American officials in China, Cuba and Russia say U.S. agencies are concealing the true extent of the episodes, leaving colleagues vulnerable to hostile actions abroad.
One of the biggest questions centers on whether Trump administration officials believe that Mr. Lenzi and other diplomats in China experienced the same mysterious affliction as dozens of diplomats and spies at the American Embassy in Cuba in 2016 and 2017, which came to be known as Havana Syndrome. American employees in the two countries reported hearing strange sounds, followed by headaches, dizziness, blurred vision and memory loss.
The New York Post’s front-page article about Hunter Biden on Wednesday was written mostly by a staff reporter who refused to put his name on it, two Post employees said.
Maine Business Daily is part of a fast-growing network of nearly 1,300 websites that aim to fill a void left by vanishing local newspapers across the country. Yet the network, now in all 50 states, is built not on traditional journalism but on propaganda ordered up by dozens of conservative think tanks, political operatives, corporate executives and public-relations professionals, a Times investigation found.
In Pittsburgh, Marlinspike uncovered an Internet vulnerability that affected nearly every popular browser. It enabled malicious actors to mount what is called a “man-in-the-middle attack”—a type of exploit in which the attacker can view and potentially alter communications between two parties and siphon data, such as log-in credentials, without detection. In 2009, Marlinspike presented the vulnerability at Black Hat D.C., an annual security conference in Washington. He took the opportunity to politely criticize the keynote speaker, Paul Kurtz, a homeland-security expert who had served under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and who had spoken about the need for the U.S. to take “leadership in cyberspace,” arguing for collaboration among the N.S.A., law enforcement, and private industry. “You know,” Marlinspike said during his presentation, “ten years ago, I feel like we would have been talking about protecting our communications from the state and the cops—not centralizing them in the hands of the state and the cops.” He paused. “So I think a lot has changed.” At the end of his talk, he released a new tool, SSLstrip, that automatically mounted man-in-the-middle attacks using the vulnerability he had discovered. SSLstrip elevated Marlinspike to expert status. These days, according to Dan Boneh, a cryptographer and a professor at Stanford, the practice of exposing vulnerabilities so that they can be fixed by other engineers, as SSLstrip has done, is “the bread and butter of computer security.” Boneh, who teaches SSLstrip to his undergraduate students, told me, “It changed how browsers work. His attack caused the Web to change.”
Because you think rationally. There are a million ways to isolate someone or kill them, but this is like some trashy thriller. I find myself living inside of a James Bond movie. If you told me that they planned to kill me using Novichok and administer it in such a way that I would die on an airplane, I would say that’s a crazy plan, because there are so many ways for it to fail. It’s like if someone asked me if I believe that I’m at risk for being beheaded with a lightsabre. I’d say no, even if I saw that someone I know is missing an arm and it looks to have been lasered off.
How the world’s greatest public health organization was brought to its knees by a virus, the president and the capitulation of its own leaders, causing damage that could last much longer than the coronavirus.
When the next history of the CDC is written, 2020 will emerge as perhaps the darkest chapter in its 74 years, rivaled only by its involvement in the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which federal doctors withheld medicine from poor Black men with syphilis, then tracked their descent into blindness, insanity and death.
Mr. Trump’s ruinous tenure already has gravely damaged the United States at home and around the world. He has abused the power of his office and denied the legitimacy of his political opponents, shattering the norms that have bound the nation together for generations. He has subsumed the public interest to the profitability of his business and political interests. He has shown a breathtaking disregard for the lives and liberties of Americans. He is a man unworthy of the office he holds.
Kevin Mathewson, who quickly organized the Kenosha Guard on Facebook, said the Wisconsin city’s police were outnumbered during protests. The streets turned deadly after his call to arms.
Tapping on his cellphone with a sense of purpose, Kevin Mathewson, a former wedding photographer and onetime city alderman in Kenosha, Wis., did not slow down to fix his typos as he dashed off an online appeal to his neighbors. It was time, he wrote on Facebook in late August, to “take up arms to defend out City tonight from the evil thugs.”
With less than three weeks left in the campaign, there was no sign that either candidate was diverging from the political tracks they laid down months ago.
President Trump spoke positively about an extremist conspiracy-theory group, expressed skepticism about mask-wearing, rebuked his own F.B.I. director and attacked the legitimacy of the 2020 election in a televised town hall forum on Thursday, veering far away from a focused campaign appeal. Instead, he further stoked the country’s political rifts as his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., pushed a deliberate message anchored in concerns over public health and promises to restore political norms.
Matthew Feldman, a professor at the University of York who studies right-wing extremism, said that November 3rd has all the hallmarks of being a potential “trigger moment.” He told me that polarization is growing on both sides, but he, too, believes that the far right represents a more lethal threat. “At the fringes on the right, a narrative is building that the left is stealing the election,” he said, warning that extremists may decide that “their way of life” will disappear “if they don’t take action.” But, he added, would-be attackers often await a signal from leaders that violence is acceptable. “Scholars have long talked about a kind of license that comes from the top,” Feldman told me. “One of the surest signs of these trigger events is an increasingly apocalyptic tone. And, of course, the biggest culprit has been Donald Trump.”
Barton Gellman is a staff writer for The Atlantic and was previously a Pulitzer-winning reporter at The Washington Post. His latest book is Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State and his latest essay is “The Election That
“I have found that I have a talent for accidentally pissing people off. … I’m interested most in accountability and the use and abuse of power. So naturally it’s going to annoy people sometimes. And sometimes they take it like grown-ups and sometimes less so.”
Burkina Faso once looked like a success story for U.S. military aid. But now it’s contending with a growing insurgency, an unfolding humanitarian crisis — and a security force targeting civilians.
Earlier this year, the U.S. State Department issued a report implicating Kaboré’s government in a litany of human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, torture, arbitrary detentions and “crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting members of national, racial and ethnic minorities.” Human Rights Watch documented more than 60 killings of civilians by armed Islamists between late 2017 and February 2019, but it uncovered more than double that number — 130 extrajudicial killings — by the Burkinabe security forces over that same period. Those executions and other abuses by government troops occurred in at least 19 separate incidents. This summer, Human Rights Watch reported that residents of the northern town Djibo frequently discovered corpses, around 180 in all, dumped along roadways, under bridges and in vacant lots, between November 2019 and June 2020. Locals said a majority were Fulani and that many were found bound, blindfolded and shot. There were no witnesses to the killings, but the locals who found the victims — sometimes relatives or acquaintances — overwhelmingly blamed government forces. “I have absolutely no doubt that atrocities, including extrajudicial executions by the dozens, have been perpetrated by members of the Burkinabe defense and security forces,” Human Rights Watch’s West Africa director, Corinne Dufka, said.
In retrospect, it seems that the company’s strategy has never been to manage the problem of dangerous content, but rather to manage the public’s perception of the problem. In Clegg’s recent blog post, he wrote that Facebook takes a “zero tolerance approach” to hate speech, but that, “with so much content posted every day, rooting out the hate is like looking for a needle in a haystack.” This metaphor casts Zuckerberg as a hapless victim of fate: day after day, through no fault of his own, his haystack ends up mysteriously full of needles. A more honest metaphor would posit a powerful set of magnets at the center of the haystack—Facebook’s algorithms, which attract and elevate whatever content is most highly charged. If there are needles anywhere nearby—and, on the Internet, there always are—the magnets will pull them in. Remove as many as you want today; more will reappear tomorrow. This is how the system is designed to work.
A top editor is now reviewing Rukmini Callimachi’s reporting on terrorism, which turned distant conflicts into accessible stories but drew criticism from colleagues.
That assumption appeared to blow up a couple of weeks ago, on Sept. 25, when the Canadian police announced that they had arrested the man who called himself Abu Huzayfah, whose real name is Shehroze Chaudhry, under the country’s hoax law. The details of the Canadian investigation aren’t yet public. But the recriminations were swift among those who worked with Ms. Callimachi at The Times in the Middle East.
A businessman-president transplanted favor-seeking in Washington to his family’s hotels and resorts — and earned millions as a gatekeeper to his own administration.
As president-elect, he had pledged to step back from the Trump Organization and recuse himself from his private company’s operation. As president, he built a system of direct presidential influence-peddling unrivaled in modern American politics.
Statistically, the coronavirus is more likely to cost Donald Trump the White House than his life, though the threat to the latter isn’t helping the former. A little more than three weeks before the election, potentially contagious and freaking everybody out, Trump faces what looks like the end of his presidency. “He’s mishandled the coronavirus, he’s never been popular, and he’s gonna lose badly. I think it’s pretty simple,” a senior Republican official said. “Of course he was going to say, ‘Oh look, I feel great! Look how badly I beat this puny little virus!’ Meanwhile, it touches every American’s life every day in multiple different ways, and he’s handled it badly and people don’t forget that.” Or, as ex–Trump adviser Sam Nunberg put it, “Everything has just completely gone to shit.”
Over $21 million in highly unusual payments from the Las Vegas hotel Donald Trump owns with Phil Ruffin were routed through other Trump companies, then directed to Mr. Trump.
The new findings, part of The Times’s continuing investigation, cast light on Mr. Trump’s financial maneuverings in that time of fiscal turmoil and unlikely political victory. Indeed, they may offer a hint to one of the enduring mysteries of his campaign: In its waning days, as his own giving had slowed to a trickle, Mr. Trump contributed $10 million, leaving many people wondering where the burst of cash had come from.
Deerskin: Directed by Quentin Dupieux. With Jean Dujardin, Adèle Haenel, Albert Delpy, Coralie Russier. A man’s obsession with his designer deerskin jacket causes him to blow his life savings and turn to crime.
How the seizure of Europe’s largest heroin shipment created bloody fallout throughout the world—and sparked still-raging political corruption scandals in Turkey, Greece, and the Middle East
The Kurds had spent years preparing for the heroin’s arrival. They had negotiated to pay more than $20 million for the Plaza Resort on the Attic Riviera, planning to use the tourist destination as a money-laundering site for proceeds from its sale. They had leased a warehouse and an industrial chicken coop in the olive groves near Athens International Airport; here, the Noor One’s heroin would be diluted with more than five tons of marble dust from a quarry on nearby Mount Pentelikon. To transport the shipment, they had purchased a forklift and several hundred canvas bags stamped “Pakistan White Sugar.” In early May, an associate from Belgium had arrived in a cargo truck outfitted with secret compartments. The truck was supposed to move most of the heroin to a port in northwest Greece, then across the Adriatic by ferry to Italy. From there, it would be distributed to the street corners of Belgium and the Netherlands, kicking back hundreds of millions of euros to its owners.
Nicholson Baker is the author of 18 books of fiction and nonfiction. He has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, and many other publications. His latest book is Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act. “In the
