Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged editorial

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Javier E

The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto: Great for Facebook, Bad for Journalism - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • 85 percent of all online advertising revenue is funneled to either Facebook or Google—leaving a paltry 15 percent for news organizations to fight over.
  • Now, Zuckerberg is making it clear that he wants Facebook to take over many of the actual functions—not just ad dollars—that traditional news organizations once had.
  • Zuckerberg uses abstract language in his memo—he wants Facebook to develop “the social infrastructure for community,” he writes—but what he’s really describing is building a media company with classic journalistic goals: The Facebook of the future, he writes, will be “for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • In the past, the deaths of news organizations have jeopardized the prospect of a safe, well-informed, civically-engaged community
  • One 2014 paper found a substantial drop-off in civic engagement in both Seattle and Denver from 2008 to 2009, after both cities saw the closure of longstanding daily newspapers
  • The problem is that Zuckerberg lays out concrete ideas about how to build community on Facebook, how to encourage civic engagement, and how to improve the quality and inclusiveness of discourse—but he bakes in an assumption that news, which has always been subsidized by the advertising dollars his company now commands, will continue to feed into Facebook’s system at little to no cost to Facebook
  • In some ways, Zuckerberg is building a news organization without journalists. The uncomfortable truth for journalists, though, is that Facebook is much better at community building in the digital age than news organizations are.
  • Facebook is asking its users to act as unpaid publishers and curators of content
  • for context: The Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun claims that its  circulation of 9 million copies daily makes it the largest in the world
  • Last quarter, Facebook counted nearly 1.9 billion monthly active users.
  • The New York Times had about 1.6 million digital subscribers as of last fall.
  • you can see how Zuckerberg is continuing to push Facebook’s hands-off approach to editorial responsibility. Facebook is outsourcing its decision-making power about what’s in your News Feed. Instead of the way a newspaper editor decides what’s on the front page, the user will decide.
  • “For those who don’t make a decision, the default will be whatever the majority of people in your region selected, like a referendum,” Zuckerberg wrote. Which makes some sense. There are all kinds of issues with an American company imposing its cultural values uniformly on 1.9 billion individuals all over the world.
  • In the United States, the combined daily prime time average viewership for CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC was 3.1 million people in 2015,
  • and now also to act as unpaid editors, volunteering to teach Facebook’s algorithmic editors how and when to surface the content Facebook does not pay for.
  • In other words, Facebook is building a global newsroom run by robot editors and its own readers.
  • he must also realize that what he’s building is a grave threat to journalism
  • Lip service to the crucial function of the Fourth Estate is not enough to sustain it. All of this is the news industry’s problem; not Zuckerberg’s. But it’s also a problem for anyone who believes in and relies on quality journalism to make sense of the world.
  • Zuckerberg doesn’t want Facebook to kill journalism as we know it. He really, really doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean he won’t.
nataliedepaulo1

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

  • 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."
nataliedepaulo1

Trump pivots to economic message in Boeing visit - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

  • Trump pivots to economic message in Boeing visit
  • North Charleston, South Carolina (CNN)President Donald Trump credited his young presidency Friday with creating a business climate that is incentivizing American companies to keep their businesses in the US and invest in American manufacturing.
  • Trump also vowed to "very strongly enforce our trade rules and stop foreign cheating," though he has not yet taken steps to label countries he decried during the campaign -- such as China -- as currency manipulators, which he could do by executive action. Trump has also floated imposing a tariff on imports from countries where he believes the US is at a trade disadvantage, though he did not specifically address those plans on Friday.
Javier E

US-China war would be a disaster for the world, says Communist party | World news | The... - 0 views

  • “Were the United States and China to wage war on one another, the whole world would divide itself,” the People’s Daily newspaper argued in a commentary, paraphrasing Henry Kissinger
  • Fears of a potentially calamitous trade war, or even a military clash between the two nuclear powers, have been building since Trump’s shock election win last November.
  • Steve Bannon, Trump’s influential chief strategist, was last week reported to have warned last year that war between the US and China in the resource-rich waterway was inevitable.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Meanwhile, in a likely indication of the frictions between Washington and Beijing, Trump has yet to speak to his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, despite having held conversations with at least 18 world leaders since his inauguration.
  • Last month, the China’s foreign ministry urged the US president’s team to “speak and act cautiously” after the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, vowed the US would foil Chinese efforts to “take over” the South China Sea.
  • In a diplomatically worded editorial published on page three of the People’s Daily domestic edition on Monday, the voice of the Communist party said both countries should strive to avoid confrontation, conflict, misunderstandings and miscalculations.
  • Differences of opinion were inevitable due to the historical, cultural, economic and social differences between the US and China, the article said, “but wise men should seek common ground”. The article was printed under the byline “Zhong Sheng”, a homonym for “Voice of China”.
  • “The Chinese have not let themselves be bated … They understand that they are dealing with a different American leader who operates in different ways. They want to manage it carefully so it doesn’t needlessly escalate,” said Medeiros, who is now the managing director for Asia at the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group.
  • However, attitudes had shifted from nervousness about the US president’s erratic tweeting to resignation that the two countries were entering a “difficult period”. “The possibilities for an escalation of tensions are growing because distrust is high,” the article said.
  • Susan Shirk, the head of the 21st Century China Centre at the University of California, San Diego, said China specialists were “flummoxed” at Trump’s apparent determination to take on Beijing and said such moves came at an unfortunate time.
  • “As a person who sees a very strong connection between Chinese domestic politics and its foreign policy, I see the Trump statements as resonating through Chinese foreign policy in a way that could really be dangerous,” said Shirk, the author of China: Fragile Superpower
Javier E

Can Megyn Kelly Escape Her Fox News Past? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The TV producer in Ailes saw a marketing niche, and the political operative in him saw a direct way of courting voters. Rupert Murdoch owned the network, but Ailes was its intellectual author. In the two decades since, the network has thrived without legitimate competition of any kind. It has proved to be a big tent, sheltering beneath it some excellent reporters but also a collection of blowhards, performance artists, cornballs, and Republican operatives in rehab from political failures and personal embarrassments. With the help of this antic cast, the Fox audience has come to understand something important that it did not know before: The people who make “mainstream” news and entertainment don’t just look down on conservatives and their values—they despise them.
  • Her understanding of the legal aspects of news stories and her tendency to conduct interviews as hostile cross-examinations (“Stay in bounds!” “I’ve already ceded the point!” “Don’t deflect!”) made her a riveting journalist-entertainer
  • Almost as soon as the election ended, Fox News went back to work on the mission, emphasizing a variety of themes, each intended to demonize the left. At the top of the list was the regular suggestion that Barack Obama was an America-hating radical, an elaboration of Glenn Beck’s observation (on Fox) that the president had “a deep-seated hatred for white people.” Other themes included the idea that straight white men were under ever-present threat from progressive policies and attitudes; that Planned Parenthood was a kind of front operation for baby murder; that political correctness had made the utterance of even the most obvious factual statements dangerous; and that the concerns of black America—including, especially, those of the Black Lives Matter movement—were so illogical, and so emotionally expressed, that they revealed millions of Americans to be beyond the reach of reason.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • We will never know to what extent Fox created or merely reported on the factor that turned out to be so decisive in the election: that to be white and conscious in America was to be in a constant state of rage.
  • In the middle of all this, feeding clips of ammo into the hot Fox News machine, was Megyn Kelly. To watch her, during one of her interviews on the subject of race and policing, interrupt a black guest to ask her whether she’d ever called white people “crackers” was to see Kelly in action, fired up and ready to go. In some respects, she was an independent actor at Fox, with her own show and ultimate control of its editorial content. But she was also a cog in something turning, and what the great machine ultimately produced was President Donald Trump.
  • As she tells it, one of the first questions Ailes asked her was “how the daughter of a nurse and a college professor understood anything other than left wing dogma.” She replied that although she’d been raised in a Democratic household, she had always been apolitical. She got the job.
  • he wanted people who hadn’t been tainted by the left-wing media machine, so they could be trained in the attitudes and opinions the network had been founded to advance.
  • Kelly is an unbelievably talented broadcaster—smart, funny, quick-witted, and able to handle a bit of fluff with as much zeal as she tackles a serious story. There can’t have been anyone more telegenic in the history of the business.
  • By 2010, the network had become so popular that—according to Gabriel Sherman’s biography, The Loudest Voice in the Room—Ailes added a new goal to the mission: the election of the next president.
  • she evinced her signature political stance: free-market enthusiasm combined with Nixonian law-and-order conservatism. “Enjoy prison!” she would call out after showing a video of an especially inept criminal enterprise.
  • She popped off the screen—fun, sexy, tough—and became popular not just with conservatives but also (in the mode of a guilty pleasure) with many progressives, including her sometime nemesis Jon Stewart, who once said she was his favorite Fox personality.
  • to see her segments on Black Lives Matter—which first aired as the primaries were getting under way and continued until the general election itself—was to see how Fox often stirred up racial anger among its viewers, a kind of anger that was crucial fuel for the Republican outcome Roger Ailes so desired.
  • hen Kelly was a litigator in high-stakes lawsuits, she learned a skill of the trade: taunting her adversaries until they snapped. “I might say something passive-aggressive just to get opposing counsel mad,” she writes. “And then when he got worked up about it, I would say calmly, ‘You seem upset. Do you need a break? We can take a moment if you’d like to step outside and get yourself together.’ ” She became “an expert in making them lose their cool.”
  • n her regular application of it to black activists, she contributed to an ugly mood that was the hallmark of Fox all last year: one of white aggrievement at a country gone mad, led by a radical black president supported by irrational black protesters who were gaining power.
  • , she introduced her TV audience to Malik Shabazz, the president of Black Lawyers for Justice and a former president of the New Black Panthers Party. Shabazz is a radical—an anti-Zionist who believes that Jews dominated the Atlantic slave trade and were involved in the 9/11 attacks, he is in a sense far more radical than Bill Ayers—but Kelly did not tell the audience that. Nor did she tell them that she had had Shabazz on her show in the past. The two proved useful to each other; he got to go deep behind enemy lines to spread his theories, while she got to show her audience members a black man who really does hate them. But to the casual viewer, he seemed like merely another Black Lives Matter supporter, no more or less extreme in his views than D. L. Hughley.
  • This was Fox News last spring and summer and into the fall: a place where black guests were always a few prodding questions away from telling the audience what they really felt about whites, and a place where white hosts were quick to defend other members of their race from unfair accusations of bias. These tactics were integral to the network’s mission: to get conservative ideas out there, to help elect a Republican president, and to make exciting television while doing it. Kelly proved adept on all fronts.
maxwellokolo

Colin Kaepernick Reportedly Will Stand for National Anthem Next Season - 0 views

  •  
    San Francisco 49ers Michael Zagaris/Getty Images After kneeling during the playing of the national anthem throughout the 2016 season, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick will reportedly resume standing in 2017. According to ESPN's Adam Schefter, sources said Kaepernick will stand to avoid detracting from progress he believes has been made and the awareness brought to the issue of social inequality.
Javier E

Magazine - Roberts's Rules - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Roberts added that in some ways he considered his situation—overseeing a Court that is evenly divided on important issues—to be ideal. “You do need some fluidity in the middle, [if you are going] to develop a commitment to a different way of deciding things.” In other words, on a divided Court where neither camp can be confident that it will win in the most controversial cases, both sides have an incentive to work toward unanimity, to achieve a kind of bilateral disarmament.
  • Marshall’s example had taught him, Roberts said, that personal trust in the chief justice’s lack of an ideological agenda was very important, and Marshall’s ability to win this kind of trust inspired him
  • “If I’m sitting there telling people, ‘We should decide the case on this basis,’ and if [other justices] think, ‘That’s just Roberts trying to push some agenda again,’ they’re not likely to listen very often,” he observed.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • He acknowledges that his undergraduate thesis at Harvard about the failure of the British Liberal Party in the Edwardian era may have reflected his early suspicion of the politics of personality. “My central thesis with respect to the Liberal Party was that they made a fatal mistake in investing too heavily in the personalities of Lloyd George and Churchill, as opposed to adopting a more broad-based reaction to the rise of Labour; that they were steadily fixated on the personalities.”
  • Roberts said he intended to use his power to achieve as broad a consensus as possible. “It’s not my greatest power; it’s my only power,” he laughed. “Say someone is committed to broad consensus, and somebody else is just dead set on ‘My way or the highway. And I’ve got five votes, and that’s all I need.’ Well, you assign that [case] to the [consensus-minded] person, and it gives you a much better chance, out of the box, of getting some kind of consensus.”
  • “You’re always trying to persuade people, obviously, as an advocate,” he said. “And I do find, I did find, that you can be generally more successful in persuading people, in arguing a case [when you] go in with something that you think has the possibility of getting seven votes rather than five. You don’t like going in thinking, ‘Here’s my pitch, and I’m honing it to get five votes.’ That’s a risky strategy,”
  • It is, whatever else, a fascinating personal psychology dynamic, to get nine different people with nine different views. It’s going to take some time,” he said. Some justices prefer arguments in writing, others are more receptive to personal appeals, and all react badly to heavy-handed orders. To lead such a strong-willed group requires the skills of an orchestra conductor, as Felix Frankfurter used to say—or of the extremely subtle and observant Supreme Court advocate that Roberts used to be.
  • Another reason for Rehnquist’s success as a chief justice, Roberts said, was his temperament—namely, that he knew who he was and had no inclination to change his views simply to court popularity. “That Scandinavian austerity and sense of fate and complication,” as Roberts put it, were important parts of Rehnquist’s character, as was his Lutheran faith. “It’s a significant and purposeful mode of worship to get up in the morning to do your job as best you can, to go to bed at night and not to worry too much about whether the best that you can do is good enough or not. And he didn’t: once a case was decided, it was decided, and if every editorial page in the country was going to trash it, he didn’t care.” Roberts said he associated Rehnquist with a certain midwestern stubbornness. “Anyone who clerked for him was familiar with him intoning the phrase, ‘Well, I’m just not going to do it.’” Here Roberts did a spot-on impersonation of Rehnquist’s deadpan drawl. “That meant that was the end of it, no matter how much you were going to try to persuade him. It wasn’t going to happen.”
  • “Politics are closely divided,” he observed. “The same with the Congress. There ought to be some sense of some stability, if the government is not going to polarize completely. It’s a high priority to keep any kind of partisan divide out of the judiciary as well.”
Javier E

Is This Really the End for the Euro? - Clive Crook - Business - The Atlantic - 1 views

  • This editorial in The Economist does an excellent job of explaining what is at stake in Europe.
Javier E

The Dark Power of Fraternities - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • College fraternities—by which term of art I refer to the formerly all-white, now nominally integrated men’s “general” or “social” fraternities, and not the several other types of fraternities on American campuses (religious, ethnic, academic)—are as old, almost, as the republic.
  • While the system has produced its share of poets, aesthetes, and Henry James scholars, it is far more famous for its success in the powerhouse fraternity fields of business, law, and politics. An astonishing number of CEOs of Fortune&nbsp;500 companies, congressmen and male senators, and American presidents have belonged to fraternities
  • They also have a long, dark history of violence against their own members and visitors to their houses, which makes them in many respects at odds with the core mission of college itself.
  • ...62 more annotations...
  • A recent series of articles on fraternities by Bloomberg News’s David Glovin and John Hechinger notes that since 2005, more than 60 people—the majority of them students—have died in incidents linked to fraternities, a sobering number in itself, but one that is dwarfed by the numbers of serious injuries, assaults, and sexual crimes that regularly take place in these houses.
  • I have spent most of the past year looking deeply into the questions posed by these lawsuits, and more generally into the particular nature of fraternity life on the modern American campus
  • to answer the vexing question “why don’t colleges just get rid of their bad fraternities?”—the system, and its individual frats, have only grown in power and influence. Indeed, in many substantive ways, fraternities are now mightier than the colleges and universities that host them.
  • The entire multibillion-dollar, 2,000-campus American college system
  • the Kappa Alpha Society. Word of the group spread, and a new kind of college institution was founded, and with it a brand-new notion: that going to college could include some pleasure. It was the American age of societies, and this new type fit right in.
  • every moment of the experience is sweetened by the general understanding that with each kegger and rager, each lazy afternoon spent snoozing on the quad (a forgotten highlighter slowly drying out on the open pages of Introduction to Economics, a Coke&nbsp;Zero sweating beside it), they are actively engaged in the most significant act of self-improvement available to an American young person: college!
  • There are many thousands of American undergraduates whose economic futures (and those of their parents) would be far brighter if they knocked off some of their general-education requirements online, or at the local community college—for pennies on the dollar—before entering the Weimar Republic of traditional-college pricing. But college education, like weddings and funerals, tends to prompt irrational financial decision making,
  • depends overwhelmingly for its very existence on one resource: an ever-renewing supply of fee-paying undergraduates. It could never attract hundreds of thousands of them each year—many of them woefully unprepared for the experience, a staggering number (some 40&nbsp;percent) destined never to get a degree, more than 60&nbsp;percent of them saddled with student loans that they very well may carry with them to their deathbeds—if the experience were not accurately marketed as a blast.
  • When colleges tried to shut them down, fraternities asserted that any threat to men’s membership in the clubs constituted an infringement of their right to freedom of association. It was, at best, a legally delicate argument, but it was a symbolically potent one, and it has withstood through the years. The powerful and well-funded political-action committee that represents fraternities in Washington has fought successfully to ensure that freedom-of-association language is included in all higher-education reauthorization legislation, thus “disallowing public Universities the ability to ban fraternities.”
  • While the fraternities continued to exert their independence from the colleges with which they were affiliated, these same colleges started to develop an increasingly bedeviling kind of interdependence with the accursed societies
  • the fraternities involved themselves very deeply in the business of student housing, which provided tremendous financial savings to their host institutions, and allowed them to expand the number of students they could admit. Today, one in eight American students at four-year colleges lives in a Greek house
  • fraternities tie alumni to their colleges in a powerful and lucrative way. At least one study has affirmed what had long been assumed: that fraternity men tend to be generous to their alma&nbsp;maters. Furthermore, fraternities provide colleges with unlimited social programming of a kind that is highly attractive to legions of potential students
  • It is true that fraternity lawsuits tend to involve at least one, and often more, of the four horsemen of the student-life apocalypse, a set of factors that exist far beyond frat row
  • the binge-drinking epidemic, which anyone outside the problem has a hard time grasping as serious (everyone drinks in college!) and which anyone with knowledge of the current situation understands as a lurid and complicated disaster
  • The second is the issue of sexual assault of female undergraduates by their male peers, a subject of urgent importance but one that remains stubbornly difficult even to quantify
  • The third is the growing pervasiveness of violent hazing on campus
  • But it’s impossible to examine particular types of campus calamity and not find that a large number of them cluster at fraternity houses
  • the fourth is the fact that Boomers, who in their own days destroyed the doctrine of in loco parentis so that they could party in blissful, unsupervised freedom, have grown up into the helicopter parents of today
  • during the period of time under consideration, serious falls from fraternity houses on the two Palouse campuses far outnumbered those from other types of student residences, including privately owned apartments occupied by students. I began to view Amanda Andaverde’s situation in a new light.
  • Why are so many colleges allowing students to live and party in such unsafe locations? And why do the lawsuits against fraternities for this kind of serious injury and death—so predictable and so preventable—have such a hard time getting traction? The answers lie in the recent history of fraternities and the colleges and universities that host them.
  • This question is perhaps most elegantly expressed in the subtitle of Robert D.&nbsp;Bickel and Peter F.&nbsp;Lake’s authoritative 1999 book on the subject, The Rights and Responsibilities of the Modern University: Who Assumes the Risks of College Life?
  • The answer to this question has been steadily evolving ever since the 1960s, when dramatic changes took place on American campuses, changes that affected both a university’s ability to control student behavior and the status of fraternities in the undergraduate firmament. During this period of student unrest, the fraternities—long the unquestioned leaders in the area of sabotaging or ignoring the patriarchal control of school administrators—became the exact opposite: representatives of the very status&nbsp;quo the new activists sought to overthrow. Suddenly their beer bashes and sorority mixers, their panty raids and obsession with the big game, seemed impossibly reactionary when compared with the mind-altering drugs being sampled in off-campus apartments where sexual liberation was being born and the Little Red Book proved, if nothing else, a fantastic coaster for a leaky bong.
  • American colleges began to regard their students not as dependents whose private lives they must shape and monitor, but as adult consumers whose contract was solely for an education, not an upbringing. The doctrine of in loco parentis was abolished at school after school.
  • Through it all, fraternities—for so long the repositories of the most outrageous behavior—moldered, all but forgotten.
  • Animal House,&nbsp;released in 1978, at once predicted and to no small extent occasioned the roaring return of fraternity life that began in the early ’80s and that gave birth to today’s vital Greek scene
  • In this newly forming culture, the drugs and personal liberation of the ’60s would be paired with the self-serving materialism of the ’80s, all of which made partying for its own sake—and not as a philosophical adjunct to solving some complicated problem in Southeast Asia—a righteous activity for the pampered young collegian. Fraternity life was reborn with a vengeance.
  • These new members and their countless guests brought with them hard drugs, new and ever-developing sexual attitudes, and a stunningly high tolerance for squalor
  • Adult supervision was nowhere to be found. Colleges had little authority to intervene in what took place in the personal lives of its students visiting private property. Fraternities, eager to provide their members with the independence that is at the heart of the system—and responsive to members’ wish for the same level of freedom that non-Greek students enjoyed—had largely gotten rid of the live-in resident advisers who had once provided some sort of check on the brothers
  • , in 1984 Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, with the ultimate result of raising the legal drinking age to 21 in all 50 states. This change moved college partying away from bars and college-sponsored events and toward private houses—an ideal situation for fraternities
  • lawsuits began to pour in.
  • Liability insurance became both ruinously expensive and increasingly difficult to obtain. The insurance industry ranked American fraternities as the sixth-worst insurance risk in the country—just ahead of toxic-waste-removal companies.
  • For fraternities to survive, they needed to do four separate but related things: take the task of acquiring insurance out of the hands of the local chapters and place it in the hands of the vast national organizations; develop procedures and policies that would transfer as much of their liability as possible to outside parties; find new and creative means of protecting their massive assets from juries; and—perhaps most important of all—find a way of indemnifying the national and local organizations from the dangerous and illegal behavior of some of their undergraduate members.
  • comprising a set of realities you should absolutely understand in detail if your son ever decides to join a fraternity.
  • you may think you belong to Tau Kappa Epsilon or Sigma Nu or Delta Tau Delta—but if you find yourself a part of life-changing litigation involving one of those outfits, what you really belong to is FIPG, because its risk-management policy (and your adherence to or violation of it) will determine your fate far more than the vows you made during your initiation ritual
  • the need to manage or transfer risk presented by alcohol is perhaps the most important factor in protecting the system’s longevity. Any plaintiff’s attorney worth his salt knows how to use relevant social-host and dramshop laws against a fraternity; to avoid this kind of liability, the fraternity needs to establish that the young men being charged were not acting within the scope of their status as fraternity members. Once they violated their frat’s alcohol policy, they parted company with the frat.
  • there are actually only two FIPG-approved means of serving drinks at a frat party. The first is to hire a third-party vendor who will sell drinks and to whom some liability—most significant, that of checking whether drinkers are of legal age—will be transferred. The second and far more common is to have a BYO event, in which the liability for each bottle of alcohol resides solely in the person who brought it.
  • these policies make it possible for fraternities to be the one industry in the country in which every aspect of serving alcohol can be monitored and managed by people who are legally too young to drink it.
  • But when the inevitable catastrophes do happen, that policy can come to seem more like a cynical hoax than a real-world solution to a serious problem.
  • Thanks in part to the guest/witness list, Larry can be cut loose, both from the expensive insurance he was required to help pay for (by dint of his dues) as a precondition of membership, and from any legal defense paid for by the organization. What will happen to Larry now?
  • “I’ve recovered millions and millions of dollars from homeowners’ policies,” a top fraternal plaintiff’s attorney told me. For that is how many of the claims against boys who violate the strict policies are paid: from their parents’ homeowners’ insurance
  • , the Fraternal Information and Programming Group’s chillingly comprehensive crisis-management plan was included in its manual for many years
  • the plan serves a dual purpose, at once benevolent and mercenary. The benevolent part is accomplished by the clear directive that injured parties are to receive immediate medical attention, and that all fraternity brothers who come into contact with the relevant emergency workers are to be completely forthright
  • “Until proven otherwise,” Fierberg told me in April of fraternities, “they all are very risky organizations for young people to be involved in.” He maintains that fraternities “are part of an industry that has tremendous risk and a tremendous history of rape, serious injury, and death, and the vast majority share common risk-management policies that are fundamentally flawed. Most of them are awash in alcohol. And most if not all of them are bereft of any meaningful adult supervision.”
  • the interests of the national organization and the individual members cleave sharply as this crisis-management plan is followed. Those questionnaires and honest accounts—submitted gratefully to the grown-ups who have arrived, the brothers believe, to help them—may return to haunt many of the brothers, providing possible cause for separating them from the fraternity, dropping them from the fraternity’s insurance, laying the blame on them as individuals and not on the fraternity as the sponsoring organization.
  • So here is the essential question: In the matter of these disasters, are fraternities acting in an ethical manner, requiring good behavior from their members and punishing them soundly for bad or even horrific decisions? Or are they keeping a cool distance from the mayhem, knowing full well that misbehavior occurs with regularity (“most events take place at night”) and doing nothing about it until the inevitable tragedy occurs, at which point they cajole members into incriminating themselves via a crisis-management plan presented as being in their favor?
  • I have had long and wide-ranging conversations with both men, in which each put forth his perspective on the situation.
  • the young men who typically rush so gratefully into the open arms of the representatives from their beloved national—an outfit to which they have pledged eternal allegiance—would be far better served by not talking to them at all, by walking away from the chapter house as quickly as possible and calling a lawyer.
  • The fraternity system, he argues, is “the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people.” The crisis-management plans reveal that in “the foreseeable future” there may be “the death or serious injury” of a healthy young person at a fraternity function.
  • His belief is that what’s tarnishing the reputation of the fraternities is the bad behavior of a very few members, who ignore all the risk-management training that is requisite for membership, who flout policies that could not be any more clear, and who are shocked when the response from the home office is not to help them cover their asses but to ensure that—perhaps for the first time in their lives—they are held 100&nbsp;percent accountable for their actions.
  • The fraternity system, he argues, is “the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people.” The crisis-management plans reveal that in “the foreseeable future” there may be “the death or serious injury” of a healthy young person at a fraternity function.
  • His belief is that what’s tarnishing the reputation of the fraternities is the bad behavior of a very few members, who ignore all the risk-management training that is requisite for membership, who flout policies that could not be any more clear, and who are shocked when the response from the home office is not to help them cover their asses but to ensure that—perhaps for the first time in their lives—they are held 100&nbsp;percent accountable for their actions.
  • Unspoken but inherent in this larger philosophy is the idea that it is in a young man’s nature to court danger and to behave in a foolhardy manner; the fraternity experience is intended to help tame the baser passions, to channel protean energies into productive endeavors such as service, sport, and career preparation.
  • In a sense, Fierberg, Smithhisler, and the powerful forces they each represent operate as a check and balance on the system. Personal-injury lawsuits bring the hated media attention and potential financial losses that motivate fraternities to improve. It would be a neat, almost a perfect, system, if the people wandering into it were not young, healthy college students with everything to lose.
  • In a sense, Fierberg, Smithhisler, and the powerful forces they each represent operate as a check and balance on the system. Personal-injury lawsuits bring the hated media attention and potential financial losses that motivate fraternities to improve. It would be a neat, almost a perfect, system, if the people wandering into it were not young, healthy college students with everything to lose.
  • Wesleyan is one of those places that has by now become so hard to get into that the mere fact of attendance is testament, in most cases, to a level of high-school preparation—combined with sheer academic ability—that exists among students at only a handful of top colleges in this country and that is almost without historical precedent.
  • Wesleyan is one of those places that has by now become so hard to get into that the mere fact of attendance is testament, in most cases, to a level of high-school preparation—combined with sheer academic ability—that exists among students at only a handful of top colleges in this country and that is almost without historical precedent.
  • This January, after publishing a withering series of reports on fraternity malfeasance, the editors of Bloomberg.com published an editorial with a surprising headline: “Abolish Fraternities.” It compared colleges and universities to companies, and fraternities to units that “don’t fit into their business model, fail to yield an adequate return or cause reputational harm.”
  • A college or university can choose, as Wesleyan did, to end its formal relationship with a troublesome fraternity, but—if that fiasco proves anything—keeping a fraternity at arm’s length can be more devastating to a university and its students than keeping it in the fold.
  • A college or university can choose, as Wesleyan did, to end its formal relationship with a troublesome fraternity, but—if that fiasco proves anything—keeping a fraternity at arm’s length can be more devastating to a university and its students than keeping it in the fold.
  • there is a Grand Canyon–size chasm between the official risk-management policies of the fraternities and the way life is actually lived in countless dangerous chapters.
  • When there is a common denominator among hundreds of such injuries and deaths, one that exists across all kinds of campuses, from private to public, prestigious to obscure, then it is more than newsworthy: it begins to approach a national scandal.
  • When there is a common denominator among hundreds of such injuries and deaths, one that exists across all kinds of campuses, from private to public, prestigious to obscure, then it is more than newsworthy: it begins to approach a national scandal.
julia rhodes

For Russian TV Channels, Influence and Criticism - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “Experts,” he intoned, “are more and more comparing the actions of these nationalists with those who came to power in Germany in the 1930s.”
  • The United States and its allies had poured resources into creating a dangerous far-right force now closing in on worried citizens in the east of the country.
  • The authorities in Kiev slammed the government-operated Russian channels’ depictions as incitement to war this week, prompting at least one Ukrainian cable operator to stop broadcasting all three.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “If you watch some of the shows that go on during the day, it’s harkening back to the heroic deeds of the Soviet Army, liberating the Crimea and Sevastopol,” said Vladimir V. Pozner, host of a political talk show on Channel One. “You begin to be very antsy — is this the buildup to something else? Is this not preparing the population for what ultimately will be the use of force?
  • Abby Martin, a Washington-based anchor from Russia Today, a state-owned, English-language cable news network, created a stir by denouncing Russia’s intervention during a broadcast on Monday. Margarita Simonyan, the channel’s editor in chief, sent her a message saying that what she had said was “not in line with our editorial policy,” she said Wednesday in a telephone interview. “We have never made a secret of the fact that we reflect Russia’s position,” she said.
  • Her decision was followed late Wednesday by the on-air resignation of a second anchor, Liz Wahl, who said she could “not be part of a network funded by the Russian government that whitewashes the actions of Putin.”In a statement, Russia Today said “the usual course of action” was to address grievances with the editor, or “quit like a professional.” Ms. Wahl’s resignation was, the statement said, “nothing more than a self-promotional stunt.”
  • Irek Murtazin, a Russian blogger, took umbrage when a state newspaper reported that the upper house of Parliament had “unanimously” approved the use of military force in Ukraine, publishing screen shots that showed that only 90 of the body’s 166 members had voted. “It is a sign that the Russian elite is not as monolithic as it is presented to us,” he said. Ms. Borodina said the fact-checking was a new phenomenon, as bloggers and others turn a critical eye on television.“People just didn’t watch television before,” she said. “Falsifications have always been there.”
julia rhodes

Echoes of Palestinian partition in Syrian refugee crisis | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

  • With more than 2 million Syrians already living outside their war-torn country and 1 million more expected to flee in the coming months, there is a growing protection gap. Indeed, a report (PDF) released in November by Harvard University shows that even Canada, which prides itself on being hospitable to refugees, has been systematically closing its borders to asylum seekers. Without a doubt, development-related aid is an important incentive to host countries, and providing sanctuary for vulnerable populations is just as vital, but what refugees need most is a legal status, which can be achieved only through a regional framework of protection and national asylum policies. The Bangkok Principles are a good start because they highlight the commitment among these states to develop a regional framework and national solutions to protect refugees, with the support of the international community. The U.S. must do its part and encourage the Middle East to build on these principles. Syrians deserve an organized and effective framework, and the risk of turning our backs is that Syrians, along with the Palestinians, will be wandering without a homeland. Galya Benarieh Ruffer is the founding director of the Center for Forced Migration Studies at the Buffett Center for International and Area Studies at Northwestern University and a public voices faculty fellow with the OpEd Project.&nbsp; The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy. 180401 Join the Conversation Post a new commentLogin&nbsp;&nbsp; c
  • Although the cause of Syrians fleeing their homeland today differs fundamentally from the flight of Palestinians in 1948, one crucial similarity is the harsh reception they are experiencing in neighboring countries. The tragedy of the Syrian refugee crisis is palpable in news stories and in the images of those risking their lives in rickety boats on Europe’s shores. More than one-third of Syria’s population has been displaced, and its effects are rippling across the Middle East. For months, more than 1,500 Syrians (including 250 children) have been detained in Egypt. Hundreds of adults are protesting grotesque conditions there with a hunger strike. Lebanon absorbed the most refugees but now charges toward economic collapse, while Turkey will house 1 million Syrians by the year’s end.
  • The surge of Syrians arriving in urban centers has brought sectarian violence, economic pressure and social tensions. As a result, these bordering countries, having already spent billions of dollars, are feeling less hospitable and are starting to close their borders to Syrians.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • A Dec. 13 Amnesty International report calls the Syrian refugee crisis an international failure, but this regional crisis necessitates a regional response — one that more systematically offers Syrian refugees legal protections. The Amnesty report rightly points out that it is not just the European Union that is failing the refugees. It is the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council that, in spite of their wealth and support for the military action in Syria, have not offered any resettlement or humanitarian admission places to refugees from Syria.&nbsp;
  • After World War II, the European refugee crisis blotted out other partition crises across the globe as colonial powers withdrew in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Partitions at the time were about questions of borders and the forced un-mixing of populations.
  • The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees — the international legal framework for the protection of refugees, which obligated states to not return refugees to their countries of origin (non-refoulement), to respect refugees’ basic human rights and to grant them freedoms equivalent to those enjoyed by foreign nationals living legally in the country — did not include those displaced from partitioned countries in its definition of a refugee.
  • Today, this largely leaves Syrian refugees entering those countries without legal recourse. It is also the most dangerous injustice that Syrian refugees face.
  • Turkey is heeding the call. In April it enacted a law establishing the country’s first national asylum system providing refugees with access to Turkish legal aid
  • The origins of the Middle East’s stagnation lie in the partition of Palestine in 1948. When half a million Arab refugees fled Jewish-held territory, seeking refuge in neighboring states, countries like Lebanon and Saudi Arabia moved to stop them. In the final days of the drafting of the United Nation General Assembly’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with the war in Palestine raging, Saudi Arabia persuaded many countries, including the U.S., to dilute the obligation of a state to grant asylum. The Middle Eastern countries feared that they would be required to absorb Palestinians and that Palestinians might lose a right of return to what is now Israel.
  • I am heartened by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ recent call not just for financial and humanitarian assistance and emergency development in the Middle East to aid Syria but also for legal protection for refugees.
  • Bangkok Principles on the Status and Treatment of Refugees. Formally adopted in 2001, the principles provide for a right of return, a broader definition of a refugee and a mandate that countries take up the responsibility of determining refugee status based on rule of law.
  • With more than 2 million Syrians already living outside their war-torn country and 1 million more expected to flee in the coming months, there is a growing protection gap. Indeed, a report (PDF) released in November by Harvard University shows that even Canada, which prides itself on being hospitable to refugees, has been systematically closing its borders to asylum seekers.
  • what refugees need most is a legal status, which can be achieved only through a regional framework of protection and national asylum policies.
  • The Bangkok Principles are a good start because they highlight the commitment among these states to develop a regional framework and national solutions to protect refugees, with the support of the international community. The U.S. must do its part and encourage the Middle East to build on these principles. Syrians deserve an organized and effective framework, and the risk of turning our backs is that Syrians, along with the Palestinians, will be wandering without a homeland.
grayton downing

BBC News - China reporter Chen Yongzhou 'confesses' on TV - 0 views

  • An imprisoned Chinese journalist whose newspaper has made front-page appeals for his release has confessed to wrongdoing on state TV.
  • Experts say confessions are still routinely coerced, despite an amendment to the criminal procedure law earlier this year forbidding the authorities from forcing anyone to incriminate themselves.
  • "I did this mainly because I hankered after money and fame. I've been used. I've realised my wrongdoing."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • China's newspaper industry is tightly controlled by a system of local censors carrying out party directives.
  • But there have been several high-profile rows over censorship.
  • Earlier this year staff at the Guangzhou-based Southern Weekly paper went on strike after a new-year editorial calling for reform was censored
julia rhodes

Claims of French Complicity in Rwanda's Genocide Rekindle Mutual Resentment - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The acrimony between their political leaders centers on France’s role in the tragedy, which was thrust back into the open by sharp remarks from Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, on the eve of somber ceremonies to mark the 1994 genocide. France, he said, bore part of the responsibility for the carnage that killed more than 800,000 people, mostly members of the Tutsi minority.
  • In the years leading up to the genocide, the French government supported the government of Rwanda, which was then dominated by the Hutu majority, helping to equip, arm and, according to many, train the Rwandan military
  • the area where French forces were assigned to protect civilians, both Tutsis and Hutus fleeing the violence, became the site of further killing by Hutu forces.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Varying views have emerged on whether the French presence simply proved insufficient, or whether the French were actually countenancing or even supporting the Hutu attackers
  • France has long struggled with confronting polarizing periods in its history, including the war in Algeria from 1954 to 1962 and the period of Nazi collaboration during World War II.
  • Intensifying France’s anger was that the accusations came from Mr. Kagame, a complex leader who has been accused of supporting rebel movements in the Democratic Republic of Congo and ruthlessly suppressing political rivals. He is alternately viewed as a savior of his b
  • Mr. Kouchner urged the French government to follow the example of Belgium and hold an open parliamentary debate with a judicial commission. The Green Party called for an opening of France’s government archives, and the lead editorial on Tuesday in Le Monde, viewed as France’s newspaper of record, advised the same.
julia rhodes

Philippines and China in Dispute Over Reef - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • China accused the Philippines on Monday of illegally occupying Chinese territory after a Philippine vessel outmaneuvered the Chinese Coast Guard and resupplied a ship that has been stranded for 15 years on the Second Thomas Shoal, a tiny reef in the South China Sea.
  • Chinese ships prevented the Philippines from resupplying the boat and its eight-man military crew in early March, but on Saturday a Philippine vessel manned by troops managed to keep the Chinese at bay by going into shallow waters and lifting food onto the stranded ship.“This is a political provocation,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, Hong Lei, said at a regular briefing on Monday, adding that the Philippines was “hyping” its “illegal occupation” by filing a case on Sunday with the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.
  • The cat-and-mouse maneuvers between the Philippines, an American ally with little naval capacity, and China, which has a fast-expanding navy, have captured attention for what they might foretell about future rivalries in the South China Sea.China claims about 80 percent of the South China Sea, a vital waterway for world trade.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Philippines invited reporters on board the government vessel that was sent to resupply the Sierra Madre, a rusted warship that has been grounded on the reef since 1999.
  • The Global Times, a Chinese state-run newspaper with nationalist views, said in an editorial on Monday that the “small and weak” Philippines had become the vanguard force of “provoking China.” It warned that China had the ability to force Filipino soldiers off the reef at any time, “like taking thieves away.”
Javier E

Caste Quotas in India Come Under Attack - The New York Times - 0 views

  • When he ran for prime minister in 2014, Mr. Modi extolled the success of what he called “the Gujarat model” — a set of business-friendly policies he claimed had led to widely shared prosperity for the people of Gujarat. Those claims have now been called into question by 500,000 of his most faithful supporters, many of whom, in dozens of interviews last week, described a Gujarat where a young, educated work force is finding it increasingly difficult to find good private-sector jobs.
  • The point of the protest, he explained in an interview, was to confront Mr. Modi and his allies with a brutally difficult choice — either side with the Patels who had brought them to power, or else earn the Patels’ political wrath by siding with the castes and tribes that currently benefit from the quota system.
  • The impact of the week’s events is still being absorbed across India. Taking their cue from the Patels, other prosperous castes have now begun talking about holding similar protests. On editorial pages and TV news programs, debate is raging over the nation’s quota system, first codified in India’s Constitution 65 years ago. The Indian Express called the Patel protest “an eruption against growth that has not been inclusive.” The Hindu called it a “rude awakening” for Mr. Modi.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Many Patels, Hardik included, readily agree that the government should give extra help to poor families, regardless of caste. They object, however, to India’s quota system precisely because it is built around caste, not economic status.
  • Even so, in this neighborhood the Patel protest is seen as an act of monumental selfishness — just one more way for the haves to have more. If the Patels succeed, Mr. Parmar said, the implications for this neighborhood are obvious: “We will grow poorer.”
qkirkpatrick

Iraq: ISIS fighters close Ramadi dam gates - CNN.com - 0 views

  • Baghdad, Iraq (CNN)ISIS has closed off a dam to the north of the Iraqi city of Ramadi -- seized by its forces last month -- cutting water supplies to pro-government towns downstream and making it easier for its fighters to attack forces loyal to Baghdad, local officials and residents said.
  • They added that the level of water in the Euphrates was now low enough that the river could be walked across, making it easier for ISIS militants to cross and attack the pro-government towns of Husaybah and Khalidiyah as well as the large security forces base at Habbaniya.
  • The 800 will be assigned to special combat missions against ISIS in Ramadi and other areas, a statement from the Iraqi Interior Ministry said.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • A senior security official told CNN the level of the Euphrates River had dropped by 1 meter (more than 3 feet) near Amiriyat al-Falluja.
  • The United Nations warned Thursday that a lack of funding threatens vital aid operations supporting more than 8 million people affected by the conflict in Iraq.
  • statement. "Humanitarian partners have been doing everything they can to help. But more than 50% of the operation will be shut down or cut back if money is not received immediately."
  •  
    ISIS is controlling dam and cutting off water to opposition cities. 
Javier E

Op-Ed Columnist - The Parent Model - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Stimulus size is not the key factor in determining how quickly a country emerges from recession. The U.S. tried big, but is emerging slowly. The Germans tried small, and are recovering nicely.
  • the Germans have built on their advantages. They effectively support basic research and worker training. They have also taken brave measures to minimize their disadvantages. As an editorial from the superb online think tank e21 reminds us, the Germans have recently reduced labor market regulation, increased wage flexibility and taken strong measures to balance budgets.
  • American policy makers have done little to maximize their model’s natural advantages or address its problems. Indeed, they’ve only made the short-term thinking problem worse, with monetary, fiscal and home-ownership policies encouraging even more borrowing and consumption.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The economy can’t be played like a piano — press a fiscal key here and the right job creation notes come out over there. Instead, economic management is more like parenting. If you instill good values and create a secure climate then, through some mysterious process you will never understand, things will probably end well.
  • The crucial issue is getting the fundamentals right. The Germans are doing better because during the past decade, they took care of their fundamentals and the Americans didn’t. The situation can be expressed this way: German policy makers inherited a certain consensus-based economic model. That model has advantages. It fosters gradual innovation (of the sort useful in metallurgy). It also has disadvantages. It sometimes leads to rigidity and high unemployment.
  • In the U.S., policy makers inherited a different economic model, one that also has certain advantages. It fosters disruptive innovation (of the sort useful in Silicon Valley). It also has certain disadvantages — a penchant for over-consumption and short term thinking.
  • Nations rise and fall on the intertwined strength of their cultures and governing institutions. Despite all the normal shortcomings, German governing institutions have functioned reasonably well, ushering in painful but necessary reforms. The U.S. has a phenomenally creative culture, but right now it’s an institutional weakling.
jlessner

Racial Isolation in Public Schools - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • New York’s schools are the most segregated in the nation, and the state needs remedies right away.
  • Minority children are disproportionately trapped in schools that lack the teaching talent, course offerings and resources needed to prepare them for college and success in the new economy.
  • It has a moral obligation to ensure that as many children as possible escape failing schools for ones that give them a fighting chance. And history has shown that districts can dramatically improve educational opportunities for minority children — and reduce racial isolation — with voluntary transfer plans and especially with high-quality magnet schools that attract middle-class families.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Today nearly half the city’s public schools either have low graduation rates or rank in the bottom 5 percent of state schools in math and English.
sgardner35

Charlie Hebdo Staff Prepares Next Issue - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • PARIS — The editorial meeting on Friday began not with article pitches or jousting over punch lines but remembrances for murdered colleagues, updates on the wounded and a surprise visit by the prime minister.
  • one of the paper’s top editors, who was on vacation the day of the shootings. In
  • decide on the cartoons; find targets for their biting brand of satire. But they did so in the offices of the left-wing daily Libération in a former parking garage in central Paris,
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “We don’t know how to do anything but laugh,” said Gérard Biard,
  • “In this edition, they didn’t kill anyone,” Mr. Biard said. The staff members will “appear as they always did.” Asked what else would go in the paper, Patrick Pelloux, an emergency room doctor who also writes for Charlie, said with a laugh: “Oh, I don’t know. Not much happening this week.”On Friday afternoon, Rénald Luzier, 43, who goes by Luz, was sketching a pumped-up Arnold Schwarzenegger tearing a copy of Charlie Hebdo in half. On the table, a few cigarette butts floated in a water bottle.
jlessner

In Cold Political Terms, Far Right and French President Both Gain - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Amid the horrors of the last week, François Hollande is widely judged to have kept his calm, acted decisively and spoken the words of condemnation, defiance and unity expected of a French president, who by tradition is called on to embody the nation.
  • But no one expects this mood of solidarity to last very long; indeed, the attacks have already sharpened his clash with the far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Mr. Hollande remains the most unpopular French president since World War II. He is troubled by a weak economy, high unemployment and an underlying atmosphere of anxiety and even fear, among both Muslims and Jews, about the impact of homegrown Islamic radicalism.
  • “Hollande has been extremely good in this crisis, showing calm and self-control, and using all the right words,” said Alain Frachon, an editorial writer for Le Monde. “If we do a cold, cynical political analysis, he did rather well. Afterwards, of course, all these questions will be raised about security failures and the future.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The homegrown terrorism here, with its apparent links to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, will also be used by other far-right, nationalist and anti-immigration movements in Europe, from the United Kingdom Independence Party to the Sweden Democrats and Germany’s Pegida — Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West. That is another reason so many European leaders from the mainstream parties of the center right and center left, from Angela Merkel of Germany to David Cameron of Britain and Mariano Rajoy of Spain, came to show their own solidarity with France and Mr. Hollande.Continue reading the main story Invitees also included the leaders of all the main French political par
« First ‹ Previous 41 - 60 of 260 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page