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Javier E

What if Reporters Covered the Climate Crisis Like Edward R. Murrow Covered the Start of... - 0 views

  • because of the looming possibility of extinction, and in response to it from the emerging leadership among young people, we have reached a “climate moment” with real momentum, and our challenge as we go forward is to dramatically change the zeitgeist—“to lock in and consolidate public opinion that’s finally beginning to come into focus.”
  • It was 54 years ago, early in 1965, at the White House. Before I became President Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary (“over my dead body,” I might add), I was his special assistant coordinating domestic policy. One day, two members of the president’s science-advisory committee came by the offic
  • he had shaken up the prevailing consensus that the oceans were massive enough to soak up any amount of excess of carbon released on earth. Not so, Revelle discovered; the peculiar chemistry of sea water actually prevents this from happening. Now, he said, humans have begun a “vast geophysical experiment.” We were about to burn, within a few generations, the fossil fuels that had slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years. Burning so much oil, gas, and coal would release massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it would trap heat that otherwise would escape into space. Earth’s temperature could rise, causing polar ice to melt and sea levels to rise, flooding the earth’s coastal regions.
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  • Revelle and his colleagues got the green light, and by the fall of 1965 they produced the first official report to any government anywhere on the possible threat to humanity from rising CO2 levels. On November 6, Lyndon Johnson became the first president to mention the threat in a message to Congress.
  • Our own global-warming “phony war” is over. The hot war is here.
  • But we failed the moment. One year later, largely preoccupied with the war in Vietnam, the president grew distracted, budgets for other priorities were squeezed, and the nation was fast polarizing. We flunked that first chance to confront global warming
  • the powers in New York resisted. Through the rest of 1939 and into the spring of 1940, Hitler hunched on the borders of France and the Low Countries, his Panzers idling, poised to strike. Shirer fumed, “My God! Here was the old continent on the brink of war…and the network was most reluctant to provide five minutes a day from here to report it.” Just as the networks and cable channels provide practically no coverage today of global warming.
  • President Johnson urged us to circulate the report widely throughout the government and to the public, despite its controversial emphasis on the need for “economic incentives” to discourage pollution, including—shudder!—taxes levied against polluters. (You can go online to “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment—1965,” and read the entire 23-page section, headlined Appendix Y4—Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.)
  • The networks put their reporters out in raincoats or standing behind police barriers as flames consume far hills. Yet we rarely hear the words “global warming” or “climate disruption” in their reports. The big backstory of rising CO2 levels, escalating drought, collateral damage, cause and effect, and politicians on the take from fossil-fuel companies? Forget all that. Not good for ratings, say network executives
  • But last October, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientifically conservative body, gave us 12 years to make massive changes to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions 45 percent below 2010 levels and to net zero by 2050
  • On his indispensable site, TomDispatch.com, Tom Engelhardt writes that humanity is now on a suicide watch.
  • Here’s the good news: While describing David Wallace-Wells’s stunning new book The Uninhabitable Earth as a remorseless, near-unbearable account of what we are doing to our planet, The New York Times reports it also offers hope. Wallace-Wells says that “We have all the tools we need…to aggressively phase out dirty energy…; [cut] global emissions…[and] scrub carbon from the atmosphere…. [There are] ‘obvious’ and ‘available,’ [if costly,] solutions.” What we need, he adds, is the “acceptance of responsibility.”
  • Late 1940. The start of the Blitz, with bombs blasting London to bits. A Gallup poll that September found that a mere 16 percent of Americans supported sending US aid to beleaguered Britain. Olson and Cloud tell us that “One month later, as bombs fell on London, and Murrow and the Boys brought the reality of it into American living rooms, 52 percent thought more aid should be sent.”
  • With no silver bullet, what do we do? We cooperate as kindred spirits on a mission of public service. We create partnerships to share resources. We challenge media owners and investors to act in the public interest. We keep the whole picture in our heads—how melting ice sheets in the Arctic can create devastation in the Midwest—and connect the dots for our readers, viewers, and listeners
Javier E

A Conversation With Christian Picciolini - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • That’s the warning of a former violent extremist, Christian Picciolini, who joined a neo-Nazi movement 30 years ago and now tries to get people out of them
  • White-supremacist terrorists—the ones who have left dozens dead in attacks in Pittsburgh, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas, in recent months—aren’t just trying to outdo one another, he told us. They’re trying to outdo Timothy McVeigh
  • Picciolini said that even if the U.S. could get a handle on its gun problem, terrorists can always find other ways. McVeigh had his car bomb, the September 11th hijackers had their airplanes, Islamic State attackers have suicide bombings, trucks, and knives. “I have to ask myself, Do we have white-nationalist airline pilots?” Picciolini said. “There have to be. I knew people in powerful positions, in politics, in law enforcement, who were secretly white nationalists. I think we’d be stupid and selfish to think that we don’t have those in the truck-driving industry.”
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  • The [white-supremacist] ideology is spreading more into the mainstream than it ever has before. There aren’t checks and balances to counter it. There aren’t programs being funded to help people disengage from extremism. Some of the rhetoric coming from the very top is emboldening extremists.
  • Picciolini: Unfortunately, I think that the underpinnings of the ideology have always been there. The extremists were on the fringe, and very visible, but other people weren’t willing to voice those beliefs.
  • I never thought we would have a social and political climate that really kind of brought it to the foreground. Because it’s starting to seem less like a fringe ideology and more like a mainstream ideology.
  • Kathy Gilsinan: What role does the internet play? There’s a lot of discussion about internet radicalization for members of ISIS—is this a parallel process for white-supremacist movements
  • Thirty years ago, marginalized, broken, angry young people had to be met face-to-face to get recruited into a movement. Nowadays, those millions and millions of young people are living most of their lives online if they don’t have real-world connections. And they’re finding a community online instead of in the real world, and having conversations about promoting violence.
  • It’s no longer a lone-wolf-type situation, which is something we were pushing in the ’80s and ’90s. The ideology then was that there were no leaders, there was no centralized movement, individuals were empowered to act on their own. But the internet has really solidified this movement globally through all these forums online; they’re connected in the virtual world in ways that we often can’t be in the real world. I would say that the threat of a transnational, global white-supremacist terrorist movement is spreading.
  • If ads are being served on their videos, chances are good, depending on how many views, they’re making ad revenue based on Google, Facebook, YouTube, serving ads against their content. So, in that sense, de-platforming is good. It does slow them down quite a bit. From my perspective, it also makes people harder to reach.
  • Picciolini: It’s a whole lot of listening. I listen for what I call potholes: things that happen to us in our journey of life that detour us, things like trauma, abuse, mental illness, poverty, joblessness. Even privilege can be a pothole that detours us. As I listen to those—rather than debate or confront them about their ideology, but creating a rapport with them—I start to fill in those potholes. I will find resources in their community to help them deal with the trauma, with whatever it is that was the motivation for them to go in that direction. Nobody’s born racist; we all found it. Then I leverage the community around them to try to engage them and support them, and try to find ways for them to crawl out of that hole. Typically what I found is, people hate other people because they hate something very specifically about themselves, or are very angry about a situation within their own environment, and that is then projected onto other people
  • Bayoumy: What are some of the things that prompt these people to question their beliefs?  Picciolini: Certainly not facts. It’s very emotional. I try to take them through an emotional journey where they come to the conclusion that they’ve changed, and it’s not me telling them that they’ve changed. What I’ve found least effective is me telling them that they’re wrong, or me telling them that they need to think a certain way. Typically these people are pretty idealistic, although they’re lost, typically pretty bruised emotionally, and they have very low self-esteem.
  • Picciolini: I’ve always found it very difficult to sway opinion when it’s a group of people. When people are in a group, they tend to not be as vulnerable or as forthcoming. So I think it has to be a personal journey
  • it’s not an easy process; it’s a very, very long process. If you think about quitting smoking, or drinking, or anything like that. For me, from the time I was 14 years old till I was 23, those were kind of the adult developmental years, so there were a lot of things that I had to unlearn.
  • Picciolini: I think we can be equipped. There’s just no will to build something about domestic extremism. We don’t currently have any hate-crime laws that apply to online activity, but photoshopping someone’s face onto an Auschwitz prisoner on Twitter isn’t so different from spray-painting a swastika in a synagogue. I think we need to start asking ourselves what kind of policies need to be in place, not to limit speech, but to protect people from it. I don’t know what the answer is there.
  • I just think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. They’re all trying to outdo each other, not just the last person, but Timothy McVeigh. Terrorists will always find another way to do it. I have to ask myself, Do we have white-nationalist airline pilots? There have to be. I knew people in powerful positions, in politics, in law enforcement, who were secretly white nationalists. I think we’d be stupid and selfish to think that we don’t have those in the truck-driving industry.
clairemann

Gunmen Storm Kabul University, Killing at Least 19 - The New York Times - 0 views

  • KABUL, Afghanistan — Gunmen laid siege to Afghanistan’s largest university on Monday, killing at least 19 people and wounding more than a dozen others
  • Fardin Ahmadi, a social science student, said he was stuck in his classroom for two hours, until Afghan forces evacuated him and several others. “The situation was very bad,” Mr. Ahmadi said. “Every single student wanted to save their own life; we had forgotten about anything else.”
  • “During the attack on Kabul University, unfortunately, 19 were killed and 22 others were wounded,”
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  • The attack — the latest sign that spiraling violence in the Afghan countryside has made its way to the capital — followed a suicide bombing on Oct. 24 at an educational center in western Kabul. More than 40 people, most of them high school students from the Shiite Hazara ethnic minority, died in the attack, for which the Islamic State claimed responsibility.
  • The Islamic State has staged numerous high-profile attacks in Kabul in recent years, often striking government postings and Shiite Muslims at schools, places of worship and other easily infiltrated — or “soft” — targets.
  • Over the past three years, concerted U.S. and Afghan military campaigns beat back the Islamic State’s offshoot in Afghanistan, hemming in what remained of the extremists in the country’s mountainous east.
  • Islamic State tactics have often mimicked those introduced by the Taliban, especially the Haqqani network, a group known for its ruthlessness, criminal networks and close ties to Al Qaeda.
  • The attack on the university followed the deadliest month in Afghanistan for civilians since September 2019, according to data compiled by The New York Times. At least 212 people were killed in October, and, according to recently released United Nations data, about 2,100 Afghan civilians died and 3,800 were wounded in the first nine months of the year.
Javier E

The Virus and the Blitz - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Britain during the Blitz has gone down in history as the exemplar of national resilience—a role model for any nation going through a hard and stressful time, whether a war, terror attack, or pandemic.
  • ow did the British do it? What can we learn? What exactly are national resilience and social solidarity made of, and how are they built?
  • If you want to list the factors that contributed to the country’s indomitable resilience, start with a sense of agency. Brits needed to feel that they were not helpless or passive, that the nation was taking positive action every second of every day.
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  • Churchill set a frenetic pace for his whole government, showering his aides with “Action This Day” memos.
  • The second element of British resilience was intense social connection. People were forced together every night in tightly packed group or family shelters.
  • In national crises, a sort of social and psychological arms race takes place. The threat—whether bombings or a pandemic—ramps up fear, unpredictability, divisiveness, fatalism, and feelings of weakness and meaninglessness. Nations survive when they can ramp up countervailing emotions and mindsets
  • Third, laughter. Brits credit themselves, accurately, for being a comic people. During the war, every disaster was turned into an occasion for humor,
  • The fourth factor in British resilience was moral purpose. Friedrich Nietzsche once remarked that “he who has a why to live for can endure any how.” The Brits had a firm sense of the moral rightness of their cause, the unique evil Hitler represented, and the reason they had to endure all this
  • Finally, there was equality. During moments of threat and crisis, people are intensely sensitive to inequality, to the feeling that some people are being treated better than everybody else.
  • The pressure of the situation induced people to be frenetically social. Singers offered free concerts, which were packed. Larson reports that young women would set up dates for every night, planning weeks in advance, so as to never be alone
  • This happens when countries take actions, even if only symbolic ones, that make frightening situations feel more controllable and predictable. This happens when they foster social solidarity by paying extreme attention to fairness. This happens when they intensify social connection and create occasions for social bonding and shared work.
  • Societies that build resilience do not hide behind a wall of happy talk or try to minimize the danger.
  • Resilience is built when people confront a threat realistically, and discover that they have the resources to cope with it together.
  • Resilience is built when people tell a collective story about the danger that places the current terror they are facing within a larger redemptive context. When all this is over, we’ll be better because of it.
  • What was once a scary threat to be avoided, releasing a surge of destructive cortisol, becomes a challenge to be met, releasing a cascade of adrenaline.
  • Evolution equipped us to deal with short bursts of terror, such as getting chased by a lion, not to cope with long, unrelenting months of stress.
  • Isolation, fear, and stress send the autonomic nervous system into overdrive, and weaken the immune system. The social-distancing measures we are taking to avoid the coronavirus make us more susceptible to it when it comes.
  • in some ways, COVID-19 presents an even more dire challenge to us than the bombing did to Great Britain in 1940. A study by the Russell Sage Foundation found that what makes societies resilient during a crisis are high levels of faith in institutions, high social trust, high levels of patriotism and optimism, and high levels of social and racial integration. The United States that confronts the coronavirus pandemic has catastrophically low levels of all these things.
  • Worse, unlike the Blitz, this pandemic deprives us of the thing social resilience needs most—close physical and social connectio
  • In America, the pandemic finds a country that has already seen a recent tripling of the number of people suffering from depression, a sharp increase in mental-health issues of all varieties; a sharp rise in suicides, and record levels of tribal hostility and polarization. The dread and isolation that COVID-19 causes threaten to exacerbate all this, to drive people even farther apart.
  • Today, the world is threatened by a virus. The moral story we tell has to be less about the evil we face and more about the solidarity we are building with one another. The story we tell has to be about how we took this disease and turned it into an occasion to become a better society
sgardner35

Suicide Attack Kills at Least 13 in Afghanistan - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The attacker, who at midafternoon had not been identified, targeted the home of Malik Usman Shinwari, the father of two prominent government officials, said Attaullah Khogeyanai, a spokesman for the provincial governor. Mr. Shinwari was injured in the attack, but his wounds did not appear to be life-threatening, people who were present said. He was taken by helicopter to Kabul, the Afghan capital, for treatment.
  • There was no immediate claim of responsibility. A Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said on Twitter that the bombing had “no connection to” the group.
  • Militant activity has made it increasingly dangerous to travel the road between Kabul and Jalalabad, a key artery linking Kabul with points in Pakistan.
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  • The violence in Nangarhar is just one security threat facing the government of President Ashraf Ghani. In the southern province of Helmand, government troops, aided by United States Special Forces, have been fighting for months to contain a Taliban offensive that threatens to wrest the region from state control.
Javier E

Opinion | World War III Begins With Forgetting - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Yet how many Americans can truly envision what a third world war would mean? Just as great power conflict looms again, those who witnessed the last one are disappearing. Around 1 percent of U.S. veterans of World War II remain alive to tell their stories. It is estimated that by the end of this decade, fewer than 10,000 will be lef
  • The vast majority of Americans today are unused to enduring hardship for foreign policy choices, let alone the loss of life and wealth that direct conflict with China or Russia would bring.
  • Preparing the country shouldn’t begin with tanks, planes and ships. It will require a national effort of historical recovery and imagination — first and foremost to enable the American people to consider whether they wish to enter a major war if the moment of decision arrives.
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  • It wasn’t just major war that seemed passé. So did the need to pay any significant costs for foreign policy choices. Since the Vietnam War roiled American society, leaders moved to insulate the American public from the harms of any conflict, large or small: The creation of an all-volunteer force did away with the draft; air power bombed targets from safe heights; the advent of drones allowed killing by remote control.
  • The deaths of more than 7,000 service members in the post-Sept. 11 wars — and approximately four times as many by suicide — devastated families and communities but were not enough to produce a Vietnam-style backlash. Likewise, although the wars have cost a whopping $8 trillion and counting, the payments have been spread over decades and passed to the future.
  • Not having to worry about the effects of wars — unless you enlist to fight in them — has nearly become a birthright of being American.
  • Today the United States is again assuming the primary burden of countering the ambitions of governments in Moscow and Beijing. When it did so the first time, it lived in the shadow of world war and acted out of a frank and healthy fear of another. This time, lessons will have to be learned without that experience.
grayton downing

Marxist Group Claims Attack on Embassy in Turkey - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Marxist group, with a history of political violence in Turkey, claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing
  • terrorist who had twice attacked government facilities in Istanbul but was released from prison under an amnesty program.
  • bomber appears to have ties to a relatively minor Marxist group
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  • , which was responsible for political violence in the 1970
anonymous

Raqqa Offensive Against ISIS to Begin Within Weeks: Ash Carter - NBC News - 0 views

  • The offensive to oust ISIS from its capital will get underway within weeks
  • t starts in the next few weeks," he said, referring to the timeline for the assault on the militants' Syrian stronghold of Raqqa. "That has long been our plan and we will be capable of resourcing both."
  • 5,000 U.S. personnel are supporting the massive military campaign to retake Mosul from ISIS that began on Oct. 16.
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  • "They are not near [Mosul] at this time ... Our forces do accompany .... the Iraqi security forces and the Peshmerga. So they will get nearer to the city as those forces get nearer to the city ... We are not going to be part of the occupation or hold forces."
  • European leaders have said they were concerned the effort to take Raqqa had not begun yet, which would allow the extremists to continue planning and inspiring the sorts of attacks that have hit France and Belgium during the last year.
  • We need do justice. And we need to do it fast," said Carter, who was heading to a meeting with NATO defense chiefs in Brussels later on Wednesday.
  • Iraqi security forces and the Kurdish militia have faced ISIS suicide attacks, car bombs and other attacks in their march toward Iraq's second-largest city which the extremists captured in 2014.
ethanmoser

Army, local police probe recent mystery deaths of 11 Fort Hood soldiers | Fox News - 0 views

  • Army, local police probe recent mystery deaths of 11 Fort Hood soldiers | Fox News
  • The Army and local police are investigating the deaths of 11 Fort Hood soldiers who have died on and off the large Texas base in the past three months under mysterious circumstances, according to reports.
  • “At this point in the investigative process we do not suspect foul play, but have not completely ruled it out while we conduct a complete and thorough death investigation,” Criminal Investigations spokesman Christopher Grey told the paper.
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  • Taylor is at least the 11th Fort Hood soldier to have died in the U.S. since Oct. 12.
  • Three other soldiers died from gunshot wounds. One of them, Pvt. Kevin Paulino, 24, died from a gunshot while he was in Indiana, Stars and Stripes reported. The Army said the soldiers' deaths were under investigation.
  • Three soldiers from Fort Hood died November 12 in a suicide bomb attack at Bagram air base in Afghanistan: Staff Sgt. John Perry, 30; Private First Class Tyler Iubelt, 20; and Sgt. 1st Class Allan Brown, 46. Brown died of injuries suffered in the attack at Walter Reade National Medical Center in Bethesda Dec. 6, the Houston Chronicle reported Friday.
johnsonma23

New Taliban leaders may mean more attacks on US targets | MSNBC - 0 views

  • New Taliban leaders may mean more attacks on US targets
  • The U.S. drone strike that killed the Taliban’s leader has also set up a potential leadership struggle between two of the terror group’s up-and-comers — and may signal more attacks on Western targets.
  • When the Taliban issued a statement Wednesday confirming that its top man, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, was killed in a recent U.S. strike, it also announced a new leadership team.
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  • aqoob is believed to be in his early to mid-twenties, but is the son of perhaps the Taliban’s most important leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, who disappeared several years ago. The Taliban confirmed Omar’s death last summer.
  • The U.S. official told NBC News that intelligence agencies are now gathering more information about how the new team might change the already complicated dynamics in the region
  • The Taliban, which has its roots in northern Pakistan, controlled Afghanistan from 1996 until the U.S. invasion in 2001. It continues to operate in large chunks of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to launch deadly attacks on both civilian and military targets.
  • The U.S. State Department has listed Haqqani as a “specially designated global terrorist” who was instrumental in introducing suicide bombing to Afghanistan and for maintaining close ties with al Qaeda.
  • The U.S. official told NBC News that authorities are keenly interested in seeing if the new Taliban team, especially with Haqqani in a more visible position, signals an increasing focus on attacks against Western interests in Afghanistan and possibly elsewhere.
  • The U.S. government has offered a $5 million bounty for Haqqani, saying he is wanted for questioning in connection with a January 2008 attack on a Kabul hotel that killed an American citizen and five other people.
  • The Russian government also views Haqqani as a significant threat, with a top Russian diplomat saying before Wednesday’s announcement that there would be “hell to pay” if he had been picked as the new Taliban leader.
anonymous

Bomber Tied to Al Qaeda Kills Dozens in Syrian City - 0 views

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    BEIRUT, Lebanon - A suicide bomber detonated a truck filled with propane tanks at a crowded military checkpoint in central Syria on Sunday, killing more than 30 people, most of them civilians, in the second such attack by fighters linked to Al Qaeda in two days.
Javier E

In Iraq, 'Romeo and Juliet' Portrays Montague and Capulet as Shiite and Sunni - NYTimes... - 0 views

  • It is not poison or a dagger that takes the lives of the young lovers, but a suicide bomb. The Montagues and Capulets are divided not just by family, but also by religious sect. And the dialogue in the Iraqi adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet” is sprinkled with references to Blackwater, Iranians and the American reconstruction effort.
B Mannke

BBC News - Winter Olympics: Russia arrests five 'terror suspects' - 0 views

  • Russian authorities say they have detained five members of a "banned international terrorist organisation" in the restive North Caucusus region.
  • Russia earlier announced it was deploying more than 30,000 police and interior ministry troops to the region.
  • The main concern is the threat of attack by Islamist militants. Security fears have been heightened after two suicide bomb attacks killed 34 people in the southern city of Volgograd on 29 and 30 December.
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  • The five suspects were in possession of "grenades, ammunition, and a homemade explosive device packed with shrapnel", the National Anti-Terrorism Committee said.
  • A "controlled zone" near Olympic venues will limit access to people with tickets and proof of identity while another "forbidden zone" will be in place in large areas around Sochi.
  • On Friday, the US issued a travel alert for its citizens planning to attend the Games.
Javier E

Inman Twins, Doris Duke Heirs: The Poorest Rich Kids in the World | Culture News | Roll... - 0 views

  • Georgia and Patterson Inman were among the wealthiest kids in America: When they turn 21, the family claims, the twins will inherit a trust fund worth $1 billion. They and their father were the last living heirs to the vast Industrial Age fortune of the Duke family, tobacco tycoons who once controlled the American cigarette market, established Duke University and, through the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, continue to give away hundreds of millions of dollars.
  • Raised by two drug addicts with virtually unlimited wealth, Georgia and Patterson survived a gilded childhood that was also a horror story of Dickensian neglect and abuse. They were globe-trotting trust-fund babies who snorkeled in Fiji, owned a pet lion cub and considered it normal to bring loose diamonds to elementary school for show and tell. And yet they also spent their childhoods inhaling freebase fumes, locked in cellars and deadbolted into their bedrooms at night in the secluded Wyoming mountains and on their ancestral South Carolina plantation. While their father spent millions on drug binges and extravagances, the children lived like terrified prisoners, kept at bay by a revolving door of some four dozen nannies and caregivers, underfed, undereducated, scarcely noticed except as objects of wrath.
  • As a 13-year-old orphan in 1965 taken in by his aunt Doris Duke, Walker – then called "Skipper" – had romped around her lavish 14,000-square-foot Hawaiian estate without regard for property or propriety, shooting her Christmas ornaments with a dart gun, setting fire to crates of expensive teak and exploding a bomb in her pool. He was hideously spoiled, and stinking rich from three trust funds: one from his father, Walker Inman Sr., heir to an Atlanta cotton fortune and stepson to American Tobacco Company founder "Buck" Duke; one from his mother, Georgia Fagan; the third from his grandmother, Buck's widow Nanaline Duke, who left the bulk of her $45 million estate to her little grandson. Altogether, on Walker's 21st birthday he would inherit a reported $65 million ($500 million in today's dollars), a fortune so vast that Time predicted the boy would rank as "one of the wealthiest men of the late 20th century."
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  • Doris knew nothing about raising children, nor much cared. The witheringly wry, worldly heiress was among the most celebrated women of her day, a six-foot glamour queen hounded by paparazzi, who brushed elbows with every midcentury icon from Jackie Kennedy to Elvis Presley, pronouncing Greta Garbo "boring" and, after dating Errol Flynn, theorizing that bisexual men made the best lovers: "I should know," she declared. "I've done exhausting research on the subject." As a child – and sole inheritor of her father Buck's $100 million fortune – she'd become famous as "the richest little girl in the world." She'd been raised by nannies in a chilly, silent Fifth Avenue mansion, with her parents taking little part in her upbringing; family lore holds that her father, on his deathbed in 1925, told 12-year-old Doris, "Trust no one." Now saddled with her pesky nephew Walker, watching him toss ketchup-covered tampons into her pool, Doris Duke regarded him with pity. He was desperate for love and attention, much like herself as a child. But Doris had her own fabulous life to live, and so she shipped Walker off to boarding school. "We were all too self-centered to be bothered with a problem child," she would later tell her cousin Angier St. George Biddle "Pony" Duke.
  • His grandmother's will had stipulated that if Walker left no heirs, upon his death his trust would be funneled into the Duke Endowment, a $2.8 billion foundation established by Buck Duke that nourishes, among other institutions, Duke University. The idea repulsed Walker: The very name that had given him such unearned bounty also stood for everything he felt he'd been deprived. "He despised Duke!" says longtime friend Mike Todd. "Duke University, Duke Foundation – everything Duke, he hated."
  • At school the twins had trouble connecting with classmates, few of whom were allowed over to the Inmans' mansion a second time after gaping at the guns, the explicit art and sometimes an eyeful of Walker, who preferred to be nude. Other kids went to summer camp, but the Inmans went to Abu Dhabi to bid millions at auctions; to Japan, where their father introduced them to friends who were supposedly yakuza; to Fiji, where Dad praised them as they dined on poisonous puffer fish. There were getaways aboard the Devine Decadence, which was docked in New Zealand. One day toward the end of second grade, when their father had yanked them out of school without warning, they told themselves it was for the best.
  • The past three years have been a struggle for the twins as they've grappled with their past. Before they were able to live with Daisha, they were sent to the Wyoming Behavioral Institute. The twins were suicidal, uncooperative and dangerously underweight. Therapist Jennifer Greenup had never seen such extreme emotional deprivation before. "If even a quarter of what they said happened to them happened, they are severely traumatized children," says Greenup, adding, "Their symptoms are real. Whether it's paranoia, lack of trust or hostility." Eventually the kids were able to move in with Daisha and began bonding, a triumph unto itself. But although they've taken positive steps, Greenup says the scale of their trauma is so great that she can't gauge their progress: "I can't say they're progressing well, because there's nothing to compare it to," she admits.
  • As for the kids' own plans, Patterson seems to hope for a quiet life. "I hope I don't have to live alone. But I actually don't mind. I'll just sit at Greenfield, fishing by my dad's little tomb, just talking about life," he says. "You can't trust anyone," he adds mournfully, repeating the words he learned from his father, which Walker learned from his aunt Doris, which she learned from her father, Buck Duke.
Ellie McGinnis

Peace Talks May Be Casualty as Pakistani Taliban Pick Hard-Liner as Leader - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • In a surprise choice that bodes poorly for proposed peace talks, the Pakistani Taliban on Thursday appointed as its new leader the hard-line commander responsible for last year’s attack on Malala Yousafzai, the teenage Pakistani education activist.
  • Mullah Fazlullah, the head of a militant faction in the northwestern Swat Valley,
  • Mr. Fazlullah is best known for ordering public beatings, executions and beheadings, and delivering thunderous radio broadcasts — in which he denounced polio vaccinations, among other topics
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  • But the news was likely to be received with less enthusiasm by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government
  • Furious government officials criticized the United States’ killing of the previous Taliban leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, in a drone strike last Friday, claiming that the Mr. Mehsud had been on the verge of starting peace talks that could end seven years of bloodshed in Pakistan’s major cities.
  • He set up a pirate radio station that broadcast jihadist propaganda across the valley, at one point urging women not to sleep with their husbands if they refused to join his jihad.
  • Mr. Sharif “bargained and sold out Hakimullah to the Americans,” he said.
  • Shahidullah Shahid, said there would be “no more talks as Mullah Fazlullah is already against negotiations.”
  • “This changes the entire equation,” said one senior government official in Peshawar.
  • For the Pakistani military, Mr. Fazlullah is a cherished enemy, too. He escaped the army’s toughest anti-Taliban offensive of recent years in 2009 when, as thousands of soldiers swept through Swat, following the collapse of a peace deal, he slipped through the dragnet and fled across the border into Afghanistan.
  • armed fighters displaced the civil government, instituting a authoritarian and often cruel rule that mandated public floggings, executions and the closure of girls’ schools.
  • But those compromises quickly foundered — there was public outrage across Pakistan over a video that showed Taliban fighters flogging a teenage girl in Swat — and by summer 2009, the army had moved in.
  • Mr. Khan has vowed to block NATO military supply lines into Afghanistan after Nov. 20 if the United States does not halt drone attacks in the tribal belt.
  • But Mr. Khan’s aggressive anti-American stance could be complicated by a fresh wave of Taliban violence — particularly if it is engineered by a Taliban leader who hails from the province that Mr. Khan controls.
  • The Pakistani Taliban is related to, but distinct from, the Afghan Taliban. The group has largely attacked targets inside Pakistan but has also deployed suicide bombers into Afghanistan and claimed responsibility for an attempted bombing of Times Square in May 2010. As a result, its leadership has been repeatedly targeted by American drones.
Javier E

Young Israelis: A Turn to the Right? by Eyal Press | NYRBlog | The New York Review of B... - 0 views

  • E-mail addthis_pub = 'nybooks'; addthis_logo = 'http://www.nybooks.com/images/logo-150.gif'; addthis_logo_background = 'ffffff'; addthis_logo_color = '666666'; addthis_brand = 'NYRB'; addthis_options = 'favorites, facebook, twitter, tumblr, reddit, digg, stumbleupon, delicious, google, more'; Share Print Comments (function() { var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0], rdb = document.createElement('script'); rdb.type = 'text/javascript'; rdb.async = true; rdb.src = document.location.protocol + '//www.readability.com/embed.js'; s.parentNode.insertBefore(rdb, s); })(); Young Israelis: A Turn to the Right? Eyal Press Uriel Sinai/Getty Images Children at the local school in the village of Ghajar, on Israeli-Lebanese border, which was recaptured during the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, November 10, 2010 Shortly after the democratic uprising began in Egypt, a group of young Israelis led by freelance journalist Dimi Reider launched Kav Hutz (“Outside Line”), a Hebrew-language blog devoted to covering the events across the border. Unable to enter Egypt on short notice with his Israeli passport—a predicament all Israeli correspondents faced—Reider chronicled the insurrection by posting minute-by-minute updates culled from an array of online sources on the ground: Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Egyptian bloggers. The tone of Reider’s blog was reportorial, but hardly detached. “Good luck,” he wrote on the eve of the huge “Day of Departure” rally in Tahrir Square—a sentiment rarely voiced in Israel’s mainstream media, which stressed the danger of a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood if the protesters prevailed. By the time Egyptians had succeeded in overthrowing Hosni Mubarak, Kav Hutz was getting up to 12,000 visitors a day and had been singled out in Haaretz for leaving the rest of the Israeli press “in the dust.” As the story suggests, Egypt’s uprising managed to inspire not only countless young Arabs but also some young Israelis. A contributor to +972, an Israel-based online magazine that features commentary and reporting by mostly young progressives—it is named after the area code shared by Israel and the Palestinian territories—Reider was deeply moved by the courage of the protesters in Cairo and dismayed by the patronizing reaction of many Israelis. “The line the establishment took was that it’s all very nice but they’re going to end up like Iran,” he recalls. “I didn’t take that line because I bothered to read stuff by Egyptians and it quickly became apparent that the Muslim Brotherhood was just one player. It also felt distasteful to me to judge the extraordinary risks Egyptians were taking solely by our profit—by how it would affect Israeli security and the policy of a government I don’t support anyway.” For observers troubled by Israel’s alarming recent shift to the right, the emergence of Internet-savvy liberal voices like Reider’s may seem heartening. But while such bloggers appear more capable of reaching a younger demographic than Haaretz—the venerable leftist newspaper whose aging readership seems likely to shrink in the years to come—it’s not clear how many of their contemporaries are listening to them. One reason is apathy. Increasingly cynical about politics and the prospects of peace, not a few young Israelis I’ve met in recent years have told me they’ve stopped following the news. When they go online, it’s to chat with friends, not to check out sites like +972. There are also growing numbers of young Israelis who simply don’t share Reider’s views. Against the 12,000 readers of Kav Hutz were countless others who didn’t question the alarmist tone of their country’s mass-circulation tabloids when the revolt in Egypt began, as NPR discovered when it aired a segment on what Israeli youth thought of the uprising. “For us it is better to have Mubarak,” one young Israeli said. “I kind of feel sad for President Mubarak,” said another. “For the last two or three years, we’ve been seeing a very consistent trend of younger Israelis becoming increasingly right-wing,” Dahlia Scheindlin, a public opinion analyst who also contributes to +972, told me. Last year, Scheindlin carried out a survey on behalf of the Kulanana Shared Citizenship Initiative that showed eroding support for democratic values among Israeli youth, at least insofar as the rights of non-Jews go. One question in the survey asked whether there should be “Equal access to state resources, equal opportunities [for] all citizens.” Among Jewish respondents between the ages of 16-29, a mere 43 percent agreed.
  • In October, a poll conducted by New Wave Research asked, “If Palestinians and Israelis reach an agreement… and the Israeli government brings the agreement to a referendum, would you vote for or against?” Among voters over 55, 61 percent—nearly two out of three—said they would support a deal. Among those younger than 35, it was the opposite: only one in three (37 percent) would vote in favor of an agreement.
  • One reason tolerance may be less widespread among young Israelis is that they rarely interact with Palestinians or Arab-Israelis. “You don’t see Palestinians on the streets of Israel,”
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  • The fact that Palestinians in the Gaza Strip chose in 2006 to elect Hamas, whose Charter cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and foresees Israel’s eventual destruction, hasn’t helped matters. Neither has the collapse of the peace process. Israelis in their late teens and twenties barely remember the hope that greeted the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords. They do have strong memories of the Second Intifada (2000-2005), when a wave of suicide bombings “managed to obliterate any trust the Israelis had in a political settlement,” as the public opinion analysts Jacob Shamir and Khalil Shikaki observe in their recent study of the violence’s impact. That was followed by Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, which the Israeli right warned would make the country vulnerable and which indeed brought a barrage of Qassam missiles to the border town of Sderot; and the Israeli war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006, in which more than one hundred Israeli soldiers—many of them young—were killed and hundreds more wounded.
  • the popular tabloids and Israel’s leaders converged around the theme of blaming the unraveling of the peace process on Palestinian intransigence.
  • “Older people remember the years when people actually liked Israel. They’re more likely to view criticism from the outside as a possibly legitimate critique of Israel’s policies. Young people are basically being told, over and over again, that criticism of Israel is de-legitimization of Israel, because they’re anti-Semites.”
  • For years Israelis have complained, not without reason, that textbooks used in Palestinian schools have failed to recognize Israel’s existence or to inculcate open-minded attitudes toward Jews among Arab youth
  • To judge by the petition signed by 472 high school teachers and sent to the Ministry of Education in December, however, some civics instructors are having trouble instilling the values of peace and tolerance in Israeli children. The subject of the petition was the growing prevalence of bigotry among students
  • What the instructor has been hearing from his pupils is, of course, something young Israelis have been hearing more and more from their leaders
  • A striking irony apparent in the survey commissioned by the Kulanana Shared Citizenship Initiative is that young Arabs, who are often portrayed in the Israeli press as implacably hostile to the country’s ideals, support principles such as “mutual respect between all sectors” in higher proportions than their Jewish counterparts (84 versus 75 percent). Significantly more (58 versus 25 percent) also “strongly agree” with Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which states: “All citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, will participate in the life of the state, based on the principle of full, equal citizenship, and appropriate representation in all state institutions.” The country’s founders hoped this language would serve as a set of guiding principles for the state.
  • it does seem ironic that in the Jewish State, which insists on defining itself as the Jewish democratic state and the only democracy in the Middle East, the Arabs are our most democratic citizens.”
Javier E

Rewriting the War, Japanese Right Attacks a Newspaper - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Tabloids brand him a traitor for disseminating “Korean lies” that they say were part of a smear campaign aimed at settling old scores with Japan. Threats of violence, Mr. Uemura says, have cost him one university teaching job and could soon rob him of a second. Ultranationalists have even gone after his children, posting Internet messages urging people to drive his teenage daughter to suicide.
  • The revisionists, however, have seized on the lack of evidence of abductions to deny that any women were held captive in sexual slavery and to argue that the comfort women were simply camp-following prostitutes out to make good money.
  • “The War on The Asahi,” as commentators have called it, began in August when the newspaper bowed to public criticism and retracted at least a dozen articles published in the 1980s and early ’90s. Those articles cited a former soldier, Seiji Yoshida, who claimed to have helped abduct Korean women for the military brothels. Mr. Yoshida was discredited two decades ago, but the Japanese right pounced on The Asahi’s gesture and called for a boycott to drive the 135-year-old newspaper out of business.
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  • With elections this month, analysts say conservatives are trying to hobble the nation’s leading left-of-center newspaper. The Asahi has long supported greater atonement for Japan’s wartime militarism and has opposed Mr. Abe on other issues. But it is increasingly isolated as the nation’s liberal opposition remains in disarray after a crushing defeat at the polls two years ago.Continue reading the main story
  • Among the women who have come forward to say they were forced to have sex with soldiers are Chinese, Koreans and Filipinos, as well as Dutch women captured in Indonesia, then a Dutch colony.
  • The threats are part of a broad, vitriolic assault by the right-wing news media and politicians here on The Asahi, which has long been the newspaper that Japanese conservatives love to hate. The battle is also the most recent salvo in a long-raging dispute over Japan’s culpability for its wartime behavior that has flared under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s right-leaning government.
  • Many on the right have argued that Japan’s behavior was no worse than that of other World War II combatants, including the United States’ bombing of Japanese civilians.
  • Since August, The Asahi’s daily circulation has dropped by 230,797 to about seven million
  • Mr. Uemura said The Asahi had been too fearful to defend him, or even itself. In September, the newspaper’s top executives apologized on television and fired the chief editor.
  • Mr. Uemura did not attend, explaining that he was now reluctant to appear in public. “This is the right’s way of threatening other journalists into silence,” he said. “They don’t want to suffer the same fate that I have.”
katyshannon

Paris Terror Attacks: Officials Searching for Man Involved in Deadly Massacre - NBC News - 0 views

  • French authorities were racing Sunday to hunt down any potential accomplices to the wave of terror attacks unleashed in Paris as the investigation widened beyond this nation's borders.
  • A French man believed to be directly involved in Friday's massacre in Paris is on the run and the subject of an international manhunt, French security officials said Sunday evening.
  • Investigators said the man rented a Belgian-registered black Volkswagen Polo, which was allegedly used and abandoned by the hostage-takers who killed at least 89 people inside a Paris concert hall. advertisement He was identified by officials as Salah Abdeslam, 26, from Brussels.
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  • Abdeslam is allegedly the brother of another suspect currently in custody and being questioned — and of one of the deceased attackers, officials said.
  • French officials were working with authorities in Belgium, Spain and Serbia in an attempt to shed more light on the attack, which ISIS claimed responsibility for and which French President Francois Hollande described as an "act of war."
  • Less than two days after the attacks Sunday, French warplanes conducted raids in Syria, targeting ISIS' stronghold in Raqqa, the defense ministry said. Reuters reported that the operation was France's biggest strike against ISIS in Syria to date.
  • "The raid ... including 10 fighter jets, was launched simultaneously from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. Twenty bombs were dropped," the ministry said in a statement.
  • The airstrikes, which were carried out in coordination with the U.S., hit a command post, a jihadist recruitment center, a munitions depot and a militant training camp, the statement said.
  • Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins said seven terrorists died in the attack on Friday. Officials initially said there were eight attackers — as did ISIS. It seems now Abdeslam is believed to be the eighth attacker.
  • A French prosecutor also said officials have identified two more assailants, whose names were not released to NBC News — a 20-year-old who was part of the attack on the Stade de France and a 31-year-old who was part of the attack on one of the restaurants in the 10th arrondissement. Both were French nationals living in Belgium.
  • "We consider this means they have a network," Francoise Shepmans, mayor of the town of Molenbeek where the individuals were detained, told Belgium's TV RTBF.
zachcutler

Jakarta: Deadly attack in Indonesian capital; ISIS blamed - CNN.com - 0 views

  • Attackers struck in the middle of the day Thursday
  • CNN security analyst Bob Baer likened the Jakarta attack to the November 13 Paris massacre in which terrorists linked to ISIS struck several locations at the same time. Yet the number of dead was nowhere near the toll of 130 in France, with Clarke Jones,
  • hub -- killing at least
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  • this time in the world's most populous Muslim country.
  • ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack in an official statement posted online by the terror organization, which was translated by the monitoring group Flashpoint and verified by CNN
  • The Jakarta carnage, in an area frequented by foreigners, came 6,000 miles from and two days after ISIS boasted about a suicide bombing in the heart of Istanbul
  • two, wounding 19 and raising alarms about te
  • "It's concerning (to have) yet one more day and another attack in another part of the world," Gohel told CNN
  • That set in motion two militants outside the coffee shop who seized two foreigners,
  • Heavily armed police soon swarmed the scene, firing on the militants and looking for other attackers
  • Dutch national among 19 wounded
  • king for those who helped them in plotting, financing and getting weaponry, according to Charliyan, the police spokesman.By then, police had already counted five assailants dead at th
  • though they are loo
Megan Flanagan

Istanbul: Explosion by ISIS bomber kills at least 10 - CNN.com - 0 views

  • The suicide bomber who killed at least 10 foreigners Tuesday in a popular central Istanbul tourist area belonged to ISIS
  • pinned blame on the group that calls itself the Islamic State, which has entrenched itself in neighboring Syria and Iraq while proving willing time and again to lash out elsewhere.
  • at least nine Germans were killed.
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  • They have targeted the whole of Turkey and the whole world."
  • Syria has been embroiled in a civil war for nearly five years -- a conflict that, according to the United Nations, has cost more than 250,000 lives, spurred more than half the country's 17 million residents to flee and caused humanitarian crises for those left behind, as illustrated by the hundreds starving in the siege of Madaya.
  • ISIS has been behind many of the worst atrocities there
  • including allowing the United States to launch strikes from Incirlik Air Base
  • ISIS has responded by singling out Turkey as a primary target
  • ISIS, which has enemies everywhere and has proven willing to strike those who don't subscribe to its twisted, hard-line version of Sharia law.
  • It's seen as a place where you have a mesh of different entities. It's a real melting pot."
  • Its military cooperation with the United States and other NATO nations in particular has angered ISIS
  • Tuesday's blast -- if it's confirmed to be the terror group's work -- ups the ante for Ankara, forcing it to step up its anti-ISIS fight even more
  • An attack like this is designed to create economic, political and social consequences,
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