failure to anticipate a market turn might spell disaster. In this context, the safety improvements are significant to Uber. They stand to further differentiate Uber's service from those of its competitors and, potentially, to win the loyalty of those who worry about getting into a car with someone they haven't met. And they signal to cities that Uber is a responsible service, capable of contributing to public safety, perhaps softening relationships with regulators over time. It's clear Khosrowshahi has a vision for what Uber can be and a strategy for how he hopes to get there. But if the first year involved fixing the dramatic problems of Uber's past, his second year must be dedicated to charting a course for its future.
The BBC	[ "Wales", "Glyn-neath", "Homelessness" ]	# Glynneath: Eight-year-old boy runs daily for homeless people By Meleri Williams November 4th, 2024 06:59 AM --- An eight-year-old has been called the Forrest Gump of Glynneath after inspiring others to join his running challenge to help homeless people. Lewys from the Neath Valley said he was so "sad" after seeing a homeless man in Swansea that he decided to run a mile daily for 26 days to raise money for homeless charities. "He barely had any money in his cup, so we bought him a meal deal," explained Lewys. "Seeing him made me feel sad. I felt like he was invisible." Lewys wanted to raise enough money to buy 10 more meal deals. But he has raised enough for about 700 so far, with other people inspired to join him - just like the movie character played by Tom Hanks that he has been named after. As well as being joined by other runners, Welsh entertainer Max Boyce has also been to cheer him on. "It's been really good," said Lewys. "Some people have been calling me Forrest Gump because every day someone else joins the run." Lewys' father, Wayne, said his son has become "a little celebrity in the town" while Lewys' mother, Rhian, said he has been receiving "amazing" support. "Every day I get messages from people wanting to know what time he's running so they can join or show their support," she said. Part of Lewys' fundraising efforts will support the work of Matthew's House in Swansea, a charity that provides food and a safe space for those in need. It currently sees 129 people a day, an increase of 29% on last year, according to project manager, Thom Lynch. "Lewys is representing a nation of people who can make a difference," he said. "We absolutely love it."
Wired	[ "beyond the beyond" ]	# The Copenhagen Letter By Bruce Sterling September 6th, 2018 04:11 AM --- *We enjoy a manifesto here on the blog. https://copenhagenletter.org THE COPENHAGEN LETTER Copenhagen, 2017 To everyonewho shapes technology today We live in a world where technology is consuming society, ethics, and our core existence. It is time to take responsibility for the world we are creating. Time to put humans before business. Time to replace the empty rhetoric of "building a better world" with a commitment to real action. It is time to organize, and to hold each other accountable. Tech is not above us. It should be governed by all of us, by our democratic institutions. It should play by the rules of our societies. It should serve our needs, both individual and collective, as much as our wants. Progress is more than innovation. We are builders at heart. Let us create a new Renaissance. We will open and nourish honest public conversation about the power of technology. We are ready to serve our societies. We will apply the means at our disposal to move our societies and their institutions forward. Let us build from trust. Let us build for true transparency. We need digital citizens, not mere consumers. We all depend on transparency to understand how technology shapes us, which data we share, and who has access to it. Treating each other as commodities from which to extract maximum economic value is bad, not only for society as a complex, interconnected whole but for each and every one of us. Design open to scrutiny. We must encourage a continuous, public, and critical reflection on our definition of success as it defines how we build and design for others. We must seek to design with those for whom we are designing. We will not tolerate design for addiction, deception, or control. We must design tools that we would love our loved ones to use. We must question our intent and listen to our hearts. Let us move from human-centered design to humanity-centered design.We are a community that exerts great influence. We must protect and nurture the potential to do good with it. We must do this with attention to inequality, with humility, and with love. In the end, our reward will be to know that we have done everything in our power to leave our garden patch a little greener than we found it. We who have signed this letter will hold ourselves and each other accountable for putting these ideas into practice. That is our commitment. Sign The Copenhagen LetterBy signing you agree to have your name listed. An email will be sent to you for confirmation. Your email address will not be shared with anyone.4467 SIGNATURES
Wired	[ "wired awake", "russia", "politics" ]	# Britain will go to the UN with details of Russian Novichok spy suspects By WIRED Insider September 6th, 2018 02:22 AM --- Theresa May has named Russian intelligence agents as responsible for a deadly nerve agent attack against a former spy in Salisbury, parental snooping tool mSpy leaks 2 million records, Uber has added new passenger and driver security features Your WIRED daily briefing. Today, Theresa May has named Russian intelligence agents as responsible for a deadly nerve agent attack against a former spy in Salisbury, parental snooping tool mSpy leaks 2 million records, Uber has added new passenger and driver security features to its app and more. Get WIRED's daily briefing in your inbox. Sign up here ## 1. Britain will go to the UN with details of Russian Novichok spy suspects UK officials will brief the UN Security Council after Prime Minister Theresa May's announcement of the names of two men thought to be responsible for Novichok nerve agent attack against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in March (BBC News). May says that the men, who entered the UK using passports in the names of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, are members of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence service. The Prime Minister said that the poisoning, which killed Sergei Skripal and investigating officer Det Sgt Nick Bailey, was "almost certainly" approved by senior Russian officials. Moscow continues to deny any involvement. ## 2. Parental spying tool leaks 2 million records Commercial privacy invasion tool mSpy, which is marketed as a means for people to spy on their children and partners' smartphone activity, has been caught leaking millions of user records, including passwords, locations and message logs, via an unsecured database server (TechCrunch). The unsecured database was first detected by bug hunter Nitish Shah, who contacted mSpy about the leak, only to find that the company was unwilling or unable to put him in touch with anyone who could do anything to stop it for over a week. Security researcher Brian Krebs writes that "before it was taken offline sometime in the past 12 hours, the database contained millions of records, including the username, password and private encryption key of each mSpy customer who logged in to the mSpy site or purchased an mSpy license over the past six months." ## 3. Uber adds passenger security features, driver panic button In a long-called-for safety update, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has announced new security features for its ride-hailing app, including concealed pick-up and drop-off addresses to give extra safety to vulnerable passengers (Engadget). Other new features include two-factor authentication and – starting in Canada, India and the US – an emergency button for drivers; a passenger panic button was rolled out in the US earlier this year. The company has also presented a roadmap of forthcoming new safety features, including automatic detection of both crashes and unusual behaviour such as long pauses and odd stops. ## 4. Amazon is the world's second trillion-dollar company Amazon's stock market value surged above $1 trillion yesterday, making it – briefly – the second company to pass the record, following Apple's attainment of the price in early August (Ars Technica). Although Amazon has since slipped back to just under the trillion-dollar threshold, it's anticipated that its growth trend will continue. The company that launched as an online bookshop 24 years ago has become a dominating force in the shopping and technology services landscape, with the New York Times reporting that the firm takes 49 cents of every US dollar spent on e-commerce. ## 5. More European productions are coming to your favourite streaming services The European Commission's impending decision to require video streaming companies to dedicate at least a third of their catalogues to local content means – hopefully – that your "Top Picks" section on Netflix is about to be hit by a whole new lot of non-English selections (WIRED). According to Roberto Viola, the head of the Commission department for communication networks, the new rules should be approved in December. Streaming services, if they don't meet the quota either by buying series and films produced in the EU or commissioning them, will have to pay a small charge to national film funds.Rumour has it that Netflix won't be hugely affected by the new law because it has so far spent over $1.75 billion on content produced in partnership with local production companies in Europe since 2012. ## Popular on WIRED It's high time to call bullshit on using social media as an accurate measure of anything. You know the drill. Something happens in the world and the news cycle rushes to gauge public opinion. This often leads to the views of an infinitesimally small group of people being negligently put up against a broad consensus. In this case, a few dozen people burning Nike trainers versus the vast majority who think Kaepernick's appointment is both admirable and appropriate. And the balance fallacy, as it is known, is rapaciously fed by "social media users". ## WIRED's one-day innovation festival this November WIRED Live returns on November 1 at its new and iconic venue in central London with speakers including Bill Browder, the investor-turned-lawmaker fighting for human rights; Mariana Mazzucato, the economist advising policy makers on innovation-led inclusive growth; and Hannah Fry, the mathematician matching the patterns in human behaviour to our future relationship with technology. Get an additional 20 per cent discount off tickets when you book online at http://wired.uk/liveawake. ## Podcast 383: Netflix's plan for global entertainment domination Listen now, subscribe via RSS or add to iTunes. Get WIRED Awake sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning by 8am. Click here to sign up to the WIRED Awake newsletter. Follow WIRED on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. This article was originally published by WIRED UK
The New Yorker	[ "middle east", "islam", "iraq", "syria", "saudi arabia", "foreign policy", "yemen", "turkey", "islamic state" ]	# The Middle East's Great Divide Is Not Sectarianism By Hussein Agha and Robert Malley March 11th, 2019 02:57 PM --- The spectre of sectarianism haunts the Middle East. It is blamed for chaos, conflict, and extremism. It defines what is seen as the region's principal fault line: Sunni versus Shiite. It has the power and elegance of a grand theory that seemingly explains all. Sunnis, embattled and embittered by Shiite ambitions, radicalize in large numbers, join Al Qaeda, or enlist in ISIS. Shiites, moved by the anxiety of a minority, overstep and seek power far in excess of their numbers. Past and present tensions between the two main branches of Islam inarguably play a part in the region's dynamics. But the vast majority of recent violence that has brought desolation and ruin to large parts of the Middle East has little to do with those strains. The bloodiest, most vicious, and most pertinent struggles occur squarely inside the Sunni world. Sectarianism is a politically expedient fable, conveniently used to cover up old-fashioned power struggles, maltreatment of minorities, and cruel totalitarian practices. The region's most ferociously violent Sunni actor, the Islamic State, for all its anti-Shiite discourse, claims Sunnis as the overwhelming majority of its victims. The fierce battles for the Iraqi city of Mosul or the Syrian city of Raqqa pitted Sunni against Sunni. ISIS attacks in Egypt, Somalia, Libya, Nigeria, and elsewhere almost always have Sunnis as prey. There are few examples of wide-scale killings of Shiites by the group. The Arab uprisings, the most momentous political upheaval to have shaken the Arab world in a generation, typically involved Sunni-on-Sunni battles: in Tunisia, where the uprisings began; in Egypt, where they grew; and in Libya, where they persist. The same was true of the extraordinarily brutal and bloody Algerian civil war in the nineteen-nineties. Each episode of unrest featured violent confrontations and shifting alliances, among the Muslim Brotherhood, neo-Ottomans, Salafis, Wahhabis (in both their Saudi and Qatari versions) and jihadis. More moderate forces—Al-Azhar in Cairo, Jordanian Hashemites, and the vast majority of peaceful Sunnis—helplessly stood by, hoping for the tumult to pass, and waiting anxiously for an opportunity to be heard. In the Syrian tragedy, the Sunni-Alawite divide is routinely presented as a subset of a broader Sunni-Shiite confrontation and as central to understanding the violence. Yet the Assad regime is not exclusively Alawite, having been built around an alliance among Alawites, Sunni middle classes, and an array of religious minorities. It is hard to imagine the regime having survived without at least some backing from mainstream Sunnis: for much of its history, it relied on financial and political support from Sunni Gulf monarchies, Saudi Arabia first and foremost. During the early stages of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Syrian regime enabled the transit of radical Sunni Islamist fighters to the country, where they targeted Americans and mostly Iranian-backed Shiites. Iran's and Hezbollah's rush to Assad's defense is political and strategic, not an embrace of common sectarian identity. Indeed, Syria's regime is about as distant in its religious orientation from that of the Islamic Republic as can be. To a large extent, the war in Syria became a battle among Sunni Islamist groups of assorted persuasions and patrons that spent more time, life, and treasure on fighting one another than on fighting the regime. To focus solely on an overriding Sunni-Alawite conflict in Syria ignores other salient facts. Sunni rebel groups targeted more Sunnis than Alawites. Islamist groups besieged Christian communities, desecrated their symbols, pillaged their villages, murdered their religious leaders, and drove them out of their ancient homelands. When Russia rescued the regime in Damascus—killing a large number of Sunnis in the process—Sunni Arab leaders did not spurn Putin; they instead embarked on repeated pilgrimages to Moscow with offers of arms and trade deals and strategic alliances. Egypt, the most populous Sunni Arab country and the seat of the most respected center of Sunni learning, maintained channels to the Assad regime and kept a distance from the opposition. Cairo saw not a Shiite or Alawite threat from the regime but an Islamist menace from the opposition. Algeria, the largest state in the Maghreb, acted in a similar manner. It is unsurprising that, as the war winds down, the U.A.E. and Bahrain have decided to restore diplomatic relations with the Syrian regime. Both are preoccupied with the struggle against Turkey and Qatar and share a fear of Sunni Islamism. Saudi Arabia may not be far behind. Yemen's complicated story has sectarian aspects, but it would be misleading to describe its civil war as a straightforward Sunni-Shiite split. The Houthi rebels are driven in large part by their conviction that their identity is threatened. The Iranian Revolution helped provide a model to emulate and an ally to curry. But at the core of the Houthis' grievance are social issues: they resent their loss of status and the increased neglect of the northern part of the country, their stronghold. The conflict morphed into a Saudi-Iranian proxy war not because of ancient or durable sectarian identities. Once they gained limited Iranian support, the Houthis—facing a Saudi-led assault—increasingly sought Tehran's backing. Iran, presented with an unexpected opportunity, obliged. This is geopolitics more than sectarianism, strategic rivalry more than religious competition. The conflict between the Houthis and the Saudi-led coalition is only one of many tearing at Yemen's seams. When that war ends, tensions surrounding southern secessionists, Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Salafis, all Sunnis, will likely rage, exacerbated by Saudi-Emirati ambitions, divergence, and rivalry. The latest, most covered, and vivid act of violence, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, is also an internal Sunni affair. The slain journalist was Sunni. The perpetrators were Sunni. Turkey, the country in which the assassination took place and that played an instrumental role in leaking information about the culprits, is predominantly Sunni as well. The backdrop to the killing is the tug-of-war among variants of Sunni Islam: the ascetic Wahhabis, the activist Muslim Brotherhood, and the statist neo-Ottomans, each competing for leadership. Conspicuously missing from this crowded drama is Iran, the region's principal Shiite country. The list goes on. The Lebanese Prime Minister detained by Saudi Arabia, in 2017, was a Sunni. Hezbollah actually increased the number of Sunni allies it has in Parliament and in the Lebanese government in the aftermath of its intervention in the Syrian civil war against Sunni rebels. Shiites are not involved in the bitter inter-Palestinian rift between Fatah and Hamas. Shiites are not involved in the Algerian-Moroccan conflict over Western Sahara, the ongoing Saudi-Jordanian tensions, Saudi-Moroccan strains, Saudi-Qatari feud, or the scramble for influence between Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the U.A.E. in the Horn of Africa. The Turkish campaign against the Kurds, likewise, is an intra-Sunni affair. The continued chaos in Libya, where there is no relevant sectarian fault line, stems from ethnic, tribal, or regional rivalries among Sunnis, as do clashes in western Iraq and geographic tensions between the Tunisian coast and hinterlands. In Iraq, intra-Shiite tensions define the political space today and may play a more important role in shaping future politics than the sectarian divide. Shiite Iran—not Sunni Turkey or Sunni Gulf countries—was the first to supply weapons and abet the predominantly Sunni Kurds when they were threatened by ISIS. Saudi Arabia's attempt to build ties to Shiite elements in Iraq and Iran's robust relations with some Iraqi Sunnis do not fit neatly in a binary sectarian dynamic. Nor does the refusal of Pakistan—which has one of the world's largest Sunni populations—to heed Saudi Arabia's call to arms in Yemen. Amid the recent upheaval in Iraq and Lebanon, the Shiite enclaves in the south of both countries, although bordered by Sunni communities, experienced no major attacks or threats from their Sunni neighbors. There is, of course, a Sunni-Shiite divide. It is constantly put to use by Saudi Arabia and Iran to mobilize their respective constituencies in the struggle for regional influence. Al Qaeda and ISIS also attack Shiites in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan to foment sectarian strife from which they hope to profit. But these are tactics of war, not its causes. In a region and religion whose glorious days lie in the past, history becomes a potent tonic to mobilize the masses. Political leaders evoke distant quarrels to revive memories of more salubrious and magnificent days. Unable to appeal to higher values such as freedom and tolerance, they resort to narratives of ancient conflict to whip up fervor and loyalty. There is an explanation for why fighting occurs more often among Sunnis than between Sunnis and Shiites. Sunnis know that, at roughly eighty per cent of the region's population, they are an undisputed majority and that there is scant threat that they will be overrun by their Shiite brethren. Shiites have long recognized that they will remain a minority in an overwhelmingly Sunni region. Sunnis of various persuasions vie for supremacy and control over their branch of Islam; there is little to gain in that tussle from fighting Shiites. Wrongly defining the struggles gripping the Middle East encourages misguided remedies. Talk of "moderate Sunni Arab states," a remarkably entrenched lore in American foreign-policy circles, is drivel. Those who advocated military support for the armed Syrian opposition typically argued that this was necessary to avoid alienating the "Sunni world." The decision to arm and aid the Syrian opposition, however, did not mean siding with Sunnis against non-Sunnis; it meant taking part in a fierce intra-Sunni fight. It was a choice based on the mistaken conviction that ordinary Syrian Sunnis hoped the Islamist opposition would prevail over the Assad regime because of its atrocities. Western misreading also led to a failure to anticipate how Iran, the most powerful Shiite state, and Turkey, the most powerful Sunni one, would agree to not allow their very real differences to prevent understandings from being reached. It led to misjudgment of the dynamics underpinning relations between Iranian and Iraqi Shiites, driven less by sectarian solidarity than by common anxiety over the role of the United States. Should American troops withdraw from Iraq, the differences between the two—between Iranian and Iraqi nationalism, and between the dominant Iranian and Iraqi variants of Shiism—will likely come to the fore. It also caused Washington to miscalculate the impact of Russia's support for the Syrian regime. Far from damaging its relations with Sunni Arab states, Moscow reëstablished and legitimized its presence throughout the region. Today, the Sunni-Shiite prism prompts illusory pursuits. The attempt to establish an Arab NATO, designed to bring together Sunni Arab states in opposition to Iran, has been mired in intra-Gulf squabbles. Sunnis in the region still perceive Iran as a strategic threat. But the American belief that bellicose U.S. rhetoric can unite Sunni Arabs in an anti-Iranian alliance comes at a time when Sunni regimes are increasingly absorbed by the challenge posed by Turkey. The neo-Ottoman dream is a competitor in a way that Iran is not. The historical roots of the struggle between Ottomans and Arabs date back hundreds of years: the Ottoman Empire ruled Mecca and Medina for four centuries; Persia never did. Longings for a resplendent past do not fade easily. The embrace of simplistic theories has real consequences. It misses the real struggles shaping what the Middle East will become.
Wired	[ "health", "science", "neuroscience" ]	# Why science's focus on male mammals is really bad for women By Daphne Leprince-Ringuet September 6th, 2018 02:00 AM --- Male and female immune systems are not the same, and yet we use the same medication to treat diseases. The problem? There's a sex imbalance in the mammals used for research A lack of female animal models in research has led to a clear failure to scientifically study sex differences. In 2017, Susanne Wolf, a neuroscientist from the Max Delbruck Center (MDC) in Germany, contacted organisations medicating against eye diseases to ask them if they had kept records of drug response for different genders. Wolf wanted to see if there was data on treatment response in males and females as part of a study she was conducting on sex differences in the immune system. The clinics simply responded that there had been no safety issues in their trials. On gender response, they remained quiet and refused to provide further information. This confirmed something that Wolf suspected. Although it has been evident for some time that male and female immune systems behave differently in the disease spectrum — there are five times more men with autism, for instance, while women are three times more likely to get multiple sclerosis— the lack of female animal models in research has led to a clear failure to scientifically study sex differences. We shouldn't read too much into the clinics' reluctance to provide data, clarifies Wolf. "It is a big claim, and probably not the right one, to say that the wrong medication was given to patients," she says. "But there is definitely a fear among clinicians to be blamed for it." In a paper published yesterday, Wolf shows that the underlying reason why male and female brains are equipped differently to fight pathologies that cause nerve damage, such as multiple sclerosis or Parkinson's disease, lies in immune cells found in the brain, called microglia. "Microglia function differently depending on sex," she says. "Male microglia are more numerous and larger, so arguably they react faster and stronger in the case of an attack. But on the other hand, they tend to overreact and wear themselves down more easily than female microglia." While it cannot be said that the male nor the female brain is better equipped to face neurological disease, continues Wolf, it is clear that they are differently equipped. This is problematic. To treat the same disease, different drugs have never been tested specifically for men and for women. That is partly because pharmaceutical companies developing new drugs have historically privileged undertaking studies on male mammals. She says: "If you are only using male models to research and then develop drugs to treat immune diseases, then clearly it will have an impact on the way we treat women because you will not have been producing drugs that are appropriate for everybody." Neuroscience ranks particularly badly. Research has shown that single-sex studies of male animals outnumbered those of females 5.5 to 1 in that field. The consequence of that is that we may have been administering certain medication to men and to women that were not adapted to the way their immune system functions. Gina Rippon, professor of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, and writer of soon-to-be published The Gendered Brain, explains that the failure to carry out research on female mammals is the primary cause of the so-called "sex bias" in science. Another reason why female mammals have received less or no attention in scientific research is also a pragmatic one. Females, indeed, are affected by sexual hormone cycles that interfere with research – and that means more work for the scientists that need to measure them and take them into account in case they have impacted the animals' reactions to tests. However, according to Wolf, ensuring that sex differences are investigated – especially when creating new medication – should be a scientific responsibility. She says: "I can sympathise with the temptation to use male models, because it is more complicated to work with female ones. But I don't think it is justification enough. If you want to really see what is going on with your medication, I believe that you are compelled to conduct research on both sexes." In fact, according to consumer organization DrugWatch, women have almost twice as many chances of developing an adverse reaction to medication than men do. This is why research organisations have been trying to implement policies to ensure that male and female mammals are equally used for research. In 2014, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) passed a rule that obligated researchers to have a valid explanation when using single-sex animal models. The European Commission similarly started the Horizon 2020 campaign – a research and innovation program stretching over seven years with the objective, among others, of including gender differences in research. For Rippon, while it is key that the scientific community does more research into sex differences to ensure that both men and women receive treatments that are more adapted to them, this comes with the danger of such a process becoming political. "One of the concerns is that quite often people jump to interpretations of sex differences to prove that there are biological differences between men and women," she says. "It's not too many steps before people claim that, because there are differences in male and female immune systems, there must be differences in their brains, too." The amalgam between sex differences and psychological differences is quick to happen, but that shouldn't stop a change that is necessary to science, claims Wolf. "Now that we know this, we have to take it into consideration," she says. "It would be a terrible loss scientifically to ignore it. And I think things will change, because awareness is growing – this kind of topic is en vogue in the media." Whether medical companies have been appropriately handling sex differences in medication seems to be a mystery that remains to be solved. And with a record-high 64.7 million items of antidepressants having been prescribed in the UK in 2016, it better be solved as soon as possible. And it starts with resolving the gender mammal gap in the lab. This article was originally published by WIRED UK

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