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anonymous

JFK assassination: Questions that won't go away - BBC News - 0 views

  • John F Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was shot dead on 22 November 1963. He was travelling in an open-topped limousine.
  • A week after Kennedy was killed, President Lyndon B Johnson set up a commission to investigate the case.
  • Around 88% of the records are open in full; 11% are open but with "sensitive portions" removed; and 1% are withheld in full.According to the 1992 law, all records must be published in full within 25 years, unless the president says otherwise.The deadline is Thursday.
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  • Some people believe the "other" gunman fired from the "grassy knoll", which the president's limousine passed.
Javier E

From sex selection to surrogates, American IVF clinics provide services outlawed elsewh... - 0 views

  • This freewheeling approach has been good for business; the U.S. fertility industry is estimated to be worth as much as $5.8 billion this year. But as technological advances outpace any social consensus on such forms of reproductive intervention, discomfort with the hands-off status quo is rising.
  • National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins condemned the gene-editing experiment as an “epic scientific misadventure,” and said he is seeking to establish a forum for oversight and public debate about the technology and related areas of science.
  • Collins said he also is concerned about the rise in the screening of embryos for characteristics such as intelligence, physical appearance and gender. Although editing a baby’s DNA is fundamentally different from picking and choosing among embryos created by nature, the procedures raise similar ethical questions about ma­nipu­la­ting human reproduction
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  • Amid this tumult, a panel of scientists, legal experts and ethicists convened by NIH released a report in 1994 on research involving human embryos. The report called for federal funding to explore this “sensitive and vital area of biomedical science.” It also emphasized the need for regulation and voiced “serious ethical concerns” about sex selection in IVF.
  • in 1995, then-Reps. Jay Woodson Dickey Jr. (R-Ark.) and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) added a provision to an appropriations bill that did the opposite of what the NIH paper proposed. Instead of supporting research and government regulation, it prohibited the expenditure of federal funds for any research that involves the creation or destruction of human embryos. The amendment was intended to help skittish lawmakers navigate a touchy issue, allowing them to vote against public funding for embryo research while permitting such research to continue in the private sphere.
  • The ban, which remains in effect, “laid the backdrop for a more hands-off regulatory approach,” said Michelle Bayefsky, a former bioethics fellow at NIH who has written a book about PGD.
  • Like the United States, Britain put together an expert panel to study assisted reproduction. The panel suggested the establishment of a public body to oversee human embryo research, regulate fertility clinics and take the lead on debates about new technologies. Parliament concurred and in 1990 established the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, the first statutory body of its kind and a model emulated by other countries.
Javier E

Why China Silenced a Clickbait Queen in Its Battle for Information Control - The New Yo... - 0 views

  • The silencing of Ms. Ma, better known in China by her pen name, Mimeng, reflects a broader campaign by President Xi Jinping to purge the public sphere of popular voices that the ruling Communist Party finds threatening, no matter how innocuous they may seem.
  • “There is no longer any freedom of speech in China,” Jia Jia, a blogger who writes about history, said of the campaign. “In the end, no one will be spared.”
  • Now Mr. Xi is pushing to tame one of the most vibrant corners of the Chinese internet: the more than one million self-help gurus, novelists, sportswriters and other independent writers who make up the so-called “self-media.”
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  • In interviews, bloggers described the silencing of Ms. Ma as a clear warning to independent media in China: The party is in charge, and writers must play by its rules.
  • The party seems concerned that independent commentators, who have become a primary news source for China’s more than 800 million internet users, are drowning out its propaganda messages
  • “Bloggers are seen as encouraging discontent in society and potentially causing social instability,” said Hu Xingdou, a political economist in Beijing.
  • Such blogs represent one of the last bastions of relatively free discourse in China and have proliferated in recent years as the state-run news media has become more heavily focused on praising Mr. Xi and his policies.
  • For many writers, blogs are a lucrative business, with readers paying small fees for content and advertisers paying for mentions of their products. To avoid China’s strict laws on news gathering, many bloggers occupy a gray area, framing their views on current events as commentary.
  • The freewheeling competition for eyeballs has led to an alarming rise in fake news, a concern that the government often uses to justify its crackdown.
  • But Mr. Xi is targeting much more than false information. The authorities have blacklisted writers who traded celebrity gossip, analysts who discussed rising property prices and advocates who wrote about problems in the countryside.
  • Since December, the authorities have closed more than 140,000 blogs and deleted more than 500,000 articles, according to the state-run news media, saying that they contained false information, distortions and obscenities.
  • But while the range of banned topics in China was once clear — independence movements in Tibet and Taiwan, and the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989, for example — the party’s red line has become much more ambiguous.
  • China’s trade war with the United States is now considered sensitive. So too, sometimes, are musings about the futility of work, a theme often derided by censors as promoting “slacker culture.”
  • Li Yongfeng, who runs a popular book review channel, said he avoided publishing articles that mentioned social movements or past or present political leaders, even to offer praise.
  • “At the end of the day, it is up to authorities to decide what constitutes ‘positive energy’ and what does not,” she said.
  • In December, the Cyberspace Administration of China listed offenses by bloggers that included distorting government policy and party history, “flaunting wealth” and “challenging public order.”
  • An account that focused on women was suspended last year after the authorities said its posts on sexual health were “distasteful.”
  • Similarly, an account run by a nonprofit named NGOCN was shut down in December after it published articles on a chemical spill in eastern China
  • Increasingly, the party is seeking to limit content that depicts life in China as a constant struggle.
  • “It is becoming unbearable,” Mr. Wang said. “The party simply can’t tolerate anyone who has a big influence on society.”
Javier E

Opinion | Is Pain a Sensation or an Emotion? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The United States uses a third of the world’s opioids but a fifth of Americans still say they suffer from chronic pain.
  • This has forced many to take a step back and ponder the very nature of pain, to understand how best to alleviate it.
  • The ancient Greeks considered pain a passion — an emotion rather than a sensation like touch or smell.
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  • In the 19th century, the secularization of Western society led to the secularization of pain. It was no longer a passion to be endured but a sensation to be quashed.
  • The concept of pain as a purely physical phenomenon reached its zenith in the 1990s
  • having pain designated a “fifth vital sign,” alongside blood pressure, temperature and breathing and heart rate.
  • This coincided with the release of long-acting opioids like OxyContin. Doctors believed they now had an effective remedy for their patients’ suffering
  • the mind does play a pivotal role in the experience of pain. After a pain signal reaches the brain, it undergoes significant reprocessing.
  • ecades of research suggests that opiates provide little to no benefit for chronic noncancer pain
  • Why is this? Studies have shown that opioids can reduce patients’ pain thresholds.
  • They can also result in a condition called opioid-induced hyperalgesia, in which people feel more and more pain as they are prescribed higher and higher doses of opioids
  • looking back it’s clear that using opioids to treat chronic pain — backaches, bum knees and the like — might well be considered the worst medical mistake of our era.
  • How much something hurts can vary depending on factors like your expectations, your mood and how distracted you are
  • Physical therapy that doesn’t just manipulate joints but also addresses the context pain comes alive in, encourages optimism and builds emotional resilience has been found to be more effective.
  • Conditions like depression and anxiety greatly increase the chance of developing chronic pain, while patients who experience pain are at high risk of developing depression or anxiety
  • there is considerable overlap in the areas of the brain that deal with pain and emotion.
  • Objectively, there is no doubt that illnesses and injuries can cause immense suffering. The question is how severe that suffering is, and how long it lasts
  • pain sensitivity varies significantly among people, most likely as a result of genetic differences.
  • rug companies greatly underplayed the risks of opioids, while billions of dollars in marketing told people that pills were the only answer to their ailments.
  • future doctors should be taught that pain is part of the story of the person who suffers from it, not just a separate physical phenomenon.
  • this education should incorporate ways to avoid prescribing opioids for chronic use.
  • Perhaps the most important tool physicians need to manage pain is empathy.
  • pain is contagious and transmittable.
  • unfortunately our health system encourages doctors to see as many patients as possible as quickly as possible. We need to change how physicians are paid in order to give them the time to really talk with patients about their pain.
  • I felt that the pain was my body’s way of telling me that something was wrong, and I didn’t want to silence that voice with a temporary fix.
  • What pulled me out after almost a year of agony was not just rigorous physical therapy that molded my spine back into shape but also the kindness of my friends, my family and my future wife.
  • a spiritual and emotional experience alleviated through prayers rather than prescriptions.
Javier E

Ancient DNA is Rewriting Human (and Neanderthal) History - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Sarah Zhang: You recently published two papers in which you analyzed over 600 genomes from ancient Europeans
  • Reich: In our hands, a successful sample costs less than $200. That’s only two or three times more than processing them on a present-day person
  • Reich: In Europe where we have the best data currently—although that will change over the coming years—we know a lot about how people have migrated. We know of multiple layers of population replacement over the last 50,000 years. Between 41,000 and 39,000 years ago in western Europe, the Neanderthals were replaced by modern human populations. The first modern human samples we have in Europe are about 40,000 years old and are genetically not at all related to present-day Europeans. They seem to be from extinct, dead-end groups.
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  • After that, you see for the first time people related to later European hunter-gatherers who have contributed a little bit to present-day Europeans. That happens beginning 35,000 to 37,000 years ago. Then the ice sheets descend across northern Europe and a lot of these populations are chased into these refuges in the southern peninsulas of Europe. After the Ice Age, there’s a repeopling of northern Europe from the southwest, probably from Spain, and then also from the southeast, probably from Greece and maybe even from Anatolia, Turkey
  • Again, after 9,000 years ago, there’s a mass movement of farmers into the region which almost completely replaces the hunter-gatherers with a small amount of mixture
  • And then again, after 5,000 years ago, there’s this mass movement at the beginning of the Bronze Age of people from the steppe, who also probably bring these languages that are spoken by the great majority of Europeans today.
  • Reich: Archaeology has always been political, especially in Europe. Archaeologists are very aware of the misuse of archaeology in the past, in the 20th century. There’s a very famous German archaeologist named Gustaf Kossinna, who was the first or one of the first to come up with the idea of “material culture.” Say, you see similar pots, and therefore you’re in a region where there was shared community and aspects of culture.
  • He went so far as to argue that when you see the spread of these pots, you’re actually seeing a spread of people and there’s a one-to-one mapping for those things. His ideas were used by the Nazis later, in propaganda, to argue that a particular group in Europe, the Aryans, expanded in all directions across Europe.
  • This was used to justify their expansionism in the propaganda that the Germans used in the run-up to the Second World War.
  • So after the Second World War, there was a very strong reaction in the European archaeological community—not just the Germans, but the broad continental European archaeological community—to the fact that their discipline had been used for these terrible political ends. And there was a retreat from the ideas of Kossinna.
  • one of the things the ancient DNA is showing is actually the Corded Ware culture does correspond coherently to a group of people. [Editor’s note: The Corded Ware made pottery with cord-like ornamentation and according to ancient DNA studies, they descended from steppe ancestry.] I think that was a very sensitive issue to some of our coauthors
  • Our results are actually almost diametrically opposite from what Kossina thought because these Corded Ware people come from the East, a place that Kossina would have despised as a source for them.
  • it is true that there’s big population movements, and so I think what the DNA is doing is it’s forcing the hand of this discussion in archaeology, showing that in fact, major movements of people do occur. They are sometimes sharp and dramatic, and they involve large-scale population replacements over a relatively short period of time. We now can see that for the first time.
  • Zhang: As you say, the genetics data is now often ahead of the archaeology, and you keep finding these big, dramatic population replacements throughout human history that can’t yet be fully explained. How should we be thinking about these population replacements? Is there a danger in people interpreting or misinterpreting them as the result of one group’s superiority over another?
  • When you see these replacements of Neanderthals by modern humans or Europeans and Africans substantially replacing Native Americans in the last 500 years or the people who built Stonehenge, who were obviously extraordinarily sophisticated, being replaced from these people from the continent, it doesn’t say something about the innate potential of these people. But it rather says something about the different immune systems or cultural mismatch.
  • Zhang: On the point of immune systems, one of the hypotheses for why people from the steppe were so successful in spreading through Europe is that they brought the bubonic plague with them. Since the plague is endemic to Central Asia, they may have built up immunity but the European farmers they encountered had not.
  • ut there have been profound and Earth-shattering events, again and again, every few thousand years in our history and that’s what ancient DNA is telling us.
  • if you actually take any serious look at this data, it just confounds every stereotype. It’s revealing that the differences among populations we see today are actually only a few thousand years old at most and that everybody is mixed.
  • I think that if you pay any attention to this world, and have any degree of seriousness, then you can’t come out feeling affirmed in the racist view of the world. You have to be more open to immigration. You have to be more open to the mixing of different peoples. That’s your own history.
Javier E

How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Christopher Wylie, who helped found Cambridge and worked there until late 2014, said of its leaders: “Rules don’t matter for them. For them, this is a war, and it’s all fair.”
  • “They want to fight a culture war in America,” he added. “Cambridge Analytica was supposed to be the arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war.”
  • But the full scale of the data leak involving Americans has not been previously disclosed — and Facebook, until now, has not acknowledged it. Interviews with a half-dozen former employees and contractors, and a review of the firm’s emails and documents, have revealed that Cambridge not only relied on the private Facebook data but still possesses most or all of the trove.
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  • The documents also raise new questions about Facebook, which is already grappling with intense criticism over the spread of Russian propaganda and fake news. The data Cambridge collected from profiles, a portion of which was viewed by The Times, included details on users’ identities, friend networks and “likes.”
  • “Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do,” Mr. Grewal said. “No systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked.”Still, he added, “it’s a serious abuse of our rules.”
  • The group experimented abroad, including in the Caribbean and Africa, where privacy rules were lax or nonexistent and politicians employing SCL were happy to provide government-held data, former employees said.
  • Mr. Nix and his colleagues courted Mr. Mercer, who believed a sophisticated data company could make him a kingmaker in Republican politics, and his daughter Rebekah, who shared his conservative views. Mr. Bannon was intrigued by the possibility of using personality profiling to shift America’s culture and rewire its politics, recalled Mr. Wylie and other former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.
  • Mr. Wylie’s team had a bigger problem. Building psychographic profiles on a national scale required data the company could not gather without huge expense. Traditional analytics firms used voting records and consumer purchase histories to try to predict political beliefs and voting behavior.
  • But those kinds of records were useless for figuring out whether a particular voter was, say, a neurotic introvert, a religious extrovert, a fair-minded liberal or a fan of the occult. Those were among the psychological traits the firm claimed would provide a uniquely powerful means of designing political messages.
  • Mr. Wylie found a solution at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre. Researchers there had developed a technique to map personality traits based on what people had liked on Facebook. The researchers paid users small sums to take a personality quiz and download an app, which would scrape some private information from the their profiles and those of their friends, activity that Facebook permitted at the time. The approach, the scientists said, could reveal more about a person than their parents or romantic partners knew — a claim that has been disputed.
  • When the Psychometrics Centre declined to work with the firm, Mr. Wylie found someone who would: Dr. Kogan, who was then a psychology professor at the university and knew of the techniques. Dr. Kogan built his own app and in June 2014 began harvesting data for Cambridge Analytica. The business covered the costs — more than $800,000 — and allowed him to keep a copy for his own research, according to company emails and financial records.
  • He ultimately provided over 50 million raw profiles to the firm, Mr. Wylie said, a number confirmed by a company email and a former colleague. Of those, roughly 30 million contained enough information, including places of residence, that the company could match users to other records and build psychographic profiles. Only about 270,000 users — those who participated in the survey — had consented to having their data harvested.Image
  • Mr. Wylie said the Facebook data was “the saving grace” that let his team deliver the models it had promised the Mercers.
  • “We wanted as much as we could get,” he acknowledged. “Where it came from, who said we could have it — we weren’t really asking.”
  • The firm was effectively a shell. According to the documents and former employees, any contracts won by Cambridge, originally incorporated in Delaware, would be serviced by London-based SCL and overseen by Mr. Nix, a British citizen who held dual appointments at Cambridge Analytica and SCL. Most SCL employees and contractors were Canadian, like Mr. Wylie, or European.
  • In a memo to Mr. Bannon, Ms. Mercer and Mr. Nix, the lawyer, then at the firm Bracewell & Giuliani, warned that Mr. Nix would have to recuse himself “from substantive management” of any clients involved in United States elections. The data firm would also have to find American citizens or green card holders, Mr. Levy wrote, “to manage the work and decision making functions, relative to campaign messaging and expenditures.”
  • In summer and fall 2014, Cambridge Analytica dived into the American midterm elections, mobilizing SCL contractors and employees around the country. Few Americans were involved in the work, which included polling, focus groups and message development for the John Bolton Super PAC, conservative groups in Colorado and the campaign of Senator Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican.
  • While Cambridge hired more Americans to work on the races that year, most of its data scientists were citizens of the United Kingdom or other European countries, according to two former employees.
  • Under the guidance of Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s digital director in 2016 and now the campaign manager for his 2020 re-election effort, Cambridge performed a variety of services, former campaign officials said. That included designing target audiences for digital ads and fund-raising appeals, modeling voter turnout, buying $5 million in television ads and determining where Mr. Trump should travel to best drum up support.
  • Mr. Grewal, the Facebook deputy general counsel, said in a statement that both Dr. Kogan and “SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica certified to us that they destroyed the data in question.”
  • But copies of the data still remain beyond Facebook’s control. The Times viewed a set of raw data from the profiles Cambridge Analytica obtained.
  • While Mr. Nix has told lawmakers that the company does not have Facebook data, a former employee said that he had recently seen hundreds of gigabytes on Cambridge servers, and that the files were not encrypted.
  • Mr. Nix is seeking to take psychographics to the commercial advertising market. He has repositioned himself as a guru for the digital ad age — a “Math Man,” he puts it. In the United States last year, a former employee said, Cambridge pitched Mercedes-Benz, MetLife and the brewer AB InBev, but has not signed them on.
  • Today, as Cambridge Analytica seeks to expand its business in the United States and overseas, Mr. Nix has mentioned some questionable practices. This January, in undercover footage filmed by Channel 4 News in Britain and viewed by The Times, he boasted of employing front companies and former spies on behalf of political clients around the world, and even suggested ways to entrap politicians in compromising situations.
  • Mr. Wylie found a solution at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre. Researchers there had developed a technique to map personality traits based on what people had liked on Facebook. The researchers paid users small sums to take a personality quiz and download an app, which would scrape some private information from their profiles and those of their friends, activity that Facebook permitted at the time. The approach, the scientists said, could reveal more about a person than their parents or romantic partners knew
runlai_jiang

Why China banned the letter 'N' - CNN - 0 views

  • The pushback to this development was intense online. So was the government's pushback to the pushback. In addition to banning use of the letter "N" online, words such as "immortality" and "ascend the throne" were also deemed inappropriate to use on the internet.
  • Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, said the government likely feared that "N" was referring to the number of terms of office, as in a mathematical equation n > 2.
  • But the nixing of "N" was a temporary one. By Monday use of the letter online was once again permitted, according to China Digital Times.
anonymous

Climate change 'impacts women more than men' - BBC News - 0 views

  • Women are more likely than men to be affected by climate change, studies show.UN figures indicate that 80% of people displaced by climate change are women.Roles as primary caregivers and providers of food and fuel make them more vulnerable when flooding and drought occur.
  • It is not just women in rural areas who are affected. Globally, women are more likely to experience poverty, and to have less socioeconomic power than men. This makes it difficult to recover from disasters which affect infrastructure, jobs and housing.
  • Much as climate change is accelerated by human behaviours, the impact of weather and climate events is influenced by societal structures. Disasters do not affect all people equally.
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  • Another study spanning 20 years noted that catastrophic events lowered women's life expectancy more than men; more women were being killed, or they were being killed younger. In countries where women had greater socioeconomic power, the difference reduced.
  • The UN has highlighted the need for gender sensitive responses to the impacts of climate change, yet the average representation of women in national and global climate negotiating bodies is below 30%.
  • Twenty-five percent of those nominated to participate in the next report are women. "IPCC has been very receptive to this and is actually discussing how they can support women better," explains Liverman."Women are half the world. It's important they participate in all major decisions," "Climate change is not a fight for power," points out Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, "it's a fight for survival."
runlai_jiang

Trump Alienates Allies Needed for a Trade Fight With China - WSJ - 1 views

  • For President Donald Trump, this could be an opportunity to lead a coalition against China’s predatory trade behavior. Instead, he is threatening trade war with the countries that would make up such a coalition, over commodities that are much less vital to the U.S.’s economy and national security than the sectors threatened by China’s expropriation of intellectual property.
  • “Beijing has doubled down on its state capitalist model even as it has gotten richer,” Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner, who both served in foreign-policy roles under former President Barack Obama, write in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. “Cooperative and voluntary mechanisms to pry open China’s economy have by and large failed.”
  • “Every year, competitors such as China steal U.S. intellectual property valued at hundreds of billions of dollars,” his national security strategy declared last December. “China is gaining a strategic foothold in Europe by expanding its unfair trade practices and investing in key industries, sensitive technologies, and infrastructure.”
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  • In January 2017, Mr. Obama’s administration launched a case at the WTO against China for subsidizing aluminum
  • Mr. Trump has failed to follow up. Last week, Mr. Trump invoked a little-used 1962 statute to promise tariffs of 25% on imported steel and 10% on aluminum, ostensibly for national security, a factor that led his chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, to announce his resignation Tuesday.
  • Chinese forced technology transfer, commercial espionage and intellectual-property theft, all aimed at creating Chinese champions in key industries by 2025
  • Yet China exports little steel to the U.S. because of existing duties and accounts for just 11% of its aluminum imports, far behind Canada. The Commerce Department argued for a global remedy because Chinese production depresses global prices and drives foreign producers out of third markets, and they then ship to the U.S.
  • It noted that since 2003 China has four times promised to address overcapacity in steel production, as its actual capacity quadrupled to roughly half the world total. “The crisis confronting the U.S. aluminum industry is China, plain and simple,” one industry group told the department.
  • When the EU threatened to retaliate, Mr. Trump said he would escalate by raising duties on European cars.
  • This means the pain of Mr. Trump’s tariffs will fall not on China but on actors that play by the rules, including Canada, Japan and the European Union.
  • The U.S. is preparing a sweeping penalty against China, but it would be more effective if done jointly; otherwise, Beijing may simply persuade others to hand over their technology in exchange for Chinese sales or capital.
  • S., EU and Japan launched a joint WTO complaint against China for restricting exports of “rare earths,” which are vital to many advanced technologies.
  • In 2014, they won and China lifted its restrictions. One former U.S. trade official says the U.S. could create a similar united front against Chinese takeovers of technology companies: “That would get their attention.” Nor would it violate WTO rules, which are less restrictive on investment than tariffs, he said.
  • “We are much more likely to get our allies to work with us if we aren’t punishing them for selling us steel that our consumers want to buy.”
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    Trump's tariffs may force allies to incline to Chinese technologies and steel products, further weakening American trade status.
knudsenlu

The James Webb, NASA's Next Space Telescope, Is Falling Behind - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The world’s next great space telescope is falling behind.The James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s successor to the famed Hubble, is at risk of experiencing significant delays in development, according to a new report from a government agency that audits federal programs.
  • Webb is an $8.8 billion project two decades in the making. Last September, NASA announced it was delaying the telescope’s launch by at least five months, from October 2018 to between March and June 2019. At the time, NASA officials said the change wasn’t due to any problems with the hardware, but because assembling the telescope’s many complex parts was “taking longer than expected.”
  • This is a disheartening forecast for many parties, including NASA; Northrop Grumman, the telescope’s main contractor; and the European and Canadian space agencies, contributors to the telescope’s design and construction. There’s no question that the Webb will launch. After 20 years of development and construction, most of the money has already been spent and the hardware rigorously tested. But the road to the launchpad may be bumpier than everyone expected.
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  • Once completed, the telescope will be an amalgamation of several complex pieces of hardware. Most of the assembly for Webb took place at NASA’s facility in Maryland, the Goddard Spaceflight Center, where it underwent a barrage of tests. In January 2016, scientists and engineers dunked the telescope’s sensitive instruments into a cylindrical chamber that simulates the extreme conditions of outer space. By November 2017, the delicate mirrors and instruments were joined together, and mission members put them through the ringer to make sure they could survive the vibrations and sounds of a powerful rocket launch. They bolted the telescope to metal plates and shook it violently, then wheeled it into an acoustic chamber and blasted it with noise through giant, vuvuzela-shaped speakers.
  • The GAO report starts out by praising the Webb mission for making “considerable progress” in the last few months in hardware integration, but things go downhill from there.The GAO places blame on Northrop Grumman for delays. “For several years, the prime contractor has overestimated workforce reductions, and technical challenges have prevented these planned reductions, necessitating the use of cost reserves,” the report said. Northrop Grumman did not respond to a request for comment about this assessment.
  • If the GAO report is any indication, there may be more troubling news for Webb to come. An independent review board for the Webb mission will conduct its own audit of the project early this year to determine whether it will make its new 2019 launch target.In the meantime, the Webb team has been reviewing and selecting research proposals for its first year of operations. The telescope, 100 more times powerful than Hubble, will be able to see deeper into the universe than ever before. Hundreds of astronomers, from many countries, want their time on it. In its first few months, Webb will focus on nearby targets—the planets in our solar system—and distant ones—glittering galaxies way out in the cosmos. It will return stunning images of it all in tremendous clarity and color. Perhaps then, when we lay eyes on these photographs, the long wait will have seemed worth
Javier E

Opinion | When Republicans Rejected John Bolton - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Mr. Bolton, President Bush’s under secretary of state for arms control and international security, had a general disdain for diplomacy that rankled several Republican members of the committee, including George Voinovich of Ohio and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. Mr. Lugar had quietly counseled the administration not to nominate him.
  • That disdain, in and of itself, did not sink his nomination. Rather, it was the testimony we heard and evidence we uncovered that Mr. Bolton had a habit of twisting intelligence to back his bellicosity and sought to remove anyone who objected
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  • As under secretary of state, Mr. Bolton insisted that Cuba was attempting to build a biological weapons program. The national intelligence officer for Latin America and the State Department’s top biological weapons expert disagreed. In a fit of rage, Mr. Bolton tried to have both reassigned.
  • Mr. Bolton made it something of a habit to request the identity of American officials whose names had been blacked out of sensitive intelligence intercepts. Some members of the Foreign Relations Committee were concerned that he was seeking information to use against those who disagreed with him — the very kind of improper “unmasking” that President Trump has falsely accused some members of the Obama administration of pursuing.
  • Other witnesses came forward to allege abusive behavior by Mr. Bolton during his time as a lawyer in the private sector — screaming, threatening, throwing documents and, in the words of one woman, “genuinely behaving like a madman.”
  • In a remarkable speech to his colleagues on the committee, a visibly pained Mr. Voinovich explained his decision to vote against Mr. Bolton, effectively killing the nomination. We’ve heard, he said, that Mr. Bolton is “an ideologue and fosters an atmosphere of intimidation. He does not tolerate disagreement. He does not tolerate dissent.”
Javier E

The Myth of Western Civilization - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Democracy is a struggle, not a trophy and not a bragging right. This is not a matter of being polite and sensitive. It is understanding that we live on the edge of the volcano, that the volcano is in us. Judt is keenly aware that late 20th century Europe's accomplishments could be wrecked by the simple actions of men.
  • What Judt wants us to see is the tenuousness of human creations, and thus the tenuousness of the West, itself. Having concluded that Europe (though not its Eastern half) has finally, in fits and starts, come to grapple with the Holocaust, he grows skeptical: Evil, above all evil on the scale practiced by Nazi Germany, can never be satisfactorily remembered. The very enormity of the crime renders all memorialisation incomplete. Its inherent implausibility—the sheer difficulty of conceiving of it in calm retrospect—opens the door to diminution and even denial. Impossible to remember as it truly was, it is inherently vulnerable to being remembered as it wasn’t. Against this challenge memory itself is helpless
  • From Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: No matter which technology was used, the killing was personal. People who starved were observed, often from watchtowers, by those who denied them food. People who were shot were seen through the sights of rifles at very close range, or held by two men while a third placed a pistol at the base of the skull. People who were asphyxiated were rounded up, put on trains, and then rushed into the gas chambers. They lost their possessions and then their clothes and then, if they were women, their hair. Each one of them died a different death, since each one of them had lived a different life.
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  • the European super-nation has long needed to believe itself above the world, above native America, above Asia, and particularly above Africa. The truth is more disconcerting: The dark continent has never been South of the Sahara, but South of Minsk and East of Aachen in the jungles of the European soul. 
  • I don't have any gospel of my own. Postwar, and the early pages of Bloodlands, have revealed a truth to me: I am an atheist. (I have recently realized this.) I don't believe the arc of the universe bends towards justice. I don't even believe in an arc. I believe in chaos. I believe powerful people who think they can make Utopia out of chaos should be watched closely.
  • I don't know that it all ends badly. But I think it probably does.
  • I'm also not a cynic. I think that those of us who reject divinity, who understand that there is no order, there is no arc, that we are night travelers on a great tundra, that stars can't guide us, will understand that the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us.
  • Maybe the very myths I decry are necessary for that work. I don't know. But history is a brawny refutation for that religion brings morality.
  • "History contributes to the disenchantment of the world," writes Judt. ...most of what it has to offer is discomforting, even disruptive—which is why it is not always politically prudent to wield the past as a moral cudgel with which to beat and berate a people for its past sins.
  • But history does need to be learned—and periodically re-learned. In a popular Soviet-era joke, a listener calls up ‘Armenian Radio’ with a question: ‘Is it possible’, he asks, ‘to foretell the future?’ Answer: ‘Yes, no problem. We know exactly what the future will be. Our problem is with the past: that keeps changing’.  So it does—and not only in totalitarian societies. 
  • All the same, the rigorous investigation and interrogation of Europe’s competing pasts—and the place occupied by those pasts in Europeans’ collective sense of themselves—has been one of the unsung achievements and sources of European unity in recent decades. It is, however, an achievement that will surely lapse unless ceaselessly renewed.
  • Europe’s barbarous recent history, the dark ‘other’ against which post-war Europe was laboriously constructed, is already beyond recall for young Europeans.  Within a generation the memorials and museums will be gathering dust—visited, like the battlefields of the Western Front today, only by aficionados and relatives. If in years to come we are to remember why it seemed so important to build a certain sort of Europe out of the crematoria of Auschwitz, only history can help us.
  • If Europeans are to maintain this vital link—if Europe’s past is to continue to furnish Europe’s present with admonitory meaning and moral purpose—then it will have to be taught afresh with each passing generation. ‘European Union’ may be a response to history, but it can never be a substitute.
malonema1

Trump Administration Delays Most Tariffs On Steel, Aluminum : NPR - 0 views

  • The Trump administration has decided to hold off on imposing most of its tariffs on imported steel and aluminum until at least June 1.
  • South Korean officials won a permanent exemption from steel tariffs in March as part of an updated free trade agreement with the U.S. But in exchange, South Korea had to reduce its steel exports to the U.S. by about 30 percent, Similar quotas could be imposed on other countries as part of a final deal. Japan never got a break from the tariffs, so Japanese exporters have been subject to the levies since late March. That was a source of some friction when Trump hosted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Mar-a-Lago two weeks ago. The EU had threatened to retaliate if the steel and aluminum tariffs took effect, by imposing levies of its own on politically sensitive American exports. Potential targets include Harley Davidson motorcycles, from the home state of House Speaker Paul Ryan, and Kentucky bourbon, which could get the attention of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
Javier E

What Mark Zuckerberg Didn't Say About What Facebook Knows About You - WSJ - 0 views

  • When testifying before the Senate Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg said, “I think everyone should have control over how their information is used.” He also said, “You have full access to understand all—every piece of information that Facebook might know about you—and you can get rid of all of it.”
  • Not exactly. There are important classes of information Facebook collects on us that we can’t control. We don’t get to “opt in” or remove every specific piece. Often, we aren’t even informed of their existence—except in the abstract—and we aren’t shown how the social network uses this harvested information.
  • The website log is a good example, in part because of its sheer mass. The browsing histories of hundreds of millions—possibly billions—of people are gathered by a variety of advertising trackers, which Facebook has been offering to web publishers ever since it introduced the “Like” button in 2009.
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  • They’ve become, as predicted, a nearly web-wide system for tracking all users—even when you don’t click the button.
  • “If you downloaded this file [of sites Facebook knows you visited], it would look like a quarter to half your browsing history,” Mr. Garcia-Martinez adds.
  • Another reason Facebook doesn’t give you this data: The company claims recovering it from its databases is difficult.
  • In one case, it took Facebook 106 days to deliver to a Belgian mathematician, Paul-Olivier Dehaye, all the data the company had gathered on him through its most common tracking system. Facebook doesn’t say how long it stores this information.
  • When you opt out of interest-based ads, the system that uses your browsing history to target you, Facebook continues tracking you anyway. It just no longer uses the data to show you ads.
  • There is more data Facebook collects that it doesn’t explain. It encourages users to upload their phone contacts, including names, phone numbers and email addresses
  • Facebook never discloses if such personal information about you has been uploaded by other users from their contact lists, how many times that might have happened or who might have uploaded it.
  • This data enables Facebook not only to keep track of active users across its multiple products, but also to fill in the missing links. If three people named Smith all upload contact info for the same fourth Smith, chances are this person is related
  • Facebook now knows that person exists, even if he or she has never been on Facebook. And of course, people without Facebook accounts certainly can’t see what information the company has in these so-called shadow profiles.
  • “In general, we collect data on people who have not signed up for Facebook for security purposes,” Mr. Zuckerberg told Congress
  • There’s also a form of location data you can’t control unless you delete your whole account. This isn’t the app’s easy-to-turn-off GPS tracking. It’s the string of IP addresses, a form of device identification on the internet, that can show where your computer or phone is each time it connects to Facebook.
  • Facebook says it uses your IP address to target ads when you are near a specific place, but as you can see in your downloaded Facebook data, the log of stored IP addresses can go back years.
  • Location is a powerful signal for Facebook, allowing it to infer how you are connected to other people, even if you don’t identify them as family members, co-workers or lovers
  • All this data, plus the elements Facebook lets you control, can potentially reveal everything from your wealth to whether you are depressed.
  • That level of precision is at the heart of Facebook’s recent troubles: Just because Facebook uses it to accomplish a seemingly innocent task—in Mr. Zuckerberg’s words, making ad “experiences better, and more relevant”— doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried.
  • Regulators the world over are coming to similar conclusions: Our personal data has become too sensitive—and too lucrative—to be left without restraints in the hands of self-interested corporations.
  • Facebook, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and a host of smaller companies that compete with and support the giants in the digital ad space have become addicted to the kind of information that helps microtarget ads.
g-dragon

Tibet and China: Early History - 0 views

  • For at least 1500 years, the nation of Tibet has had a complex relationship with its large and powerful neighbor to the east, China. The political history of Tibet and China reveals that the relationship has not always been as one-sided as it now appears.
  • Indeed, as with China’s relations with the Mongols and the Japanese, the balance of power between China and Tibet has shifted back and forth over the centuries.
  • The first known interaction between the two states came in 640 A.D., when the Tibetan King Songtsan Gampo married the Princess Wencheng, a niece of the Tang Emperor Taizong. He also married a Nepalese princess.
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  • Tibet and China signed a peace treaty in 821 or 822, which delineated the border between the two empires. The Tibetan Empire would concentrate on its Central Asian holdings for the next several decades, before splitting into several small, fractious kingdoms.
  • Canny politicians, the Tibetans befriended Genghis Khan just as the Mongol leader was conquering the known world in the early 13th century. As a result, though the Tibetans paid tribute to the Mongols after the Hordes had conquered China, they were allowed much greater autonomy than the other Mongol-conquered lands.
  • Over time, Tibet came to be considered one of the thirteen provinces of the Mongolian-ruled nation of Yuan China.
  • The Tibetans transmitted their Buddhist faith to the eastern Mongols; Kublai Khan himself studied Tibetan beliefs with the great teacher Drogon Chogyal Phagpa.
  • When the Mongols' Yuan Empire fell in 1368 to the ethnic-Han Chinese Ming, Tibet reasserted its independence and refused to pay tribute to the new Emperor.
  • After their lifetimes, the two men were called the First and Second Dalai Lamas. Their sect, the Gelug or "Yellow Hats," became the dominant form of Tibetan Buddhism.
  • The Third Dalai Lama, Sonam Gyatso (1543-1588), was the first to be so named during his life. He was responsible for converting the Mongols to Gelug Tibetan Buddhism, and it was the Mongol ruler Altan Khan who probably gave the title “Dalai Lama” to Sonam Gyatso.
  • The Fourth Dalai Lama, Yonten Gyatso (1589-1616), was a Mongolian prince and the grandson of Altan Khan.
  • During the 1630s, China was embroiled in power struggles between the Mongols, Han Chinese of the fading Ming Dynasty, and the Manchu people of north-eastern China (Manchuria). The Manchus would eventually defeat the Han in 1644, and establish China's final imperial dynasty, the Qing (1644-1912).
  • The Dalai Lama made a state visit to the Qing Dynasty's second Emperor, Shunzhi, in 1653. The two leaders greeted one another as equals; the Dalai Lama did not kowtow. Each man bestowed honors and titles upon the other, and the Dalai Lama was recognized as the spiritual authority of the Qing Empire.
  • In 1788, the Regent of Nepal sent Gurkha forces to invade Tibet.The Qing Emperor responded in strength, and the Nepalese retreated.The Gurkhas returned three years later, plundering and destroying some famous Tibetan monasteries. The Chinese sent a force of 17,000 which, along with Tibetan troops, drove the Gurkhas out of Tibet and south to within 20 miles of Kathmandu.
  • China took advantage of this period of instability in Tibet to seize the regions of Amdo and Kham, making them into the Chinese province of Qinghai in 1724.
  • Three years later, the Chinese and Tibetans signed a treaty that laid out the boundary line between the two nations. It would remain in force until 1910.
  • The Imperial Army then defeated the rebels, but the Emperor recognized that he would have to rule through the Dalai Lama rather than directly. Day-to-day decisions would be made on the local level.
  • The Simla Convention granted China secular control over "Inner Tibet," (also known as Qinghai Province) while recognizing the autonomy of "Outer Tibet" under the Dalai Lama's rule. Both China and Britain promised to "respect the territorial integrity of [Tibet], and abstain from interference in the administration of Outer Tibet."
  • Despite this sort of assistance from the Chinese Empire, the people of Tibet chafed under increasingly meddlesome Qing rule.
  • when the Eighth Dalai Lama died, and 1895, when the Thirteenth Dalai
  • none of the incumbent incarnations of the Dalai Lama lived to see their nineteenth birthdays
  • If the Chinese found a certain incarnation too hard to control, they would poison him. If the Tibetans thought an incarnation was controlled by the Chinese, then they would poison him themselves.
  • Throughout this period, Russia and Britain were engaged in the "Great Game," a struggle for influence and control in Central Asia.
  • Russia pushed south of its borders, seeking access to warm-water sea ports and a buffer zone between Russia proper and the advancing British. The British pushed northward from India, trying to expand their empire and protect the Raj, the "Crown Jewel of the British Empire," from the expansionist Russians.
  • Tibet was an important playing piece in this game.
  • the British in India concluded a trade and border treaty with Beijing concerning the boundary between Sikkim and Tibet.However, the Tibetans flatly rejected the treaty terms.
  • The British invaded Tibet in 1903 with 10,000 men, and took Lhasa the following year. Thereupon, they concluded another treaty with the Tibetans, as well as Chinese, Nepalese and Bhutanese representatives, which gave the British themselves some control over Tibet’s affairs.
  • The 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso, fled the country in 1904 at the urging of his Russian disciple, Agvan Dorzhiev. He went first to Mongolia, then made his way to Beijing.
  • According to Tibet, the "priest/patron" relationship established at this time between the Dalai Lama and Qing China continued throughout the Qing Era, but it had no bearing on Tibet's status as an independent nation. China, naturally, disagrees.
  • He returned to Lhasa in 1909, disappointed by Chinese policies towards Tibet. China sent a force of 6,000 troops into Tibet, and the Dalai Lama fled to Darjeeling, India later that same year.
  • China's new revolutionary government issued a formal apology to the Dalai Lama for the Qing Dynasty's insults, and offered to reinstate him. Thubten Gyatso refused, stating that he had no interest in the Chinese offer.
  • He then issued a proclamation that was distributed across Tibet, rejecting Chinese control and stating that "We are a small, religious, and independent nation."The Dalai Lama took control of Tibet's internal and external governance in 1913, negotiating directly with foreign powers, and reforming Tibet's judicial, penal, and educational systems.
  • Representatives of Great Britain, China, and Tibet met in 1914 to negotiate a treaty marking out the boundary lines between India and its northern neighbors.
  • The Chinese declared that the Dalai Lama had been deposed as soon as he left Tibet, and claimed full sovereignty over not only Tibet but also Nepal and Bhutan. The Dalai Lama went to Beijing to discuss the situation with the Emperor Guangxu, but he flatly refused to kowtow to the Emperor.
  • China walked out of the conference without signing the treaty after Britain laid claim to the Tawang area of southern Tibet, which is now part of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. Tibet and Britain both signed the treaty.
  • As a result, China has never agreed to India's rights in northern Arunachal Pradesh (Tawang), and the two nations went to war over the area in 1962. The boundary dispute still has not been resolved.
  • China also claims sovereignty over all of Tibet, while the Tibetan government-in-exile points to the Chinese failure to sign the Simla Convention as proof that both Inner and Outer Tibet legally remain under the Dalai Lama's jurisdiction.
  • Soon, China would be too distracted to concern itself with the issue of Tibet.
  • China would see near-continuous civil war up to the Communist victory in 1949, and this era of conflict was exacerbated by the Japanese Occupation and World War II. Under such circumstances, the Chinese showed little interest in Tibet.The 13th Dalai Lama ruled independent Tibet in peace until his death in 1933.
  • Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama, was taken to Lhasa in 1937 to begin training for his duties as the leader of Tibet. He would remain there until 1959, when the Chinese forced him into exile in India.
  • In 1950, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) of the newly-formed People's Republic of China invaded Tibet. With stability reestablished in Beijing for the first time in decades, Mao Zedong sought to assert China's right to rule over Tibet as well.
  • The PLA inflicted a swift and total defeat on Tibet's small army, and China drafted the "Seventeen Point Agreement" incorporating Tibet as an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China.Representatives of the Dalai Lama's government signed the agreement under protest, and the Tibetans repudiated the agreement nine years later.
  • On March 1, 1959, the Dalai Lama received an odd invitation to attend a theater performance at PLA headquarters near Lhasa.
  • The guards immediately publicized this rather ham-handed attempted abduction, and the following day an estimated crowd of 300,000 Tibetans surrounded Potala Palace to protect their leader.
  • Tibetan troops were able to secure a route for the Dalai Lama to escape into India on March 17. Actual fighting began on March 19, and lasted only two days before the Tibetan troops were defeated.
  • An estimated 800 artillery shells had pummeled Norbulingka, and Lhasa's three largest monasteries were essentially leveled. The Chinese rounded up thousands of monks, executing many of them. Monasteries and temples all over Lhasa were ransacked.
  • In the days after the 1959 Uprising, the Chinese government revoked most aspects of Tibet's autonomy, and initiated resettlement and land distribution across the country. The Dalai Lama has remained in exile ever since.
  • China's central government, in a bid to dilute the Tibetan population and provide jobs for Han Chinese, initiated a "Western China Development Program" in 1978.As many as 300,000 Han now live in Tibet, 2/3 of them in the capital city. The Tibetan population of Lhasa, in contrast, is only 100,000.Ethnic Chinese hold the vast majority of government posts.
  • On May 1, 1998, the Chinese officials at Drapchi Prison in Tibet ordered hundreds of prisoners, both criminals and political detainees, to participate in a Chinese flag-raising ceremony.Some of the prisoners began to shout anti-Chinese and pro-Dalai Lama slogans, and prison guards fired shots into the air before returning all the prisoners to their cells.
  • The prisoners were then severely beaten with belt buckles, rifle butts, and plastic batons, and some were put into solitary confinement for months at a time, according to one young nun who was released from the prison a year later.
  • Three days later, the prison administration decided to hold the flag-raising ceremony again.Once more, some of the prisoners began to shout slogans.Prison official reacted with even more brutality, and five nuns, three monks, and one male criminal were killed by the guards. One man was shot; the rest were beaten to death.
  • On March 10, 2008, Tibetans marked the 49th anniversary of the 1959 uprising by peacefully protesting for the release of imprisoned monks and nuns. Chinese police then broke up the protest with tear gas and gunfire.The protest resumed for several more days, finally turning into a riot. Tibetan anger was fueled by reports that imprisoned monks and nuns were being mistreated or killed in prison as a reaction to the street demonstrations.
  • China immediately cut off access to Tibet for foreign media and tourists.
  • The unrest came at a sensitive time for China, which was gearing up for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.The situation in Tibet caused increased international scrutiny of Beijing's entire human rights record, leading some foreign leaders to boycott the Olympic Opening Ceremonies. Olympic torch-bearers around the world were met by thousands of human rights protestors.
  • Tibet and China have had a long relationship, fraught with difficulty and change.At times, the two nations have worked closely together. At other times, they have been at war.
  • Today, the nation of Tibet does not exist; not one foreign government officially recognizes the Tibetan government-in-exile.
zareefkhan

Russian Trolls Were Sloppy, but Indictment Still 'Points at the Kremlin' - The New York... - 0 views

  • Just because the operation was thinly veiled, however, does not mean that the Russian trolling — creating provocative online posts about immigration, religion and race to try to sway voters — lacked high-level support.
  • since the first reports surfaced in 2014 about the existence of a troll farm called the Internet Research Agency, there have been questions about its Kremlin ties.
  • The United States indictment is among the clearest documents yet in stating outright that Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a businessman grown fabulously wealthy off government contracts, controls the agency despite denials from him and the Kremlin. He has long been linked to President Vladimir V. Putin
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  • Others noted, however, that degrees of control vary. There is a saying in Russian that the Kremlin has many towers, meaning that various bureaucratic cabals and government agencies hold differing and sometimes competing interests.
  • The Kremlin; the F.S.B., the main security service; and the S.V.R., or the foreign intelligence service, all have interests overseas, which complicates singling out the troll farm’s ultimate godfather.
  • “People do not go ask permission from Putin: ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, can we go hack the servers of the Democratic Party?’ It’s not like that,” said Anton Merkurov, an internet analyst. “Putin never really uses the internet, so he doesn’t understand how it works.”
  • “It was very ad hoc, very amateurish,” he said. “They did not consider this to be a sensitive operation. They used easily traceable methods.”
  • Lyudmila Savchuk, an internet activist who went undercover as an employee at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, said that there should be thousands of names in the indictment, not just 13 top managers.
  • The Internet Research Agency was initially formed in 2013 to attack members of the political opposition, like Aleksei A. Navalny, Mr. Putin’s most outspoken critic
g-dragon

The short life and tragic death of the 6th Dalai Lama - 0 views

  • He received ordination as the most powerful lama in Tibet only to turn his back on monastic life. As a young adult he spent evenings in taverns with his friends and enjoyed sexual relations with women. He is sometimes called the "playboy" Dalai Lama.
  • a young man who was sensitive and intelligent, even if undisciplined.
  • After a childhood locked away in a country monastery with hand-picked tutors, his assertion of independence is understandable. The violent end of his life makes his story a tragedy, not a joke.
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  • The "Great Fifth" lived in a time of volatile political upheaval. He persevered through adversity and unified Tibet under his rule as the first of the Dalai Lamas to be political and spiritual leaders of Tibet.
  • Sangye Gyatso and a few co-conspirators kept the 5th Dalai Lama's death a secret for 15 years.
  • the deception averted possible power struggles and allowed for a peaceful transition to the rule of the 6th Dalai Lama.
  • The boy identified as the Great Fifth's rebirth was Sanje Tenzin, born in 1683 to noble family that lived in the border lands near Bhutan.
  • The search for him had been carried out in secret.
  • In 1697 the death of the Great Fifth finally was announced, and 14-year-old Sanje Tenzin was brought in great fanfare to Lhasa to be enthroned as His Holiness the 6th Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso, meaning "Ocean of Divine Song." He moved into the just-completed Potala Palace to begin his new life.
  • The teenager's studies continued, but as time passed he showed less and less interest in them. As the day approached for his full monk's ordination he balked, then renounced his novice ordination. He began to visit taverns at night and was seen staggering drunkenly through the streets of Lhasa with his friends. He dressed in the silk clothes of a nobleman. He kept a tent outside Potala Palace where he would bring young women.
  • At this time China was ruled by the Kangxi Emperor, one of the most formidable rulers of China's long history. Tibet, through its alliance with fierce Mongol warriors, posed a potential military threat to China.
  • To soften this alliance, the Emperor sent word to Tibet's Mongol allies that Sangye Gyatso's concealment of the Great Fifth's death was an act of betrayal. The Desi was trying to rule Tibet himself, the Emperor said.Indeed, Sangye Gyatso had become accustomed to managing Tibet's affairs on his own, and he was having a hard time letting go, especially when the Dalai Lama was mostly interested in wine, women and song.
  • The Great Fifth's chief military ally had been a Mongol tribal chief named Gushi Khan. Now a grandson of Gushi Khan decided it was time to take affairs in Lhasa in hand and claim his grandfather's title, king of Tibet. The grandson, Lhasang Khan, eventually gathered an army and took Lhasa by force. Sangye Gyatso went into exile, but Lhasang Khan arranged his assassination, in 1701.
  • Now Lhasang Khan turned his attention to the dissolute Dalai Lama. In spite of his outrageous behavior he was a charming young man, popular with Tibetans. The would-be king of Tibet began to see the Dalai Lama as a threat to his authority.
  • Lhasang Khan sent a letter to the Kangxi Emperor asking if the Emperor would support deposing the Dalai Lama. The Emperor instructed the Mongol to bring the young lama to Beijing; then a decision would be made what to do about him.
  • Then the warlord found Gelugpa lamas willing to sign an agreement that the Dalai Lama was not fulfilling his spiritual responsibilities.
  • Remarkably, monks were able to overwhelm the guards and take the Dalai Lama back to Lhasa, to Drepung Monastery.
  • He left the monastery with some devoted friends who insisted on coming with him. Lhasang Khan accepted the Dalai Lama's surrender and then had his friends slaughtered.
  • There is no record of exactly what caused the 6th Dalai Lama's death, only that he died in November 1706 as the traveling party approached China's central plain. He was 24 years old
  • The 6th Dalai Lama's chief legacy are his poems, said to be among the loveliest in Tibetan literature. Many are about love, longing, and heartbreak. Some are erotic. And some reveal a bit of his feelings about his position and his life, such as this one:
oliviaodon

Can France's Far-Right Reinvent Itself? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Through much of the last two years, the populist far-right seemed poised to conquer France. In the surreal aftermath of Trump and Brexit, the prospect of a victory by Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front (FN), felt alarmingly possible. After decades of mounting racism and economic insecurity, Western democracies were lashing out at the ballot box.
  • But today, eight months after the French presidential election, the FN seems flummoxed by Emmanuel Macron, the country’s centrist president, who, with his hefty budget cuts and far-reaching welfare reforms, would seem to be the party’s ideal adversary.
  • The National Front’s inability to seize the moment stems, in large part, from a raft of internal contradictions.
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  • Perhaps nothing better exemplifies the FN’s identity crisis than the departure of Florian Philippot, the party’s former vice president and national spokesperson. He had embodied the FN’s “de-demonization” strategy—less racism and xenophobia, more education, healthcare and progressive economics.
  • “They’re returning [to] an identity-based rhetoric. It’s really a step backwards,” he said. Since Philippot’s break with the FN (he insisted he was pushed out), he has co-founded a political party called “the Patriots.”
  • This logic animates the push for the party to pick a new name, which is expected to be announced at the FN’s “re-foundation congress” in March.
  • The Front’s leaders, however, insist that they don’t want to revive the FN of the 1970s and 1980s, the days of the party’s Holocaust-denying president Jean-Marie Le Pen and his obsession with immigration.
  • It’s difficult to see anything changing until another FN politician rises to challenge Le Pen.
  • To some degree, the party still operates as something of a personality cult.
  • “If people from the National Front are really asking themselves questions about the basics and about strategy, and they want to bring them forward, they need to run against Marine Le Pen for the presidency of the National Front,”
  • Perhaps the most sensitive question for the FN is that of a potential electoral alliance with the Republicans, France’s mainstream conservative party, which has struggled to differentiate itself from Macron’s La République En Marche
jayhandwerk

Mahmoud Abbas Says Donald Trump Plan: 'Slap of the Century' | Time - 0 views

  • The Palestinian president railed at President Donald Trump in a fiery, two-hour-long speech on Sunday, saying “shame on you” for his treatment of the Palestinians and warning that he would have no problem rejecting what he suggested would be an unacceptable peace plan
  • He (Trump) said in a tweet: ‘We won’t give money to the Palestinians because they rejected the negotiations,'” Abbas said. “Shame on you. When did we reject the talks? Where is the negotiation that we rejected?
  • Abbas has said that by siding with the Israelis on a sensitive issue, the announcement had destroyed Trump’s credibility as a Mideast peace broker.
anonymous

Roxana Hernandez: Anger over transgender migrant's death in US - BBC News - 0 views

  • According to ICE, Ms Hernandez was "processed as an expedited removal" when she applied for admission at the San Ysidro port of entry in California on 9 May.
  • Immigrants' rights groups have condemned the US government after a transgender immigrant died in US custody while seeking asylum.
  • She died early in the morning of 25 May having been transferred to Lovelace Medical Center in Albuquerque by air ambulance.
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  • The immigrants' rights groups are calling for dignified and humane treatment for all asylum seekers, medical care sensitive to the needs of transgender people and those with HIV, and the closure of all immigration detention centres.
  • Earlier this month, a 20-year-old indigenous Guatemalan woman, Gomez Gonzalez, was shot dead in Texas by a US border patrol officer who said a group of migrants rushed towards him.
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