Polished, soft-spoken, and a self-styled moderate, Jared Kushner has become his father-in-law’s most dangerous enabler.
via The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/08/how-jared-kushner-became-trumps-most-dangerous-enabler/615169/
Polished, soft-spoken, and a self-styled moderate, Jared Kushner has become his father-in-law’s most dangerous enabler.
Police monitored a hundred million encrypted messages sent through Encrochat, a network used by career criminals to discuss drug deals, murders, and extortion plots.
Link: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3aza95/how-police-took-over-encrochat-hacked
Unbeknownst to Mark, or the tens of thousands of other alleged Encrochat users, their messages weren’t really secure. French authorities had penetrated the Encrochat network, leveraged that access to install a technical tool in what appears to be a mass hacking operation, and had been quietly reading the users’ communications for months. Investigators then shared those messages with agencies around Europe.
“What people need to know is we’re not protesting churches. We’re protesting this church.”
via BuzzFeed News: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/viral-video-seemed-to-show-blm-storming-a-church-the-real
The day of the video, the church was hosting its second AR-15 “raffle” in two days: In the middle of a neighborhood stricken with gun violence, the church was giving away one of the deadliest guns on the market. The Black Lives Matter protesters were invited inside by the church’s pastor, John Koletas, a self-proclaimed “bigot” who has preached against interracial marriage, defends the use of the n-word, and believes that Black people, as descendants of Ham and Canaan, are cursed by God. He thinks Black History Month is “communism and Marxism month.” He calls Black Lives Matter protesters “savages.” He places a pork product — a ham or hot dogs — at the door, and requires all church attendees to touch it, supposedly to ward off would-be jihadists. He abhors feminists and gay people. He hates Catholics and thinks Muslims shouldn’t be allowed in the country. He mocks sexual abuse victims and the #MeToo movement. And videos of Koletas preaching these beliefs are readily available on the church’s Facebook and YouTube pages.
The brutality of the state’s response not only failed to scare people into staying home but united them against Alexander Lukashenka’s regime.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/we-were-locked-up-in-one-country-and-released-into-another-horror-and-hope-as-protests-in-belarus-continue
The following day was marked by absences. There was no food or water, and no formal charges or grounds for arrest presented to the inmates. More than twenty-four hours after they were detained, the women were taken out of their cell and told to sign a document that purported to describe the circumstances under which they were detained. “We heard people saying, ‘I was at a polling place,’ or ‘I was walking the dog,’ or ‘I was with my kids,’ and immediately the sound of blows, and you could hear that they are using their batons and, from their comments, that they are trying to impress each other with how hard they are hitting.” Svetlana couldn’t read what she was being asked to sign, because an officer covered the top part of the sheet with her hand. “I could see that the address and time of arrest were false,” she said. “So I wrote, ‘I do not certify.’ The woman officer started twisting my arms behind my back and made me kneel. She had some trouble getting me down to the floor, so she put me in a choke hold. I said, ‘You are going to strangle me now and will have to live with it on your conscience,’ and she loosened her grip. She then forced me to stand facing the wall, legs spread super-far apart. Then I was put back in a cell.”
As rural Wisconsin’s fortunes have declined, its political importance has grown.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/17/how-suffering-farmers-may-determine-trumps-fate
State agencies issued protocols for dumping milk, which can pollute groundwater and decimate fish populations. Though Volenec has not had to dump any of his milk, he’s been worrying about the environmental costs of large-scale dairy farming, from water contamination to climate change. Manure runoff from industrial dairy farming has contributed to a dramatic increase in bacteria and nitrates in the state’s groundwater, according to a study funded in part by Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources. (A farm with twenty-five hundred cows produces as much waste as a city of four hundred thousand people.) The E.P.A. recently sampled the groundwater in a thirty-mile area of Juneau County that’s dense with dairy cows and found that sixty-five per cent of the sites had elevated levels of nitrates, which have been linked to birth defects, colon cancer, and “blue-baby syndrome,” a condition that reduces oxygen in an infant’s blood and can be fatal.
Baltimore almost had a revolution. On an April morning in 2015, Baltimore Police officers tackled a young black man named Freddie Gray and pulled him screaming into a van where his spine was brok…
via CrimeReads: https://crimereads.com/a-heist-on-time-and-a-half-inside-the-most-corrupt-police-squad-in-the-nation/
Ward opened the bag and heaved it, chunking stacks into the woods, the bundles of bills hitting the tangled brush, others landing in the dirt. He went inside, knowing, even if the money was gone, this was not over.
If Republicans succeed in their long-sought goal of privatizing the Postal Service, they will suck out what life remains in many of the communities they theoretically represent.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trumps-attack-on-the-postal-service-is-a-threat-to-democracy-and-to-rural-america
I’ve lived most of my life in small towns in pretty remote rural areas. Some were in red regions, some were purplish-blue—but every last one of them centered on the local post office. I remember years of picking up the mail from a little window in the postmaster’s living room. (If you called her the postmistress, she would tartly reply, “Uncle Sam can’t afford mistresses.”) Eventually, she needed her parlor back, to have room to work on her genealogy projects, so the community built a small freestanding building. Where I live now, the local post office takes up a third of the space in the only business in our town, a country store complete with potbellied stove and rocking chairs. It’s probably why we still have a store: if you’re there to pick up mail, you might as well get some eggs, too.
Kaufman became famous writing self-conscious films in a self-conscious time. In his début novel, he reminds us of the triumphs—and blind spots—of a generation.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/can-charlie-kaufman-get-out-of-his-head
Kaufman became famous writing self-conscious films in a self-conscious time. In his début novel, he reminds us of the triumphs—and blind spots—of a generation.
Indian authorities had to manage 250 million festivalgoers. So they built a high-tech surveillance ministate.
via Rest of World: https://restofworld.org/2020/india-magh-mela/
Indian authorities had to manage 250 million festivalgoers. So they built a high-tech surveillance ministate.
Alexander Lukashenka is claiming his sixth term, and his strongest opponent has fled the country.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/after-a-rigged-election-belarus-crushes-protests-amid-an-information-blackout
The streets of Minsk and other Belarusian cities have been battlegrounds since Sunday evening, when authorities announced that eighty per cent of voters had chosen to reëlect Alexander Lukashenka, who has been President for twenty-six years. His electoral opponent, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, has fled the country. At least three thousand people have been arrested, one protester has died, and an unknown number have been injured.
Restoring the rule of law is not the same as “lock her up.”
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/opinion/trump-corruption.html?ref=oembed
Last week, NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked Joe Biden whether, if elected, he could envision Donald Trump being prosecuted. Biden replied that the prosecution of a former president would be a “very, very unusual thing” and probably “not very good for democracy.” The former vice president said he would not stand in the way if the Justice Department wanted to bring a case, but when Garcia-Navarro pressed him, he suggested she was trying to bait him into a version of Trump’s threat against his 2016 opponent: “Lock her up.”
Geolocation is not just useful for investigations involving current events. The same techniques that we use to geolocate images in modern day cases of human rights violations and child sexual abuse can be used to determine the location of images captured
via bellingcat: https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2020/08/12/historic-bombing-runs-the-memphis-belle-case/
Geolocation is not just useful for investigations involving current events. The same techniques that we use to geolocate images in modern day cases of human rights violations and child sexual abuse can be used to determine the location of images captured long ago. Historians and film buffs, for example, can use geolocation to find out more details and discover new facts about past events.
The coronavirus has illuminated the stark divides in a global game—and spurred new efforts to bridge them.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/the-fractured-world-of-tennis-amid-a-prolonged-pandemic
The coronavirus has illuminated the stark divides in a global game—and spurred new efforts to bridge them.
Apple Daily, a pro-democracy paper known for celebrity gossip and hard-hitting investigations, has become a target in Beijing’s new national security law in Hong Kong.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/12/world/asia/hong-kong-apple-daily-jimmy-lai.html?ref=oembed
Apple Daily, a pro-democracy paper known for celebrity gossip and hard-hitting investigations, has become a target in Beijing’s new national security law in Hong Kong.
Corruption, as much as violence, makes Iraq unlivable. It helped fuel the rise of ISIS. And America provides the cash to sustain it, at least $10 billion a year in hard currency.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/magazine/iraq-corruption.html?ref=oembed
Early last October, while working in his office in Baghdad, a businessman named Hussein Laqees got a phone call from a number he’d never seen before. “We need to talk,” the caller said. The man’s voice was gruff and self-assured, a little menacing. He demanded that Laqees come meet him but refused to give his name.
The arrest of the tycoon and democracy activist Jimmy Lai has reinvigorated defiance rather than demoralize his supporters.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/chinas-arrest-of-a-free-speech-icon-backfires-in-hong-kong
Last September, when I was in Hong Kong reporting on the anti-government protests engulfing the city, I spent an afternoon in the industrial-looking headquarters of Apple Daily, a popular tabloid owned by perhaps the city’s most unusual tycoon, an outspoken democracy activist and one of the Communist Party’s leading critics. To meet Jimmy Lai, I walked through the publication’s vast open-plan office, where hundreds of staff members busily put out the day’s news. “When I went into the publishing business, twenty-five years ago, it was a no-brainer,” Lai told me in his office, which resembled the appearance of its owner: determinedly functional and, unusually for Hong Kong, absent of status markers. “Information is freedom, and I wanted to be in the business of delivering freedom.” Lai admitted that back then he hardly thought this was a risky proposition. “I believed that all of China was going forward, that it was inevitable China would adapt to openness.”
Yevgeny Prigozhin can be described as the Renaissance man of deniable Russian black ops. An ex convict who served time for robbery, fraud and involving a minor in drinking and criminal activity, he began his legitimate business career in the 90s as a St.
via bellingcat: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2020/08/14/pmc-structure-exposed/
Yevgeny Prigozhin can be described as the Renaissance man of deniable Russian black ops. An ex convict who served time for robbery, fraud and forcing minors into prostitution, he began his legitimate business career in the 90s as a St. Petersburg restaurant owner and later as caterer for the Kremlin.
Yevgeny Prigozhin can be described as the Renaissance man of deniable Russian black ops. An ex convict who served time for robbery, fraud and involving a minor in drinking and criminal activity, he began his legitimate business career in the 90s as a St.
via bellingcat: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2020/08/14/pmc-structure-exposed/
Now, a long-running investigation by Bellingcat, The Insider and Der Spiegel has uncovered that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s disinformation, political interference and military operations are tightly integrated with Russia’s Defense Ministry and its intelligence arm, the GRU. Prigozhin’s private infrastructure – along with that of other government-dependent entrepreneurs, like Kostantin Malofeev – it appears serves as a deniable veneer and a round-tripping money laundering channel for government-mandated overseas operations.
It was around 2:30 AM—a couple hours before closing time at the strip club—when Cesar Sayoc’s coworkers noticed him acting strangely. A bouncer and occasional emcee at the club, Sayoc had worked that night but finished up earlier. Now he’d come back in, t
via Washingtonian – The website that Washington lives by.: https://www.washingtonian.com/2020/08/13/inside-the-mind-of-the-maga-bomber-the-trump-superfan-who-tried-to-wreak-havoc-on-the-last-national-election/
At some point during Sayoc’s breakdown, he resolved to take more drastic action. In 2017 and 2018, according to federal prosecutors, Sayoc plugged a number of alarming terms into Google: “How to kill all democrats,” “Kill George soros head off,” “Kill all socialist.” In March 2018, he searched the phrases “What a letter bomb” and “How do they make letter bomb”; among the results was a YouTube video labeled “demonstration of a letter bomb.”