As the United States withdraws from Afghanistan, it leaves behind broken and battered Afghan security forces to defend the country from the Taliban and other threats.
Until recently, Lieutenant Atash was in charge of several police outposts. One sold out to the Taliban. Another was overrun. At least 30 of his officers have abandoned their posts, he said.
QAnon adherents and other far-right influencers are making thousands of dollars broadcasting election and vaccine conspiracy theories on the streaming site.
Joan Donovan, a Harvard University researcher who studies disinformation and online extremism, said streamers who rely on their audience’s generosity to fund themselves felt pressured to continue raising the stakes.
“The incentive to lie, cheat, steal, hoax and scam is very high when the cash is easy to acquire,” she said.
With Venezuela in shambles, criminals and insurgents run large stretches of the nation’s territory. We traveled through one of the regions under their control.
“Venezuela is sleepwalking into fragmentation by armed groups,” said Andrei Serbin Pont, a Latin America security analyst. “Recovering control of the territory will be an enormous challenge to whoever is in power in Venezuela in the upcoming decades.”
The New York Post has complained that Facebook is blocking and downplaying its stories. But the platform doesn’t pay any special deference to journalists.
There’s something depressing about an internet in which you’re left choosing between Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Murdoch, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s director of strategy, Danny O’Brien, pointed out to me. It didn’t have to be that way.
We soon discovered a secret, hidden behind a smokescreen of fake companies and false identities. The people facilitating slander and the self-proclaimed good guys who help remove it are often one and the same.
The anti-Islam agitator Tommy Robinson struck gold in America. Keeping it might require help from Moscow, where other British far-right activists are also finding friends.
A former soccer hooligan and founder of the English Defence League, one of Britain’s most notorious nationalist groups, Mr. Robinson has largely been a pariah in his home country but Trump loyalists embraced him much the way they embraced many of the American extremist groups whose members would join the Capitol riot, including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.
In its rush to find informants to search for terrorists, the government had unwittingly created an incentive system. Many had committed crimes and agreed to work with the authorities in return for leniency; others were promised immigration assistance. (In November 2004, an informant who was afraid that his family would be targeted for his work with the F.B.I. set himself on fire in front of the White House.)
In a federal indictment unsealed on Friday, prosecutors said Carrillo and four members of the Grizzly Scouts, including its leader, “discussed tactics involving killing of police officers and other law enforcement.” The indictment also alleges that the same four Grizzly Scouts tried to thwart a criminal investigation into their activities by destroying evidence of their communications with Carrillo and each other.
As men continue to bicker over the future and control of Afghanistan, I have already lost my home and my country. I worked in Kabul as a television journalist for 12 years, and finally left in November after threats to my life.
Secret codes. Legal threats. Betrayal. How one couple built a device to fix McDonald’s notoriously broken soft-serve machines—and how the fast-food giant froze them out.
“No one at McDonald’s or Taylor will explain why there’s a secret, undisclosed menu,” O’Sullivan wrote in one of the first, cryptic text messages I received from him earlier this year.
In less than nine months, an assassin on a motorbike fatally shot an Al Qaeda commander given refuge in Tehran, Iran’s chief nuclear scientist was machine-gunned on a country road, and two separate, mysterious explosions rocked a key Iranian nuclear facility in the desert, striking the heart of the country’s efforts to enrich uranium.
Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes turned their Infowars-skewering podcast into a business. In the post-Trump era, they’re documenting Mr. Jones’s reckoning.
“We used to talk about his outbursts at the very beginning as being so fake, just like: ‘This is performative outrage. You’re yelling because you’re playing that character of Alex Jones, who’s supposed to be yelling,’” Mr. Holmes said. “And now whenever you listen to him freak out, you’re like: ‘This guy’s freaking out. This is somebody who is not in control.’”
A recent OAN segment said there were “serious doubts about who’s actually president,” and another blamed “anti-Trump extremists” for the Capitol attack.
He recalled seeing a photo of someone in the Capitol mob holding a flag emblazoned with the OAN logo. “I was like, OK, that’s not good,” Mr. Golingan said. “That’s what happens when people listen to us.”
Gates told reporters he had only just learned the “eye-opener” that the Taliban were attracting so many fighters because they paid more. Generals in Afghanistan said the Taliban were giving fighters $250 to $300 a month, while the Afghan Army was paying about $120. So Gates, employing the American way of throwing more money at a problem, got the recruits a raise to $240.
And this pathetic bidding war with the Taliban was eight years in.
This reminds me: I read that you and your mom have very different politics — she’s a Trump fan. How does she understand your political perspective? I honestly don’t know. There’s definitely some Fox News, OAN News talking points that get thrown around about Hollywood liberals. Here’s something funny that happened: I got an email from her husband, because we’re trying to find common ground. He sent me a video, and it was Michael Douglas talking about the corruption of our political process. He was like, “Is this something we can agree on?” And I’m like, “That video is from my group!” RepresentUs: Their singular mission is get big dirty money out of politics. They’re not a right- or left-wing group. It took him aback: He had sent me a video from my group. Then I tried to tell him: “I’m trying to explain to you: I don’t watch CNN. I don’t love Joe Biden. I’m not a fan of the D.N.C. I want money out of our politics. I want universal health care. I want fair wages.” They didn’t quite know what to make of that. I’m hoping that now that the orange turd is gone, things might settle down a little. But how would they describe my politics? They probably think I’m Karl Marx.
In 1974, John Patterson was abducted by the People’s Liberation Army of Mexico—a group no one had heard of before. The kidnappers wanted $500,000, and insisted that Patterson’s wife deliver the ransom.
“That young 31-year-old woman, she acted with no help, no one to hold her; her best friend was missing,” she said. “But she acted—I acted—completely honorably throughout that whole period. And I love her.”
Most — if not all — journalists likely share a commitment to a set of journalistic values, including a belief that those in power should be subject to oversight, that transparency is the right approach to important information, that facts are required to get to the truth, that the less powerful deserve a voice, and […]
Open mind: “I must confess that my first impulse was to resist these findings. After all, I’ve spent decades with the ideas described above as my lodestar, convinced that journalism serves the public good. And after all, investigative journalism is built on the idea of being society’s watchdog,” writes Margaret Sullivan, the Washington Post‘s media columnist, in a piece about the API research. “However, given that trust in the news media has fallen from about 70 percent in the early 1970s to about 40 percent now, according to Gallup — it seems worth viewing this report with an open mind.”
Wil was right. It was a body. It – he – had plummeted 3,500ft, half-frozen, hitting the ground at 3.38pm. He was the man who fell from the sky. The stowaway.
On Sunday, at the rally, Joanie Shafer, a local photographer, highlighting the connections between Floyd and Wright, pointed out that Wright had called his mother on the phone when the officers pulled him over, and that Floyd had called out to his deceased mother as he himself was dying. The implication was that interactions with the police had become so fraught that grown men were enlisting the aid of their mothers, on earth or in the hereafter.
Sometimes, programming feels like magic: you chant some arcane incantation and a fleet of robots do your bidding. But sometimes, magic is mundane. If you’re willing to embrace the grind, you can pull off the impossible.
I don’t disagree: being able to offload repetitive tasks to a program is one of the best things about knowing how to code. However, sometimes problems can’t be solved by automation. If you’re willing to embrace the grind you’ll look like a magician.
