“Get hold of yourselves,” a shaken Patrick Gallagher—then the director of the college-counseling office—wrote to the 12th-grade parents in a December email. You could tell what these people must have been up to by the new policies that Gallagher outlined. They included: not placing calls from blocked numbers or sending anonymous letters; not meeting with counselors to spread gossip about other students; not secretly recording counselors’ conversations.
Insiders say that the Manhattan District Attorney’s investigation has dramatically intensified since the former President left office. “It’s like night and day,” says one. According to another, “They mean business.”
Vance’s investigation, which appears to be focussed largely on business practices that Trump engaged in before taking office, may seem picayune in comparison with the outrageous offenses to democratic norms that Trump committed as President. But the New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, whose recent book “Strongmen” examines the characteristics of antidemocratic rulers, told me, “If you don’t prosecute Trump, it sends the message that all that he did was acceptable.” She pointed out that strongmen typically “inhabit a gray zone between illegal and legal for years”; corrupt acts of political power are just an extension of their shady business practices. “Trumpism isn’t just about him,” Ben-Ghiat went on. “It’s a whole way of being in the world. It’s about secrecy, domination, trickery, and fraud.” She said, of Vance’s probe, “It’s symbolic for the public, and very important to give the public a sense of accountability.”
She turned around and recognized with horror the man who had kidnapped her one year earlier. Ruth ran for her car, but before she could unlock the door the man came up from behind and grabbed her wrist, then shoved her head against the window. “Get in,” he ordered, saying he wanted to take her to a bridge near August Airport Road. He threw a brown paper shopping bag through the partially open rear window onto the back seat. The bag held clothesline rope, white tape, a red bandana, and a half empty bottle of wine. “We’ll go to a nice little place where it says ‘Keep Out,’” he said.
Beaudette had been shot through the head. The autopsy report, which was released nearly a year later, showed that a copper-jacketed lead bullet had entered just below his hairline and penetrated his brain. It was a homicide, but an utterly baffling one. The weapon’s make and model were unknown. There were no eyewitnesses, no suspects, and no motive. Rumors flew around Malibu. Had his vaccine work made him a target of “Big Pharma” or “the government”? Was the perpetrator a disgruntled former park worker? Someone associated with an illegal marijuana grow? None of it made sense; it felt both terrifyingly random and shockingly precise. Beaudette had been killed while he slept beside his children, and no one knew why.
After some early resistance from the company, Twitter accounts critical of the Modi government have disappeared in the hundreds without explanation; government officials engaging in bald incitement and overt hate speech on Twitter and Facebook have been permitted to continue in clear violation of the companies’ policies; and Delhi police boast that they are getting plenty of helpful cooperation from Google as they dig through the private communications of peaceful climate activists like Ravi.
Long hailed for his bravery during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Paul Rusesabagina is now charged with being an insurgent leader. Did Rwanda change, or did he?
As Rusesabagina stepped onto the tarmac, a half dozen armed men emerged from the predawn darkness. Identifying themselves as agents of the Rwanda Investigation Bureau — the country’s equivalent of the F.B.I. — they handcuffed him and hustled him into a waiting vehicle. It was only then that Rusesabagina realized that he had fallen into a trap. The plane hadn’t landed in Burundi. Their real destination was declared by a sign on the terminal: KIGALI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT.
When I asked Milley about what Trump had said, his reply was clear. “As the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, if there was an order for ten thousand National Guardsmen, I would like to believe I would know that,” he said. “I know that was never transmitted to me by anyone—the President, the Secretary of Defense, or anyone else—for the 6th of January.”
Since 2015, the Crown Prince has also got the country bogged down in a costly and unwinnable war in Yemen, which has spawned the world’s largest humanitarian disaster. And now he has disrupted the kingdom’s relationship with the United States, its most important ally. The Biden Administration has notified the kingdom that it will no longer provide offensive military equipment to pursue the war in Yemen, although it has vowed to continue selling weapons to defend the kingdom. This weekend, after the Saudi military intercepted a missile attack near the capital and bomb-laden drones in the south, both launched by Houthi rebels in Yemen, the State Department reaffirmed its “longstanding partnership” to protect the kingdom. Yet experts say that Saudi Arabia needs the United States far more than Washington needs Riyadh. “We have total and absolute leverage over the Saudi military,” Riedel said.
In denying him bail, Judge Sally J. Berens quoted from transcripts of conversations taped by an informant in which he threatened to hurt people or to blow things up. “I am going to do some of the most nasty, disgusting things that you have ever read about in the history of your life,” the judge quoted him as saying.
In my meeting with Ghani, he seemed abandoned, like a pilot pulling levers that weren’t connected to anything. He professed gratitude to the United States, but was clearly uneasy with the deal. Recently, he said, he had ordered the release of five thousand Taliban prisoners—“not because I wanted to, because the U.S. pushed me.” He feared a security disaster, as Taliban fighters returned to the streets and American soldiers left the country. “The U.S. can withdraw its troops anytime it wants, but they ought to negotiate with the elected President,” he went on. “They should call me. I’m the elected President.”
On social media, on cable networks and even in the halls of Congress, supporters of Donald J. Trump tried to rewrite history in real time, pushing the fiction that left-wing agitators were to blame for the violence on Jan. 6.
Nearly two months after the attack, the claim that antifa was involved has been repeatedly debunked by federal authorities, but it has hardened into gospel among hard-line Trump supporters, by voters and sanctified by elected officials in the party. More than half of Trump voters in a Suffolk University/USA Today poll said that the riot was “mostly an antifa-inspired attack.” At Senate hearings last week focused on the security breakdown at the Capitol, Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, repeated the falsehood that “fake Trump protesters” fomented the violence.
But the race for the most salacious shot was never an equal-opportunity game. It was not young men who appeared in photos with their bra straps showing and their makeup smeared, or had their breasts enlarged in postproduction without their knowledge, as was the case for Ms. Spears on a 2000 cover of British GQ, according to the photographer, who recently posted about it on Instagram. While white women were scrutinized on the covers of magazines, Black artists were told, as Beyoncé was, that they’d never get covers at all — “because Black people did not sell.”
A video, aired by Al Jazeera English, shows that the attorney general intercepted legal materials from Paul Rusesabagina, who was portrayed in the movie “Hotel Rwanda” and is accused of terrorism.
But in an hour-and-half-long preparation video that his public relations team accidentally sent to the media outlet, Mr. Busingye contradicted himself, saying that the prison authorities had intercepted correspondence between Mr. Rusesabagina and his lawyers and children, some of which included escape plans.
A lighthearted suggestion by a U.S. envoy hoping to bridge a vast rift between Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo has taken on a life of its own — only to be ridiculed by local residents on both sides.
A student said she was racially profiled while eating in a college dorm. An investigation found no evidence of bias. But the incident will not fade away.
The janitor who called campus security quietly returned to work after three months of paid leave and declined to be interviewed. The other janitor, Mr. Patenaude, who was not working at the time of the incident, left his job at Smith not long after Ms. Kanoute posted his photograph on social media, accusing him of “racist cowardly acts.”
But the one that blows my mind is “probiv.” It’s drawn from the word that means “to pierce” — or to enter something into a search bar. Today, it refers to the practice by which anyone can buy, for a couple of dollars on the social media app Telegram or hundreds on a dark web marketplace, the call records, cellphone geolocation or air travel records of anyone in Russia you want to track. Probiv is purchased by jealous spouses or curious business partners, and criminals of various sorts. But it has also been used recently, and explosively, by journalists and political activists, overlapping categories in Russia, where the chief opposition leader, Aleksei A. Navalny, often makes use of the tools of investigative journalism.
All of these factors led to Ultima VIII shipping in a state that almost defies critical description; seldom has a game so blatantly unfinished been allowed onto store shelves. The writing is so sparse and unrefined that it often seems like placeholder text, and yet still manages to leave threads dangling and plot holes yawning everywhere; the cloth map that is included in the box bears almost no relation to the world in the game itself, what with so much of the latter having gone missing in action; what’s left of the CRPG mechanics are so broken that it’s possible to max out your character in less than an hour of play; every place in the game looks the same, being all too clearly built from the same handful of pre-rendered graphics (giant mushrooms everywhere for the win!); every single chest in the game explodes, even if it doesn’t contain anything, as if the developers didn’t have time to address each one individually and so just set a global flag somewhere; your unresponsive lunk of a character drowns instantly if he falls into two feet of water. Tellingly, the one part of Ultima VII that is painstakingly preserved in Ultima VIII is its most annoying: an impossible inventory-management system that forces you to spend minutes at a time dragging around tiny overlapping icons just to find anything.
This from a man who had been detained at an airport with a prescription, not in his name, for Viagra, a sexual aid typically paid for by health insurance, and who trumpeted the importance of traditional family values before he died childless and on his fourth marriage to a much younger woman.
The HBO documentary follows three nobodies who are trying to become social-media famous—a pursuit that involves buying followers, unboxing products, and staging photo shoots in a plastic kiddie pool.
There is a kind of D.I.Y. creativity about all of this, a spirit of making do, which allows the plucky influencer some agency. “Remember, you’re the Lulu girl!” Dominique’s mom reminds her daughter, early on in the film, when Dominique expresses doubts about her ability to make nice at her retail job—and, in her attempts to become an influencer, Dominique’s fealty to Lululemon is exchanged for a commitment to the new version of herself that she has decided to sell online. Dominique wants to brand her own self rather than work for someone else’s, and on the face of it, one might wonder what could be wrong with this strategy, in which, instead of allowing a corporation to harvest the surplus value of an employee’s personality, the employee is able to harvest it for herself. (Slay, kween!) Depressingly, though, as Dominique’s popularity grows—she even starts getting more auditions and acting gigs, thanks to her burgeoning Instagram profile—her success seems to depend not on any surplus of personality but, rather, on a lack thereof. She develops an audience by posting videos of herself unboxing products that she has been sent for free by other brands: a blender, energy bars, slippers, a CBD vibrator. Dominique “is like a piece of Play-Doh,” Chris says to Bilton. Like the pink wall on Melrose, she is eye-catching, but still blank enough.
