The gallant panzer general gets his orders. (How can you argue with cool uniforms like these?) The game studiously avoids swastikas. In popular culture, the swastika has come to stand for the Gestapo, SS, and other “bad” Nazis, while the older iconography of the Iron Cross or eagle wings stands in for the “clean” Wehrmacht. But the real distinction is, as we’ve seen, less clear-cut than many would like it to be.
n the early hours one morning last January, Yacouba Ladji Bama, a forty-two-year-old investigative reporter, woke up at his home, in Ouagadougou, to the sound of shattering glass. He ran outside and found the rear windscreen of his black Hyundai sports car smashed in. Inside the car was a glass liquor bottle with a charred lip, still three quarters full of gas. On the back seat, surrounded by veins of melted upholstery, lay the detritus of Bama’s life: an umbrella, tissues, washing powder, batteries, a singed bundle of documents. Bama extinguished the flames, but the message was clear: someone wanted him to stop reporting.
The findings of a four-year military inquiry paint a brutal picture of a special forces culture of rewarding the killing of innocents and prisoners and methodically covering it up.
Commanders ordered junior soldiers to execute prisoners so they could record their first “kill,” then covered up their actions. Adolescents, farmers and other noncombatants were shot dead in circumstances clearly outside the heat of battle. Superior officers created such a godlike aura around themselves that troops dared not question them, even as 39 Afghans were unlawfully killed.
The judge’s 31-page opinion offers an intricate account of the bureaucratic turmoil that has left the mammoth agency and its quarter-million employees without Senate-confirmed leadership for 600 days and counting. His deadpan account of the ways in which the formal rules of succession were flipped and evaded by a changing cast of characters makes the department seem like a Feydeau farce. (In a footnote, Judge Garaufis observed dryly: “The court wishes the government well in trying to find its way out of this self-made thicket.”)
The ability to better visualize work would also enable smarter processes. If you notice that the influx of administrative demands from other parts of your company is overwhelming you and your co-workers, you’re now motivated to seek fixes. Such optimizations are unlikely to occur when the scope of the problem is hidden among in-box detritus, and when productivity is still understood as a matter of personal will.
Each morning, when the adults went to work for the regime, the children stayed home, warmed by coal. One day, a house nearby caught fire, with a boy inside. Kim watched the father race into the house and emerge with his most valuable possessions: a portrait of then-Supreme Leader Kim Il-Sung and another of his first wife, Kim Jong-Suk. The child never came out.
On the afternoon of February 22, 2019, a tall Asian man rang the doorbell of the North Korean Embassy in Madrid. His business card identified him as Matthew Chao, an investor from Baron Stone Capital, with offices in Toronto and Dubai. Once he was allowed in, nine men in their twenties and thirties, carrying pellet guns, knives, and metal bars, entered. They covered their faces with black balaclavas, tied up four staffers with zip ties and handcuffs, and herded them into a meeting room, before taking a senior Embassy official to the basement. His wife and his eight-year-old son were put in a room on the first floor.
The situation in Afghanistan is tenuous. In February, American and Taliban diplomats signed an agreement, by which the United States would withdraw all of its forces once security conditions in Afghanistan were stable. But Trump has been reducing the number of U.S. troops even though the conditions have not yet been met. American officials say that the President has been undercutting his own negotiators and emboldening the Taliban. “The trouble with the Taliban is, they are getting everything for free now,” an American official told me.
Bryan Pata was 22 when someone killed him in the parking lot of his apartment complex after football practice in 2006. Fourteen years later, a police investigation had gone dormant. Then an ESPN investigation revealed some theories — and a suspect.
“I was nowhere around no murder. … That’s not me,” he said. “I was a football player myself. I wouldn’t do that to nobody. … I never shot a person a day in my life.”
But the Trump administration had no such objections. Even before Trump took office, his chief immigration adviser Stephen Miller, the soon-to-be appointed U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and a handpicked group of immigration restrictionists and white nationalists were debating how to shut down asylum at the border, as recounted in the book “Border Wars” by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael Shear. In early March 2017, retired Gen. John Kelly, then-secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told CNN that he was considering separating families. “I would do almost anything to deter” Central Americans from “getting on this very dangerous network that brings them up through Mexico into the United States,” he explained. “We have tremendous experience in dealing with unaccompanied minors. … They will be well cared for as we deal with their parents.”
What the paper did have — in increasing numbers in fact — was a growing cohort of people who came to the paper with a different set of values. They were younger, which produced some of the division. A reporter who identified as “young Gen X” warned me about “toxic millennial workplace values,” while a millennial complained about the masthead’s tortured relationship to social media by arguing that “boomer is a mind-set.”
It was the same old tired Trump routine we’ve watched for four years, right through the pandemic failure: Beat your chest and bleat that you’re king of the world. Then do nothing except screw up.
Marc Polymeropoulos served in the CIA for nearly three decades working across the middle east until his career was cut short by a mysterious attack in Moscow.
When Donald Trump came out to speak just before 2:30 a.m. on Wednesday, votes were still being counted in enough states—notably Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—to make it impossible to say whether he or Joe Biden had won the Presidency. But, whichever of them does, what Trump said in his brief remarks was a reminder of why he does not deserve the office. Trump, standing in front of a phalanx of flags, claimed that the vote count had been “called off” because he won; that is not true on either count. He said that his lead in those swing states was insurmountable, which is also false, and that when “they”—he didn’t really identify “they,” except as “a very sad group of people”—realized that he was winning, they had swooped in to perpetrate “a fraud on the American public.” In saying this, he was lying to the American public. And when he told the country that there was a conspiracy afoot to “disenfranchise” people who voted for him—adding, “We won’t stand for it”—he seemed to be willfully prodding his supporters toward violence. Trump’s statement was squalid; if the country is lucky, it is just a last indignity before he is defeated. But, in those few minutes, he caused America’s troubles to multiply.
There have been many times, over the past four years, that covering Trump’s Washington felt like a foreign assignment to me, never more so than while driving around the capital these past few days and seeing boarded-up storefronts and streets cordoned off for blocks around the White House, in anticipation of unprecedented post-election violence. I have seen such scenes before, in places like Azerbaijan and Russia. This is Trump’s America. It is not the America I have known.
William O’Brien was a well-heeled doctor with a thriving Philadelphia medical practice. He was also at the center of a massive painkiller supply chain run by an outlaw biker gang.
Anna Marie thought the police should have paid more attention to a strange incident that occurred the day before. She had been upstairs cleaning when she heard yelling across the street. Through her window, she could see two men outside Anthony’s house. One was long-necked and wiry, with a hairline in deep retreat and small, coal-like eyes. He held a metal pipe. The other was bald, bearded and burly. She yelled down, threatening to call the police. The wiry man walked into the street and looked up at her. “Do you know who I am?” he said. Anna Marie had never laid eyes on him. Before the exchange went much further, the men got into a car and drove away.
An hour after the rally, I could not stop thinking about the most remarkable moment from it: Trump accusing U.S. doctors of artificially inflating the number of covid deaths in order to somehow collect money. “You know, our doctors get more money if somebody dies from covid,” he claimed. “You know that, right?” He even joked about it, imagining himself, I guess, as a doctor pulling off this scam: “With us, ‘when in doubt, choose covid.’ . . . You get, like, two thousand dollars more. It’s true.” I cannot think of a better illustration of Trump’s cynical world view: everything is a scam, corrupt, not on the level. “It’s true,” he said, over and over—which, of course, was one of many tells that it was not.
Trump and his allies had set a publicly disparaging tone against health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert. On April 18th—a particularly dire moment in the pandemic—the President’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, had bragged to Bob Woodward, “Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors.” In Colorado, nearly seventy per cent of local public-health officials reported receiving threats, and some resigned. In Washington State, one county official had to install a security system after making a simple phone call to remind a quarantining family to stay home: “Accusations started flying that we were spying, that we had put them under house arrest,” the official told NPR. In Nebraska, a former TV meteorologist and mayoral spokesman anonymously sent Adi Pour, head of the Douglas County health department, at least fifteen threatening e-mails, including one that read, “There was a lynching outside the Douglas County Courthouse a century and one year ago. You’re next, bitch”; in another, he wrote, “Maybe I will just slit your throat instead. That will get you to shut the fuck up.” (The meteorologist, Ronald Penzkowski, pleaded no contest to third-degree assault and stalking.) Fauci, after receiving death threats, was assigned a federal security detail.
Heshy Tishler, a radio host and City Council candidate, has emerged as the leader of a neighborhood’s uprising against government coronavirus measures.
In Borough Park, Tischler has become the leader of this movement. He has posted hundreds of videos on social media, in which you’ll find him using bolt cutters to break into a locked playground or harassing local health inspectors. In each video, he also plugs his weekly radio program, “The Just Enough Heshy Show,” where he reflects on topics such as whether he should apologize for calling a young Muslim girl a terrorist (initially yes; later no), and the intellectual capacity of women (“not as smart as men”). The other day, on the air, he challenged the Mayor to a fight on his deck, “man to man, because I think he’s not a man.”
