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malonema1

The Pritzker Prize, Architecture's Most Prestigious Award, Gets Political | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...e-prizes-political-crazy-world

us

shared by malonema1 on 02 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Even Architecture Prizes Are Political In This Crazy World Related Galleries Stunning Images Show the Earth's Imperiled Water Even Architecture Prizes Are Political In This Crazy World The FCC Graciously Sets Internet Providers Free to Sell Your Data Keeping Fentanyl Out of the US Will Take More Than a Wall Range Rover's New Baby SUV Will Swaddle You for $50,000
  • “Each building can only be in the place that it is located,”
  • “That place involves the climate, the topography, the history, the culture, and the landscape, including the sky and the stars. Yet you don’t have to be from that place to experience it, to feel uplifted, or feel at peace, or feel emotional, or feel good.” Put differently, RCR Arquitectes stands in as a metaphor for appreciating otherness in the world.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Consider RCR Arquitectes’ choice to run its shop in a town of 30,000 people, instead of the nearby metropolis Barcelona. It’s quaint in that way—practically mom-and-pop. Yet, the firm’s three architects work collaboratively, building open structures that anyone can enjoy, the jury says. It’s a much lighter declaration than choosing, say, a woman like Jeanne Gang or an Iranian practice like Admun Studio.
  • RCR Arquitectes’s buildings evoke the same sentiment, by letting light and greenery inside.
malonema1

Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...ting-nikki-haley-1212661827918

trump politics US

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley
  • President Trump is walking back plans to impose new economic sanctions against Russia announced Sunday by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. 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  • Amid the historic developments formally ending the Korean War, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has promised to close down a nuclear test site in May. 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  • ...1 more annotation...
  • North Korea to close down nuclear test site in May
Javier E

The Wall Street Journal's Trump problem | Media | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-street-journals-trump-problem

wsj journalism influence trump media

shared by Javier E on 10 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • The talented staff that remain still produce memorable journalism. But when it comes to covering Trump – according to interviews with 18 current and former Journal staffers, some of whom have provided the Guardian with previously unpublished emails from Baker – many say this is no thanks to management.
  • “The Journal has done a lot of good work in covering the Trump administration, but not nearly as much as it should have,” another recent departee said. “I lay almost all of that at Gerry’s doorstep. Political editors and reporters find themselves either directly stymied by Gerry’s interference or shave the edges off their stories in advance to try to please him (and, by extension, Murdoch).”
  • “This is the most access he has had to a sitting president ever – that is something he’s tried to do and has done in other countries particularly with British prime ministers,” Ellison said. “He’s choosing his own personal access over having any journalistic clout.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Murdoch and Trump have known each other for years on the New York scene, but what started out as a reportedly slightly chilly relationship has warmed considerably in recent years. As recently as April, the two were said to be talking “almost every day” (the White House has denied this). Murdoch’s Fox News played a crucial cheerleading role in Trump’s election and before that, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were known to go on double-dates with Murdoch and his ex-wife Wendi Deng, the two women remaining close even after Murdoch split with Deng. Throughout the campaign, Ivanka was a trustee of the $300m fortune allocated to Murdoch’s daughters with Deng, stepping down only after the financial connection became public.
  • the full transcript revealed a number of lines embarrassing for Trump that the paper had ignored, from Trump’s inquiry about Scottish independence – “What would they do with the British Open if they ever got out? They’d no longer have the British Open” – to his claim that the head of the Boy Scouts had called him to say he had delivered “the greatest speech that was ever made to them” the day before. (The Boy Scouts denied that.)
  • By the time of the February town hall meeting in the WSJ newsroom, tensions were running high between Baker and his staff.
  • And they came to a head again this summer when Politico published a leaked transcript of an Oval Office interview Baker had carried out with Trump, after the Journal had printed a news piece and a partial transcript.
  • In early January 2017, Baker upped the ante, publicly expressing reluctance to accuse Trump of “lying” amid a bout of national media soul-searching over how to cover the incoming president’s false statements, and lashing out at critics in a column mocking a “fit of Trump-induced pearl-clutching among the journalistic elite”. “If we are to use the term ‘lie’ in our reporting, then we have to be confident about the subject’s state of knowledge and his moral intent,” Baker explained of his approach.
  • By adhering to the conservative worldview – newly supercharged by Trump – that all media skews liberal, Baker just may have helped the Journal straddle the divide between readers who want their information from a trustworthy outlet and those typically skeptical of journalism as an institution.
  • Last month, another series of emails were leaked, to the Journal’s top competitor, the New York Times. In them, Baker again chastised his staff for the language they used to describe Trump, in this case in coverage of the president’s erratic rally in Phoenix, Arizona, at the height of controversy over his remarks equating neo-Nazis with protesters opposing them. “Sorry. This is commentary dressed up as news reporting,” Baker wrote in a late-night email to staff about the draft story. “Could we please just stick to reporting what he said rather than packaging it in exegesis and selective criticism?
  • On Wednesday night last week, a staffer contacted the Guardian about the latest obfuscating clause included in a Journal story on the debt ceiling that day. In it, Trump was described as having “condemned white supremacists in Charlottesville”, obscuring the fact that his last word on the subject was rather the opposite. “I almost threw up,” the staffer told the Guardian of reading the story.
  • The full transcript also showed that the Journal’s White House reporters were sidelined during the interview by Baker, who dominated the questioning, speaking familiarly with Ivanka Trump about their children and a party they had both attended in the Hamptons in New York.
  • But many staffers aren’t satisfied to be the best media voice in the Trump echo chamber, given the Journal’s history as one of the top papers in the country, with 16 newsroom Pulitzer prizes under pre-Murdoch editor Paul Steiger between 1991 and 2007 (only one more has been added in the Murdoch era).
  • Carr noted that Baker, as early as 2010, when he was deputy managing editor, was already seen as pushing the WSJ into “adopting a more conservative tone, and editing and headlining articles to reflect a chronic skepticism of the [Obama] administration”.
  • “It really came to a head after the election,” a recent Journal departee told the Guardian. “The election was on Tuesday and it wasn’t until Monday or Tuesday of the next week that the Journal wrote a single story about the legitimate anxiety that Trump’s win had provoked within large sections of the population.”
  • the Journal is not competing with the Post and the Times for scoops and talent the way they have in earlier eras.
  • In November, Poynter reported that 48 Journal employees had accepted buyouts – a trend seen across the media industry. In the months that followed, more staffers opted for the door. The departures include two top White House reporters, well-respected political and policy reporters, veteran foreign correspondents, and virtually the entire national security team, some of whom were poached by the Washington Post.
  • Baker’s influence is often not direct, current and former employees say. Instead, his preferences are internalized by reporters who avoid pitching stories they expect he won’t like or who tone down language in their copy before turning it in.
  • “The main way he influenced the coverage in a political way was not by saying you can’t write about X subject,” one former staffer said. “It was more that there were certain stories that could get into the paper very easily and other stories you knew would be a fight.”
  • Others said reporters, in the DC bureau especially, have had to fight to get their harder-hitting Trump stories published, if they get published at all. “Almost everyone in the newsroom has a story about their story or a story of a colleague’s getting killed,” said a reporter. “That happens in all newspapers, but the killings run in one direction.
  • Murdoch appeared to recognise there was an opportunity for a major publication outside of the coastal media bubble, just as he saw the opportunity for a right-leaning cable channel when he launched Fox News in the 1990s.
  • But the difficulty for the Journal is its owner’s close relationship with the president. This year Murdoch, long adept at cultivating relationships with powerful conservatives, has become closer than ever to the White House, according to some accounts, speaking almost every day.
  • One staffer added: “Words have consequences and Gerry’s terrible handling of things like why we don’t call lies ‘lies’ had a chilling effect.”
  • And Martin Peers, who was head of the Journal’s media and marketing bureau from 2011 until 2014, recalls being pressured to go soft when covering Murdoch’s company and tough on rivals. “It was really striking how any time we were writing something about News Corp they would go over it very carefully,” he told the Guardian. “With the New York Times they’d say we weren’t being hard enough on them.”
  • And as repeated leaks from the newsroom have made clear, top editors have continued to pull reporters back from writing which was too critical of Trump – and there’s hardly an infraction too minor. Recently, a reporter in the Washington bureau was chided by an editor for a tweet regarding Trump’s effects on the stock market, which was deemed to be too sharp on Trump, according to a colleague.
  • “The whole culture of the Journal for decades has been to be fair and accurate but also convey analysis and perspective and meaning,” another ex-Journal person said. “Gerry’s saying ‘just report the facts’, but there’s a difference between journalism and stenography.”
Javier E

The unhappy states of America: Despite an improving economy, Americans are glum - The W... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ing-economy-americans-are-glum

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Americans are more glum now than they were during the Great Recession
  • 2017 turned out to be the worst year for well-being on record. The overall index score was even lower than during the financial crisis, and, for the first time in the decade that Gallup has done this poll, no state in the country showed a statistically significant increase in well-being.
  • In 2009, a year when 15 states showed declines in well-being, money and financial worries were at the top of the list. Today, emotional and psychological factors dominate. People are not content in their jobs and relationships, and depression diagnoses are at an all-time high in the United States.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Some blame politics and polarization for causing people to feel more anxiety and bitterness toward work colleagues and family. There's a constant narrative of division in the country between Republicans and Democrats, gun-rights supporters and gun-control advocates, the religious and the nonreligious, and so on. And there are near daily headlines about chaos in the White House.
  • “We don’t know what is going to happen next. There’s no clear path toward stabilizing either the country or the world.”
  • Almost every demographic group dropped in well-being in 2017 — except for wealthy white men. Women, African Americans, Hispanics and lower-income households (those earning less than $48,000 a year) all saw substantial drops in their perception of their well-being.
  • Democrats also showed far bigger declines than Republicans or independents. “Switching out the person in the Oval Office can and does have an effect on well-being,”
  • While consumer confidence is at the highest level since 2004, polls that look at broader issues than income and spending power don't appear as rosy.
  • Forty percent of American adults now say they are lonely, double the share of people who said that in the 1980s, according to AARP. Some people are even struggling to feel connected to their work colleagues
  • In 2017, the No. 1 fear was corrupt government officials followed by the overall state of health care and worries about pollution. There was also a significant jump last year in fears about the United States getting into another world war.
  • In 2017, half of Americans said one of their top fears was “not having enough money for the future,” a reminder that even if people have jobs now, they remain anxious because they aren't sure how long that will last.
  • “People are feeling more economically insecure, even if they have a job and a salary,” said Rachel Schneider, co-author of “The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty.” “I think it's a combination of knowing you're responsible for your own retirement, knowing you're responsible for your own health care and knowing that you don't have any significant job security.”
  • There's a growing push from academics and even Wall Street bankers, such as hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio, to get politicians to look beyond the national statistics on jobs and economic. Those numbers aren't painting the full picture of how Americans are doing, let alone feeling, experts say.
  • Despite the improving economy, the fear of running out of money down the road jumped nearly 10 points from the year before, and it was followed closely by fears of “high medical bills.”
oliviaodon

American Elections Remain Unprotected - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...549260

russia

shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Two weeks before the inauguration of President Donald Trump, the U.S. intelligence community released a declassified version of its report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. It detailed the activities of  a network of hackers who infiltrated voting systems and stole documents from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. It also issued a stark warning: “Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the U.S. presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against U.S. allies and their election processes.”
  • How disinformation will be deployed in 2018 and beyond is unclear. What is clear, however, is that the Kremlin believes its efforts to sow chaos in the American political process, which it has continued to hone in Europe, have worked and are poised for a return.
  • So far, Washington’s response to all this has been muted.
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  • Russian and American officials have discussed how to stabilize the situation.
  • Fact-checking measures adopted by major tech and social-media companies are unlikely to stop Russia from seeking out new vulnerabilities in Western democracies.
  • While such an attack would mark a major escalation for Russia, it would not be unprecedented. Attacks on at least a dozen electric facilities in America—including one nuclear plant—have been traced back to a Russian-linked group. Russia is also thought to be behind an increasing number of cyberattacks against private corporations and government agencies in Ukraine. Similarly, Moscow waged a massive disinformation and propaganda campaign alongside its annexation of Crimea in 2014.
  • In recent years, Kremlin-linked cyber and disinformation campaigns of varying ambition have hit several European countries. In Germany, Russian state news spread a fake story about the rape of an underage girl by migrants during the height of Europe’s refugee crisis in 2016 that led to dozens of protests across the country. Similarly, Russian-backed broadcasters targeted Germany’s Russian emigrant community allegedly to bolster support for the country’s right-wing Alternative for Germany party in its bid to enter parliament for the first time. In France, Russian-linked hackers were believed to have stolen and leaked emails from French President Emmanuel Macron’s campaign. Moscow also recently launched a French version of RT, the public broadcaster formerly known as Russia Today. Spanish investigators found that both private and state-led Russian-based groups disseminated information on social media to try to sway public opinion ahead of Catalonia’s independence referendum in October.
  • “On the security side, there are some improvements that can happen without the [Trump] administration,” Sulmeyer, the former cyber official, said. “But without a greater counterweight or cost for Russia, none of this is going to stop.”
millerco

Another Republican Call to Arms, but Who Will Answer? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-mccain-corker-bush-trump.html

US trump history politics republicans

shared by millerco on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • George W. Bush. John McCain. Bob Corker. And now Jeff Flake of Arizona, who delivered a stinging indictment of President Trump and his own party on the Senate floor on Tuesday afternoon as he announced that he would not seek another term.
  • His stirring call to arms came minutes after Mr. Trump concluded a private session with Senate Republicans meant to unite them over their shared agenda.
  • The four men represent a new type of freedom caucus, one whose members are free to speak their minds about the president and how they see his words and actions diminishing the United States and its standing in the world without fear of the political backlash from hard-right conservatives.
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  • But who — if anyone — will follow?
  • Well aware of the mercurial nature of the president, most congressional Republicans are loath to do or say anything that could upset Mr. Trump and risk provoking an early-morning Twitter tirade from the White House when they are trying to delicately piece together a complex tax agreement.
  • One can practically sense Republicans tiptoeing around the Capitol, taking extra care not to awaken the president to their presence in a way that could draw a scolding or rebuke.
  • They are equally wary of raising the ire of hard-right activists who already had Mr. Flake in their sights, contributing to his decision. Those activists celebrated Mr. Flake’s decision, claiming a Republican scalp.
  • While Mr. McCain, who is being treated for brain cancer and has spoken bitingly of Mr. Trump in recent weeks, glowingly praised his home-state colleague for his “integrity and honor and decency,” he did not use the Senate floor to second Mr. Flake’s worrisome message of a government and nation at risk. Mr. Flake is popular with his colleagues, and his fellow Republicans quickly noted how sorry they were to hear of his decision. But none joined him publicly in urging Republicans to stand up more defiantly to the president.
  • Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, credited Mr. Flake as a “team player” and man of high principle after Mr. Flake’s speech. But Mr. McConnell quickly turned the Senate floor back to a minor debate over a budget point of order.
nataliedepaulo1

The U.K. Election Wasn't That Much Of A Shock | FiveThirtyEight - 0 views

fivethirtyeight.com/...uk-election-hung-parliament

shared by nataliedepaulo1 on 09 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Despite betting markets and expert forecasts that predicted Theresa May’s Conservatives to win a large majority in the U.K. parliamentary elections, the Tories instead lost ground on Thursday, resulting in a hung parliament. As we write this in the early hours of Friday morning, Conservatives will end up with either 318 or 319 seats, down from the 330 that the Tories had in the previous government. A majority officially requires 326 seats.1Although, there are some ambiguities on account of Sinn Fein, the Irish nationalist party which traditionally does not take its seats in parliament, and the Speaker of the House of Commons, who traditionally does not vote.
  • There were also a lot of events during the campaign, but the compressed time frame makes them hard to sort out from one another. How much did the Conservative manifesto hurt the Tories? Did terrorist attacks in Manchester and London work against them? Was May’s perceived softness toward President Trump a factor, especially after Trump began to attack London Mayor Sadiq Khan? Given the results of the French election, is there an overall resurgence toward liberal multiculturalism in Europe, perhaps as a reaction to Trump? We don’t know the answers to these questions, although we hope to explore some of them in the coming days. We do know that elections around the world are putting candidates, pollsters and the media to the test, and there isn’t a lot they can be taking for granted.
malonema1

FACT CHECK: President Trump's Record On Jobs And Stocks : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...umps-record-on-jobs-and-stocks

US policy trump politics culture

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • It's difficult to tie those gains directly to President Trump's economic vision, however. On average, employers have added 170,000 jobs in each of the 10 months since Trump took office. That's slightly below the 196,000 per month pace during the comparable period in 2016, under President Obama. If you throw out September of this year, when job gains were depressed by hurricanes, Trump's monthly average is closer to Obama's, at 185,000, but the change in administrations doesn't appear to have had much effect on the overall job market.
  • Factories nationwide have added 171,000 jobs so far in 2017 — a rebound from the previous year when factories shed 16,000 jobs. Trump has promised to lead a renaissance in American manufacturing. The sector has generally been adding jobs since 2010, although the strength of export-oriented factories is strongly tied to what's happening in the global economy.
  • According to the Labor Department, there are 95 million Americans 16 and older who are not working. But that figure includes retirees, students and voluntary stay-at-home parents. It's an open question how many might be lured into the workforce. Lower taxes might offer a carrot to would-be workers. The administration is also considering sticks — in the form of a less generous safety net.
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  • The S&P 500-stock index has risen more than 23 percent since Election Day last year. Along with a rising real estate market, that's helped to push the nation's total household wealth to $96.9 trillion. However, as NPR noted last spring, only about half the people in the country own stocks either directly or through retirement accounts.
  • malonema1 on 01 May 18
     
    " "
oliviaodon

Letting It Be an Arms Race - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...550400

US foreign policy

shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • As Americans question whether President Donald Trump has the judgment necessary to command the most capable nuclear arsenal on earth, the Pentagon is moving to order new, more usable nuclear options.
  • aggressive shift that will add to the spiraling cost of the nuclear arsenal, raise the risk of a nuclear exchange, and plunge the country into a new arms race
  • The compromise reflected principles of responsible nuclear policy in place since the late Cold War
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  • Trump’s administration has suggested that it sees nuclear weapons as useful against “non-nuclear strategic attacks” on U.S. infrastructure, perhaps including cyber or terrorist attacks.
  • It proposes two new nuclear-capable systems.
  • Neither weapon is needed to deter potential adversaries, and would instead raise the risk of the use of a nuclear weapon—whether because an adversary thinks it is being attacked or whether a U.S. president thinks he has to order an attack. As it stands, the Pentagon and the Department of Energy, the institutions that would handle the warhead changes, will struggle to find the funding or the manpower to meet existing modernization requirements. New programs would only compound this uncertainty and endanger core nuclear-modernization priorities. Moreover, developing new warheads creates an unpalatable choice: They will either be deployed without a test or with a test. Both options are bad. Lastly, the draft NPR asserts that its program proposals are affordable, but avoids making fiscal trade-offs between different military priorities. Yet Congress will have to ask whether new nuclear weapons programs are really worth the money, given that there is still no plan to pay the $1.2-trillion bill for nuclear weapons over the next 30 years.
  • Even as the Trump administration is proposing expanding U.S. nuclear capabilities, it is subverting traditional mechanisms for controlling them.
  • Today, an astonishing 58 percent of Americans lack confidence in the president’s judgment with the nuclear arsenal. It is difficult to believe that Congress or the American public will quietly acquiesce to a major expansion of U.S. nuclear capabilities and missions. Yet, without concerted pressure, the Trump Nuclear Posture Review will abandon U.S. leadership to reduce nuclear risks and instead follow our adversaries into a world where nuclear competition is commonplace.
aleija

U.S. life expectancy: Americans are dying young at alarming rates - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-8397-a955cd542d00_story.html

health US culture

shared by aleija on 26 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Despite spending more on health care than any other country, the United States has seen increasing mortality and falling life expectancy for people ages 25 to 64, who should be in the prime of their lives. In contrast, other wealthy nations have generally experienced continued progress in extending longevit
  • Although earlier research emphasized rising mortality among non-Hispanic whites in the U.S., the broad trend detailed in this study cuts across gender, racial and ethnic lines. By age group, the highest relative jump in death rates from 2010 to 2017 — 29 percent — has been among people ages 25 to 34.
  • About a third of the estimated 33,000 “excess deaths” that the study says occurred since 2010 were in just four states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana — the first two of which are critical swing states in presidential elections. The state with the biggest percentage rise in death rates among working-age people in this decade — 23.3 percent — is New Hampshire, the first primary state.
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  • “It’s supposed to be going down, as it is in other countries,” said the lead author of the report, Steven H. Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. “The fact that that number is climbing, there’s something terribly wrong.”
  • The opioid epidemic is a major driver of the worrisome numbers, but far from the sole cause. The study found that improvements in life expectancy, largely because of lower rates of infant mortality, began to slow in the 1980s, long before the opioid epidemic became a national tragedy
  • Some of it may be due to obesity, some of it may be due to drug addiction, some of it may be due to distracted driving from cellphones
  • Given the breadth and pervasiveness of the trend, “it suggests that the cause has to be systemic, that there’s some root cause that’s causing adverse health across many different dimensions for working-age adults.”
  • The risk of death from drug overdoses increased 486 percent for midlife women between 1999 and 2017; the risk increased 351 percent for men in that same period. Women also experienced a bigger relative increase in risk of suicide and alcohol-related liver disease.
  • The all-cause death rate — meaning deaths per 100,000 people — rose 6 percent from 2010 to 2017 among working-age people in the United States
  • There’s something more fundamental about how people are feeling at some level — whether it’s economic, whether it’s stress, whether it’s deterioration of family,” she said. “People are feeling worse about themselves and their futures, and that’s leading them to do things that are self-destructive and not promoting health.”
  • . The general trend: Life expectancy improved a great deal for several decades, particularly in the 1970s, then slowed down, leveled off, and finally reversed course after 2014, decreasing three years in a row.
  • Obesity is a significant part of the story. The average woman in America today weighs as much as the average man half a century ago, and men now weigh about 30 pounds more
  • Princeton professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton, whose much-publicized report in 2015 highlighted the death rates in middle-aged whites, published a paper in 2017 pointing to a widening gap in health associated with levels of education, a trend dating to the 1970s. Case told reporters their research showed a “sea of despair” in the United States among people with only a high school diploma or less. She declined to comment on the new report.
  • “When they get up into their 20s, 30s and 40s, they’re carrying the risk factors of obesity that were acquired when they were children. We didn’t see that in previous generations.”
  • Most people in the United States are overweight — an estimated 71.6 percent of the population ages 20 and older, according to the CDC. That figure includes the 39.8 percent who are obese, defined as having a body mass index of 30 or higher in adults (18.5 to 25 is the normal range). Obesity is also rising in children; nearly 19 percent of the population ages 2 to 19 is obese.
  • The average life expectancy in the United States fell behind that of other wealthy countries in 1998 and since then, the gap has grown steadily. Experts refer to this gap as America’s “health disadvantage.”
  • Death rates from suicide, drug overdoses, liver disease and dozens of other causes have been rising over the past decade for young and middle-aged adults, driving down overall life expectancy in the United States for three consecutive years, according to a strikingly bleak study published Tuesday that looked at the past six decades of mortality data.
  • The 33,000 excess deaths are an estimate based on the number of all-cause midlife deaths from 2010 to 2017 that would be expected if mortality was unchanged vs. the number of deaths actually recorded by medical examiners.
  • Outside researchers praised the study for knitting together so much research into a sweeping look at U.S. mortality trends.“This report has universal relevance. It has broad implications for all of society,” said Howard Koh, a professor of public health at Harvard University who was not part of the research team.
  • The average life expectancy in the United States fell behind that of other wealthy countries in 1998, and since then the gap has grown steadily. Experts refer to this gap as the United States’ “health disadvantage.”
  • For example, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, cigarette companies aggressively marketed to women, and the health effects of that push may not show up for decades.
  • Obesity is a significant part of the story. The average woman in the United States today weighs as much as the average man half a century ago, and men now weigh about 30 pounds more. Most people in the United States are overweight — an estimated 71.6 percent of the population age 20 and older, according to the CDC. That figure includes the 39.8 percent who are obese, defined as having a body mass index of 30 or higher in adults (18.5 to 25 is the normal range). Obesity is also rising in children; nearly 19 percent of the population age 2 to 19 is obese.
katherineharron

In Trump world, flattery will get you everywhere -- and nowhere (Opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump

shared by katherineharron on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Sycophancy in politics is often hard to see, something done behind closed doors, away from public scrutiny. But the release of a rough transcript of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's conversation with President Trump offered a window into it. His flattery of Trump began small, as routine ingratiation -- a phone call, a private kowtow, with a limited audience of diplomats and officials inured to this dynamic. But now we have an expanded theater, a media spectacle that plays to an audience whose complicity is eagerly solicited.
  • Politics and sycophancy have a long association, ranging from the ingratiating punctilio of diplomacy to the pomp and fatuity of state visits. But the Trump brand prefers a different version of this old practice, one that exploits new media to intensify and redirect its force.Flatterers perform through the media for a target who often monitors the tribute at a distance. As toadying becomes spectacle, the observers -- or in the patois of new media, followers -- become more important. Where observers traditionally have been bystanders -- sometimes amused, sometimes appalled -- their participation and approbation are now cultivated.
  • We can trace a rough history of this rewiring of flattery. Trump himself tried something like this earlier in his career as a developer, when he reportedly called journalists using an assumed name to praise himself.
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  • Whatever pleasure Trump got out of flattering himself, this deceptive promotion of a brand was essentially flattery for the observer.
  • As kowtowing has become spectacle, flatterers are no longer embarrassed by their abasement. Who can forget the June 2017 cabinet meeting, which opened with a round of competitive sycophancy? Or Kellyanne Conway urging everyone "Go buy Ivanka's stuff?" Or when Anthony Scaramucci, during his brief tenure as White House communications director, addressed the camera directly to repeatedly proclaim "I love the President?"
  • In 2017, during the President's trip to the Middle East, Saudi King Salman, in presenting Trump with the country's highest civilian medal, affirmed that the Saudis respected him far more than his predecessor. Trump's picture was everywhere during the visit, culminating in the inspired five-floor projection of the President on the exterior of the Ritz-Carlton hotel. All this obsequiousness paid off handsomely, as Trump backed the Saudis' vision of the Middle East.
  • The more successful flattery is, the less likely the flatterer is to see it as fraud. It becomes habitual, second nature. Even in a time of swift technological change we can count on humans to, as Shakespeare memorably puts it, "commit the oldest sins the newest kind of ways."
  • Flattery diminishes the trust on which the social order is based, and it ultimately threatens this order. Dante associates flattery with an entire class of transgressions against social order -- such as hypocrisy, lying, graft, sowing of discord, false counsel -- by placing them on one level in hell. Fraud connects all them all.
ethanmoser

Iraqi forces raise flag at Mosul University in push against ISIS | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...sity-in-push-against-isis.html

mosul isis usa iraq

shared by ethanmoser on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Iraqi forces raise flag at Mosul University in push against ISIS
  • Published January 14, 2017 FoxNews.com Facebook0 Twitter0 Email Print A member of Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) stands in a military vehicle at the University of Mosul during a battle with Islamic State militants, in Mosul, Iraq, January 14, 2017. REUTERS/Ahmed Saad - RTSVHSV Iraqi special forces raised the Iraqi flag above the buildings at the Mosul University complex on Friday as they continued the battle for control of the city against Islamic State militants.
  • "We congratulate the Iraqi Security Forces on their continued progress in Eastern Mosul,” U.S. army Col. John Dorrian, a spokesman for the U.S.-led anti-IS coalition said in a statement. “Work still needs to be done but ISIL's days in Mosul are quickly coming to an end.
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  • The U.S.-led coalition supporting the Iraqi forces offensive on Mosul told The Associated Press on Friday that the Islamic State group "warped the purpose of a beloved institution of higher learning when they used the university for military purposes."
  • "The entire university has been burned,"
  • "I think it will take at least two or three years to rebuild," he added
  • The extremist group, which controls most of Deir el-Zour province, has kept the provincial capital under siege since 2014. Government forces have withstood the encirclement thanks to air-dropped humanitarian assistance and weapons and ammunition flown into the airport. Remaining residents have reported malnourishment and starvation amid severe shortages of food, water and fuel. The Islamic State group, which in 2014 seized large parts of Iraq and Syria and established a so-called Islamic caliphate straddling both sides of the border, is under intense pressure in both countries where it has lost significant territory in recent months.
nataliedepaulo1

John Kasich: Repealing Medicaid expansion is 'a very, very bad idea' - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by nataliedepaulo1 on 23 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Email<
  • Washington (CNN)Ohio Gov. John Kasich says he won't "sit silent" and watch the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion get "ripped out" as Republicans work to repeal the law.
  • Kasich said 700,000 Ohio residents now receive care who did not before Obamacare became law, including "a third of whom have mental illness and need to be treated or drug treatment, which is a problem throughout the country."
malonema1

Trump Voter Fraud Commissioner Says Panel Should Be More Transparent Or Disband | HuffPost - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...ng_us_59ef8424e4b0b7e632655fb5

Trump US politics

shared by malonema1 on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • A Democratic member of President Donald Trump’s voter fraud probe said it should urgently disclose what it’s been working on and its future plans, or else disband entirely. Alan King, a probate judge in Jefferson County, Alabama,&nbsp;is one of four Democrats on the 11-member Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. He told HuffPost on Tuesday that he was disappointed in how the commission had conducted business and wouldn’t be surprised if other members of the panel had already drafted a recommendation to the president. “Based on what I’ve read and accounts, it wouldn’t surprise me,”&nbsp;King said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if this whole commission was set up and they had an end result in mind when this commission was first originated.”
  • While he added that it was possible “that there are maybe some pockets of folks on both sides of the aisle who perhaps haven’t followed the rules,” he continued, “it’s a huge leap to go from that type of scenario to then go to to this massive plot, conspiracy of almost election mafia standards, to think that there are massive, widespread voting fraud in the United States.”&nbsp;
  • As some Democrats on the commission have begun openly questioning their fellow commissioners’ activities, Democrats in Congress have asked the Government Accountability Office to review whether the panel is complying with transparency requirements. Several federal lawsuits have also sought to block the commission from operating, alleging it is not complying with federal transparency and privacy requirements. Critics of the panel characterize it as an effort to weaken confidence in American elections, saying it aims to lay the groundwork for more restrictive voting laws and substantiate Trump’s claim that millions voted illegally last year (several studies and investigations have shown voter fraud is not a widespread problem). Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, the commission’s chair, have pledged that the panel would be bipartisan and neutral.
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  • Von Spakovsky defended his role on the commission,&nbsp;citing his work on local election boards in Georgia and Virginia and federal agencies dealing with voting.&nbsp;“You might want to ask him if he knows about any of that experience,” he wrote. After seeing a transcript of King’s quote, Logan Churchwell, a spokesman for Adams, wrote, “Mr. Adams has endeavored to engage the other Commissioners in serious discussion and constructive ideas. Your characterizations of his comments seem beyond anything Alan King would say, considering the Commissioners have exhibited the utmost courtesy to each other and would have never questioned the qualifications of a Commissioner without knowing what they were.”
Javier E

Are Trump's Feuds With Tillerson and Corker a Prelude to War? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...542481

trump war korea foreign policy diplomacy

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • On face, however, the splits with Tillerson and Corker both center around the same material question of whether the United States will start a shooting war, most likely with North Korea.
  • , Corker told the Times that he worried Trump didn’t understand the stakes of his statements on foreign-policy questions, viewing it as a “reality show of some kind.”
  • “He doesn’t realize that, you know, that we could be heading towards World War III with the kinds of comments that he’s making,” said Corker, who is the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and close to Tillerson, and therefore particularly well-placed to analyze Trump’s foreign-policy choices.
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  • There are two obvious things Corker could be talking about (and one hopes no less-obvious ones): North Korea and Iran.
  • Trump keeps telegraphing a desire to start a war with North Korea.&nbsp; Having first drawn blood with his missile-strike on Syria, and been pleased with the reaction from the public and press, Trump seems to want more.
  • Although the official U.S. position, as outlined by other officials, is that all options are on the table, the president keeps suggesting that really only one is on the table. Why else would he so publicly slam the door shut on Tillerson’s open channel to Pyongyang? What else might he mean when he promised that the U.S. will “do what has to be done”?
  • There are other indications, too. In August, after a North Korean missile test, he said, “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal statement, and as I said they will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.” (Aides said the language was improvised, and could not explain what he meant by it.)
  • In mid-September, at the United Nations General Assembly, Trump said that if Pyongyang’s aggression continued, the U.S. “will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” also saying, “The United States is ready, willing and able, but hopefully this will not be necessary.”
  • Of course, Trump could be just talking trash, trying to do the geopolitical dozens with Kim Jong Un, but there’s no way for Kim, or diplomats from other foreign countries, or the American people to know the difference. (North Korea itself claimed Trump’s UN remarks constituted a declaration of war, though the regime has a long history of similar comments.)
  • The impression of a slouch toward war is sharpened by other evidence. Mattis, for example, on Monday told Army generals to be ready to fight a war in Korea. Some of that is standard readiness, but given his own bleak view of a military solution—Mattis said earlier this year that a war against North Korea would be “catastrophic” and “probably the worst kind of fighting in most people's lifetimes”—it could also be an indication of growing probability of a shooting war.
  • Yet the road to a major war is usually a long one. The Bush administration spent months laying the groundwork, both publicly and privately, for the war in Iraq. At this point, the president has demonstrated a pattern of comments that indicate a preference for a military response to North Korea, although it’s not clear that his preference will prevail. That pattern is enough that Trump’s feuds with Tillerson and Corker deserve to be seen not merely as wacky, somewhat disconcerting antics, but as part of a potential move toward a war—whether that’s World War III or not.
Javier E

Alex Stamos, Facebook Data Security Chief, To Leave Amid Outcry - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...facebook-alex-stamos.html

fb cybersecurity privacy security crisis

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • One central tension at Facebook has been that of the legal and policy teams versus the security team. The security team generally pushed for more disclosure about how nation states had misused the site, but the legal and policy teams have prioritized business imperatives, said the people briefed on the matter.
  • “The people whose job is to protect the user always are fighting an uphill battle against the people whose job is to make money for the company,” said Sandy Parakilas, who worked at Facebook enforcing privacy and other rules until 2012 and now advises a nonprofit organization called the Center for Humane Technology, which is looking at the effect of technology on people.
  • Mr. Stamos said in statement on Monday, “These are really challenging issues, and I’ve had some disagreements with all of my colleagues, including other executives.” On Twitter, he said he was “still fully engaged with my work at Facebook” and acknowledged that his role has changed, without addressing his future plans.
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  • Mr. Stamos joined Facebook from Yahoo in June 2015. He and other Facebook executives, such as Ms. Sandberg, disagreed early on over how proactive the social network should be in policing its own platform, said the people briefed on the matter.
  • Mr. Stamos first put together a group of engineers to scour Facebook for Russian activity in June 2016, the month the Democratic National Committee announced it had been attacked by Russian hackers, the current and former employees said.
  • By November 2016, the team had uncovered evidence that Russian operatives had aggressively pushed DNC leaks and propaganda on Facebook. That same month, Mr. Zuckerberg publicly dismissed the notion that fake news influenced the 2016 election, calling it a “pretty crazy idea
  • In the ensuing months, Facebook’s security team found more Russian disinformation and propaganda on its site, according to the current and former employees. By the spring of 2017, deciding how much Russian interference to disclose publicly became a major source of contention within the company.
  • Mr. Stamos pushed to disclose as much as possible, while others including Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of communications and policy, recommended not naming Russia without more ironclad evidence, said the current and former employees.
  • A detailed memorandum Mr. Stamos wrote in early 2017 describing Russian interference was scrubbed for mentions of Russia and winnowed into a blog post last April that outlined, in hypothetical terms, how Facebook could be manipulated by a foreign adversary, they said. Russia was only referenced in a vague footnote. That footnote acknowledged that Facebook’s findings did not contradict a declassified January 2017 report in which the director of national intelligence concluded Russia had sought to undermine United States election, and Hillary Clinton in particular.
  • By last September, after Mr. Stamos’s investigation had revealed further Russian interference, Facebook was forced to reverse course. That month, the company disclosed that beginning in June 2015, Russians had paid Facebook $100,000 to run roughly 3,000 divisive ads to show the American electorate.
  • The public reaction caused some at Facebook to recoil at revealing more, said the current and former employees. Since the 2016 election, Facebook has paid unusual attention to the reputations of Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg, conducting polls to track how they are viewed by the public, said Tavis McGinn, who was recruited to the company last April and headed the executive reputation efforts through September 2017.
  • Mr. McGinn, who now heads Honest Data, which has done polling about Facebook’s reputation in different countries, said Facebook is “caught in a Catch-22.”
  • “Facebook cares so much about its image that the executives don’t want to come out and tell the whole truth when things go wrong,” he said. “But if they don’t, it damages their image.”
  • Mr. McGinn said he left Facebook after becoming disillusioned with the company’s conduct.
  • By December 2017, Mr. Stamos, who reports to Facebook’s general counsel, proposed that he report directly to higher-ups. Facebook executives rejected that proposal and instead reassigned Mr. Stamos’s team, splitting the security team between its product team, overseen by Guy Rosen, and infrastructure team, overseen by Pedro Canahuati, according to current and former employees.
  • “I told them, ‘Your business is based on trust, and you’re losing trust,’” said Mr. McNamee, a founder of the Center for Humane Technology. “They were treating it as a P.R. problem, when it’s a business problem. I couldn’t believe these guys I once knew so well had gotten so far off track.”
Javier E

Donald Trump's Words Are Reshaping American Politics - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...553349

language psychology politics trump culture values

shared by Javier E on 15 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Do the president’s words matter?In Donald Trump’s first year in office, there has been a surprisingly widespread effort to argue that they do not. Liberals and moderates occasionally insist that the media and the public should shift their attention from the president’s vulgar statements to the real policy work happening at federal agencies.
  • The upshot seems to be: Ignore the words, heed the substance.
  • But Trump’s words are his substance. “Politics is persuasion as well as coercion,” the political scientist Jacob Levy wrote last week, rightly arguing that Trump has “changed what being a Republican means.”
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • through persuasive insistence. On issues as diverse as the alleged dangers of immigration and the nature of truth, Trump’s words have the power to cleave public opinion, turning nonpolitical issues into partisan maelstroms and turning partisan attitudes on their head.
  • Years ago (even months ago) it would have been absurd to imagine “law and order” Republicans souring on the FBI; or that the party of Reagan and Bush would turn on the NFL, America’s most orgiastically patriotic sport.
  • In 2014, about 60 percent of both Republicans and Democrats said the FBI was doing an "excellent" or "good" job. Last year, their views forked: Republican approval of the agency fell by about 10 points, while Democratic opinion improved by a similar margin.
  • And yet, because Democrats have become more pro-immigrant under Trump, a record-high share of Americans now say "immigrants strengthen the country.”
  • Trump evinces not a Midas touch, but a Moses touch—an extraordinary talent for planting a stake in the ground and dividing the landscape before him.
  • In mid-2016, 20 percent of both Republicans and Democrats considered Russia an “ally” or “friendly.” One year later, Republicans were more than twice as likely as Democrats to say the same.
  • Immigration had for years been a marginal political topic, especially when compared with issues like jobs and terrorism. But Trump effectively recast immigration as a question of American identity and national security.
  • The construction of a wall along the Mexican border, once a fringey scheme, became the centerpiece of the GOP presidential candidate’s agenda. Today, three-quarters of Trump supporters say that “building the wall” should be the highest priority of his presidency
  • Less than 20 percent of Republicans said they had unfavorable views of the NFL in the summer of 2017. But their disapproval had more than tripled by October, after Trump blasted players for kneeling to protest police violence during the national anthem
  • Trump’s “mere” words could starve his party of moderate legislators, while encouraging Democratic candidates to embrace more liberal positions to distinguish themselves as distinctly anti-Trump.
  • It's tempting to downplay the power of Trump's words by saying their influence is “merely” shifting public opinion. But that's not quite right. First, there’s nothing subtle about Republican voters clutching nativism, the far-right right clutching Nazism, or Democratic voters radicalizing in defiance of the president.
  • Second, Trump’s rhetorical posture has some real policy implications. Though he hasn’t yet signed any major legislation on immigration, his harsh stance on undocumented workers empowered the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to increase arrests by 40 percent in his first year, often to shocking effect
  • And his constant disparagement of experts who refuse to parrot his policies has sucked the talent out of several government agencies, notably the State Department.
  • Trump’s refusal to accept critical information as true—from his denial of Russian interference in the 2016 election to the “alternative facts” about his inauguration size—has demolished the right’s faith and trust in a free press. Three-quarters of the GOP now say that news organizations make up anti-Trump stories.
  • Even worse, a January study found that nearly half of Republicans believe that accurate stories that “cast a politician or political group in a negative light” are “always” fake news. Trump, along with Fox News, has given his supporters the license to self-deport from reality.
  • Trump’s obsession with building and broadcasting an alternative ledger of facts has made epistemology the fundamental crisis of his term
  • In its first month, the administration invented or mainstreamed a new vocabulary of mendacity—e.g., fake news, alternative facts—and within 10 months, Trump made more than 1,500 false or misleading claims, according to The Washington Post. That’s roughly six lies, exaggerations, or omissions per day
  • No legislation, no executive order, and no official speech has caused this shift. It is the president’s words, delivered often via Twitter and amplified on Fox News, that have exploded the very notion of a shared political truth.
  • The insistence that Trump’s words don’t matter isn’t incidental to the GOP’s broader strategy. It is the strategy—to quarantine Trump’s most noxious rhetoric and proceed apace with traditional Republican governance.
  • The idea that a president’s words don’t matter is a deeply ahistorical position. And that’s particularly true for the GOP
  • Perhaps Republicans don’t treat Trump as a typical Republican president because, in a very real sense, Trump is not really the president. Instead, he has become a kind of nationalist identity guru for the new American right.
  • an anonymous White House source all but acknowledged this strategy, telling Axios that the president would spend 2018 seeking “unexpected cultural flashpoints,” like the NFL’s kneeling controversy. The White House sees Trump’s principle talent as the ability to activate cultural resentment among his supporters, encouraging them to redefine their identity and values around a nativist anger.
  • Politics is downstream from persuasion, and law is downstream from language.
malonema1

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke Proposes Shrinking Monuments - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...540843

US trump culture

shared by malonema1 on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • In April, President Trump ordered Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to review more than two dozen national monuments, arguing that the designation of sites under previous administrations had gotten out of hand. Months later, Zinke’s recommendations, detailed in a leaked memo delivered to the White House, have sparked concern among local officials and environmental groups, prompting some to describe the proposals as “unprecedented.”
  • The contents of the report were made public a week shy of the 111th anniversary of America’s very first national monument designation. On September 24, 1906, Theodore Roosevelt deemed an area known as Devils Tower, Wyoming, worthy of preservation under the Antiquities Act. That act, passed the same year, gives presidents the power to protect “objects of historic and scientific interest.”
  • In his assessment, Zinke proposed shrinking Bears Ears from 1.35 million acres to roughly 160,000, saying changes would “provide a much-needed change for the local communities who border and rely on these lands.” Still, environmental groups have pledged to fight Trump in court if he follows through on the recommendations.
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  • I spoke with Mark Squillace, a law professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and former assistant to Bruce Babbitt, the interior secretary under President Bill Clinton, about the unprecedented territory the Trump administration has entered into—and the history behind a significant presidential power. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
malonema1

Full Text, Analysis: Trump's 2016 Election Night Victory Speech, 1 Year Later : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-speech-annotated-1-year-later

US trump politics

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump's 2016 Victory Speech, Annotated 1 Year Later Facebook Twitter Flipboard Email
  • Much has changed in the year since Donald Trump gave his election night victory speech. Journalists across the NPR newsroom have annotated his remarks in retrospect, providing context and analysis to his policy promises and noting who, among the people he thanked, is still in the inner circle.
  • malonema1 on 01 May 18
     
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oliviaodon

What Russian Journalists Uncovered About Russian Election Meddling - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...549422

russia

shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Much of 2017 was consumed with untangling the political mess that was 2016 and Russia’s role in it. Much of what we learned came from&nbsp; American journalists, who brought us revelation after revelation about how the Kremlin meddled in the presidential election. Through these reporters’ domestic sources—in the White House, Congress, and the intelligence community—we learned how Russians bought Facebook ads aimed at sowing division; how Russian government agencies hacked the Democratic National Committee and congressional races; how Russians loosely affiliated with the Kremlin reached out to the Trump campaign; and how the Kremlin turned the popular Kaspersky Labs anti-virus software into a spying tool.
  • Here’s a rundown of what we learned from the Russian press this year:
  • revealed how and when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the attack on the American election.
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  • Because of Putin’s highly conspirological mindset, he apparently blamed Goldman Sachs and Hillary Clinton for the release of the embarrassing information, Soldatov and Borogan reported.
  • An October report from the Russian business media outlet RBC explained in great detail how the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, also known as the “troll factory,” operated during the 2016 election. The report, authored by two Russian journalists, detailed the funding, budget, operating methods, and tactics, of the 100 trolls who spent 2016 populating American social media sites with divisive commentary and imitating civil rights groups. The report showed how the Agency was financed through its owner, Putin’s court caterer Yevgeny Prigozhin. It also detailed the reach of various politically inflammatory posts. It showed, for example, how the Agency produced over 20 Facebook posts that gathered over a million unique views each.
  • That same month, TVRain, Russia’s last independent television network, interviewed “Maxim,” a man who had worked as a troll at this factory. He revealed that the factory was largely staffed by college students from the prestigious St. Petersburg State University, Russia’s #2 university; their majors included international relations, linguistics, and journalism. They were, in other words, young, educated, worldly, and urban—the very cohort Americans imagine would rise up against someone like Putin. Instead, they worked in the factory, making nearly double the average Russian’s salary, sowing discord on Twitter, Facebook, and in the comments sections of various websites. They were instructed not to mention Russia, but instead to focus on issues that divided Americans, like guns and race.
  • ozlovsky told the journalists how he had been entrapped and blackmailed into working for the FSB, the main Russian security agency, nearly a decade ago. He said that when he hacked into the servers of the DNC, he purposely left behind a calling card: a data file with the number of his visa to the Caribbean Island of St. Martin, as well as his passport number. Kozlovsky also said that he was arrested now because the FSB wanted “to hide the digital traces” of what he did. (It’s worth noting that many of these claims are unverified.)
  • This had previously been the exclusive domain of the FSB—once run by Putin—and the GRU was trying to muscle in on the FSB’s territory and money. A side effect of this internal rivalry, Reiter concluded, was how the Americans discovered the hack.
  • Why has there been so little reporting on Russian election interference coming out of the place that perpetrated it? For one thing, the Russian security services and the Kremlin do not leak, at least not nearly as much as their American counterparts, and they are suspicious of Western journalists, of whom there are fewer and fewer these days. Russian government officials also “don’t like talking to independent journalists, but they’re still better to talk to than to American journalists,” said Liza Osetinskaya, a legendary Russian editor who now runs The Bell.
  • The problem is that independent journalism in Russia has been decimated.
  • Facing this kind of political and economic pressure, many of Russia’s journalists—many of them among the country’s best—either left home or abandoned the profession altogether.* What we are witnessing “is the last phase of the death of independent Russian media,” Galina Timchenko said at last summer’s Aspen Ideas Festival. She is another well-known Russian editor forced out under Kremlin pressure. She now runs the independent Meduza from Latvia. It has a fraction of the reach of the outlet she ran for a decade, Lenta.ru.The squelching of press freedom and the shuttering of independent media abroad is, in other words, not an academic matter. As 2017 has shown, when these voices are silenced, we know far less than we need about vital national security interests. If the violation of an abstract principle doesn’t bother you, its very concrete repercussions should.
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