Cory Booker on the Issues: Where He Stands
In his six years in the Senate, Cory Booker has progressed from a moderate who defended private equity to a leading progressive voice on issues like criminal justice reform and marijuana legalization. As he transitions to a national presidential campaign, which he announced Friday, the candidate has been focusing on some key issues that animate the left wing of the Democratic Party.Mr. Booker has made criminal justice reform a cornerstone of his Senate tenure. He sought early on to craft bipartisan bills that would have changed penalties for nonviolent crimes and reduced prison sentences, though neither effort became law. Late last year, Congress passed a criminal justice reform act, signed by President Trump, that Mr. Booker had originally sponsored. But during his time as mayor, Newark’s police department faced accusations of brutality and intimidation, and the Department of Justice launched an investigation into the department; Mr. Booker said he “welcomed” the inquiry.In 2017, Mr. Booker announced his support for the Medicare for All Act drafted by Senator Bernie Sanders, and reiterated his support in an interview after he announced his candidacy Friday, saying “I signed up and am a big believer in Medicare for all.” But as a senator from New Jersey who had received millions in campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, Mr. Booker had been reluctant to focus regulatory efforts on the industry, voting against a measure in 2017 that would have greatly reduced drug prices by allowing imports from Canada. He has since reversed course, announcing his support this year for Mr. Sanders’s bill to rein in prescription drug costs.Mr. Booker said Friday that “environmental justice” will be one of the three top policy issues of his campaign. He has recently signed on to endorse the Green New Deal, a progressive litmus test on the environment pushed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, that pushes for investments in clean-energy infrastructure and policies to directly address climate change.
Yes, Democrats Should Impeach Trump
Judging from its disappearance from the headlines, impeaching President Trump seems like it will be consigned to the back burner when the House reconvenes next week. Not so. Over the break, a dozen more Democrats came out in favor, bringing the number to 131, and Rep. Jerrold Nadler said an impeachment inquiry might begin in late fall, after hearings this month and next.The pooh-bahs of the House leadership are proceeding cautiously. One of them rightly told me last week that the worst thing they could do would be to lose an impeachment vote. They need a majority of the House—217 Democrats (plus independent Justin Amash)—which means they must gather at least 87 more commitments by the end of the year. There are currently 235 Democrats.Can they get there? (Any later than early 2020 and it’s too close to the election). The party line is Democratic members will do their duty and look at the evidence, which Trump is fighting furiously in court to withhold. This argument is partly legit (it’s important to build a public case) but mostly window-dressing. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the moderates already know that the man obstructed justice, abuses power every day, and is clearly unfit for office. What’s holding them back is a faulty analysis of the politics of impeachment. They’re still caught in the grips of myopic conventional wisdom about the way the whole thing would actually play out in a trial in the Senate.Recall that in the July 31 debate, Sen. Michael Bennet repeated the familiar argument that the Senate will not remove Trump from office. If the House impeaches him, Bennet said, Trump “would be running saying that he had been acquitted by the United States Congress.”Julian Castro shot back: “If they don’t impeach him, he’s going to say, ‘You see? You see? The Democrats didn’t go after me on impeachment, and you know why? Because I didn’t do anything wrong.’”Conversely, Castro continued, if the House impeaches Trump, the public would conclude that “his friend, Mitch McConnell, Moscow Mitch, let him off the hook.”Castro’s argument was so persuasive that Bennet did something you never, ever see in a debate—he changed his mind on stage: “I don’t disagree with that. You just said it better than I did. We have to walk and chew gum at the same time.”Walking and chewing gum at the same time—a useful cliché—usually means in this context legislating and investigating Trump simultaneously. But it could also mean something else: attacking Trump and McConnell at the same time. It may be that a winning Democratic impeachment strategy is coming into view, one that simultaneously upholds the rule of law and yields political dividends. I call it “Stain and Blame”—stain Trump by impeaching him, and blame McConnell when he is acquitted in the Senate. There’s only one modern case of a Senate impeachment trial of a president, and the circumstances differed. But I covered Bill Clinton’s trial for Newsweek in 1999 and the procedure that was followed then is instructive. The Clinton trial took place in a Republican-controlled Senate and was presided over by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who wore a special robe embroidered with ribbons he adopted from a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. The prosecutors in the case were 12 “House Managers” (including then-Rep. Lindsey Graham); the defense was handled by Clinton’s private lawyers—including a brilliant, wheelchair-bound litigator named Charles Ruff—and one Democratic senator, Dale Bumpers. Because the evidence of perjury and obstruction of justice contained sexual material, much of it was heard behind closed doors and all three witnesses to the possible obstruction of justice—Monica Lewinsky, Vernon Jordan, and Sidney Blumenthal— appeared only on videotape. With 67 votes required for conviction, Clinton’s acquittal was—like Trump’s—a foregone conclusion.But Clinton’s impeachment, while unpopular at the time, was nonetheless a humiliating blow. The next election after the whole process was completed was not the 1998 midterms—won by Democrats before Senate acquittal—but the 2000 presidential election, which George W. Bush (barely) won over Clinton’s vice-president, Al Gore, in part by promising to “restore honor and dignity to the Oval Office.” The argument worked, even though Clinton wasn’t on the ballot. In 2020, after impeaching Trump, it would work much better. Without impeaching him, it has no sting.This time, the trial in the well of the Senate would be presided over by Chief Justice John Roberts, who, like Rehnquist, would run it like a quasi-trial, with evidence, witnesses (who would likely appear in person) and summations. Nadler and others from the House Judiciary Committee would serve as prosecutors. Trump would have private lawyers defending him. The senators would be the jury. It would be Roberts’ job to make sure the rules are followed, which means the prosecution and defense must stick to the indictment—the articles of impeachment approved by the House. McConnell would not have the 60 votes needed to change those rules or dismiss the motion to consider the articles. This necessity of adhering to the articles of impeachment has received no discussion. But it is crucial to understanding how a Senate trial would actually go. Recall Robert Mueller’s testimony. With the exception of Reps. John Ratcliffe and Louie Gohmert, no Republicans tried to claim Trump did not commit obstruction of justice. Instead, they changed the subject to Fusion GPS, the Steele dossier, and other counter-charges irrelevant to what would be at issue in a Senate trial. Except in the defense’s opening argument and summation, these distractions would likely not be allowed during the bulk of the Senate trial, televised for tens of millions. “Despite his acquittal, impeachment—a convenient shorthand for all of his despicable qualities—would be wrung around Donald Trump’s neck all the way to Election Day.”Think about the defense that Trump would be compelled to mount. His trial lawyers would have the unenviable task of shooting down at least eight clear examples of obstruction of justice outlined in the Mueller Report, plus explain why Trump did not abuse and disgrace his office and obstruct Congress (other likely articles of impeachment). They would have to explain why it was perfectly okay for Trump to feather his own nest by directing his people to stay at Trump hotels, after promising he would not tend to his businesses in the White House. (That article of impeachment could fall under either abuse of power or violation of the emoluments clause). The point is, Trump would be flayed every day for the duration of the short trial—hardly helpful to his re-election. Meanwhile, vulnerable Republican incumbents from blue states like Cory Gardner and Susan Collins would face a very tough vote. To save their seats, they might be forced to vote for conviction, which would hurt Trump even more in battleground states.Now contrast this with what would happen if the House decides not to impeach Trump. Without a trial, the whole thing goes in the rear view mirror, except whenever Trump wants to fling it in the Democrats’ face. Beyond acquittal in the Senate, the other conventional argument against impeachment made by House moderates in swing districts is that they want to campaign in 2020 as they did in 2018–on real issues that people care about, like health care. That would be a good point if Democrats were stressing Trump’s failure to protect people with preexisting conditions—a big issue in the midterms. But that argument received zero attention in the recent presidential debates, which showed that the more Democrats discuss health care, the more divided and impractical they look. And impeachment would hardly prevent Democrats from returning to smart health care arguments after the primaries.A related piece of conventional wisdom is that impeachment and a Senate trial would open Democrats up to the charge—already being made by the GOP against pro-impeachment House members—that they are not working for their constituents. But if the Clinton case is any indication, a week-long Senate trial would wrap up only a month or so after impeachment. That means the whole thing would be over in January or February. The Democrats could shower blame on McConnell for the acquittal and move on. By summer, Democratic members would have had plenty of time to refocus their attention on constituent concerns. No Republican challenger can credibly argue in October of 2020 that the incumbent Democrat ignored constituents for a brief period 10 months earlier while he or she voted for impeachment. People can’t remember what happened two weeks ago, much less 10 months ago. With one exception: The impeachment of the President. The memories of that are long. Despite his acquittal, impeachment—a convenient shorthand for all of his despicable qualities—would hang around Donald Trump’s neck all the way to Election Day. And he would be stained forever in history, his just deserts.
Artificial intelligence can help find illegal opioid sales online
Now the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which is part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, is investing in an artificial intelligence-based tool to track how “digital drug dealers” and illegal internet pharmacies market and sell opioids (though online transactions are likely not a large share of overall illegal sales). New AI-based approaches to clamping down on illegal opioid sales demonstrate how publicly available social media and internet data — even the stuff you post — can be used to find illegal transactions initiated online. It could also be used to track just about anything else, too: The researcher commissioned by NIDA to build this tool, UC San Diego professor Timothy Mackey, told Recode the same approach could be used to find online transactions associated with illegal wildlife traffickers, vaping products, counterfeit luxury products, and gun sales.As with most technical innovations, these tools pose concerns, too. For instance, drug policy experts caution that in the case of online opioid sales, such AI tools — depending on how they’re ultimately used by law enforcement — risk enabling the over-criminalization of low-level drug sellers. They also emphasize that these tools won’t ultimately help reduce the demand for these substances. Coming up with a way to find illegal drug sales online is no easy task. You can’t just search “opioid” and expect to only find accounts illegally selling these medications. Think about it: Tons of people have written about opioids online. Maybe you’ve shared your thoughts about a Vox article on this topic, or posted about a loved one who passed away from an overdose. Neither of those is an illegal transaction.In fact, only a small percentage of online posts that mention opioids are related to illegal selling or marketing, says Mackey. In one study of more than 600,000 tweets containing the names of several prescription opioids, he found that fewer than 2,000 tweets were identified as actually marketing those substances. Another challenge: People selling these substances online don’t always use obvious keywords, and they change their strategies and quickly remove their posts. For instance, Mackey has noticed that some accounts that appeared to be online drug sellers have included pictures of exercise equipment in their posts. He says another common behavior is misspelling the names of drugs. That’s because Instagram, for instance, has blocked searching by some drugs’ exact names. A search for the tag “percocet” on Instagram shows no result. Similar to findings by BuzzFeed News, when Recode searched for “#percocet” on Instagram, there were no results, but our search of slightly misspelled “#percocert,” a search term suggested by Mackey, revealed thousands of posts, some of which had comments that appeared to be related to drug-selling. (Facebook and Instagram community standards ban this type of content. The company says that it encourages users to report this content and uses automated systems to preemptively catch it). Comments that appear to be selling opioids, as well as other drugs, that Recode found by searching “#percocert” on Instagram. “For a platform like Instagram where we see a lot of drug dealers, it’s a number of hashtags associated with different opioid communities, and then it’s usually information about how to contact the drug dealer and buy from them,” Mackey says. He explains that there are also sellers who illegally represent themselves as internet pharmacies, which can advertise on social media or internet sites and then direct potential customers to some form of e-commerce platform. The FDA has repeatedly tried to clamp down on these sites. That’s where data — lots of it — and artificial intelligence come in. Last year, Mackey and his team used a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning to track down illegal drug sellers on Instagram. This type of AI focuses on recognizing patterns in data, and in this case, in Instagram posts. The idea is to get an AI-based system to recognize what drug-selling content looks like so that it can automatically find new sale-related posts within a much larger set of internet content.Mackey and his team have also used an AI-based approach called topic-modeling. Here’s how that works: You expose an AI system to a bunch of words and phrases from a larger set of information, like a database full of tweets that include the word “fentanyl” (a type of opioid). Then you let the AI system loose to figure out what words and phrases appear to be related to keywords like fentanyl. It’s a complicated form of sorting and matching that ultimately finds conversations, or “topics,” within the broader discussions of fentanyl. The hope is that one of the “topics” the AI finds is related to suspected sales, potentially revealing relevant keywords or information you otherwise would not have known about. Such a method helped Mackey whittle down a set of nearly 30,000 tweets about fentanyl to fewer than 10 unique tweets that appeared to be marketing fentanyl and included links to external sites. Mackey has also used this method to sort through online conversations about other types of opioids, like oxycodone and oxycontin.It’s important to keep in mind that most illegal opioid sales probably don’t occur online. But it’s still a problem that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), members of Congress, and the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) are worried about. In 2018, FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb called out social media companies, among other internet companies, for not being “proactive enough in rooting out these illegal offers to distribute opioids.” Soon afterward, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was hammered about illegal online pharmacies promoting opioids on his platform while testifying before Congress. He, too, pointed to AI as part of the solution. That represents a broader trend. A Food and Drug Administration spokesperson told Recode that the agency’s criminal investigations office often gathers intelligence from public tips, the internet, the dark web, and social media, “oftentimes using a number various AI-enabled applications to correlate and understand information from multiple sources.” Last year, the government budgeted the FDA $20 million to create a “data warehouse” meant to be mined, in part, by machine learning algorithms, which would be used to identify and address emerging trends in the opioid crisis. (The Drug Enforcement Administration told Recode it would not comment on investigative techniques.) Meanwhile, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook all told Recode they’re now using automated or AI-based technology to flag or investigate content that violates their policies, including illegal opioid sales. Mackey said he’s only been in limited talks with Facebook and Twitter, which were spurred by an FDA summit in 2018 focused on cracking down on illegal sales online. But Mackey says a pilot study he ran for Google led to the removal of some opioid sale-related content on YouTube (mostly in the comments section of videos about opioids).Now, as part of his work for NIDA, Mackey is developing a prototype based on his research, which he soon plans to commercialize (essentially, NIDA’s funding helped him launch a small company). He says that, for now, only the government is funding his work on tracking illegal opioid sales. Mackey’s hope is that the tool could ultimately be used by regulators, social media platforms, pharmaceutical companies, and even law enforcement agencies, like the DEA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mackey says his tool is needed because, even if proposed drug policy reforms succeed, we’ll still need to prevent the opioid crisis from extending itself online. While research shows that’s already happened to some extent, two drug policy researchers told Recode that online sales are probably a small share of overall illegal opioid purchases. The DEA told Recode that its investigations into retail-level sales are still dominated by traditional, and not online, sales. “We still don’t know to what extent this is a problem or what’s the size of it, relative to other kinds of traditional drug supply avenues,” said Bryce Pardo, a drug policy researcher at Rand Corporation, a nonpartisan think tank. He said it’s possible a tool like Mackey’s could help find specific populations that tend to sell these substances online. But he cautioned that such a tool would be most applicable to finding sellers at the bottom of the supply chain, not large-scale importers that illegally bring massive amounts of these controlled substances into the US.“When we try to target sellers, it becomes a game of whack-a-mole,” cautions Sheila Vakharia of the nonprofit Drug Policy Alliance. “Even when a seller is taken off the streets, taken off the web, or taken off a username or an account, there’s very little in place that’s going to prevent the next one from popping up.” Mackey says it’s true some of the accounts his system will flag will be relatively low-level, but he emphasizes that their volume varies, and could also be used to find where drugs are being sold on other parts of the web. Ultimately, he says, the AI can help law enforcement link investigations they’re conducting online to those they’re pursuing offline, and to gain a better sense of the entire supply chain. He says the information they gain from this system could ultimately help them prosecute an existing case, target larger actors, issue a subpoena, or even conduct a “test-buy.” Vakharia agreed that some applications of data-mining and AI might be useful. For instance, these tools could help those seeking opioids — or those who are already at risk of an overdose — access rehabilitative resources.More broadly, AI is also being used to study how people talk about their drug abuse and recovery online. And researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology are working on a somewhat similar tool to Mackey’s — called DrugTracker — that uses social media and geospatial data to mine through slang related to, and detect risks of, drug activity. The idea, professor Hai Phan explains, is to keep local institutions informed of the risk of drug abuse in their areas. “Drug abuse uptick is really, really fast, especially when we have a new drug,” he told Recode. Still, Vakharia said there’s a risk it could be used to crack down on low-level sellers in an ineffective way that would ultimately exacerbate a failing war on drugs. “This is that fine line that we’re going to continue to walk for some time,” Vakharia said. “If we know that the internet is a big place where people are engaging in these transactions but also looking for information, it would be really great to be able to target messaging for them. But I think that assuming the best of intentions for all players who are going to get access to this information is naive.”Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.
The Guardian view on immigration and Covid
Covid-19 has accomplished in weeks something that UK governments spent a decade failing to do. It has drastically cut labour migration. Lockdown prevents the gathering of real-time data, but it is a reasonable assumption when international travel has stopped that net migration is currently happening at a rate well below 100,000 per year.That was the target adopted by David Cameron in 2010 and pursued aggressively by Theresa May at the Home Office and in Downing Street. It was never met before being abandoned last year. What happens next is uncertain. This week would have seen the government’s post-Brexit immigration bill return to the Commons, but the timetable has been discarded, not least because parliament’s digital systems are not yet ready for remote voting.There is no indication that ministers are reconsidering the new regime, which is based on a points system designed to select “skilled” workers over “unskilled” labour. The distinction is meant to favour what ministers call “the best and brightest” while deterring those whom decades of political rhetoric have cast as undesirable. The charges against that latter group are various: poaching jobs from British-born citizens, depressing wages, failing to observe cultural norms and generally upsetting people with conspicuous otherness.The vilification reached its apogee in the campaign to take Britain out of the EU. The promise to “take back control” of borders had strong emotional appeal, but was never rooted in the reality of modern Britain, where migrants of all skill levels and income brackets keep the economic and social wheels turning. That awkward fact was always bound to emerge over time, but it has been revealed abruptly by the pandemic.Farmers are already warning that fruit will rot in the fields without seasonal labour normally provided by EU citizens. Attempts to entice UK workers to fill the gap are failing. Immigrants have kept public transport running, delivered goods and, most poignantly, kept the NHS and social care services operational. They have put their lives at risk for a country that has been, at best, ambivalent about their entitlement to live here at all.There is no longer an explicit commitment to make Britain a “hostile environment” for immigrants, but the apparatus of automatic suspicion and bureaucratic bullying developed under that rubric has not gone away. An appeal court this week upheld the law obliging landlords to check the immigration status of tenants, despite an earlier finding by the high court that the rules led to discrimination on racial grounds. Many immigrant workers, already in precarious employment or on visas that prohibit access to benefits, will suffer disproportionately from the economic impact of the pandemic.It would be shameful if the heroic contribution and sacrifices made by immigrants in these difficult times were met with callous ingratitude by the government. Fallacies and prejudices that have informed UK policy for a generation are being exposed by the current crisis. The debate has been oriented in entirely the wrong direction, with all the emphasis on a burden that should more rightly be understood as a blessing. It will not be easy to reverse that trend, but the opportunity is there if our politicians have the honesty and the courage to take it.
She Argued Facebook Is a Monopoly. To Her Surprise, People Listened.
By Updated Dec. 10, 2019 3:44 pm ET When Dina Srinivasan quit her job as a digital advertising executive two years ago, she wasn’t looking to retool antitrust law for the social-media age. She just wanted to spend some time reading in coffee shops. Then 36 years old, with a Yale law degree she had never put to use, Ms. Srinivasan spent a few months in cafes around her Connecticut home reading economic history, and mulling over her own misgivings about the evolution of the digital advertising market. One mystery nagged at her, she said: How could a company with... To Read the Full Story Subscribe Sign In Continue reading your article with a WSJ membership View Membership Options
Robots will take our jobs. We’d better plan now, before it’s too late
A new sort of convenience store opened in the basement of the headquarters of Amazon in Seattle in January. Customers walk in, scan their phones, pick what they want off the shelves and walk out again. At Amazon Go there are no checkouts and no cashiers. Instead, it is what the tech giant calls “just walk out” shopping, made possible by a new generation of machines that can sense which customer is which and what they are picking off the shelves. Within a minute or two of the shopper leaving the store, a receipt pops up on their phone for items they have bought.This is the shape of things to come in food retailing. Technological change is happening fast and it has economic, social and ethical ramifications. There is a downside to Amazon Go, even though consumers benefit from lower prices and don’t waste time in queues. The store is only open to shoppers who can download an app on their smartphone, which rules out those who rely on welfare food stamps. Constant surveillance means there’s no shoplifting, but it has a whiff of Big Brother about it.Change is always disruptive but the upheaval likely as a result of the next wave of automation will be especially marked. Driverless cars, for instance, are possible because intelligent machines can sense and have conversations with each other. They can do things – or will eventually be able to do things – that were once the exclusive preserve of humans. That means higher growth but also the risk that the owners of the machines get richer and richer while those displaced get angrier and angrier.The experience of past industrial revolutions suggests that resisting technological change is futile. Nor, given that automation offers some tangible benefits – in mobility for the elderly and in healthcare, for instance – is it the cleverest of responses.A robot tax – a levy that firms would pay if machines were taking the place of humans – would slow down the pace of automation by making the machines more expensive but this too has costs, especially for a country such as Britain, which has a problem with low investment, low productivity and a shrunken industrial base. The UK has 33 robot units per 10,000 workers, compared with 93 in the US and 213 in Japan, which suggests the need for more automation not less. On the plus side, the UK has more small and medium-sized companies in artificial intelligence than Germany or France. Penalising these firms with a robot tax does not seem like a smart idea.The big issue is not whether the robots are coming, because they are. It is not even whether they will boost growth, because they will. On some estimates the UK economy will be 10% bigger by 2030 as the result of artificial intelligence alone. The issue is not one of production but of distribution, of whether there is a Scandinavian-style solution to the challenges of the machine age.In some ways, the debate that was taking place between the tech industry, politicians and academics in Davos last week was similar to that which surrounded globalisation in the early 1990s. Back then, it was accepted that free movement of goods, people and money around the world would create losers as well as winners, but provided the losers were adequately compensated – either through reskilling, better education, or a stronger social safety net – all would be well.But the reskilling never happened. Governments did not increase their budgets for education, and in some cases cut them. Welfare safety nets were made less generous. Communities affected by deindustrialisation never really recovered. Writing in the recent McKinsey quarterly, W Brian Arthur put it this way: “Offshoring in the last few decades has eaten up physical jobs and whole industries, jobs that were not replaced. The current transfer of jobs from the physical to the virtual economy is a different sort of offshoring, not to a foreign country but to a virtual one. If we follow recent history we can’t assume these jobs will be replaced either.”The Centre for Cities suggests that the areas hardest hit by the hollowing out of manufacturing are going to be hardest hit by the next wave of automation as well. That’s because the factories and the pits were replaced by call centres and warehouses, where the scope for humans to be replaced by machines is most obvious.But there are going to be middle-class casualties too: machines can replace radiologists, lawyers and journalists just as they have already replaced bank cashiers and will soon be replacing lorry drivers. Clearly, it is important to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. Any response to the challenge posed by smart machines must be to invest more in education, training and skills. One suggestion made in Davos was that governments should consider tax incentives for investment in human, as well as physical, capital.Still this won’t be sufficient. As the Institute for Public Policy Research has noted, new models of ownership are needed to ensure that the dividends of automation are broadly shared. One of its suggestions is a citizens’ wealth fund that would own a broad portfolio of assets on behalf of the public and would pay out a universal capital dividend. This could be financed either from the proceeds of asset sales or by companies paying corporation tax in the form of shares that would become more valuable due to the higher profits generated by automation.But the dislocation will be considerable, and comes at a time when social fabrics are already frayed. To ensure that, as in the past, technological change leads to a net increase in jobs, the benefits will have to be spread around and the concept of what constitutes work rethought. That’s why one of the hardest working academics in Davos last week was Guy Standing of Soas University of London, who was on panel after panel making the case for a universal basic income, an idea that has its critics on both left and right, but whose time may well have come.• Larry Elliott is the Guardian’s economics editor Topics Robots Opinion Amazon Retail industry Self-driving cars Universal basic income Work & careers Seattle comment
Attorney General Barr Accuses Hollywood, Big Tech of Collaborating with China
Clint Eastwood has been working in Hollywood longer than many folks posting here, and haven't been denied work. Neither has John Malcovich or Robert Duvall. There may be some political bias in Hollywood, but the primary bias is profits. Plenty of actors of the "right" political alignment can't get work either, and it's mainly because the bean counters have decided their names won't sell movies. Let's face it, the real bias in Hollywood is age, beauty and sex. If your a male actor, and you keep yourself in reasonable shape, you can keep going for a long time. If you're a woman, you're often dead in the water by your mid-40s. There are exceptions, but those exceptions are usually actors of such significant renown, or more wisely, like Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford, have their own production companies and act as their own executive producers, and thus have a helluva lot more clout when they go out looking for cash to make a film.As to editing films for various markets, that's been going on for decades. China may be the most visible form of that, but producers are also mindful of countries like Malaysia, Singapore and the like where domestic censorship and decency laws means they often have to recut films, sometimes redubbing lines, sometimes outright filming alternate scenes, just to get past the censor.This all boils down to one thing. Hollywood has only one bias; and that's money. The same town that could produce an anti-establishment film like Easy Rider could pump out what could only be regarded as the greatest pro-war film ever made; Patton, and all within a few years of each other. And you know why? Because someone somewhere thought "I bet these films can make money".If the likes of Vince Vaughan and Tim Allen have a problem, it's simply that no one is very interested in seeing their films (I feel bad about Allen, because, after all, he made Galaxy Quest, the best Star Trek movie ever made).
California bill would make utilities pay some blackout costs
In the state plagued by catastrophic blazes started by strong winds knocking down power lines, large investor-owned utilities have been aggressively shutting off power for millions of customers ahead of windstorms.Utility companies cite public safety for the practice but also do it to protect their bottom line. Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the nation's largest electric utility, filed for bankruptcy last year after facing an estimated $50 billion in damages from several Northern California wildfires that were linked to its equipment. including one blaze in 2018 that killed 85 people and destroyed 19,000 buildings.PG&E shut off power for more than 2 million customers in October. The blackouts caused major disruptions throughout the region, closing schools and businesses and making it more difficult for people who rely on medical devices powered by electricity.State Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco, says the liability issue acts as a financial incentive for electric companies to err on the side of large blackouts covering more people for longer periods of time. Wiener said he designed his bill to act as an incentive for utility companies to have smaller, more targeted blackouts.The bill would require investor-owned utilities to reimburse customers and local governments for some costs associated with blackouts. It would require an electric company's shareholders — not its customers — to put money into a fund to reimburse customers within two weeks of a blackout. It would also ban electric companies from raising rates to cover losses from a blackout.The California Public Utilities Commission would oversee the fund and decide how big it should be. The measure would also let the commission fine power companies up to $250,000 an hour for every 50,000 customers impacted by a power shutoff if regulators determine the utility “failed to act in a reasonable and prudent manner.”If the penalties had been in effect last fall, PG&E could have faced fines of more than $1 billion, according to a legislative analysis of the proposal.“It's about giving utilities an incentive to use planned blackouts as a scalpel and not as a sledgehammer,” Wiener said.Others worry the bill would spook electric companies into being too cautious with blackouts, thus increasing the risk of deadly wildfires.“I believe it gives perverse incentives that could harm people,” said state Sen. Bill Dodd, a Democrat from Napa.The bill passed the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday, clearing the way for a vote in the full Senate next week. The bill must pass the Senate by Jan. 31 to have a chance at becoming law this year.In a letter to committee members on Wednesday, PG&E Chief of State Government Relations DaVina Flemings said the company proactively turns off power “for one reason only and that is keeping customers and communities safe.”However, Flemings said the bill “would put customers and communities in a very dangerous position by penalizing the utilities for deploying a public safety power shutoff.”Wiener said the bill would not ban planned blackouts, saying “they can save lives and property.” Instead, he said it is to “incentivize the right behavior.”
California Cities Hire Goats To Help Prevent Wildfires : NPR
Enlarge this image A herd of goats spent the fall in and around Deer Canyon Park in Anaheim, Calif., helping to keep grasses and other potential wildfire fuels in check. Megan Manata hide caption toggle caption Megan Manata A herd of goats spent the fall in and around Deer Canyon Park in Anaheim, Calif., helping to keep grasses and other potential wildfire fuels in check. Megan Manata California has gone through several difficult fire seasons in recent years. Now, some cities are investing in unconventional fire prevention methods, including goats.Anaheim, a city southeast of Los Angeles, has recently re-upped its contract with the company Environmental Land Management to keep goats grazing on city hillsides nearly year-round.The goats are stationed in places like Deer Canyon Park, a nature preserve with more than a hundred acres of steep hills. Beginning in July, roughly 400 goats worked through the park, eating invasive grasses and dried brush.The company's operations manager Johnny Gonzales says that Deer Canyon, with its peaks and valleys, is just the right kind of place to use goats for fire prevention."This is the topography that poses challenges during these wildfire events," Gonzales says. "And we can go ahead and reduce the fuel loads and take out the invasive plants, and establish the native plants on these banks; you're reestablishing the ecology."Gonzales says that demand for wildfire prevention goats has soared in recent years."It's not an underestimation to say that we got over 100 calls a month from private individuals with smaller parcels, little lots or things from an acre, 2 acres requesting the goats," Gonzales says. "And unfortunately, as a commercial herd, I can't take on all these private lots."Nature's weed wacker Anaheim's Fire Marshall Allen Hogue says the steepness of the hills in parts of the city makes the goats invaluable for landscape management."It would be almost impossible for a human to sit there or walk up and down with a weed whacker or a Weed Eater, so that's why we use the goats," Hogue says.What makes the goats important isn't just their ability to climb steep hillsides. According to Hogue and Gonzales, the animals eat invasive plants and grasses while only minimally grazing on native plants. Enlarge this image Goats are able to better navigate and clear brush from steep hills, where humans walking with weed wackers or riding on lawn mowers can't easily go. Megan Manata hide caption toggle caption Megan Manata Goats are able to better navigate and clear brush from steep hills, where humans walking with weed wackers or riding on lawn mowers can't easily go. Megan Manata A recent study from the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that these alien grasses are increasing the frequency of wildfires because of how easily they burn."If you throw a bunch of matches into a forest, some small percentage of them might actually start a fire," says Bethany Bradley, professor of environmental conservation at UMass Amherst and co-author of the study, "but if you throw a bunch of matches into a big hay pile, there's a good chance that many of those will catch fire."The study found that these alien grasses double or triple the likelihood of a fire occurring if they're present.While this particular study didn't measure the change in invasive plant abundance, researchers have found that climate change has made it easier for these plants to spread. These flammable grasses outgrow native plants that are naturally more fire-resistant, which adds potential fuel to fires.A year-round problemEven a particularly rainy year doesn't help slow down a fire season. Bradley says that water helps these invasive plants grow year after year. There's no easy fix for breaking the invasive plant cycle."So this is one of the biggest challenges with invasive species," Bradley says. "Like any home gardener knows that you can't just go out and weed once, declare victory and leave, right?"This is where goats can play a role, according to Bradley."Goats are really good at eating stuff, right? The challenge with them though, is that you can't just do it once. They need to go back time and time again in order to keep controlling that biomass," she says.However, not all researchers are convinced. Some like Jon Keeley from the U.S. Geological Survey think that using goats alone as fire prevention isn't enough. Environment For Some California Residents, Latest Wildfires Are A Tipping Point "One of the things that concerns some people is there is this feeling oftentimes that if you're using goats to graze these invasive grasses, you're somehow making the environment safer for communities and for homes," Keeley says. "And that's debatable."He says that goats will eat grasses and keep the invasive plants down, but he says that the goats don't go everywhere they're needed."The problem is those grasses are going to spread far beyond areas where you would graze the goats," Keeley says. "These grasses are all over the Santa Monica Mountains, and so you're not likely to impact very many areas by goat grazing."Keeley says that grazing also isn't enough since homes are most commonly lit aflame because of burning embers. Clearing out grasses around a house is useful, but "those embers are going to be blown over these areas that were grazed the goats," he says.Living in fire-prone areasKeeley says wildfires are a people problem. As the state continues to grow in population and the cost of housing rises dramatically, residents are pushed to live in unsafe areas."We've been forced to move out into landscapes that are very hazardous, and this almost certainly accounts for why these fires have become more destructive in the last couple of decades," Keeley says. "And the problem is not likely to go away." National Unanswered Questions Leave Californians Worried About Fire Season While California continues to combat wildfires, the city of Anaheim says the goats are a key part of its fire prevention plans, but they're just one piece of a large puzzle. The city also uses heat-sensing satellite imagery and wildfire detection cameras.Gonzales, who hires out his goats, says that when the goats spend so much time in an area, they become part of the community and sometimes even get their own names."There's Chewy, Spot, Pokey and Peggy and there's lots of different names. Mainly now, the names come from the residents. When we get into a neighborhood, if we have some kids, they'll name it," Gonzales says. "And sure enough, you know, year after year, they come back to see the goats and the names live because the people come back to see the goats."Megan Manata is an intern on NPR's National Desk.
Setback for Boris Johnson as Lords amend Brexit bill
Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal has received a setback in the Lords after three amendments to the bill were passed.In the government’s first parliamentary defeat since the general election, peers voted for EU citizens to have the right to be given official documentation if they lawfully reside in the UK after Brexit.They backed a cross-party amendment to the withdrawal agreement bill allowing for physical proof of status. The second defeat was over the power of British courts to depart from European court of justice judgments and the third swiftly followed when peers backed a move to allow cases to be referred to the supreme court to decide whether to depart from EU case law.However, because of Johnson’s big majority, the results are expected to be overturned by the Commons. The Lords passed the first amendment, moved by Liberal Democrat peer Jonny Oates, by 270 votes to 229. It would give EU citizens in the UK the automatic right to stay, rather than having to apply to the Home Office, and would ensure they can get physical proof of their rights.Afterwards the Home Office minister Brandon Lewis issued a statement rejecting outright the calls for a physical card to prove settled status, adding that the government’s policy would not change.He tweeted: “I disagree with the results of today’s @UKHouseofLords vote. The EU settlement scheme grants #EUcitizens with a secure, digital status which can’t be lost, stolen or tampered with. There will be no change to our digital approach.”A survey of EU citizens published on Monday showed that 90% want a physical card to demonstrate their right to be in the country and to avert discrimination by employers and landlords post-Brexit.Oates said that without physical documentation EU citizens eligible to remain in the UK would be “severely disadvantaged” in dealings with landlords, airlines, employers and other officials.He denied it was an attempt to challenge Brexit or “frustrate” the legislation, which has already passed through the Commons with large majorities ahead of Brexit day on 31 January.Oates said EU citizens covered by the settled status scheme should have the right to a physical form of proof of status, instead of the digital-only proof proposed by the government.He said the right to remain should also be based on eligibility and not forfeited by failing to meet an arbitrary deadline under a cut-off date in June 2021, which could lead to EU citizens being “criminalised” afterwards.Speaking for Labour, Lord McNicol of West Kilbride said the party was “far from convinced” about the government’s proposals and would vote against them unless concessions were granted.Home Office minister Lady Williams of Trafford said the amendment could lead to “ID card creep”. She defended the digital provision of proof, insisting the service was robust and reliable, and said physical documents could be lost, stolen or tampered with.“The government is adamant that we must avoid the situation where years down the line EU citizens who have built their lives here find themselves struggling to prove their rights and entitlements in the UK,” Williams said. Topics Brexit House of Lords Boris Johnson news
China accused of buying influence after Czech billionaire funds PR push
The Czech Republic’s richest man is at the centre of a suspected foreign influence campaign by the Chinese government after one of his businesses financed an attempt to boost China’s image in the central European country.In a development that has taken even seasoned sinologists aback, Home Credit – a domestic loans company owned by Petr Kellner that has lent an estimated £10bn to Chinese consumers – paid a PR firm to place articles in the local media giving a more positive picture of a country widely associated with political repression and human rights abuses.Home Credit also funded a newly formed thinktank – headed by a translator for the Czech Republic’s pro-Chinese president, Miloš Zeman – to counteract the more sceptical line taken by a longer-established China-watching body, Sinopsis, linked with Prague’s Charles University, one of Europe’s oldest seats of learning.Experts say the moves, revealed in an investigation by the Czech news site Aktualne, bear the hallmarks of a foreign influence campaign by China that highlights its aggressive attempts to gain access to former communist central and eastern European countries through its ambitious “belt and road” initiative, under which it offers to fund infrastructure projects in those states.According to analysts, the Czech Republic has been more open to Chinese influence than most other European countries, a situation that has coincided with the burgeoning commercial relationship between China and Kellner’s sprawling PPF group, which boasts an estimated £40bn in assets, including Home Credit. PPF began accumulating its vast wealth in the mass privatisation of state assets that followed the fall of communism in the former Czechoslovakia in 1989.Critics accuse Home Credit of currying favour with the Chinese regime in an effort to protect its interests after a series of political disputes between China and the Czechs that cooled previously warm bilateral relations.Home Credit has acknowledged paying the PR firm, C&B Reputation Management, and backing Sinoskop, the thinktank, to try to bring “greater balance” to debate about China.“Discussion of China in the Czech Republic had become one-sided, relentlessly negative and poorly informed,” Home Credit’s spokesman, Milan Tomanek, told the Observer. “Home Credit simply sought to add greater balance to the discussion by enabling different viewpoints to be heard … We want open, informed conversations on every country, including China, particularly where distorted conversations are hurting our image and reputation.”Martin Hala, a lecturer at Charles University’s Sinology department and director of Sinopsis, said: “The bottom line is that Home Credit hired this company not to defend their own corporate interests per se, but rather to promote the narrative coming from the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese communist party.“The first goal is to normalise China, presenting it not as a dictatorship but as a country, like any other, that is opening up to reforms. I don’t think that’s an accurate picture.” Czech president Miloš Zeman meets China’s president Xi Jinping in Beijing in April last year. Photograph: ReutersThe revelations coincide with a recent warning by the Czech intelligence service, BIS, that Chinese influence campaigns pose a greater threat to national security than alleged meddling by the Russian government of Vladimir Putin.“The BIS considers primarily the increase in the activities of Chinese intelligence officers as the fundamental security problem,” the report says. “These activities can be clearly assessed as searching for and contacting potential cooperators and agents among Czech citizens.”Czech ties with Beijing grew closer after 2014 when the regime granted Home Credit a nationwide licence to offer domestic loans, the first foreign company to be given the right.Experts say this would only have happened on the understanding that Home Credit would work to ensure favourable coverage of China in the Czech media and political discourse. It heralded several trips to China by Zeman, who is close to Kellner, and culminated in a state visit in 2016 by the Chinese leader Xi Jinping to Prague.The rapprochement – which also saw the purchase of a Czech brewery, television station and Slavia Prague football club by a Chinese energy company, CEFC – reversed the policy adopted by the late Václav Havel, the Czech Republic’s first post-communist president who had championed human rights, and the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet.But relations began to sour last year when the Czech government of prime minister Andrej Babiš, acting on advice from the country’s cybersecurity agency, banned Huawei phones from ministerial buildings, prompting Chinese protests and a rebuke from Zeman, who accused the security services of “dirty tricks”.They took a further turn for the worse when Prague’s liberal mayor, Zdeněk Hřib, refused to abide by the One China policy – recognising China’s territorial claim to Taiwan – accepted by his predecessor as part of a twinning arrangement between the Czech capital and Beijing. In retaliation, China scrapped the agreement and cancelled a planned tour of the country by the Prague Philharmonia.Amid the rows, criticism began to appear in Chinese state media of Home Credit’s lending practices, accompanied by several failures in court to fully recover unpaid debts. That has fuelled speculation that the company began to fear for the future of its interests in China.When Sinopsis reported the Chinese media criticism on its website, it received a “cease and desist” legal warning from Home Credit which threatened to sue unless in the absence of an apology. The company accuses Sinopsis of failing to correct “misleading or incorrect statements”.Home Credit had earlier abandoned a £50,000 sponsorship deal with Charles University – which foreswore each institution from damaging the other’s good name – after a backlash from academics, who feared it would muzzle any criticism of China.Now critics see a new threat, from PPF’s recent £1.62bn purchase from AT&T of Central European Media Enterprises (CME), a company which includes the Czech Republic’s most-watched commercial TV station, Nova, as well as channels in neighbouring countries. PPF has dismissed warnings about potential political interference in the station’s output but some are sceptical.“PPF negotiated this deal saying that they would never meddle in politics,” said Petr Kutilek, a Czech political analyst and human rights activist. “But from the Home Credit affair, you actually see them meddling in politics.”
Rural Venezuela Crumbles as President Shores Up the Capital and His Power
PARMANA, Venezuela — From his palace in Caracas, President Nicolás Maduro projects an image of strength and his grip on power appears secure. Residents have a regular supply of electricity and gasoline. Shops are bursting with imported goods.But beyond the city, this facade of order quickly melts away. In order to preserve the quality of life of his most important backers, the country’s political and military elites, his administration has poured the country’s dwindling resources into Caracas and forsaken large swaths of Venezuela.“Venezuela is broken as a state, as a country,” said Dimitris Pantoulas, a political analyst in Caracas. “The few available resources are invested in the capital to protect the seat of power, creating a ministate amid the collapse.”Across much of the country, basic government functions like policing, road maintenance, health care and public utilities have been abandoned.The only remaining evidence of the state in Parmana, a fishing village on the banks of the Orinoco River, is the three teachers who remain at the school, which lacks food, books, and even a marker for the board.ImageThe school in Parmana has no food or books. The students often leave early, too hungry to focus.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York TimesThe priest was the first to leave Parmana. As the economic crisis deepened, the social workers, the police, the community doctor and several of the schoolteachers deserted.Overwhelmed by crime, the village’s residents say, they turned to Colombian guerrillas for protection.“We are forgotten,” said Herminia Martínez, 83, as she stooped with a machete in the tropical heat to tend an overgrown bean field. “There’s no government here.”A year ago, it seemed, for a moment, that Mr. Maduro’s critics might have a chance to oust him. An opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, had staged the biggest challenge to Mr. Maduro’s rule to date by claiming the presidency and quickly winning support from the United States and almost 60 other countries. Now Mr. Maduro’s adversaries have lost momentum. The Trump administration remains supportive of Mr. Guaidó: On Monday, the United States issued new sanctions against government allies who tried to block him from assuming the leadership of the country’s National Assembly. Despite this pressure, Mr. Maduro’s tenure seems secure, in part because of how well Mr. Maduro’s policies have bolstered Caracas.[Update: The U.S. has imposed sanctions on the Russian oil company supporting Venezuela’s leader.]But the economy, suffering from poor management, diminished oil and gold exports and crippling sanctions by the United States, is now entering its seventh year of a devastating contraction.This lasting depression, along with the retrenchment of the state, has allowed much of the nation’s infrastructure to fall into neglect. It has also led to Venezuela’s breakup into localized economies with only nominal links to Caracas. As runaway inflation rendered the country’s currency, the bolívar, practically worthless, dollars, euros, gold and the currencies of three neighboring countries began to circulate in different parts of Venezuela. Barter is rampant.ImageBartering fish for basic goods in Parmana.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times“Each place survives in its own way, as best it can,” said Armando Chacín, head of Venezuela’s ranchers’ federation. “They are completely different economies.”Outside Caracas, citizens of what was once Latin America’s wealthiest nation can be relegated to surviving in what are nearly preindustrial conditions. About half the residents of Venezuela’s seven major cities are exposed to daily blackouts and three-quarters get by without a reliable water supply, according to a September survey by the Venezuelan Public Services Observatory, a nonprofit.In Parmana, flooding last year washed away the only road out of town, leaving the village without regular deliveries of food, fuel for the power plant and gasoline. To get by, its 450 remaining residents have resorted to clearing fields with machetes, rowing their fishing boats and using the beans they grow themselves as currency.ImageGuillermo Loreto, 19, working on his grandmother’s bean field.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York TimesAfter decades of lavish oil spending, Venezuela’s government is running out of money. The country’s gross domestic product has shrunk 73 percent since Mr. Maduro took office in 2013 — one of the biggest declines in modern global history, according to estimates by the opposition-controlled congress, based on official statistics and data from the International Monetary Fund.Unable to pay meaningful salaries to millions of state employees, the government has looked the other way as they resorted to graft, influence peddling and side businesses to make ends meet. The official salary of Venezuela’s top military general is $13 a month, according to Citizens’s Control, a Venezuelan research group.In Caracas, the private sector — maligned for years under the Socialist government of Mr. Maduro and his popular predecessor, Hugo Chávez — has been allowed to fill some of the gaps in consumer products left by declining state imports. As once sacrosanct economic controls disappeared overnight, the capital filled up with hundreds of new shops and showrooms, offering everything from imported sports cars to American-made seaweed chips.And the burden of the country’s collapse has fallen largely on Venezuela’s provinces, where many residents have been effectively cut off from the central government.ImageGirls waiting for fishermen to arrive with a catch that they can take home.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York TimesRegions close to Venezuela’s borders have resorted to smuggling and cross-border trade for survival. Agricultural towns in Venezuela’s interior have sunk into subsistence, as the collapse of the road system and gasoline shortages decimated domestic trade. Tourism hot spots have survived on private investment and by catering to the elites. Local military commanders and a few ruling party strongmen with limited ties to Mr. Maduro have taken political control of far-flung regions. As national law enforcement shrank, irregular armed groups took their place, including Colombian Marxist guerrillas, former right-wing paramilitaries, criminal gangs, pro-Maduro militias and indigenous self-defense groups.Across the Venezuelan interior, these groups have often taken charge of enforcing business contracts, punishing common crimes and even settling divorces, according to dozens of testimonies of residents collected over months of reporting in three regions.The collapse of the Venezuelan state has run its course in Parmana, a large and once prosperous village of fishermen and farmers in Venezuela’s central plains.For lack of pay, the local police unit packed up and left one day in 2018, followed by the public workers who ran social programs. Shortly after, locals chased away the village’s detachment of National Guards for drunkenness and extortion.ImageThe abandoned National Guard post.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York TimesTo replace the guards, the village leaders decided to travel to the closest gold mine controlled by Colombian guerrillas to ask them to set up a post in Parmana.Over the past four years, to protect their supply lines, the guerrillas had wiped out the river pirates who had terrorized Parmana’s fishermen, robbing their boats of motors and killing several people.“We need authority here,” said Gustavo Ledezma, a shop owner and community sheriff. The guerrillas “bring order,” he said. “They don’t mess around.”Parmana’s descent into lawless subsistence is a steep downfall from its glory days of exporting rice, beans and cotton. The village’s wetlands and pristine springs drew throngs of holidaymakers every year.“Parmana, Parmana, how beautiful it is to wake up with you,” went a song by Venezuela’s legendary country bard, Simon Díaz.ImagePower lines that no longer supply electricity run along an abandoned property in Parmana.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York TimesMr. Chávez, the former president, had seen in the region’s agricultural potential the future of the Venezuelan economy. A decade ago, he spent at least a billion dollars building a bridge over the Orinoco to connect the region to Brazilian markets. The bridge, unfinished, is now abandoned. Parmana’s springs dried up after a politically-connected landowner diverted the water to his cotton fields in 2013, destroying the tourism industry.Now, on the village’s dusty streets, desperate fishermen stop the occasional visiting drivers in search of gasoline for their boat motors. A farming family sat by a pile of watermelons. They had tried sending a phone message to a wholesaler to pick up their harvest, but the cellular tower had been down for two weeks, and they were unsure if he would come, or when. “We have to depend on each other now, not on the state,” said Ana Rengifo, the community council leader.In October, the village doctor went to the closest town to find medications for his empty shelves. He never came back. The abandoned Catholic church is filled with bats, its pews chopped up for firewood.The pastor of the local evangelical group still comes once a week. The group meets daily to sing for salvation, but breaks up at sunset for lack of electricity.ImageAn evangelical worship service in Parmana. The service ends before dark, for lack of electricity.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York TimesThe village ambulance rusts in a shed without tires, its driver having left that job three years ago to plant beans to survive. At the school, after singing the national anthem and doing calisthenics, the students study basic reading and math, but go home after an hour or two. Teachers say many of them get too hungry to focus.Despite the town’s collapse, most here prefer to remain on their land, where they can grow some food, to risking hunger elsewhere.“You go outside and the hunger kills you,” said Inselina Coro, a 29-year-old mother of four. “At least here you go to the river and get a fish.”Ms. Coro lives with her children and her boyfriend, a fisherman, in a one-room shack of corrugated iron and dirt floors. The six of them share two hammocks. Her oldest daughter, Ana Herrera, 14, is pregnant, but the family has no means to take her to a doctor.Ms. Coro’s dreams for her family are confined to moving to Caicara, a dilapidated town about three hours upstream. The reason? “There is electricity,” she said.ImageMs. Coro’s family preparing lunch.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times
Pete Buttigieg Decision On Police Chief Shadows Presidential Run
SOUTH BEND, Ind. (AP) — Karen DePaepe had been waiting all day for a call back from Pete Buttigieg. It was March 2012, and the 30-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, had just decided to replace the city’s first African American police chief over complaints that he illegally wiretapped police officers’ phone calls. DePaepe, who oversaw the department’s phone system, had called the mayor to try to talk him out of removing the popular chief. She wanted to tell him the situation was not that simple. It was DePaepe who discovered a mistakenly recorded phone line, and, she says, heard white police officers making racist comments. She said in an interview with The Associated Press that she reported what she heard to the chief, and the recording continued. Buttigieg — who’s now competing for the Democratic nomination for president — never called her back. When DePaepe’s phone finally rang, she says, it was the young mayor’s chief of staff, who told her she, too, had to go. Federal prosecutors, he told her, had suggested that she and the chief could be indicted if they weren’t removed. DePaepe hung up, crying and in disbelief. She called one of the prosecutors, who she says told her she was not in trouble and should not quit. “Who do I believe? I’m being told two different stories,” DePaepe recalled thinking, adding, “Someone is lying to me.” Buttigieg’s demotion of Chief Darryl Boykins and firing of DePaepe has shadowed his presidential campaign, giving rise to complaints he has a blind spot on race and raising questions about whether he can attract the support of African Americans who are crucial to earning the Democratic nomination. It’s also reinforcing skepticism that the 37-year-old former mayor has the wisdom or experience to handle the demands of the Oval Office. Black Lives Matter activists have been protesting at his campaign events in recent days, spurred in part by his handling of the case. Buttigieg has defended his actions, saying he was responding to a “thinly veiled” message from federal prosecutors. In his telling, he saved two people from criminal charges and took the political heat for getting rid of a well-liked chief. But interviews with more than 20 people with direct or indirect knowledge of the events, along with a review of documents and contemporaneous news reports, paint a more complicated picture that is not as flattering to Buttigieg. While some said they believed the young mayor was trying to do the right thing, others told the AP that his lack of experience led him to take actions that weren’t well thought out, and that his explanations don’t ring true. His subsequent failure to include African American people in positions of power further damaged his standing in the community. “It left a really, really bad taste in my mouth,” said Pastor Wendy Fultz, who is black and a leader of the local chapter of the activist group Faith In Indiana. RECORDED CALLS, ALLEGED RACISM The story begins before Buttigieg was elected. The South Bend Police Department had a long-standing practice of recording certain telephone lines, including front desk lines, 911 calls and the phone lines of most division chiefs. In 2010, some of those phone lines were switched, and a detective’s line began being mistakenly recorded, according to a federal investigation. DePaepe said she learned of the mix-up in February 2011. She was troubleshooting a problem when she says she heard what she describes as racist comments by officers and discussion about something she considered possibly illegal. She reported it to the chief weeks later. He was shocked, she recalled, but didn’t immediately tell her to do anything, and the recording continued. Just before Christmas, the chief asked her to make tapes of what she heard. Boykins, who did not respond to messages seeking comment, listened to at least one tape and made copies of some of them. He confronted an officer about his “loyalty,” then told him he would take the tapes to the mayor, according to a November 2012 FBI report on the case obtained by the AP through a Freedom of Information request. A 2015 investigation by a special prosecutor in Indiana found Boykins’ motivation for continuing the recordings was to gather evidence of disloyalty, rather than to expose racism. However, the prosecutor declined to bring charges. Shortly after Buttigieg was sworn in, multiple officers complained to the U.S. attorney’s office in northern Indiana, alleging that their phone calls were being illegally recorded and that Boykins had threatened to use the information to fire or demote them, according to FBI records obtained by the AP. The FBI launched an investigation of possible violations of the federal Wiretap Act. The tapes have never been released, despite repeated calls from the community. Buttigieg says he hasn’t heard them, and DePaepe won’t discuss details of what she heard, citing a settlement that bars her from doing so. The South Bend Common Council — the community’s city council — sued to release the tapes, and the lawsuit is pending. The next hearing is Jan. 22. At the heart of the lawsuit is whether the calls were recorded legally. Boykins and DePaepe, who is white, denied wrongdoing, and no one was charged. A lawyer for several officers who sued the city says the tapes were made illegally and were an invasion of privacy. He says his clients made no racist comments, and some had their jobs threatened by the chief. But Buttigieg, within months of becoming mayor, was faced with the dual challenge of a federal investigation into the police department and officers accused of racism. THE MEETING Buttigieg was sworn in on Jan. 1, 2012. In his memoir, he writes that he believed there were problems with the management of the police department and that cleaning it up would be a major task. Still, he reappointed the chief, who had the support of both the Fraternal Order of Police and the NAACP, and was known for his work with youth and in city neighborhoods. “He is liked and respected for very good reasons. And I have a lot of respect for him,” Buttigieg told the AP last month. But the decision to keep him on, Buttigieg wrote in his memoir, became his “first serious mistake as mayor.” Weeks after Buttigieg took office, three officers complained to his chief of staff, Mike Schmuhl, that Boykins was recording and listening to their phone conversations, according to a 2013 deposition of Schmuhl obtained by the AP through a public records request and first reported by the website The Young Turks. Schmuhl relayed the information to Buttigieg. A few days later, then-U.S. Attorney David Capp called Schmuhl to say his office was looking into it, Schmuhl said in his sworn testimony. Soon after, Schmuhl told Buttigieg about the investigation, campaign spokesman Sean Savett said. But what Schmuhl told him didn’t seem to make an impression. “I remember there were rumors going around about the internal politics inside the police department, and it might have had something to do with people recording each other, but not a way that I really understood and pieced together until that meeting with the prosecutors,” Buttigieg told the AP. On March 23, 2012, at Capp’s request, South Bend officials met with federal law enforcement. Buttigieg sent Schmuhl, a high school friend who is now managing his presidential campaign, along with acting city attorney Aladean DeRose and Rich Hill, an outside lawyer Buttigieg hired for advice. Capp brought then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Schmid, two other federal prosecutors and an FBI agent. What happened at that meeting is hotly contested. It’s also the key to much of the acrimony that arose in the days and weeks afterward, and it has raised questions about Buttigieg’s management style and his forthrightness. Three days after that meeting, according to a lawsuit Boykins later filed alleging racial discrimination and defamation, Schmuhl met with the police chief to pressure him to resign, which he did three days later. The response was explosive: Angry members of the Common Council joined the next day with community leaders for a meeting attended by more than 100 people to demand Boykins’ reinstatement. The mayor refused. Local news reported over the following days that DePaepe had found recordings of officers making racist comments. More than a week later, on April 10, she, too, was fired. Buttigieg’s memoir glosses over that timeline, omitting the fact that he fired DePaepe well after racism allegations were reported. The mayor initially refrained from publicly justifying his decisions, but as rumors swirled across South Bend, he began to explain. He told the South Bend Tribune that “charges were not filed because we acted to satisfy federal authorities.” “It was still the right thing to do to prevent them from getting into deeper trouble, even if they were going to hate me for it,” he told the newspaper. He repeated that explanation in his memoir, published in 2019, and went on to question the U.S. attorney’s motives. “Why should a U.S. attorney shoulder the responsibility of taking down a beloved African-American police chief, if he can get the mayor to do it for him by removing him from his position?” he wrote. In an interview with the AP, Hill, one of the city’s lawyers in the meeting, backed up Buttigieg’s account. He said federal officials explicitly told them the city needed to take “personnel action.” “The U.S. attorney said, you have problems with two people and ... if you address the issues with those two people satisfactorily, then there would not be prosecution,” Hill said. Leaving the meeting, Hill said they all had the same understanding. “There was no difference in interpretation. There was no discussion about what we heard,” Hill said. “We were all three equally clear of what the message was that we needed to deliver to the mayor.” Schmuhl, through the Buttigieg campaign, declined interview requests but agreed to answer written questions. He said that it was clear the city needed to act to ensure the police department complied with the law and that “the people whose actions prompted a federal investigation into the police department could not remain in their positions.” In his 2013 deposition, Schmuhl said authorities gave them 60 days to address those issues. But he also said in the deposition that during the 30-minute meeting, the U.S. attorney never overtly said anyone had to be fired. “IT’S JUST WHAT HAPPENED” Several people involved in the case have cast doubt on Buttigieg’s story. “I don’t feel he’s being accurate at all,” DePaepe told the AP. “When I listen to him speak, and somebody asks him a question, he sort of talks in circles.” DePaepe said she spoke three times with Schmid, the prosecutor who handled the investigation and who attended the March meeting. She said she asked him whether she was in trouble and needed a lawyer. “He said, ‘No, you’re a witness to a complaint,’” she told the AP. After Schmuhl told her she and Boykins could be indicted, she said she called Schmid and he told her she should not quit her job. Boykins’ lawyer, Tom Dixon, told the AP that three of the federal prosecutors who were in the March 23 meeting assured him that, as a matter of policy, the office does not involve itself in personnel decisions of local government. Dixon recalled they told him: “We just want to reiterate that we never get involved, regardless of what you hear on the news.” On May 31, 2012, Capp wrote in a letter to the city that during the March meeting, “We advised that our primary concern was that (South Bend Police Department) practices comply with federal law.” After reviewing the situation in South Bend, he concluded, “It is our opinion that no federal prosecution is warranted.” Buttigieg has pointed to the letter as proof that he made the right decision, but others have said the letter shows investigators were not planning to charge Boykins or DePaepe to begin with. The U.S. attorney’s office and current and former federal officials who attended the March 23 meeting either did not comment or did not respond to messages seeking comment. Former federal law enforcement officials who reviewed details of the case at the request of the AP agreed it would be unlikely for a U.S. attorney to suggest they would not pursue criminal charges in a public corruption case if a mayor fired or demoted staff. Brian Kelly, who specialized in public corruption as a federal prosecutor, said Buttigieg inherited a “fiasco involving inappropriate taping” but said any personnel decisions he made were his own. “It’s not surprising that a local mayor would try to deflect blame to the U.S. attorney’s office for a decision that was unpopular,” he said. “But ultimately, the U.S. attorney’s office would have nothing to do with the hiring and firing of people.” Buttigieg, in an interview with the AP, stood by his story. “It’s just what happened.” Boykins, he insisted, had to go because he “failed to tell me that he was under federal investigation.” DePaepe had to go, he said, “because her actions led to a federal felony investigation into the police department.” But even that is disputed. Boykins’ lawyer said investigators told Boykins he was not under investigation. Buttigieg said he should have insisted on getting something from prosecutors in writing “so that years later, there wouldn’t be a need to defend my account of what I believe happened, but that we would have a document that we could point to that was clear.” But Buttigieg also acted without having the city do its own investigation. DePaepe says she was never given the chance to explain what happened. Boykins told her and others who spoke with the AP he wasn’t either. Janice Hall, then the city’s head of human resources, told the AP that she was not consulted. “I would have wanted to hear the facts” from DePaepe, Hall said. “There was so much secretiveness involved in the whole process.” That failure had an important side effect. Buttigieg wrote in his memoir that he didn’t know about the purportedly racist comments until after he removed Boykins, allegations he called “explosive, and serious” if true. But his book leaves out DePaepe and fails to address why he went ahead with her firing with no internal investigation, even after local media reported on the comments on the recordings. Buttigieg said he didn’t think they were in a position to second-guess the FBI, and even if they did their own investigation, “the main investigative resource we would have had would be the police department, which obviously would not be able to conduct this one.” Tom Price, a top aide to Buttigieg’s predecessor, said, “It seemed like a quick reaction that wasn’t well thought through.” NO BLACK LEADERS Buttigieg’s response raised questions about his age and ability to manage, questions that are echoed in his presidential run. It also damaged his relationship with the African American community in South Bend, a rift that has led to doubts about whether he can attract the support of black voters nationwide. Former Councilman Oliver Davis, a vocal critic of Buttigieg who has endorsed Joe Biden, said people understood he would pick his own chief, but the way he went about it brought disrepute on one of South Bend’s most respected African American leaders. “The issue is not that he removed and demoted the chief. You can change people around all you want to. But you disgraced him. You disgraced him for your own political good,” Davis said. Boykins was at that time the only African American in a senior position in city government. The previous mayor had three black men in top-level positions: Boykins, the fire chief and a senior mayoral adviser. When Buttigieg took over, the adviser left. The fire chief, Howard Buchanon, retired because Buttigieg chose another chief. That appointee was a white man. Buchanon told the AP that after the Boykins situation blew up, Buttigieg asked to meet to discuss it. “I said, ‘You led us to believe that a lot of minorities were going to be in your administration,’” Buchanon recalled telling him. “But Mayor Pete, I don’t see that.” He recalled asking the mayor where black and Hispanic leaders were in his administration: Buttigieg’s head dropped — a tacit acknowledgement that there were none. Pastor J.B. Williams, a leader in Faith In Indiana, told the AP: “We did not see a plan to have minorities involved in decision-making processes. That, to me, was a big mistake.” Asked about the criticism, Buttigieg highlighted his 2013 appointment of an African American woman as the city’s top lawyer — an appointment made more than a year after Boykins’ demotion. Among the steps Buttigieg took to address allegations of racism in the department, his campaign said, were requiring all officers to take civil rights and implicit bias training, and installing a majority-minority civilian police board. South Bend’s population is 53% non-Hispanic white, and more than one-quarter black. But more than three-quarters of the people Buttigieg chose as top advisers or department heads during his eight years in office — including two police chiefs — were white, according to an AP analysis of information provided by the campaign. Buttigieg’s defenders say he knew there would be implications within the black community if he removed Boykins, but he had to do “the right thing.” “There was never a good choice,” said Mark Neal, Buttigieg’s first city controller. “Like any good leader, you live with the consequences of that.” His critics are unmoved. Buchanon said if Buttigieg’s record in South Bend is any indication of how he’d run the White House, “I don’t see any black person in leadership for him.” “He had the opportunity to change some things,” Buchanon said. “And he didn’t.” Around South Bend, opinions about Buttigieg’s tenure and abilities are as varied as the people who hold them. Many people say he entered the mayor’s office with good intentions but not enough experience — less than three years as a consultant at McKinsey, a position he recently described as mostly doing research and analysis. He was also an intelligence analyst in the Navy Reserve and in his memoir referred to himself as “a more junior employee ... rather than the boss.” Hall, the former HR director, said Buttigieg got poor advice from people he depended on, including Schmuhl, who now runs his campaign. “They had not had a lot of experience,” Hall said. Davis and others noted Buttigieg got rid of veteran leadership, instead going with what Davis called a “millennial crowd” that had “no muscle memory” for how things worked. Price, who supported Buttigieg in the past, said his experience running a city of just 100,000 doesn’t make him ready for the White House. “I think he’s massively underqualified to be president,” Price said. “I think he would be a dreadful mistake for our country, and for the Democratic Party.” Buttigieg told the AP he has learned from the Boykins affair, which he calls a “no-win” situation. Sometimes, he said, you can’t find a perfect answer — only an approach that’s going to involve “the least harm.” When you’re young and encounter a problem, Buttigieg said, people who disagree will say you did it because you were young. “If you were older, they would still disagree,” Buttigieg said. “They just wouldn’t say it had to do with being young.” ___ AP writer Stephen Braun in Washington and researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York contributed to this report. ___ Catch up on the 2020 election campaign with AP experts on our weekly politics podcast, “Ground Game.” RELATED... Governors Once Ruled The Presidential Landscape. Now They’re Absent. The Political Upside Of Giving Free College To Rich Kids Black Lives Matter Activists Tail Pete Buttigieg Around The Country Download Calling all HuffPost superfans! Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost's next chapter Join HuffPost
The 'law against Apple': Apple has a Vladimir Putin problem
In November 2019, Russian parliament passed what’s become known as the “law against Apple.” The legislation will require all smartphone devices to preload a host of applications that may provide the Russian government with a glut of information about its citizens, including their location, finances, and private communications.Apple typically forbids the preloading of third-party apps onto its system’s hardware. But come July 2020, when the law goes into effect, Apple will be forced to quit the country and a market estimated at $3 billion unless it complies. This piece of legislation, along with a controversial law aimed at the construction of a “sovereign internet,” is the latest step in Vladimir Putin’s ongoing encroachment into digital space—and has brought Apple into direct conflict with the autocratic Russian president.Apple declined to comment on what it plans to do. But while the company has yet to make an official statement, independent Russian outlet the Bell has reported that sources inside Apple have expressed resistance to the new regulations. Making the change would not only require an overhaul of Apple’s existing operating system; it would go against its principle of honoring user privacy over the interests of federal governments. But Apple’s insistence on putting privacy first is gradually pushing the tech giant into a larger, global struggle over data rights and digital sovereignty.When user privacy clashes with national interestsApple’s position has also gotten the company into trouble with both the FBI and the Trump administration. Earlier this month, Apple denied Attorney General William Barr’s request to unlock two iPhones connected to the December 2019 shooting at a naval base in Pensacola, Florida, an act suspected to be linked to international terrorist networks. Apple has a history of helping law enforcement with particular cases by sharing information, and even reportedly dropped its plans to encrypt iPhone backup files stored in the cloud. But while creating a backdoor that official bodies such as the FBI and police departments could use to access encrypted devices would expedite investigations such as the one in Pensacola, Apple says it would set a disturbing precedent.“We have always maintained there is no such thing as a backdoor for just the good guys,” the company said in an official statement. “Backdoors can also be exploited by those who threaten our national security and the data security of our customers.”We have always maintained there is no such thing as a backdoor for just the good guys.”AppleWhen the “law against Apple” was passed in Russia back in November, experts expressed concern that the preloaded apps would pose just as real a threat as an official backdoor. Last week, the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service published a list of which applications will be required: Among the programs are government-produced apps for paying taxes and fines, as well as banking, navigation, and social media platforms with links to official bodies. These would have the potential to collect and send data related to finances, location, communications, and more, all without direct user permission.This worries digital rights activists such as Artem Kozlyuk, founder of the NGO Roskomsvoboda (short for “Russian media freedom”). He opposes the law, telling the Moscow Times that “devices are already stuffed with a huge number of services . . . a number of which can secretly collect information: location, tools and services being used.” What makes this dangerous, Kozlyuk said, is that users have no knowledge of nor control over which data are collected and used by Russia’s government.Russia’s interests lie in trying to exert autocratic control over its citizens, which appears to be fundamentally at odds with Apple and its mission to maintain privacy protections for its users—no matter where they’re located in the world, and regardless of what the government is demanding. The “law against Apple” is an example of how trillion-dollar tech companies are running up against the prerogatives of the nations in which they operate, but that hasn’t stopped Apple from trying to find a compromise.A solution for Apple, an uproar in nearby UkrainePerhaps in an attempt to pave the way for a win-win outcome this summer, Apple made a controversial concession to the Kremlin. Just weeks after the “law against Apple” was passed, the company’s mapping and weather apps began showing the Crimean peninsula, which the international community considers to be Ukrainian territory, as part of the Russian Federation. This only happens when users open these Apple applications inside Russia, but it represents a major break with international consensus.Apple made these changes in response to another law that declared that companies who do not show Crimea as Russian territory will be prosecuted for violating the Russian constitution. (Google, for its part, identifies Crimea as part of Russia for Google Maps users within the country.) Apple’s decision to adhere to this law provides some evidence that the company may not be truly willing to leave the Russian market.Apple’s concession also indicates that Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian technology policies are bearing fruit. Since 2014, Putin has aimed to reshape Europe’s geopolitics through tactics that depend on a high degree of digital control and coordination. His successes include the extended propaganda campaigns preceding the bloody war in Ukraine’s Donbas region, as well as alleged election interference in Europe and the United States. Digital space and tools have proved to be valuable assets in hybrid warfare, and so any sign of Western capitulation to Moscow’s strategy, whether from a government or a tech giant, is worrying for the vulnerable nations in Russia’s orbit.Ukraine is particularly sensitive to any attempts to appease Putin. Once news of Apple’s border policy went public, Ukranian social media spiraled into overdrive, with calls for a boycott putting to rest any possibility that Apple’s concession would go unnoticed. Olga Ivanova, a civil society activist working on social cohesion and displacement issues in Ukraine, says that social media was full of the sense that “our pain and tragedy is being traded for access to the Russian market.” Even Vadym Prystaiko, the country’s foreign minister, criticized the tech giant on Twitter for not giving “a damn” about the country. IPhones are great products. Seriously, though, @Apple, please, please, stick to high-tech and entertainment. Global politics is not your strong side. #CrimeaIsUkraine — Vadym Prystaiko (@VPrystaiko) November 27, 2019While Apple officials met with Prystaiko last week at Davos, a possible attempt to smooth things over, the company’s decision may have contributed to Ukraine’s isolation at a critical moment. In early December, mere weeks after the border scandal, the first meeting between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, the newly-elected Ukrainian president, took place in Paris. According to Ivanova, the United States, typically a strong Ukrainian ally, was too distracted by impeachment hearings to support the new president in Paris. Apple’s concession comes as one more blow to a country feeling increasingly abandoned by the West.A new age of Big Tech governanceApple’s ability to impact the ongoing crisis in Ukraine fits into a wider trend of how large tech companies’ choices have increasingly geopolitical implications. These decisions can even threaten a given nation’s economic or national security interests, in part because tech companies’ products are unique, popular, and sometimes inescapable. While Apple’s “solution” was causing unintentional waves in nearby Ukraine, companies such as Google were also flexing their muscles abroad in the service of their interests.In December 2019, Google effectively suspended service for Android systems in Turkey over the nation’s requirement that Google provide more space for competitors, such as the Russian search engine Yandex, to operate on Android devices in the country. Monopoly critic Matt Stoller compared the action to “using financial sanctions recklessly.”Previously, large tech companies would only take such large-scale action at the request of government officials, such as when Google halted Android updates to Huawei devices in compliance with an executive order from the White House last year. Stoller says that this is the first time that Google has unilaterally suspended its services within a country. He adds that it’s dangerous when companies reimagine their relationship to governments as one of being “a partner,” replacing the former model where sovereign states had ultimate control over the policies of businesses operating within them.Countries and tech companies are engaged in a struggle to define how sovereignty applies to the internet.This may be the very reason why nations such as Russia are passing a host of laws to exert control over cyberspace. Countries and tech companies are engaged in a struggle to define how sovereignty—which typically refers to a country’s ability to govern itself without outside interference—applies to the internet. And while Turkey may not have the clout to challenge companies such as Google or Apple directly, Russia very well might. In 2016, for example, the Russian state agencies responsible for regulating communications blocked companies such as LinkedIn and Pornhub for their refusal to host data on servers located inside the Russian Federation. In 2017, the Kremlin infamously attempted to block the popular messaging app Telegram for its refusal to hand over encryption keys. Russia’s current struggle with Apple is merely the latest in what’s proved to be a long-term bid for digital control.In its public statements on the Pensacola incident, Apple has attempted to claim the moral high ground by saying that any precedent it sets by unlocking phones or creating backdoors would have a negative effect on its operations in other, more autocratic parts of the world. But at the same time, Apple has compromised with the Kremlin by adhering to its demands around Crimea—leaving it on the wrong end of Putin’s contentious geopolitical maneuverings and creating a PR disaster.Ultimately, when the July deadline for the “law against Apple” comes around, Tim Cook’s decision to either leave potential profit on the table or to uphold Apple’s principles will help set a precedent for global politics, privacy, and digital sovereignty. Apple may not be asking for that role, but, in this fraught age of global technology, the company may find itself occupying it regardless.Josh Nadeau is a Canadian journalist based in St. Petersburg who covers the intersection of Russia, technology, and culture. He has written for The Economist, Atlas Obscura, and The Outline.
36 Years Ago Today, Steve Jobs Unveiled the First Macintosh
What about the x86 coprocessors available for the Quadra line?A pricey add-on rather than built-in functionality.Multitasking? That was implemented in 8 way before Jobs made a bunch of money selling NeXT to Apple.Implemented poorly. As I said, Win3.1/Win9x style multitasking, lacking protection. WinNT / MacOS X / *nix get it right, before these it was just a kludgy hack.The problem with the classic system was ...... it was stuck in the late 80s, whenever cooperative multitasking was added to Mac OS. I suffered through Win3.1, Win9x and Mac OS classic development. Microsoft had the decency to move on to WinNT, Apple's missteps caused them to offer classic for far too longer than it should have been offered. It should have been replaced much earlier. They tried, twice ?, and NeXTSTEP literally saved the day. It was getting embarrassing.I honestly do not see the Macintosh lasting throughout the 2020's. It will likely be ended and superseded with a line of iOS products that range from a huge, foldable iPad Pro complete with bluetooth keyboard and ...I'm completely open to the idea of some convergence between mobile and desktop. Mobile CPUs/GPUs are computationally more than capable of what most people do on their laptops or desktops. However I think the convergence will be more hardware than software. There will be a keyboard/mouse based OS, macOS, and a touchscreen based OS, iOS. Different user experiences. Of course macOS and iOS share a bit of code so there is some software convergence too I suppose, but I expect the user experiences to remain different. Will there be a common "motherboard" with Apple CPU and GPU shared between some future iPad and MacBook? Maybe. Will the computers really be docks you plug an iPad into as the display? Maybe, docked you get macOS, undocked you get iOS. Data is cloud based and handed off between macOS and iOS apps. They are offering hand off functionality today.
One third of Hong Kong adults suffering from PTSD symptoms due to protests, study finds
closeVideoNew Year's protests rock Hong KongArmed police officers stand guard as pro-democracy activists light fires and march through the city.A new study finds one in three Hong Kong adults are suffering from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of violent protests that began there in June.The University of Hong Kong (HKU) study found the number was six times higher than four years ago, the BBC reported, adding that the increase in PTSD symptoms corresponds with around 2 million adults in the semi-autonomous territory.Hong Kong has an adult population of about 6.3 million. Protesters march Sunday during a demonstration against "parallel traders" who buy goods in Hong Kong to resell in mainland China. (AP Photo/Andy Wong) According to the study, up to 11 percent of adults reported symptoms of depression, up from two percent before separate protests in 2014 and 6.5 percent in 2017,"One in five adults now reports probable depression or suspected PTSD, which is comparable to those experiencing armed conflicts, large-scale disasters, or terrorist attacks," the study said.The clashes between protestors and police have led to nearly 7,000 arrests, 2,500 injuries and several deaths, according to reports.The researchers also found that heavy use of social media to follow socio-political events appeared to increase the risk of probable depression and suspected PTSD, Agence France-Presse reported."Hong Kong is under-resourced to deal with this excess mental health burden," said research leader Gabriel Leung, HKU's dean of medicine, according to AFP.The researchers, who published their findings Friday in The Lancet medical journal, conducted surveys of more than 18,000 Hong Kong residents between 2009 and 2019, according to the BBC.
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen has won reelection in this Saturday’s elections. She received 57 percent of the vote, to her chief rival’s 38 percent, in a victory that had a lot to do with China, and the continuing upheaval in Hong Kong.“Taiwan is showing the world how much we cherish our free democratic way of life and how much we cherish our nation,” Tsai said in her victory speech, as she warned China to stay out of the island’s affairs: “I also hope that the Beijing authorities understand that democratic Taiwan, and our democratically elected government, will not concede to threats and intimidation.”China always hangs over Taiwan’s elections. Taiwan, also known as the Republic of China, was established in 1949 when the Chinese nationalists fled after the Communist Party took control in mainland China. It wasn’t always a democracy; Taiwan was ruled by one party (the Kuomintang) until democratic reforms took hold in the 1980s, and it’s had direct presidential elections since 1996.When it comes to mainland China and Taiwan, as Vox’s Jennifer Williams has explained: The two territories have been governed separately ever since, with both governments claiming to be the legitimate representative of “One China” — that is, China and Taiwan.” Most countries, including the US, only have formal diplomatic relations with mainland China and don’t officially recognize the government in Taiwan ... Just a handful of countries have formal ties with Taiwan, but its democratic rule and de facto independence remain a sore spot for Beijing, which wants to exert its influence there and, ultimately, bring the island back under its control. And during this year’s elections, Beijing has been even harder to ignore. Chinese President Xi Jinping has been explicit that he wants to reunify Taiwan and mainland China, and he appears willing to use force to do so. That could establish a “one country, two systems” setup that currently governs its relationship with Hong Kong. For many Taiwanese, six months of massive pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong have shown just what a bad deal that would be, and in Saturday’s election, they signaled they want a leader who will fight efforts to bring Taiwan under Beijing’s rule.“I want to once again call upon Beijing authorities to remind them that peace, parity, democracy and dialogue are key to positive cross-strait interactions and long-term development,” Tsai said Saturday. “Peace means that China must abandon threats of force against Taiwan.”Tsai, the incumbent Taiwanese president, is a member of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which favors an independent Taiwan. She was first elected in 2016, along with a majority in Taiwan’s legislature, the Legislative Yuan. But Tsai’s candidacy surged in recent months, and her tough line against China and unequivocal embrace of the protesters in Hong Kong likely has a lot to do with it. Many Taiwanese who worry about Chinese encroachment see Tsai (who also has cultivated pretty strong ties with the US) as the better candidate to protect Taiwan from Beijing’s heavy hand. This is especially true of Taiwan’s younger voters, who’ve grown up with Taiwan as a democracy. Tsai played this up as a campaign issue, too, including running ads that compare normal daily life in Taiwan with the unrest in Hong Kong. “Part of it [is an] effort by Tsai and by her party to show that she is the one that can protect Taiwan’s sovereignty and security,” Bonnie Glaser, the China Power Project director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told me.She added that the Hong Kong protests wouldn’t be as large an issue if there wasn’t an upcoming election, mostly because “people in Taiwan don’t look to Hong Kong as their future. They never have.”In other words, even voters who may see the benefit in closer ties between Taiwan and China never envisioned Taiwan becoming a vassal state, even before the protests. This still created a problem for Tsai’s opponent, Han Kuo-yu, who represents the Kuomintang Party (KMT). Han favors closer ties economic and cultural ties with Beijing, seeing a tighter relationship with the mainland as better securing Taiwan’s economy in the long term. To be clear, Han himself opposes a Hong Kong model for Taiwan. He has explicitly said Taiwan would enter a “one country, two systems” arrangement with China “over my dead body.” But Han, who won a key mayoral election in a DPP stronghold in 2018, has since struggled because he’s still seen as being too friendly toward Beijing at a time when the Hong Kong protests make that position look a lot less tenable. Han was also implicated in a scandal this fall, when a man who claimed to be a Chinese intelligence operative told Australian authorities that Beijing had been meddling in elections in Hong Kong and Taiwan, including by spreading disinformation. This alleged operative also claimed that he had poured about $2 million directly into Han’s 2018 mayoral campaign, which Han has denied. Beijing preferred Han over Tsai (there’s one other candidate running, but these are the main two) and that’s also increased popular skepticism of him. And there’s little doubt that China again tried to interfere in Taiwan’s vote, using tools to spread fake news and disinformation. China has moved in more direct ways to put pressure on Tsai, including conducting military exercises in the Taiwan Strait. The question is whether such pressure will intensify now that Tsai has won reelection. And it may, particularly given that Tsai will come back into office with a clear mandate. The DPP has won 61 of the Legislative Yuan’s 113 seats, with Han’s KMT winning just 38. Tsai’s party retaining its majority will go a long way in boosting the president’s effectiveness in implementing her agenda — and, like her election, is certainly a blow to Beijing. Correction: A mistranslation of the word “parity” in Tsai’s statement has been corrected.
Venezuela’s Maduro Ousts Opposition Head of National Assembly
By Updated Jan. 5, 2020 8:10 pm ET CARACAS, Venezuela—President Nicolás Maduro took over the last independent institution in Venezuela on Sunday when his allies replaced the opposition head of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, with their own lawmaker in a maneuver that was condemned from Washington to Latin America. Mr. Guaidó and other congressmen who form the assembly’s opposition majority were barred from entering as Mr. Maduro’s allies in the body and some new converts who had previously opposed the regime chose Luis Parra as the new president. The machinations... To Read the Full Story Subscribe Sign In Continue reading your article with a WSJ membership View Membership Options
Most political unrest has one big root cause: soaring inequality
The popular protests that erupted in 2019 and have continued to rumble – from France and Spain in Europe to Hong Kong and India in Asia; from Chile, Colombia and Bolivia in Latin America to Lebanon, Iran and Iraq in the Middle East – have perplexed analysts. Because they have been so far-flung and have lacked an iconic moment like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the common thread hasn’t been obvious. But there is one: rage at being left behind. In each instance, the match may differ, but the kindling has (in most cases) been furnished by the gross inequality produced by global capitalism.Consider Lebanon. The demonstrations that erupted there in October were triggered by the government’s plan to tax calls made through WhatsApp and other internet services, but they quickly mushroomed into a broader protest against high unemployment, sectarian rule, corruption, and the government’s failure to provide basic services like electricity and sanitation.According to the World Inequality Database, the top 1% of Lebanon’s population receives about 25% of the nation’s income. Six Lebanese billionaires have a combined personal wealth of about $11bn, according to Forbes. Three of those billionaires are the sons of Rafik Hariri, who made a fortune in construction and twice served as Lebanon’s prime minister before being assassinated in 2005. (A fourth son, Saad Hariri, was prime minister until his recent resignation amid reports that he had given more than $16m to a bikini model he had met while vacationing in the Seychelles.) Protesters maintained that the pampered elite, rather than strapped working people, should foot the bill for the country’s economic problems.In Chile, an increase in subway fares catalyzed protest. The popular discontent caught many observers by surprise, since Chile has experienced years of steady growth and has a reputation for good governance. In fact Chile, with a per capita income of $15,800, is a member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for prosperous nations. Of the OECD’s 36 members, however, Chile has one of the highest levels of inequality. Its economy is dominated by a group of powerful oligarchs, among them its current president, Sebastián Piñera, who is worth an estimated $2.8bn (amassed largely in the credit card business). Despite their country’s wealth, working Chileans have had to grapple with rising utility costs, stagnant wages and paltry pensions. The protests have registered their fury.Worldwide, the numbers are stark. As calculated by Oxfam, 26 people have the same amount of wealth as the 3.8 billion people in the world’s bottom half. In the United States, the three richest people have the same amount of wealth as the bottom 160 million.And the political fallout continues to spread. Not only the current round of street protests but also such recent upheavals as Brexit, Trump, the gilets jaunes in France, and rightwing populist governments in Hungary, Poland and Italy all have roots in the financial crash that was set off by the fall of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and followed by the world’s worst economic contraction since 1929.In the US alone, the great recession erased about $8tn in household stock-market wealth and $6tn in home value. From 2003 to 2013, inflation-adjusted net wealth for a typical household fell 36%, from $87,992 to $56,335, while the net worth of wealthy households rose by 14%. Workers without college degrees and low-income Americans were especially hard hit.In addition to causing such widespread deprivation, the 2008 crash stripped the sheen off global capitalism. Just as the Iraq war undermined the authority of the US foreign policy establishment, so did the financial crisis discredit the bankers, asset managers, ratings agencies, and regulators responsible for running the world economy. Compounding that damage was the government’s decision to bail out many of the same institutions – Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo – that had caused the crisis.In a recent New York Times article about Vladimir Putin’s growing worldwide stature, the former Kremlin adviser Gleb Pavlovsky sought to explain why Putin turned away from his earlier aspirations to join the western family of nations and toward his current brand of authoritarian nationalism. The “decisive threshold” was the 2008 financial meltdown, Pavlovsky said. Before it, Putin saw America as running the world economy. “Suddenly it turned out: no, they are not running anything.” At that moment “all the old norms vanished” and Russia set about creating its own norms.Many members of the liberal establishment in America have failed to come to terms with the waning appeal of the free-market model. They dismiss populism as a sort of exogenous disease to be cured by appeals to reason and facts rather than recognize it as a darkly symptomatic response to a system that has failed so spectacularly to meet the basic needs of so many.In a recent Financial Times essay reflecting on the coming decade, Steven Pinker hailed the dramatic recent gains made by humanity – the advances in science and medicine, the spread of democracy and human rights, the embrace of free trade and environmental regulation. He waved away authoritarian populism as a passing phenomenon, since its support “is greatest among rural, less-educated, ethnic-majority and older cohorts, all in demographic decline”.In other words, the marginalized will die out, so there’s no need to worry about them. Pinker made no mention of inequality, the rise of the superrich, and the surging discontent with a global economy that has produced such grotesque imbalances.Obliviousness such as this has contributed to the growing estrangement between left-liberal political parties and their traditional working-class base – another underlying cause of global unrest. The Democratic party’s struggles in such long-time strongholds as Michigan’s Macomb county and Wisconsin’s Racine county; the Labour party’s recent thrashing in the once-dependable English north; the collapse of the Socialists in France; the fading of the Social Democrats in Germany – all testify to how thoroughly the world’s social democrats have lost their way. These parties have been captured by what Thomas Piketty, in his forthcoming book Capital and Ideology, calls “the Brahmin left” – winners in the meritocratic race fostered by postindustrial society, who have lost touch with those who are less connected, mobile, and well read.The current race among Democratic presidential contenders is in effect a competition to see which candidate can offer the most convincing explanation for the failures of the current system and the most appealing program to fix them. If no such program is forthcoming, Americans, too, might soon take to the streets. Michael Massing is the author most recently of Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind
Hong Kong Protest Organizer Faces Incitement Charge
A leading organizer of the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong appeared in court Tuesday, accused of defying police orders to disband a rally, in what activists say is an effort by city authorities to weaken the opposition movement by deterring others from staging demonstrations.Ventus Lau, who has organized several large protests over the past few months, was charged with inciting others to take part in an unlawful assembly and refusing or willfully neglecting to obey an order of a police officer.Police gave Mr. Lau permission for an eight-hour rally on Sunday in the city’s financial district that was attended by thousands of people, but officers at the scene declared it unlawful after 90 minutes, citing violence among some of the participants.Mr. Lau, a 26-year-old freelance writer, is a spokesman for the Hong Kong Civil Assembly Team, which has organized at least 19 rallies since June. If convicted, he faces up to six years in jail, according to his lawyer.Fellow activists criticized the arrest of Mr. Lau as the latest sign of tougher police tactics in recent weeks as Hong Kong authorities seek to end seven months of turmoil in the city. Citizens first took to the streets in June to oppose a since-withdrawn extradition bill. The movement has evolved into a broader call for democracy and for police to be called to account for alleged brutality. Mass rallies have sometimes ended in protesters blockading roads and battling with police throughout the months of unrest.