Brazil reported a new 24-hour record for new coronavirus cases on Friday, pushing the country’s total to more than 1 million confirmed cases — an indicator that the South American nation could surpass the US as the worst-hit country in the world this summer.Experts say that President Jair Bolsonaro’s anti-scientific attitude toward the virus and resistance to robust social distancing measures have contributed significantly to the accelerating spread of Covid-19 and its mounting death toll.The 54,771 new cases reported on Friday bring the country’s confirmed total to 1,032,913. Total official fatalities due to the coronavirus hit 48,954, and given the pace of new infections, the country could surpass 50,000 deaths over the weekend.Experts say the number of actual cases in Brazil is likely significantly higher. Alexandre Naime Barbosa, a medical professor at the São Paulo State University, told NBC News that he believes there is “under-reporting of a magnitude of five to 10 times.” “There are questions about really how much testing is going on in most of the areas worst-affected, which may also influence the numbers,” Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA)’s director of the Andes, told CBS News.Sánchez-Garzoli also added she wouldn’t “trust” the numbers released by the government. Earlier in June, Brazil’s health ministry wiped its running cumulative totals of cases and deaths, and instead showed only data on new cases and deaths on a 24-hour basis. Bolsonaro tweeted that the change in available data was because “cumulative data, in addition to not showing that the large part [of patients] no longer has the illness, does not depict the moment of the country.”But the move received backlash, and Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled that the government had to report comprehensive data, according to CNN.According to a University of Washington tracking model, Brazil could surpass the US with the highest number of coronavirus deaths in the world as early as August 1, CNN reports. The model predicts that the death toll could break the 100,000 mark in less than a month.The spread of the virus poses a particularly serious threat to Brazil’s most socioeconomically vulnerable populations. Sánchez-Garzoli told CBS that the health care system was poorly equipped to provide adequate care to most people, and that the coronavirus was an “added factor that is leading to the extinction of different [indigenous] groups.”Experts say that much of the current crisis can be attributed to Bolsonaro’s leadership style and policy decisions.Bolsonaro has consistently downplayed the virus, calling it a “little flu” and arguing that Brazilians are well-suited for it because they can be dunked in sewage and “don’t catch a thing.” The president has also frequently defied social distancing guidelines from his own administration, encouraged massive rallies, and has opposed lockdowns initiated by governors of states, accusing them of exploiting the pandemic for political gain. In other words, much as Trump’s rhetoric about the virus has done in the United States, Bolsonaro has turned the coronavirus crisis in his country into a polarizing culture war. In April, Bolsonaro fired his popular health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, because Mandetta urged Brazilians to observe social distancing and to stay indoors. The dismissal came after weeks of the two offering diverging prescriptions for how the public should act to slow the spread of the virus, and raised the ire of many Brazilians.And the health minister who took over after Mandetta resigned just four weeks into the job.In addition to actively undermining the counsel of public health officials, Bolsonaro has promoted the use of remedies that have not been proven to treat Covid-19, like chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.“Decisions are being made not based on evidence and empirical data but rather on anecdotal reports,” Denise Garrett, a Brazilian-American epidemiologist who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for more than 20 years, told the New York Times. “Bolsonaro invested a huge amount of money into an action that has not been proven to be effective at the expense of increasing testing and contact tracing.”Bolsonaro has also used the pandemic as an opportunity to attempt to undermine other branches of government and amass more political power. Earlier this spring, he joined a rally of right-wing supporters who called for military intervention because they view the country’s Supreme Court and legislature as obstacles to his campaign against pandemic lockdown measures.Brazil’s past health ministers predicted the spread of the coronavirus would hit its peak between May and July. But given Bolsonaro’s resistance to adhering to any scientific guidance, it’s extremely difficult to predict its course. Support Vox’s explanatory journalismEvery day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. 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Another area of excellence is our organ transplantation system. Brazil maintains the largest public program in the world, with about 27,000 transplants performed last year — 96 percent of them carried out by S.U.S. In number of transplants, we are second only to the United States.A friend of mine has familial amyloid polyneuropathy, a rare disease in which the liver produces abnormal proteins that accumulate throughout the body. It leads to serious sensory, motor and autonomic nervous system impairments, and can become fatal 10 years after the onset of symptoms. She lost her mother, grandmother and one uncle to the disease. But now it’s different: When she started to feel ill five years ago, she joined the waiting list for a liver transplant. Months later, she underwent surgery in a state-of-the-art hospital and received a new organ. Everything was financed by S.U.S., including post-surgical treatment with immunosuppressants and follow-up appointments.Brazil’s S.U.S. is also internationally renowned for starting a pioneering H.I.V. program that has provided free universal access to antiretroviral therapy for all patients since 1996. The project has drastically reduced AIDS-related mortality and morbidity, including mother-to-child transmission of the virus.What does Mr. Bolsonaro say to all this? He’s been dismissive, not only of the efficiency but the quality of our health care system. His proposals for reforms have been contradictory. He claims there will be no increase in the public health budget, but then proposes costly innovations like implementing a national clinical data registry and creating a federally funded career path for doctors. He has also suggested that clinicians in the private sector could be incorporated into the public health service, a change that would require the use of subsidized reimbursements. This is not necessarily bad, but it would be costly — and most important, Mr. Bolsonaro doesn’t seem to have a clue on how to accomplish any of it. But as his remarks about Cuban doctors show, that would hardly stop him from stumbling in and ripping apart what’s currently working.It is clearly worth working to preserve S.U.S. We cannot lose what we have accomplished so far. If our president-elect is fine with losing the services of thousands of Cuban doctors, he needs to find a new way to deploy good medical professionals to the most underserved areas of our country. And if he doesn’t have all the solutions for improving health care, at least he should make the commitment to maintain public spending while seeking to improve efficiency — in other words, to not make things worse.The foundations for great public health care in Brazil are already in place. It only takes political will to maintain and expand this remarkable system. Let’s hope it can survive the next four years.Vanessa Barbara, a contributing opinion writer, is the editor of the literary website A Hortaliça and the author of two novels and two nonfiction books in Portuguese.

Wall Street is waking up to the threat of the coronavirus.The stock market took a dip Monday morning in the face of increasing fears about the coronavirus’s potential impact on the global economy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500, and Nasdaq all ended the day down by more than 3 percent. The Dow tumbled by more than 1,000 points, erasing its gains for the year.There have been concerns about the coronavirus for months, but worries about it approaching pandemic status have been building in recent days. As Vox’s Julia Belluz explained, as of Monday, there were more than 79,000 cases of Covid-19 (the disease caused by the coronavirus strain) in 29 countries. While most cases have been found in China, countries around the world have reported surges in recent days, including Italy, Iran, and South Korea. Italy quarantined multiple towns and canceled the Venice Carnival and several football events. And an outbreak on a cruise ship outside Japan has increased concerns, too. “The likelihood that we’re in a pandemic, a new disease that spreads around the world — or that we’re hurtling toward one — seems higher than just a week ago,” Belluz wrote.The World Health Organization said it believes there’s still time to contain the virus and that its epidemic peak may be declining in China, but other experts believe the virus has already spread widely and anticipate epidemics around the world. Either way, the threat is causing ripples across global stock markets and economies. An investor survey conducted by the market insight and research firm DataTrek Research released on Sunday found that most investors still believe coronavirus will not cause a global economic recession, and only about one-third of them had made changes to their or their clients’ portfolios, taking into account the risks of the disease. But it’s worth noting the survey was collected between Tuesday and Saturday of last week, before the latest wave of fear-inducing news hit.In a note to clients on Monday, Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at the research firm Pantheon Macroeconomics, warned that “virus-induced nerves will persist until non-China cases decline” and said there’s still a lot of uncertainty on the impact of the coronavirus. “At this point, no one knows — and no one can know — whether these fears [around the virus] will prove justified, which means that markets are now slaves to the news,” he wrote.The spread of the disease in China and elsewhere has already impacted global supply chains and travel, and the situation could worsen. Last week, Apple said it would slash sales expectations, noting its smartphone supply was going to slow because so much of its production is based in China, and saying that demand for its devices in China had been harmed. As CNBC noted on Monday, the coronavirus-induced market slide was specifically felt by airlines and chipmakers. And it’s not just US stocks that are suffering — markets around the globe shuddered, too.Billionaire investor Warren Buffett on Monday told CNBC that the US economy still looks pretty solid, but President Donald Trump’s trade war and coronavirus are cause for concern. “Tariffs — the tariff situation was a big question mark for all kinds of companies. And still is to some degree. But that was front and center for a while. Now, coronavirus is front and center,” he said.While the coronavirus news and its potential effects on the global economy and markets are worrying, it’s important not to panic. (Today is perhaps not the day to look at your 401(k) balance.) The Dow is just slightly below where it started in 2020, and it’s about 2,000 points above where it was this time a year ago.

The spread of coronavirus has been catastrophic in Brazil, with the country now ranking second for infections behind only the US. The infection rate has been growing rapidly in Latin America and on Friday, Brazil's health ministry reported 20,803 new cases, bringing the total to 330,890 confirmed cases.From a sceptical president to a healthcare system on the verge of collapse, the Guardian's Tom Phillips explains the factors that have made Brazil a hotspot for the virus Brazil overtakes UK as country with third-highest coronavirus cases Hospitals in Latin America buckling under coronavirus strain

High-profile Twitter accounts, including those of Barack Obama and Elon Musk, were the target of a widespread attack that security experts are calling the worst hacking incident in the company's recent history. WSJ’s Euirim Choi reports on the hack, which looks different from other security breaches. Photos: Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images, Sean Gallup/Getty Images and Dado Ruvic/Reuters ByEuirim Choiand Updated July 15, 2020 11:42 pm ET Twitter Inc. was hit with a widespread attack Wednesday that allowed hackers to take over an array of accounts including those of celebrities, politicians and billionaires such as Bill Gates, Kanye West, Joe Biden and Barack Obama, as well as Apple Inc. and other companies. The attack, which security experts called the most significant hacking incident in Twitter’s history, began before 4 p.m. EDT, when compromised accounts—many of them related to the digital currency bitcoin—began posting messages requesting money be sent... To Read the Full Story Subscribe Sign In Continue reading your article with a WSJ membership View Membership Options

At least a dozen Twitter accounts belonging to the world’s most wealthy and influential people were taken over Wednesday in an unprecedented attack on the platform designed to promote a suspected cryptocurrency scam. The culprits, as yet, are unknown. Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Apple, Uber, Kanye West, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Wiz Khalifa, and even Kim Kardashian West saw their accounts tell hundreds of millions of followers to send Bitcoin money to a certain wallet address if they wanted to see their money doubled in a giveaway of up to $10 million.“I am giving back to my fans. All Bitcoin sent to my address below will be sent back doubled. I am only doing a maximum of $10,000,000. bc1qxy2kgdygjrsqtzq2n0yrf2493p83kkfjhx0wlh. Only going on for 30 minutes!” the tweets read. Musk’s account, which has been the victim of imitators hawking Bitcoin wallets before, sent three tweets promoting this one and replied once to Bill Gates.People sent almost $110,000 to the account listed within a couple hours of the fraudulent tweets going up, according to The Verge. According to Twitter, the hackers used employees’ corporate accounts to gain access to internal tools with vast capabilities. The hijackers used “social engineering,” where malicious actors trick account owners into divulging sensitive information like login credentials, to wrest control from the employees themselves. “We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools...” the social media giant said. “We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf.”CEO Jack Dorsey acknowledged that it had been a “tough day” for Twitter late Tuesday. “We all feel terrible this happened. We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened,” he tweeted. A Biden campaign official told The Daily Beast, “Twitter locked down the account immediately following the breach and removed the related tweet. We remain in touch with Twitter on the matter.”A representative for Gates said in a statement to Recode, “We can confirm that this tweet was not sent by Bill Gates. This appears to be part of a larger issue that Twitter is facing. Twitter is aware and working to restore the account.”The hack also affected his other company, Square, when its popular CashApp Twitter account pushed the Bitcoin scam. Twitter temporarily locked down an unspecified number of verified accounts in response to the incident, potentially leaving health organizations and emergency management agencies unable to put out statements on the platform amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The National Weather Service in Lincoln, Illinois, was hit by the lockdown in the middle of a tornado warning. “We’re in the middle of it right now—middle of the storm, middle of this situation on Twitter,” Chris Miller of the Central Illinois National Weather Service told The Daily Beast. “If anybody has a feed through twitter, they’re not getting information,” he said. “We’ve had so many warnings this evening I can’t even count—flash floods, severe thunderstorm warnings, high winds, tornado, all kinds of severe warnings this afternoon.” When asked about the widespread blocking, a Twitter spokesperson sent a tweet from the company’s security account: “You may be unable to Tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident.” Some verified Twitter accounts were apparently back up and running a couple of hours after the lockdown. Sources cited by Motherboard said the social media giant was also deleting screenshots of an internal administration tool being circulated among hackers. One source said the tool had apparently played a role in the account takeovers. The FBI’s San Francisco Bureau said it was “aware of today’s security incident” and advised the public not to send money to the Bitcoin wallet in the tweets. The hijackers also took over prominent accounts in the cryptocurrency industry, including Coinbase, the largest trading platform for Bitcoin and other digital currencies.Most quickly deleted the tweets. The domain registrar used by the scammers told TechCrunch the company removed the URL after it was reported Wednesday. Experts say it’s not at all surprising that a slew of influential figures were the ones targeted in the attack. “Crypto-scams are nothing new and have been around essentially since the technology was created. Scammers commonly rely upon impersonating celebrities to feign credibility and wealth when pedaling these ploys,” said Brenna Smith, a cryptocurrency researcher who writes the CryptOsint newsletter for Bellingcat.But in this case, the hackers were somehow able to go above and beyond their usual MO of using fake accounts. “This mass hack was unprecedented in the crypto-world because of the coordinated and systematic hijacking of verified accounts on a major social media platform,” Smith said. Scammers frequently use accounts imitating Musk, one of the accounts hit by the latest hacking scam, in order to promote schemes purporting to pay back double the amount Bitcoin users send to a given address and have hit platforms ranging from Twitter to YouTube. Hoax artists perpetrating the double-your-money hoaxes have netted at least $2 million in bitcoin since the schemes first began, according to bitcoin.com. In 2019, hackers pulled off a similar attack against Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey. In that case, hackers gained access to Dorsey’s account through his mobile provider, AT&T. It’s unclear how, exactly, the hackers managed to get the company to give them access to his phone number on a different device, but once in control of the number they were able to send tweets via an outdated service that allowed users to tweet by sending text messages.

The Trump administration is sending a new “surge” of rangers from US national parks such as Zion, Yosemite and the National Mall to patrol the southern border for crossings by illegal immigrants.Continuing a controversial policy initiated in 2018, rangers who work in law enforcement will be dispatched to Organ Pipe Cactus national monument on the Arizona and Mexico border as well as Big Bend national park on the border in south-west Texas. Donald Trump has been unable to obtain funding for his border emergency plan, which includes an increase in immigration enforcement officials as well as large sums for border wall construction. Diverting rangers from national parks is a way to direct federal resources to the border without the need for congressional approval.Valerie Naylor, a former National Park Service (NPS) superintendent who worked for the agency for 31 years, said she was troubled by the idea of rangers being tasked with arresting migrants instead of protecting the parks where they work.“My concern is sending rangers from parks that are already understaffed specifically to work with border patrol in areas that are outside the mission of the National Park Service,” she said. “This potentially puts visitors at risk, certainly resources at risk, in the parks they are leaving.”Since the fiscal year 2011, the National Park Service has seen an 11% reduction in staff while experiencing a 19% increase in visitation. Trump’s proposed 2020 budget, which includes considerable increases in border security spending, cuts the NPS budget cut by $481m.“This is coming at a time when national parks are experiencing the most significant staff and funding shortages in American history,” said Laiken Jordahl, borderlands campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity who previously worked for the NPS for two years. “It’s a publicity stunt with genuine consequences.”The “pilot” program was initially set to last just 90 days but has been extended into the fall of 2020, according to High Country News. Federal officials have been tight-lipped about the number of rangers taking part in three-week rotations at national parks on the border. The NPS declined to provide the number of rangers reassigned to these duties since 2018 to the Guardian.. “The National Park Service continues to support our federal partners by deploying law enforcement personnel to Department of the Interior managed lands along the southern border,” said a spokesperson. “Due to operational security, we will not be disclosing any additional information about our officers assisting in the operations.”A recent investigation by USA Today found that numerous parks are involved in the program, including the Great Smoky Mountains national park in North Carolina, Wrangell-St Elias national park in Alaska, the National Mall in Washington DC, and Zion national park.Andrew Fitzgerald, deputy chief ranger at Zion national park, confirmed to the Guardian that they would be sending three rangers to the border by the end of the year for three-week rotations. Critics have questioned the efficacy of these rotations, because while national park law enforcement rangers are trained to enforce federal laws, they are not necessarily well versed in the complexities of immigration enforcement.“This new directive rotates rangers from places like the National Mall, Redwood Park and Yosemite,” said Jorhdahl, referring to national parks not located along the border. “They are essentially sending people down there that have no idea how to do the job.”Naylor said that “rangers are exceptionally well trained”. The problem is of a different kind. Rangers are commonly redeployed from one park to another to deal with a crisis – a fire, for instance. “Whether sending them [rangers] to the border meets that need, that criterion – well, I would question that,” she said. Topics US-Mexico border This land is your land National parks US immigration Trump administration news

President Trump’s latest assault on immigration, cutting the number of refugees accepted to a mere 18,000 from 30,000 last year, is better than the complete ban that some of his aides were seeking. But looking at mere numbers misses the point.This is the administration’s latest message to anyone dreaming of a freer life in America: that they should just stay away. The Trump administration has systematically acted to bar as many refugees and asylum seekers as possible, virtually from its first day, supplanting America’s traditional welcome to the world’s desperate people with a spirit of xenophobia and bigotry. Led by Stephen Miller, a zealot who has planted lieutenants throughout the government, the Trump White House has made its anti-immigration campaign something akin to a crusade, with “the wall” along the Mexican border as its symbol.The administration has tried to scare away Central Americans by separating children from their parents when families arrive at the border seeking asylum; it threatened to end “temporary protected status” for people escaping natural and other disasters in a number of countries, including Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan; it suspended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which let undocumented immigrants who arrived here as children stay and work; it has dramatically deported immigrants without regard for their ties to family and community; and it has enacted a system that would prevent migrants from seeking asylum if they passed through another country without first seeking asylum there.Any question about the mind-set guiding the administration should have been put to rest by President Trump’s icy explanation to reporters earlier this month for why he was barring residents of the hurricane-battered Bahamas from taking refuge in the United States.“I don’t want to allow people that weren’t supposed to be in the Bahamas to come into the United States, including some very bad people and some very bad gang members, and some very, very bad drug dealers,” he said. He offered not a shred of proof of any such danger, while the shattering evidence of Bahamians’ needs still lies everywhere.The limit announced by the State Department on Thursday is far below the 110,000 refugees a year that President Barack Obama said in 2016 should be let in. Most of the 18,000 slots, moreover, are already filled by Iraqis who worked with the American military, victims of religious persecution and some Central Americans. That would leave only 7,500 slots for families seeking unification, like parents of Rohingya children who have already been admitted. The proffered reason for the cut was the huge backlog in immigration courts as the number of people seeking asylum is expected to reach 350,000. Most refugees trying to enter the United States, though, have already been cleared. So it’s not immediately clear how lowering the annual limit will help ease the backlog. There are enormous backlogs, and the United States cannot let in everyone who wants to come. But the severity of the cutbacks makes clear that the administration’s rationale hides its real motive: to score political points with a base of voters fearful of immigration by seeming to keep out as many people as possible.This shortsighted politicking denies a fundamental virtue — and key advantage — of America’s democracy: that it is a land of immigrants and refugees. It ignores the contributions of immigrants to the greatness of the United States.There is no sensible argument for opening the borders to everyone. Any refugee or asylum program needs a solid vetting process. But Mr. Trump’s approach is not the answer. Congress should have stepped in long ago with serious immigration reform. But that failure is no reason for Americans to be taken in by Mr. Trump’s fear-mongering and evasive explanations. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

The US has accused China and Russia of using "opaque" and "corrupt" practices to expand their influence in Africa.US National Security Adviser John Bolton said the two nations were "deliberately and aggressively" attempting to gain an economic advantage over the US on the continent.He said the Trump administration's new strategy for Africa would focus on trade and countering terrorism.He warned the US would no longer fund "unproductive" peacekeeping efforts."Under our new approach, every decision we make, every policy we pursue, and every dollar of aid we spend will further US priorities in the region," he said in a speech at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. Should Africa be wary of Chinese debt? US cuts Africa troops amid Russia focus He accused China of using "bribes, opaque agreements and the strategic use of debt to hold states in Africa captive to Beijing's wishes and demands".He highlighted China's influence in Djibouti, which he said was not only having a direct impact on the US's military base there but could soon shift the balance of trading power in the region towards the east.Russia, he said, was seeking to increase its influence in Africa by advancing "its political and economic relationships with little regard for the rule of law or accountable and transparent governance".He said Russia was continuing to "sell arms and energy in exchange for votes in the United Nations" and extracting "natural resources from the region for its own benefit".The BBC's Anne Soy says Mr Bolton's speech could cause disquiet among Africans already concerned that their continent is being used as a platform to advance the agenda of global players. The US strategy may be viewed by some Africans through the same lens the Trump administration is using to assess China and Russia's intentions in Africa, she notes.

The 328 American patients who had been quarantined onboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan flew home on Feb. 18. Amongst them were 14 people who were known to be infected with the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19. More hadn’t been diagnosed yet.The patients tested positive after the arrangements for their repatriation had been made as part of the group. That prompted a heated debate between the State Department, wanting to go ahead with the repatriation, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recommended against it. The State Department got its way.Reportedly, Donald Trump had not been informed that the protocol would be respected and people evacuated despite testing positive, and was furious that such a decision was made. The US president has never made a secret of being a germaphobe.Neither Trump nor the White House have publicly commented on the repatriation. It’s a departure from Trump’s past behavior: Notably, when in 2014 the US dealt with the repatriation of health workers who had contracted Ebola while treating people in West Africa, he was adamant they should not be brought back to the country.At the time, he had called for shutting down borders and keeping the health officials out of the country, warning that people who “go to far away places to help out are great—but must suffer the consequences!” He had also advocated refusing visa applications from Ebola-hit countries.This time, however, there may be some ground to the president’s worries. The way the evacuation was conducted seems to point more to a rushed addressing of the discontent of the passengers (who had been kept in very uncomfortable conditions on the ship) than due diligence.Anne Schuchat, the CDC executive who passionately advised against the repatriation, thought the safer course of action would have been keeping the infected people in Japan, as it had initially been considered for the whole group of US passengers onboard the cruise ship. The State Department, on the other hand, trusted the precautions put in place on the plane, and considered the journey back to the US safe: The infected passengers would be separated in an enclosure in the plane.The CDC’s concern was shared by infectious disease experts, but the Department of Health and Human Services supported the State Department. Eventually, all passengers boarded the plane and were flown to the US. The CDC said it wished to be left out from official communications on the decision, for fear of raising more concerns with its position against it.Curiously, it was Trump’s people from the State and Health departments who made the decision that Trump later considered reckless—a move that raised concerns amongst experts that the administration may not be prepared to handle a health emergency.More test results on the people repatriated have come back positive since they reached the US. That suggests that even if the 14 people were cordoned off in the plane, there were others traveling with healthy passengers who had been infected. The passengers will all be in quarantine for 14 days in the US, between military bases and treatment centers.

Love Breitbart or hate it, it’s impossible to be neutral about the site. Openly espousing Islamophobia and anti-globalism while it toys with white nationalism, it’s unapologetic about its approach to news and opinion. Regardless of one’s political stance and reaction to Breitbart, it seems like an odd place to find advertising from Amazon, a company that typically tries to avoid controversy.Our research hasn’t shown any direct Amazon ad placements on Breitbart. But the company does continue to allow the site to use “native shopping ads” from its Amazon Associates program, which let third parties receive commissions and other bounties from advertising links. Amazon generates native ads dynamically, populating them with contextually derived products of interest, and labeling the unit “Ads by Amazon.” To a visitor’s eye, there’s no difference between native shopping ads and other advertisements from Google, Facebook, and other third-party ad networks. (On a recent visit, a Breitbart Amazon ad suggested four different books about Wells Fargo’s stagecoach era to me; on other pages, it plugs titles with a more direct connection to the Breitbart audience, such as Ann Coulter’s In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!)The Audible audiobook service, a longtime division of Amazon, also shows up on Breitbart, with banner ads that, like the other Amazon ads on the site, can be generated through the Associates program.Amazon maintains direct control over these native ads and the entire Associates program—which it says has over 900,000 participants—and has frequently cut sites off from this commission-based revenue for violations of its terms of service. The fact that it hasn’t blocked Breitbart has made it a target of Sleeping Giants, a group of anonymous individuals that claims (and third parties have at least partly verified) to have helped convince 3,800 advertisers—from Avis to Zynga—to drop Breitbart since its campaign started in late 2016. Amazon remains one of the most prominent firms to have ads or placements of any kind on the site, and the Seattle behemoth has never responded to inquiries from Sleeping Giants or reporters (including myself) on the topic, even after Sleeping Giants rented a billboard truck to drive around Seattle to ask them to “stop funding bigotry” on Breitbart. — Sleeping Giants (@slpng_giants) June 20, 2017Curated CommerceAcross its various services, products, and affiliate relationships, Amazon prohibits a range of behavior. For instance, for third-party sellers on its platform, it refuses to allow products “that promote or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual or religious intolerance, or promote organizations with such views.” To participate in its Associates affiliate program, it notes sites are “unsuitable” if they “promote or contain materials or activity that is hateful, harassing, harmful, invasive of another’s privacy, abusive, or discriminatory (including on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, or age).”Amazon won’t talk about Breitbart’s use of Associates ads, and that in itself is an implicit message. It indicates to those outside the company that it agrees Breitbart meets its standards for affiliates and native advertising. That remains true even if the ads are there, because Breitbart used self-serve tools rather than because Amazon chose to place them.I agreed to speak with Sleeping Giants through its Facebook account without being provided the identities of individuals. The group told me that its members first encountered Breitbart in 2016, and were appalled. “We could not believe the type of racist and bigoted rhetoric and the virulent racism and sexism in their comment section,” they say. They were equally shocked that advertisers would pay to have their messages next to these articles and associated comments.Without any intent to start a movement, Sleeping Giants set up a Twitter account and tweeted at the founder of a company whose ads appeared on Breitbart along with that person’s company. Within 30 minutes, that company said “that they had no idea their ads were appearing there,” Sleeping Giants says. Things snowballed from there, and the group has now over 210,000 followers between Twitter and Facebook, as well as independently run chapters in U.S. states and other countries.The group denies that it advocates boycotting companies as a tactic, and it’s clear from its various feeds that it doesn’t directly suggest people stop buying the products of advertisers. “Free speech means that people can say whatever they want and be protected from their government, but it doesn’t entitle them to advertising dollars,” it says. Rather, it appears to be using exposure to provoke a response. It posts public messages about companies that advertise on Breitbart and encourages members to the do the same, tagging advertisers and showing their messages alongside egregious subject matter.A Breitbart page with ad units powered by Amazon and Google.Based on the replies from company accounts, executives, and spokespeople, the vast majority of those whose ads appeared had no idea their ads were showing up on Breitbart or other sites that might not align with their moral, political, environmental, or other philosophies, left or right. YouTube has a similar huge backlash it’s currently coping with, because of the horrific, inappropriate, potentially illegal, and inexplicable nature of some of the videos it hosts, and from which it allows content producers to earn money on ads.Web advertising at the moment is a particularly ugly ball of wax, metaphorically matted with detritus. Most editorial sites and nearly all other sites that post advertising rely either in small part or entirely on networks run by ad tech firms that use auction algorithms. These systems allow advertisers to specify demographic and other criteria and associated bids. Publishers with extra ad inventory—which is all publishers—may pick up salvage revenue of pennies per thousand page views (CPM). For publications, blogs, podcasts, or other sites that have tens of millions to hundreds of millions of views a month, those pennies add up, although they’re typically earned alongside much higher CPM rates from directly contracted advertising buys. Really amazing to see @Amazon backdoor fund Breitbart's bad-faith attacks on them by placing @audible_com ads there, and that's on top of the racism and sexism they're supporting by advertising on Breitbart already. CC: @slpng_giants pic.twitter.com/1Tcaai2PER — Strider ???? (@striderhlc) April 8, 2018Advertisers who make programmatic ad buys lose control of where ads appear unless they put in place extremely tight guidelines. Few companies are public about how these buys go astray, but JPMorgan Chase was blunt to the New York Times in March 2017. JPMorgan had its ads appear on 400,000 sites, and then changed that abruptly to a hand-selected set of 5,000 sites. The company didn’t see much change in its costs or outcomes shortly afterwards, and its chief marketing officer confirmed in October to AdAge that although the company had increased its list of white-listed sites somewhat, the results remained on track. JPMorgan also developed its own in-house algorithm for YouTube placement, and shifted from 5 million channels to about 3,000.Many advertisers have asked networks on which their ads appear to specifically blacklist Breitbart, while some networks have developed opt-in blacklists of political sites that engage in extreme examples of speech, and other categories that could cause a backlash. Amazon’s continued relationship with Breitbart can’t be a mere oversight; the company surely has a sizable number of staffers dealing with how its ads appear through its affiliate network, partners, and direct placements.Breitbart didn’t reply to my request for comment. In previous remarks to other media, the site’s editor-in-chief has said Sleeping Giants’ characterization of the site is a “lie.” The company hasn’t responded in previous statements or interviews to claims of lost advertisers, including third-party advertising monitoring firms’ analyses, which appear to confirm Sleeping Giants’ claims about the effectiveness of its campaign. It’s also unclear how much of Breitbart’s budget relies on advertising, merchandise, and other revenue, given the deep pockets of the Mercer family of billionaires that owns part of the company.It’s Not Just AmazonAmazon may be the largest Breitbart advertiser to remain in place, but Sleeping Giants notes that three other companies have an impact as well. Google and Facebook’s advertising networks—AdSense and Facebook Audience Network—are among those delivering ads to Breitbart, and Disqus powers its commenting system. Sleeping Giants asserts that Breitbart routinely violates the terms of service of each of those companies’ products used on the site.A Facebook spokesperson says that the company’s Audience Network, which powers ads on sites outside of Facebook’s own ecosystem, has strict community standards, and pointed to a post from last September by Carolyn Everson, its VP of global marketing solutions, about initiatives the company has under way. This includes providing a preview to advertisers of where their ads will run, and more reporting tools. Facebook’s spokesperson says that the company can’t address individual sites, but routinely removes ones that violate Audience Network policies.Google provided a statement that noted that “Google has extensive policies that restrict publishers in our ad network from monetizing discriminatory, harmful, and disparaging content—and we enforce these policies vigorously.” As in the case of Facebook, a spokesperson says the firm doesn’t comment publicly on actions related to individual sites. The statement concluded, “We regularly review sites and content on their domains to ensure compliance.”Mario Paganini, director of marketing at Disqus, says the company has cooperated with Sleeping Giants’ inquiry and mission, but he admits that Disqus’s last interaction with the group was in early 2017. Sleeping Giants says it’s been trying to re-engage the company since those conversations via Twitter and email without success, though Paganini says he’s unaware of any “direct” outreach. Paganini says the firm has increasingly added feedback options to report content and websites that violate policy. “If we find that a site’s own published content or the comments that their moderators and employees post are in violation of our TOS, we opt to remove the site from Disqus,” he adds. Sleeping Giants disagrees vociferously, and routinely posts screen captures of Disqus forum posts from Breitbart that contain seemingly obvious violations of terms of service, some of which the protest group or others have reported and which remain in place.Ultimately, Sleeping Giants’ complaint about Amazon has two goals. There’s the stated one—to have Amazon remove its advertising from Breitbart. But even if Amazon chooses to stay, Sleeping Giants would like it to go on the record about that decision. By not speaking, Amazon keeps itself above the fray and gains sales from its ads on a prominent site that doesn’t appear in harmony with its expressed corporate values. And with a major brand remaining in place, Breitbart retains some market credibility. Which means that as long as Amazon refuses to talk about its Breitbart relationship, Sleeping Giants is unlikely to shut up about it.[Editor’s note: Article updated on 04/17/2018 to clarify the nature and recency of communications between Sleeping Giants and Disqus, as well as Sleeping Giants’ ongoing dissatisfaction with Disqus’s Breitbart presence.]

This is actually an amazing example of precisely what the article talked about. Fox posts a lot of blatantly political, one sided "news". This article, which clearly was also highly political, attacked them for it and claimed much of their reporting is lies. You responded with yet another super political post filled with more assertions that are, at best, highly questionable.But surely we can find some objective reality in here? Facts are facts whether you like them or not. We should be able to make some unambiguous determinations about whether certain people lied or not?Hannity did or did not claim the report had concluded the FBI was wrong in opening the investigation? Not that be believed/hoped/assumed some followup investigation would do that, but that this investigation's report did? Did he in fact say, "It is all there in black and white?" If so, what did he mean by "it", and is it, in fact, there in black and white?These aren't political question. They're simple questions of fact. And the answers are easy to find, because the relevant documents are all available online. Here's the full report [justice.gov], available for all of us to read.Did the report state, as you assert, that "the entire Meuller report was entirely dependent on the Steele dossiere?" Not just that it was one factor inspiring them to open the investigation, but that it was the sole basis of the entire report? If so, you should be able to point to exactly where in the report it says that.Unfortunately, you've also created a strong bias by selecting and discarding "facts". You put lots of weight on the inspector general's report, since you presumably like what it says, or what you've been led to believe it says. But you dismiss the Mueller report as a "political hit job". Can you provide objective facts that would convince an unbiased person of those views? Or is this simply a matter of confirmation bias, focusing on whatever supports your beliefs and rejecting anything that contradicts them? What evidence can you present that the Mueller report is a "political hit job" and the inspector general's report is not?

Facebook has announced it’s building teams that will study racial bias baked into the algorithms used on its platform and on Instagram, which it owns. The move is a significant acknowledgment that the algorithms driving two of the most influential social media platforms can be discriminatory.Instagram will create an “equity team” charged with tasks like analyzing the enforcement of its harassment policies and studying its algorithms for racial bias, the Wall Street Journal reports. Facebook spokesperson Stephanie Otway told Recode that the team will continue to work with Facebook’s Responsible AI team to study bias, and added that Facebook will also create a similar equity team. “The racial justice movement is a moment of real significance for our company,” Vishal Shah, a vice president of product at Instagram, said in a statement. “Any bias in our systems and policies runs counter to providing a platform for everyone to express themselves.” Algorithmic bias can be pervasive and impact how a platform treats users by affecting the content and ads they see as well as the way their own posts get filtered. Users can have trouble spotting algorithmic bias on their own since, for example, most can’t necessarily compare their News Feed with those of other users. Researchers, civil rights groups, and politicians have sounded alarm bells about algorithmic bias on its platforms, and now Facebook is devoting more resources to addressing the problem. Notably, the Facebook news comes amid an advertising boycott of the platform organized by major civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League, and just two weeks after the company shared the results of its civil rights audit, which panned Facebook for failing to address racism and misinformation on its site. Ahead of the boycott, Instagram acknowledged and pledged to deal with algorithmic bias on its platforms more directly. As demonstrations against police brutality and racism swept across the United States in mid-June, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced that the company would look into racial bias on Instagram, including in its account verification policies and approach to content filtering and distribution. “While we do a lot of work to help prevent subconscious bias in our products, we need to take a harder look at the underlying systems we’ve built, and where we need to do more to keep bias out of these decisions,” Mosseri wrote at the time.We don’t know much about the new efforts yet. Facebook’s Otway emphasized that these initiatives are still in the early stages and said the new team will be charged with reviewing a wide variety of issues that marginalized groups may encounter on the Instagram platform. As an example, she suggested that the company will get behind tools that focus on supporting minority-owned businesses. The company seems especially willing to invest in efforts analyzing the role of bias in its systems after its recently concluded civil rights audit highlighted two pilot programs at the company: a Facebook-built tool called Fairness Flow and a fairness consultation process launched in December. The auditors also called for Facebook to establish “processes and guidance designed to prompt issue-spotting and help resolve fairness concerns” that employees company-wide must follow. “The company certainly has the resources to be more proactive and aggressive in its actions, to be a leader,” Kelley Cotter, a graduate student who studies public understanding of algorithms at Michigan State University, told Recode at the time of the audit. “That Facebook still appears to be in an ‘exploratory’ phase after years and years of civil rights complaints evidences its reluctance to prioritize public values like equity and justice over its private interests.” Automated tools can discriminate in myriad ways. Bias can be inherent in algorithms and artificial intelligence based on who builds these technologies, which assumptions are programmed into them, how they’re trained, and how they’re ultimately deployed. One notable source of this bias can come from data: If an algorithm is trained using a database that isn’t representative of a particular demographic group, it’s very possible the algorithm will be inaccurate when applied to people who are part of that group. Algorithmic bias can have life-changing and dangerous impacts on people’s lives. Résumé-screening algorithms can learn to discriminate against women, for example. Facial recognition systems used by police can also have racial and gender biases, and they often perform worst when used to identify women with darker skin. In June, we learned of the first known false arrest of a Black man living in Michigan caused by a facial recognition system. On social media platforms built by Facebook, there’s concern that bias could show up anywhere an automated system makes decisions, including in how Instagram filters content and whose posts get flagged by Facebook’s content moderation bots. There’s also concern that the lack of racial diversity among Facebook’s employees could hinder its efforts to make its product more equitable. Just under 4 percent of roles at Facebook are held by Black employees, and just over 6 percent are held by Hispanic employees, according to the company’s diversity report. Facebook would not share statistics on the racial diversity of the teams that work on its algorithms and artificial intelligence. According to Nicol Turner Lee, the director of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation, “Without representative input, the company may find itself generating trade-offs that further the differential treatment or disparate impacts for communities of color.”Meanwhile, the capacity these systems have to be discriminatory is why some say the algorithms themselves need to be externally audited, which Facebook thus far has not opted to do. Facebook “seems to plan to keep the results of its research in-house,” Nicolas Kayser-Bril of Algorithm Watch told Recode after the announcement of the new teams. “It is unlikely that, were the new ‘equity and inclusion team’ to make claims regarding discrimination or the remediation thereof, independent researchers will be able to verify them.”After all, Facebook can say it’s improving its algorithms again and again, but it’s not clear how those outside the company, including Facebook and Instagram users, would ever know if the changes were actually making an overall difference.Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.Support Vox’s explanatory journalismEvery day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Scientists in the Swiss city of Basel have solved a decades-old mystery over the identity of a mummified woman. Their research revealed a surprise: the woman is the great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother of UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson.The body was uncovered in 1975 while renovations were being done on Basel's Barfüsser Church. She was buried right in front of the altar, clearly well fed, and wearing good quality clothes.This was obviously the body of a wealthy lady of Basel.But who was she exactly, and when did she die? There was no gravestone to indicate her identity, but initial testing of her wooden coffin suggested it dated from the 16th Century.Another clue: her body was riddled with mercury - a standard treatment for syphilis from the late 15th to the 19th Century. Highly toxic mercury treatment was more often a kill than a cure and it was this that preserved her body.But that still left open the question of who she was. Boris Johnson: A history of undiplomacy Johnson under pressure over jailed mum case Boris Johnson's dad in I'm A Celebrity Basel in the 16th and 17th Centuries was a wealthy trading city; its port on the river Rhine was a key hub for moving goods across Europe, and it remains so today.Local historians knew that members of Basel's wealthy families were buried in and around the Barfüsser Church. Some were clearly named in records, some had clearly marked gravestones. But not the mummy. It only became clear in 2017, in newly discovered archives, that the mummy had been uncovered once before, in 1843.Those records led historians to suspect the mummy was a member of a well-established Basel family, the Bischoffs.Using the most up to date methods, scientists were able to extract DNA material from the mummy's big toe. This was compared, by scientists working independently from one another, with DNA taking from living descendants of the Bischoff family. The results were clear, showing a 99.8% probability that the descendants and the mummy were all from the same maternal line.Now the scientists and the historians were sure: the mummy was none other than Anna Catharina Bischoff. Born in Basel in 1719, she died there in 1787.Once her identity had been established, genealogists were able - with the help of the efficient records of births, marriages, and deaths which tend to be kept by the wealthier classes - to trace more of Anna Catharina's descendants.She had seven children. Only two survived childhood, but one daughter, also Anna, married a certain Christian Hubert Baron Pfeffel von Kriegelstein. Five generations of von Pfeffels later, and we find Marie Luise von Pfeffel marrying one Stanley Fred Williams. Their daughter Yvonne married Osman Wilfred Johnson Kemal… and their son, Stanley Johnson, is British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson's father. The five-star review that changed my life The protester who is a social media hero The church that thrives in a ghost town Boris Johnson had already been aware of the von Pfeffel connections, having once told the BBC programme Who Do You Think You Are? that they were "posh toffs". He was clearly delighted by the discovery of his ancestor.After hearing of the find, Stanley Johnson told the BBC he thought it was "most brilliant" that scientists had managed to make the connection. "I think she's rather nice," he said of his ancestor. But what of Anna Catharina herself? Did she, to borrow a phrase from her seven-times great grandson, live a life of blameless domesticity?In fact she seems to have.She married a church minister, and lived for much of her adult life in Strasbourg. There, it is believed, she may have contracted syphilis while caring for patients with the sexually transmitted disease.On the death of her husband she returned to her home town of Basel, and apparently underwent rigorous mercury treatment in the hope of a cure.It did not work: scientists believe Anna Catharina probably died from mercury poisoning.But the mercury also preserved her body - allowing today's researchers to find out exactly who she was, and who her descendants are.

For weeks, Iran has faced a deadly wave of explosions and fires at sensitive military and civilian sites, including one incident that caused immense damage to an important nuclear facility. No one officially knows why it’s happening or who is responsible — but many believe Israel, with the Trump administration’s tacit or even direct support, is behind it all.On June 26, a massive explosion rocked the Khojir missile-production complex, a location considered vital to Iran’s missile capabilities. Four days later, another blast — this time at a medical clinic north of the capital, Tehran — killed 19 people.On July 2, an explosion and fire occurred at the underground Natanz nuclear facility, a key component to the country’s uranium-enrichment efforts. What actually transpired is unclear, but a Middle Eastern official — believed to be the head of Israeli intelligence, Yossi Cohen — told the New York Times last week that Israel had detonated a bomb. Analysts differ on the extent of the damage, but assessments say centrifuge production may have been delayed a few months or even a few years as a result of the explosion and fire. New images show the scale of the destruction from the explosion at Iran's Natanz nuclear facility on July 2. There may be further damage to the facility's underground elements, which aren't visible from above. Image: @Maxar pic.twitter.com/ZN7V25nCoE— Raf Sanchez (@rafsanchez) July 8, 2020 And this week, fires broke out in an aluminum plant in Lamerd and a seaport in Bushehr, engulfing at least seven wooden ships in the process.It’s possible all of this is a coincidence. With a reeling economy and a devastating coronavirus outbreak, perhaps the Islamic Republic has merely struggled to maintain sensitive facilities that require constant upkeep. Accidents do happen.But current and former US and Israeli officials as well as experts I spoke to are pretty certain Israel is responsible for the incidents at the military and nuclear sites (but not the clinic or the port or plant), with or without Washington’s explicit approval. “There is a pattern of escalation and a context that would suggest a motive on the Israeli side to target the Iranians,” said Dalia Dassa Kaye, the director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy at the RAND Corporation.Their reasoning is straightforward: Since President Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, Iran has inched closer to obtaining a nuclear weapon, though the country fiercely denies it is seeking one. Now that Iran is in a weakened position due in large part to the coronavirus pandemic, Israel and the US can target the country’s nuclear and military programs without fear of a massive retaliation.Such a move would send an unmistakable signal to Tehran. “The message is: ‘You can’t control your country. We can hit you whenever we want, wherever we want,’” said Eric Brewer, who worked on Iran issues as a member of Trump’s National Security Council.The direct consequences of that signal, though, are unclear. Some suspect Tehran may activate its proxies in Iraq to attack Americans or launch a cyberattack against Israel. It’s also possible Iran will look the other way, as the lack of a known attacker both leaves the regime devoid of a clear target and provides it the political space not to retaliate. But no one believes these moves will actually convince Iran to back down and suspend all nuclear activity. If anything, the country might start sprinting toward the bomb.“Covert operations will only undermine long-term nonproliferation efforts,” Mahsa Rouhi, an expert on Iran’s nuclear program at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, wrote Wednesday in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “Hardline voices in Tehran will become more motivated to rapidly advance Iran’s nuclear program.”Which means if Israel (maybe with the US) truly is behind these events in Iran, it’s taking quite the gamble.Israel has long targeted nuclear programs in the Middle East in secret, open, and openly secret ways.In 1981, Israeli jets bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. And in 2007, it struck a reactor in Syria that could have produced nuclear fuel. But Israel has saved its most audacious counter-nuclear efforts for Iran. In the early 2000s, Israeli spy chiefs hatched a plan to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists, a campaign Jerusalem has never formally acknowledged. In 2012, a top official at Natanz — Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan — was killed in a mysterious explosion. His death followed two other suspected killings over the previous two years. But that wasn’t all: In 2009, Israel joined the US in using a cyber weapon, known as Stuxnet, to destroy about 1,000 of Iran’s 6,000 centrifuges. Why would Israel resort to such bold methods? Simply put, officials in Jerusalem worry Iran could more credibly threaten Israel’s existence if it had a nuclear weapon. There’s real justification for that concern: Just last year, for example, a top Iranian general told local reporters, “Our strategy is to erase Israel from the global political map.” When it became clear two of the recent explosions in Iran happened at a missile site (Khojir) and a key uranium enrichment facility (Natanz), all eyes turned to Israel as the likely culprit.“Israel as well as the US have a clear interest in stopping, or at least disrupting, Iran’s weapons production capability, and in particular nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles,” retired Israel Defense Forces Lt. Col. Raphael Ofek, who served in Israeli military intelligence and in the prime minister’s office, told me.The damage at Khojir doesn’t seem that extensive, but Natanz took quite a blow. .@Maxar company releases tonight new image of the area that was his by an explosion near #Tehran this weekend: the explosion at Khojir missile base completely destroyed on builsing and a large burn areaIran claims: Gas explosion pic.twitter.com/l1fU6neccD— Amichai Stein (@AmichaiStein1) June 28, 2020 Nuclear experts at the Institute for Science and International Security on July 8 assessed that the facility had sustained “significant, extensive, and likely irreparable, damage to its main assembly hall section” which “was critical to the mass production of advanced centrifuges.” (Research and development of those centrifuges was permitted under the terms of the Iran nuclear deal, experts told me.)“The building’s replacement would be expected to take at least a year, if not longer,” the nuclear analysts concluded.And per Ofek, the explosion “won’t dramatically disrupt Iran’s advanced centrifuges program,” but “it may delay the deployment of the latest models of these machines for a year or two.”Such assessments are important, former US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro told me. Israeli officials believe that if those advanced centrifuges were ever installed and operated at full capacity, it “might allow Iran to break out not with just one bomb, but with an arsenal” of nuclear weapons, he said. Delaying that possibility, then, is certainly a clear and vital Israeli goal.It’s therefore plausible that Israel was involved in the explosions at the missile and nuclear facilities — though there is no official confirmation that’s the case — and that the US may have given some kind of thumbs-up to such efforts. Tehran, importantly, surely suspects Jerusalem.“Regardless of whether these are part of a Western sabotage effort ... Iran is going to believe that they are,” Brewer, who now works on nuclear issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “Given that these are hitting all across Iran at military and civilian locations, that is going to cause Iran’s threat perceptions to spike.”But those perceptions depend greatly on the kind of campaign Iran thinks Israel might be waging.It’s worth keeping in mind that Israel and Iran have been engaged in a shadow war for decades, yet no major fight has erupted in years. In 2006, Israel and Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, battled in a month-long war during which the militant group fired more than 4,000 rockets into Israel and Israeli forces fired around 7,000 bombs and missiles into Lebanon. About 160 Israeli troops and civilians died, according to the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and about 1,100 Lebanese — most of them civilians — perished, per Human Rights Watch, a US-headquartered advocacy organization. HRW also reports about 4,400 Lebanese were injured, and around 1 million people were displaced.After that battle, Israel became more wary of Iran placing weaponry near its territory. It’s why Israeli warplanes have consistently bombed locations in Syria in recent years, for example, both to destroy weapons shipments and deter further movement of Iranian proxies and officials there. Israeli officials see the persistent thwarting of Iranian intentions, especially after the 2006 conflict, as the “war between the wars.” As Shapiro, the former American ambassador to Israel, explained it to me, the concept “reflects the Israeli philosophical approach to buy time and maybe indefinitely push off future wars — and if they occur, to make them as short as possible.” Following this strategy allows Israel to increase its own capabilities, gather intelligence, and gain a greater military advantage against Iran over time.Degrading Iran’s nuclear and missile program via covert means fits within this framework. Jerusalem is able to keep Tehran from gaining power at minimal expense and without much public fuss, thereby lowering Iran’s confidence it could defeat Israel in a war, should one break out.That plan seems to be working for the moment. “At end of the war in 2006, if you had told most Israeli officials that there wouldn’t be another war on that border [with Lebanon] after 14 years, they wouldn’t have believed you,” Shapiro said.The question now is if Iran views the possible Israeli actions through that lens, or as something more sinister. Since Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal two years ago, the US and Iran have been engaged in tit-for-tat escalations. They’re based on a fundamental disagreement: Washington and Jerusalem want Tehran to give up its nuclear program entirely, as well as to curb its other activities such as missile development and support for violent groups in the region; Iran sees those activities as critical to its survival and as an important pillar of its power and reach, however, and wants sanctions lifted without having to give up those activities.That disagreement has manifested violently. Iran and its proxies bombed oil tankers and Saudi oil fields, and downed an unmanned American surveillance drone and killed US troops stationed in Iraq — all while it loosened restrictions on its nuclear development. The US responded by killing Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s paramilitary forces, in January. Undeterred, Iran continued its offensive actions, using a cyberweapon to attack Israel’s water supply in May, a strike that potentially could have sickened hundreds of people.Officials in Iran might therefore see the Khojir and Natanz explosions as part of that fight, thereby compelling them to respond in a bigger way in the tit-for-tat. However, most experts believe Iran will see the incidents in the context of its long-running nuclear feud with Israel. If that’s the case, it would be good news. What Israel may have done “is a slight escalation, but it’s not really that surprising and not really uncharacteristic of what you’ve seen in the recent history,” Ilan Goldenberg, the Defense Department’s Iran team chief from 2009 to 2012, told me. “All these activities are being done in a way that makes it hard for Iran to retaliate, and gives them space to not retaliate.”Indeed, the Iranian regime is faltering under sustained economic pressure from the United States, one of the world’s worst coronavirus outbreaks, and political protests. It may not have the time or desire to engage in a massive fight with Israel right now. Between the deniability of Israel and America’s involvement, and the fact that the possible attacks fit into a longstanding pattern, Tehran may not feel compelled to respond immediately and in a dramatically forceful way.That’s not to say Iran will stand by idly forever. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Abbas Mousavi vowed this week that “if a regime or a government is involved in the Natanz incident, Iran will react decisively.” And if Israel and the US continue to hit Iran while it’s down, it may have no choice but to get back up, including potentially launching more cyberattacks or even pushing to develop a nuclear weapon before Israel can do anything about it. Any of those moves would be very provocative — and perhaps make an already dangerous situation much worse.“The Iranians don’t want this to spiral,” the RAND Corporation’s Kaye told me, “but the longer this persists, the harder it will be for Iran to pretend this isn’t happening.”“It’s a humiliation at a certain point,” she said.Support Vox’s explanatory journalismEvery day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Four days after Fox News aired a particularly tone-deaf graphic connecting the killings of Black men—including George Floyd and Martin Luther King Jr.—to stock market gains, many of the network’s Black staffers took part in a phone call with company brass to confront Fox’s increasingly racist and hostile rhetoric towards the protests against police brutality. It did not go well.The call on June 9 lasted more than 90 minutes and included Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott, President Jay Wallace, and HR chief Kevin Lord, people familiar with the matter told The Daily Beast. It was led by Scott, who is white, and Marsheila J. Hayes, the vice president of diversity and inclusion at Fox Corporation, who is Black. It was almost immediately rife with tension. One staffer directly asked why Bret Baier—the anchor of the network’s key weekday news broadcast, Special Report, which aired the offensive graphic—was not on the call, nor any other white on-air talent. (Baier had previously apologized for the “major screw-up,” noting that, because the show bears his name, “the buck stops with me.” Fox News also apologized for the “insensitivity” of the infographic, adding that it “should have never aired on television without full context.”) Other participants on the call expressed anger and distress about rampant racism at Fox, both on- and off-air. Fox Business Network host Charles Payne, who is Black, was particularly incensed, according to multiple people who attended the call. In fact, he had previously called Scott directly and, per a person familiar, was “ripshit” about the Baier graphic debacle and about racist remarks that Laura Ingraham had recently made on the air. At one point on the June 9 call, sources told The Daily Beast, an irate Payne suggested he’d been the victim of racial discrimination, repeatedly passed over for opportunities given instead to white colleagues. Elsewhere, the staffers recalled, Payne, who has been at Fox since 2007, lamented the network’s tone when covering Black cultural stories, including the killing of California rapper and anti-gang activist Nipsey Hussle. How can he talk to his children about Fox News, the host wondered, when it portrays people like Hussle in a racist, stereotypical manner as a gangster?“They created a white supremacist cell inside the top cable network in America.”— A Fox News staffer to The Daily BeastUltimately, the conversation was full of “a lot of talking and a lot of emotions,” one staffer said, making sure to note how Fox executives were “deliberate to allow everyone to have a chance to talk.” A spokesperson said in a statement to The Daily Beast, “FOX News Media is committed to providing an ongoing dialogue targeting issues of diversity and workplace inclusion, which is why we recently took the unprecedented action of providing an open forum among an intimate group of diverse employees to candidly discuss this critical issue.“We have long been a leader in cable news for featuring a broad range of voices, and will continue those efforts to ensure all views are respected and celebrated both on and off air.”But even if the call may have been therapeutic, staffers say the network has since then made barely any progress on confronting its own racism. In the month since, on-air talent has continued to rant against the Black Lives Matter “mob” and proclaim that America is “under attack,” while a top writer for Tucker Carlson’s show was ousted just last week for his pseudonymous racist and sexist posts on an online troll forum. Two people familiar with the situation told The Daily Beast that Fox Corporation CEO Lachlan Murdoch personally approved what Carlson would say in his defensive Monday remarks addressing the exit of his top writer. Despite demands from Fox News executives that he pre-tape the segment and strike a conciliatory tone, Carlson barely sounded apologetic, knowing he had the full backing of the Murdoch heir.A rep for Murdoch did not respond to a request for comment. But The Daily Beast spoke to more than a dozen Fox News insiders, who all suggested that behind the scenes there is a growing despair among employees about the network’s role in demonizing and spreading fear about Black Americans in particular.One employee was especially angry, saying, “They created a cell—they created a white supremacist cell inside the top cable network in America, the one that directly influences the president… This is rank racism excused by Murdoch.”Fox News has an apparent racism problem, and it’s not just the network’s critics who notice it. Anger over the cable giant’s shoddy coverage of racial issues is also increasingly coming from inside the building.Over the past month, the network’s Black employees, including on-air talent, have begun to openly confront management over Fox’s anti-Black rhetoric—especially that of the network’s biggest stars, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson.Fox News personnel have expressed outrage to network brass over their unwillingness to rein in hosts like Ingraham, whose primetime show—helmed by Tommy Firth, the same executive producer behind Megyn Kelly’s former Fox show—has long made white grievance politics a core feature. On June 29, she did an anti-Black Lives Matter monologue which included a line that many viewed as a racist dog whistle and threat: “We will remember those who desert their colors.”A complaint to corporate executives prompted an HR investigation into how Ingraham's segment was conceived and made it to air, which ultimately cleared Ingraham and her team of racist intent in deploying the loaded phrase. Marsheila J. Hayes, the Black HR official who also led the June 9 call, was detailed to explain that the phrase was not racist at all. It was simply a historical military reference, said Hayes. (The phrase appears to have been more often used during the nineteenth century, frequently in reference to Civil War turncoats.)A Fox News insider, meanwhile, suggested to The Daily Beast that the network frequently deploys right-leaning Black contributors and guests to give cover to racially insensitive content. “That’s something they routinely do—they turn out these people, like Candace Owens, to support these things, and use Black apologists to denigrate other Black men and women and victimize them.”In one such monologue, Carlson warned viewers that a Black Lives Matter “mob” will “come for you.” Fox News PR scrambled to claim his tirade was actually just about Democrats and “inner city politicians,” but some of the primetime star’s co-workers weren’t buying it.“Bull. Shit. They have the script written that gives them an out,” one Fox staffer told The Daily Beast. “But what the viewers hear is the white supremacist crap. And that crap goes straight to the White House.” The company’s inclination to look the other way as Carlson seemingly stokes a race war is also a concern that several staffers mentioned to The Daily Beast—especially because Murdoch sent a company-wide memo in early June urging all employees to “closely listen to the voices of peaceful protest and fundamentally understand that Black lives matter.” Furthermore, and in stark contrast to the fact that he is known to personally approve of what his top primetime host says nightly on TV, the Murdoch heir added: “We support our Black colleagues and the Black community, as we all unite to seek equality and understanding.”Fox’s willingness to give its top-rated star a pass for openly flirting with racist ideology has never been more apparent than in the aftermath of last week’s CNN report that Carlson’s top writer, Blake Neff, had for years pseudonymously posted bigoted comments to AutoAdmit, a notoriously unmoderated message board.The 29-year-old Neff, who’d worked on Carlson’s show for nearly four years and once bragged that “anything [Carlson is] reading off the teleprompter, the first draft was written by me,” resigned after his extensive history of hateful comments was revealed. “Make no mistake, actions such as his cannot and will not be tolerated at any time in any part of our work force,” Fox said at the time in an internal memo. Network execs also condemned Neff’s “horrific racist, misogynistic and homophobic behavior” while assuring that Carlson would sufficiently address the ordeal during his next broadcast.But when Monday rolled around, Carlson’s brief on-air remarks were anything but conciliatory. While never actually mentioning what Neff had done, Carlson said the writer was “ashamed” and that his words—which the Fox host did not “endorse”—“have no connection to the show.” Before announcing a “long-planned” vacation to go trout fishing, Carlson spent the majority of the monologue attacking and threatening the media for having the audacity to expose his top staffer.“We should also point out to the ghouls now beating their chests in triumph of the destruction of a young man, that self-righteousness also has its costs. We are all human. When we pretend we are holy, we are lying,” he said. “When we pose as blameless in order to hurt other people, we are committing the gravest sin of all, and we will be punished for it. There’s no question.”Network executives had hoped that Carlson’s brief address would temper the internal unease over his on-air conduct. But Fox News staffers told The Daily Beast that his snarling, defensive commentary has only further served to anger the primetime star’s co-workers.“How hard would it have been to say sorry?” one Fox insider told The Daily Beast. “That being said, I’m not surprised.” Another staffer noted that because Carlson never specified the nature of what Neff had written, his viewers—many of whom are unlikely to be reading CNN articles during the day—were left with no clue of what happened in the first place.“What has happened since that [June 9] phone call is we’ve taken two steps forward and now three steps back,” another Fox insider told The Daily Beast. “What [Fox executives] don’t understand is you had a white supremacist in a very senior position on [Carlson’s] show. That kind of thing doesn’t live in a garden that isn’t fertile.”Indeed, Neff is just the latest person employed by Carlson to have a history of secret racist posts or connections to white supremacist groups. At least 11 people who wrote or edited for The Daily Caller—the conservative website Carlson co-founded in 2010 and only recently divested from—were found by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other outlets to have been laundering aggressively racist beliefs, either publicly or anonymously online.Another source of internal strife at Fox News is that the network has never come close to promulgating any consistent standard as to what constitutes unacceptable, racist rhetoric and what is allowed on its air. In 2012, for example, Fox News contributor Jehmu Greene—a Black woman who is prominent in Democratic Party politics—was removed from the air for two weeks after she jokingly referred to Carlson as a “bow-tying white boy” during an on-air debate with him on Megyn Kelly’s primetime show. Carlson angrily objected and Kelly ended the show by telling viewers that Greene’s quip was unacceptable and did not meet Fox’s standards.Eight years later, in the wake of the recent on-air incidents involving Ingraham and Carlson, for which these white Fox News anchors have suffered no consequences, Greene offered to help the network come up with standards of on-air rhetoric, especially for remarks that can be interpreted as race-baiting, said a person familiar with her offer which has yet to receive a response. (Greene declined to comment for this story.)And the network’s deeply problematic record regarding race was already well-established by the time weekend anchor Kelly Wright, in April 2017, was the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against Fox News that included nine other current and former Fox News employees of color who claimed systemic racial discrimination.“We literally have a handful of Black and Latino reporters, and only one Black male anchor—which in 2017 shouldn’t be the case,” Wright, then one of very few Black anchors at the network, said during a packed press conference. He added that the situation, along with the alleged denigration of minority employees toiling behind the scenes, was “inexcusable and indefensible” and the result of “systemic and institutional racial bias.” (Wright, who left Fox News shortly after that and currently anchors the 6 p.m. news program on the just-launched Black News Channel, declined to comment.)“Fox has a reputation for being bigoted and racist, all for very good reason.”— Eboni K. Williams, former Fox News host, in 2019That same year, 2017, the network formed a diversity and inclusion council—an in-house group including staffers of color whose membership was determined by Fox’s senior management. During her time on the committee, long-time weekend booking director Patricia Peart registered concerns about racism with the network executives.Peart, who has been at Fox News since 2005, was treated unfairly, Fox News insiders said, and occasionally tasked over the years with training younger, less qualified white men and women who were ultimately promoted to jobs above her. Fox News insiders told The Daily Beast that several of Peart’s colleagues had advised her over the years to hire an attorney and sue the network, but she hesitated to jeopardize her job by engaging in a public fight with her employer. “A lot of us watched her go through it,” said one Black Fox News insider. “A lot of us told her years ago to file a lawsuit…A lot of people are still being hurt.”Peart recently received a salary bump and a better title: vice president of weekend booking. She initially declined to comment to The Daily Beast, but ultimately offered one on the record in a phone call on Thursday evening. “There have been a couple of issues that have happened with one person and it got to the point where a complaint was made but that was not made by me,” she told The Daily Beast of an incident that happened during the Roger Ailes era. “I was asked to meet Suzanne Scott. We had a conversation about it. I was given an option of what I wanted to do—did I want the person fired. I said no. I received an apology and the issue never came up again. The n-word was not used but there were other comments that were inappropriate and insensitive and it was not a one-time thing but it was not something that was ongoing.”Meanwhile, blatant instances of on-air racism—including dozens of incidents catalogued over the past decade—are often excused or laughed off, especially if the offender is a key star for the network. During a 2015 holiday cooking segment on Fox & Friends, in which Outnumbered host Harris Faulkner, who is Black, prepared her mother’s peach cobbler recipe, host Brian Kilmeade, who is white, asked Faulkner if she also serves Kool-Aid at her family gatherings—a stunningly blunt reference to a negative racial stereotype.Faulkner initially let the incident slide but, as she later revealed to the Los Angeles Times, she eventually confronted Kilmeade in his office. “We sat. He said, ‘I didn’t mean anything by it. I want you to know I have no idea what it really means, blah, blah, blah.’ By the end of the conversation, I apologized. He said, ‘Why are you apologizing?’ I said, ‘Because I need to hear the words ‘I’m sorry’ right now.’ So we moved on.”“Fox has a reputation for being bigoted and racist, all for very good reason,” former Fox News Specialists host Eboni K. Williams, who left the network in 2018, told The Breakfast Club last year. She now works for Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Revolt TV.Fox News’ coddling of racist behavior, Williams said, has been a deeply ingrained feature since its founding, not least because the late Roger Ailes saw the opportunity to profit off “the fear of intrinsic devaluation of white people in this country.” When radio host Charlamagne tha God asked if, at Fox, “the fear of a Black and Brown planet drives the message,” Williams agreed: “It feels like a viable threat.” “What the viewers hear is the white supremacist crap. And that crap goes straight to the White House.”— A Fox News employee to The Daily BeastAnd Carlson has launched to Fox News superstardom primarily by appealing to that exact fear—whether it comes from the threat of immigrants, whom he accused of making America “poorer and dirtier” in Dec. 2018, or the Black Lives Matter “mob,” or “hoax” fears about white supremacy, or Muslims like Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar, whom the Fox host called “a living fire alarm, a warning to the rest of us that we better change our immigration system immediately or else.”Such bigoted commentary has driven away many of the network’s sponsors, and yet, according to The New York Times, Lachlan Murdoch personally texted his support to Carlson amid one such advertiser boycott. All told, advertising during Carlson’s show, the most-viewed on the entire network, has been reduced to an anemic roster of Fox promos, PSAs, low-budget direct marketers, and MyPillow—an aggressively pro-Trump pillow company that now accounts for more than 30 percent of the show’s ads.But Carlson, along with like-minded Fox News stars like Ingraham, appears to be safe from ever facing any repercussions for his conduct, leaving concerned employees feeling frustrated and resigned.“It’s unbelievable,” one staffer said. “I know you’re supposed to stay silent, but this is intolerable.”

But there are still new movies coming out — and the latest crop is particularly brilliant. Seven great films are premiering this week (one of which had an all-too-brief run before theaters closed in March). There’s an engrossing action movie starring Charlize Theron and an engrossing war movie starring (and written by!) Tom Hanks. Andy Samberg leads an almost too on-the-nose comedy about being stuck in a time loop. Emily Mortimer watches her mother decay in a terrifying horror film. A documentary (of sorts) celebrates dive bars and the end of the world. A cow arrives in a frontier town. And one of the most beloved figures in Latin culture gets his due.Among them, there’s something to suit most tastes. (But if none of them pique your interest, you can always check out one of the 28 best films from this year so far.)In the extraordinary Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, documentarians and brothers Bill and Turner Ross chronicle the last night of service at a Las Vegas dive bar called Roaring ’20s — as regulars come and go, fight and kiss, and try to face the fact that the place that felt most like it was theirs will no longer exist. For them, it’s the end of the world.But there’s a catch: The Ross brothers used a real bar in New Orleans as a set and asked people to play characters much like themselves. Is the movie fiction? Yes, technically. Is it nonfiction? Not exactly. Is it “real”? Absolutely. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets reminds us that we’re constantly reinventing and performing ourselves, even in our most comfortable, cherished settings — and cinema does, too.How to watch it: Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is in virtual theatrical release. A list of participating theaters is available on the film’s website. (You’ll receive a rental link, and profits help support the independent theater you select on the page.)Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow is set in a 19th-century frontier settlement of tiny houses somewhere in Oregon, near the Columbia River, populated by people who are trying to scratch out a living in the New World, as well as the First Nations people who’ve been living there for generations. Into that settlement, a cow arrives, setting off a chain of events that are both momentous and small. But the film is about much more than just that. First Cow is also a gentle (and gently devastating) tale about male friendship, about finding someone to share your aspirations and dreams with, and, most deliciously, about cooking. It’s also about the kinds of constructed hierarchies — based on factors like race, class, money, and firepower — that seem to be imposed on the world wherever new civilizations pop up.How to watch it: After a brief theatrical run in March before theaters closed, First Cow is available to digitally purchase on platforms including iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Vudu, and on-demand providers. (It will be available to rent on July 21.) First Cow is also playing in select “virtual theatrical” release. See the film’s website for full details.Tom Hanks both wrote and stars in Greyhound, an old-fashioned nail-biter about heroism inspired by actual events (not unfamiliar territory for Hanks). He plays Captain Ernest Krause, who is tasked with leading an international convoy of ships carrying troops and supplies to Great Britain during World War II. Those ships are vulnerable to German U-boats in an area of the Atlantic called the “Black Pit,” and along the way, they run into trouble. Krause is a man of faith and quiet valor, and most of Greyhound is spent watching him peer out at the dark waters and give authoritative orders to his trusting men. It’s a simple and straightforward movie — rather than relying on thrills and scares, Greyhound is interested in the intricate work of fighting on the high seas — but if that’s what you’re in the mood for, it’s thoroughly satisfying. How to watch it: Greyhound is streaming for Apple TV+ subscribers.The Puerto Rican psychic and astrologer Walter Mercado, who passed away last November, was more than just a familiar TV personality. For decades, millions of Latinx viewers looked to his flamboyant personality, warm televised horoscopes, and pioneering gender nonconforming persona as a beloved anchor point for life. He was both a guide and a kind of friend. But he disappeared from the public eye in 2007, and despite becoming a touchpoint and even a meme for younger people, many wondered where he’d gone. In Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado, documentarians Cristina Costantini and Kareem Tabsch let Mercado tell his own story through extensive interviews conducted in his own home, as well as discussions with people who loved him (including performers like Eugenio Derbez and Lin-Manuel Miranda). The film is a fond farewell to Mercado and a celebration of his life, and enlightening both for Mercado newbies and those who grew up at his proverbial knee. How to watch it: Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado is streaming on Netflix.Seemingly custom-made to scratch the summer action movie itch, The Old Guard is a globetrotting thriller with a compelling story at its core. It centers on a small group of people — Andy (Charlize Theron), Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), Joe (Marwan Kenzari), and Nicky (Luca Marinelli) — who form what seems to be a band of elite assassins and carry out highly secretive missions. But then the movie goes sideways, and that’s when it gets interesting. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood, working from a screenplay by Greg Rucka (based on his own comic book series), deftly handles shoot-em-up set pieces with a skill too rarely seen in action movies. And The Old Guard asks some existential questions that leave the audience wanting more. If Netflix is trying to develop an action franchise (and it seems as if it might be), The Old Guard is a promising start.How to watch it: The Old Guard is streaming on Netflix.When Palm Springs premiered at Sundance in January, it was impossible to realize we’d be trapped in its premise by the time it came out in July. Nyles (Andy Samberg) is at a wedding with his girlfriend, whom he doesn’t like very much. After a strange occurrence, he wakes up to realize that today is ... yesterday. And it happens again, and again, and again — an unendingly bleak repeat day until he meets fellow wedding guest Sarah (Cristin Milioti). The same-day-over-again concept seems ripped from Groundhog Day or Russian Doll, but Palm Springs takes it in a different direction, exploring the routes we try to take out of existential despair and the struggle of living through it all. Sound familiar? How to watch it: Palm Springs is streaming on Hulu and playing at select drive-in theaters.Relationships between mothers and daughters provide rich fodder for horror films. So does the fear of what you might inherit from your parents. Relic dives into those familiar waters with a creepy, taut story about Kay (Emily Mortimer) and her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote), who go to Kay’s mother’s house when they get a call that she’s missing. Edna (Robyn Nevin) eventually turns up, though it’s clear her dementia is beginning to advance. Edna starts to do things that can’t be easily explained by her dementia, and she’s not alone in her odd behavior; Edna’s house itself seems to be haunted by something that nobody can quite figure out, and relationships between the three women become ever more strained. Relic is a slow movie, and a quiet one; director Natalie Erika James is in no hurry to explain to us what’s happening. But that’s what makes it so effective, so chilling, and so unsettling in the end.How to watch it: Relic is playing in select theaters and drive-ins, and available to digitally rent or purchase on digital platforms including iTunes and Amazon. See the film’s website for details.Support Vox’s explanatory journalismEvery day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

James Comey, the former director of the FBI who has become a prime nemesis of Donald Trump, admitted on Sunday to being responsible for “real sloppiness” over the handling of surveillance of a Trump campaign adviser.He also fiercely defended himself and the bureau against any suggestion of political bias, prompting a new threat, of “years in jail”, from Trump.Comey, who was fired by Trump as America’s top law enforcement official in May 2017, came under intense questioning on Fox News Sunday, sparring with anchor Chris Wallace over the findings of the inspector general’s report into the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.Comey seized on one of Michael Horowitz’s main conclusions, that there was no evidence of political bias in the investigation, to launch an impassioned critique of how he and his FBI colleagues had been treated by Trump.“The FBI was accused of treason, of illegal spying, of tapping Mr Trump’s wires illegally, of opening an investigation without justification, of being a criminal conspiracy to unseat a president. All that was nonsense.”He also had pointed words for Fox News: “Remember, I was going to jail, lots of other people were going to jail. People on this network said it over and over again … The American people, especially your viewers, need to realise they were given false information about the FBI.”That Comey was given the opportunity by Fox News to welcome the absence of any bias finding in the report clearly riled Trump, who intervened with a characteristically breathless tweet. Paradoxically, the president accused Horowitz himself – an independent watchdog with no known political animus – of bias.Pointing out that the inspector general was appointed by Barack Obama, Trump claimed: “There was tremendous bias and guilt exposed, so obvious, but Horowitz couldn’t get himself to say it. Big credibility loss.”The president followed up by attacking Comey himself, in loose and intemperate terms. “So now Comey’s admitting he was wrong,” he tweeted. “Wow, but he’s only doing so because he got caught red handed. He was actually caught a long time ago. So what are the consequences for his unlawful conduct. Could it be years in jail? Where are the apologies to me and others, Jim?”Even before Trump’s intemperate intervention, Comey did not get an easy ride. Under persistent questioning by Wallace, he was forced to admit he presided over serious mistakes in the course of applying for permission to place former Trump adviser Carter Page under surveillance.The IG report gives details of 17 “significant errors and omissions” in the way four applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) court were made from October 2016, the first two on Comey’s watch.Asked to explain the contrast between the report’s criticism of serious problems in the Fisa process and his earlier defense of the FBI’s actions as “thoughtful and appropriate”, Comey replied that Horowitz “was right, I was wrong”.“I was overconfident in the procedures that the FBI had built over 20 years. I thought they were robust enough. It’s incredibly hard to get a Fisa and he was right there was real sloppiness. It was not acceptable.”Comey’s admittance of fallibility, albeit over procedural issues rather than the overriding accusation of bias, is likely to give Trump and his enablers in the Republican party the fuel they need to continue to attack the FBI as the heart of the supposed “deep state”. William Barr, the US attorney general, has already launched his own investigation of the Russia investigation.Trump has gone on the warpath on the back of the IG’s report, despite its central finding of lack of evidence of any conspiracy. At a rally this week in Hershey, Pennsylvania, the president falsely claimed the FBI had conducted multiple undercover operations spying on his campaign.“Look how they’ve hurt people,” he said. “They’ve destroyed the lives of people that were great people, that are still great people. Their lives have been destroyed by scum. OK, by scum.”Hours before the Fox News Sunday broadcast, Trump hurled further insults, calling Comey a “sleazebag”. The Texas senator Ted Cruz then added reinforcement, telling ABC’s This Week the IG report was “unbelievably damning of the Department of Justice and FBI. The abuse of power that occurred there is stunning.”Neither the president nor the senator pointed out that two of the four Fisa applications were brought to the court by Trump’s own administration.Page was an adviser on foreign affairs to the 2016 Trump campaign. Comey admitted Page had been “treated unfairly” in being subjected to wiretapping. The most egregious aspect, he said, had been Page’s name being made public. “He is a United States citizen and it never should have been made public – that was an outrage.”Horowitz pinpointed significant problems committed by three teams of FBI investigators. Two errors in particular stand out.The report highlights that the Fisa court was not told Page had contact with the CIA even after the FBI had become aware of that link, which would have severely diluted any suspicion of wrongdoing in his dealings with Russia. A justice department lawyer even altered an email to hide this crucial detail.The report also criticizes the FBI for critically relying on the highly contentious Steele dossier, an investigation conducted as opposition research against Trump that was paid for initially by Trump’s Republican opponents and then by Democrats.Horowitz found the Steele dossier had played a “central and essential” role in the Fisa application, despite having contained “misstated or exaggerated” intelligence.Comey told Fox News the Steele dossier had been just “one of a bunch of different facts that were assembled to apply to the court”. But he conceded it had “convinced the lawyers that they had enough to go forward” with a surveillance application. Topics James Comey FBI Trump-Russia investigation Donald Trump Trump administration US politics Fox News news

Former FBI Director James Comey admitted he was “wrong,” noting on Fox News Sunday that the recently released Justice Department inspector general’s report on the Russia probe launch did find “significant errors” in the FISA warrant applications related to a former Trump campaign aide. Following the release of IG Michael Horowitz’s report on Monday, Comey has been doing a bit of a victory lap, pointing to the inspector general finding there was no political bias and the FBI had sufficient evidence and predicant to launch the Russia probe. Horowitz, however, told Congress last week that his report didn’t “vindicate anybody” associated with the investigation.Fox News anchor Chris Wallace’s grilling of Comey comes as President Donald Trump took to Twitter to complain about Fox News agreeing to interview the former FBI chief in the first place. The Comey interview on Fox News Sunday was booked shortly after Comey claimed Fox & Friends had canceled on him after the release of the IG report.Highlighting Horowitz’s remarks during their interview on Sunday, Wallace confronted Comey on the inspector general saying he shouldn’t feel any vindication from the report.“Maybe it turns on how we understand the word,” the ex-FBI chief replied. “What I mean is the FBI was accused of treason, of illegal spying, tapping Mr. Trump’s wires illegally, opening an investigation without justification and being a criminal conspiracy to unseat—defeat and then unseat a president. All of that was nonsense.”Comey went on to acknowledge there was “real sloppiness” in the process, prompting Wallace to explain that the "sloppiness" Comey was admitting to was how the FBI handled the FISA application of former Trump campaign official Carter Page.“17 significant errors in the FISA process and you say that it was handled in a thoughtful and appropriate way?” Wallace pressed.“He’s right, I was wrong,” Comey answered. “I was overconfident as director in our procedures.” Wallace, meanwhile, continued to hold Comey’s feet to the fire, telling the ex-FBI head that he made it “sound like you’re a bystander, an eyewitness” during the launch of the investigation, adding: “You were the director of the FBI while a lot of this was going on, sir!”Comey would go on to again admit that Horowitz was right in his findings on the FISA process, stating that if he were still FBI director he would try to get to the bottom of this.The Fox News anchor also took Comey to task over previously downplaying the role the infamous Steele dossier played in the FISA applications and probe, noting that Horowitz found that the document was more than just a “broader mosaic,” as Comey had previously claimed.“I'm not sure he and I are saying different things,” Comey insisted, adding that “it’s a long FISA application that includes Steele material and lots of other material, I don’t think we are saying different things.”“You’re saying it is part of a broader mosaic of just one element,” Wallace countered. “He’s saying it was the tipping point, it’s what brought it over. That doesn’t make it part of a broader mosaic, it makes it the centerpiece of the whole FISA application and the ability to surveil Carter Page.” “I don’t understand him to be saying that, and I could be wrong with that,” Comey shrugged.

Former FBI Director James Comey on Sunday took responsibility for what the Justice Department's watchdog described as concerning and fundamental errors the FBI made in the course of its investigation into Russian attempts to influence President Donald Trump's campaign.But Comey also claimed the Justice Department inspector general's report had vindicated both himself and the agency he used to lead by saying no political bias had driven the launch of what turned into a years-long investigation of Russian efforts to connect with Trump's campaign and influence the 2016 election.Later Sunday, the president himself cast doubt on the Justice Department's watchdog, Michael Horowitz, saying he was appointed by President Barack Obama. He also suggested Comey could face jail time.In an interview with "Fox News Sunday," Comey said, "As director, you are responsible for this," referring to errors made in the course of the probe."I was responsible for this," Comey said. "And if I were still there I would be doing what Chris Wray is doing about this...figuring out, so how did this happen, and is it systemic?"Horowitz's report found that the FBI mishandled parts of its application to monitor Trump campaign aide Carter Page. Though the report said the overall investigation was justified and not launched for political reasons, Horowitz detailed 17 significant errors or omissions in the surveillance applications on Page.Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings."We are deeply concerned that so many basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate, hand-picked investigative teams on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations, after the matter had been briefed to the highest levels within the FBI," Horowitz said in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week.After Horowitz publicly concluded the investigation was properly launched, Attorney General William Barr and U.S. Attorney for Connecticut John Durham, a prosecutor Barr tapped to lead another review of the Russia probe, immediately criticized that finding.In Comey's interview with Fox, host Chris Wallace pointed to past remarks Comey made in which he said the FBI followed the process to obtain the surveillance warrants properly."He's right, I was wrong," Comey said. "I was overconfident in the procedures that the FBI and Justice had built over 20 years. I thought they were robust enough."Comey, though, pointed to the report's other findings, adding that Horowitz "doesn't conclude there was intentional misconduct." When asked about his recent assertion that Horowitz "vindicated" him —despite the watchdog's statement to Congress that no one was vindicated based on the report — Comey responded that "maybe it turns upon how we understand the word."'What I mean is that the FBI was accused of treason, of illegal spying, of tapping Mr. Trump's wires illegally, of opening an investigation without justification, of being a criminal conspiracy to defeat and unseat a president," Comey said. "All of that was nonsense. I think it's really important that the inspector general looked at that and the American people, your viewers and all viewers understand that's true.""But, he also found things we were never accused of, which is real sloppiness, and that's concerning — [and] as I said all along, has to be focused on," Comey said. "If I were director, I'd be very concerned about it and diving into it."Trump tweeted on the Horowitz report and Comey Sunday afternoon."As bad as the I.G. Report is for the FBI and others, and it is really bad, remember that I.G. Horowitz was appointed by Obama," Trump said. "There was tremendous bias and guilt exposed, so obvious, but Horowitz couldn’t get himself to say it. Big credibility loss. Obama knew everything!""So now Comey’s admitting he was wrong," Trump added in a second tweet. "Wow, but he’s only doing so because he got caught red handed. He was actually caught a long time ago. So what are the consequences for his unlawful conduct. Could it be years in jail? Where are the apologies to me and others, Jim?"House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., on Sunday pointed to the report's top-line takeaway that the investigation had been properly predicated."They were right to seek a FISA on Carter Page and there wasn't some deep state conspiracy," Schiff said on "Fox News Sunday." "There was no spying on the Trump campaign. There was no effort based on political bias to open the investigation, it was properly predicated. But there were nonetheless serious abuses of FISA which were not apparent two years ago but which have become apparent now with 170 witnesses interviewed and two million documents reviewed by the I.G."Schiff added he was "certainly willing to admit the inspector general found serious abuses of FISA that I was unaware of.""Had I been aware of them, yes, I would've called out the FBI at the same time," he continued. "But I think it's only fair to judge what we knew at the time, not what would be revealed two years later. But yes, there were very serious abuses of the FISA process, they need to be corrected, we need to make sure they never happen again."