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.
At least three correspondents have tested positive for the coronavirus, along with the press secretary and two of her deputies.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/business/white-house-coronavirus.html
Throughout a pandemic that has now landed squarely in the West Wing, Trump officials — who routinely shunned masks — declined to institute thorough safety protocols to protect the White House press corps, according to interviews with reporters who now face the prospect of a rapidly escalating outbreak in their daily work space.
Progressives are wary of the conservative group hammering the President, but its founders say they’re fighting for all Americans.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/12/inside-the-lincoln-projects-war-against-trump
After Obama won his second term, the Republican National Committee commissioned a study that became known as the “autopsy report.” The country’s voting population was diversifying rapidly, and, the report said, young voters were “increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents.” It noted, “Many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.” In a recent book, “It Was All a Lie,” Stevens writes, “How do you go from dedicating a political party to expansion and inclusiveness and two years later rally around a man who calls Mexicans ‘rapists,’ and called for a religious test to enter the United States?” He goes on, “For decades, conservatives attacked liberals for living by ‘situational ethics,’ but the ease with which Republican leaders abandoned any pretense of being more than a whites-only party is the ultimate situational ethic.” In January, Wilson told Trevor Noah that Trump “has broken the Republican Party—it doesn’t believe in anything.” Stunningly, the 2020 Republican National Convention put forward no new platform, signalling that the Party’s sole position was fealty to Trump.
More than a year after American diplomats began to suffer strange, concussion-like symptoms in Cuba, a U.S. investigation is no closer to determining how they were hurt or by whom, and the FBI and CIA are at odds over the case. A ProPublica investigation reveals the many layers to the mystery — and…
via ProPublica: https://www.propublica.org/article/diplomats-in-cuba
A series and podcast from Longreads, in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting.
via Longreads: https://longreads.com/bundyville/
A collection of Twitter accounts that has criticized Joel Embiid and Markelle Fultz, disclosed sensitive information, and outlined team strategy shares eye-opening similarities. What does that have to do with the Philadelphia 76ers’ decision-maker?
Teens have taken a technology that was supposed to help grownups stop smoking and invented a new kind of bad habit, molded in their own image.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/the-promise-of-vaping-and-the-rise-of-juul
How a scandal started with a poor housemaid and ended up taking down the most powerful woman in Africa
via Medium: https://medium.com/latterly/cashgate-2e6628549bf5
The most ignorant man in America knows that Donald Trump is president — but that’s about it. Living a liberal fantasy is complicated.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/style/the-man-who-knew-too-little.html
In 2014, Russell Bonner Bentley was a middle-aged arborist living in Austin. Now he’s a local celebrity in a war-torn region of Ukraine. His journey reveals a troubling development in Putin’s information war.
via Texas Monthly: https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/son-wealthy-businessman-foot-soldier-vladimir-putin-russia-hacking/
The inside story of the first homicide in America’s most secure prison.
via The Atavist Magazine: https://magazine.atavist.com/murder-adx-florence-fbi-mexican-mafia
How a senseless double murder in Florida exposed the rise of an organized fascist youth movement in the United States
via Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/all-american-nazis-fascist-youth-united-states-w519651
The city’s Establishment will ignore unscrupulous acts to serve its interests — just look how it treated the onetime lawyer to the president.
via Intelligencer: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/frank-rich-roy-cohn-the-original-donald-trump.html
Why an expert in counterterrorism became a beat cop.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/07/the-spy-who-came-home
For years, inventive companies like The Onion and Funny or Die capitalized on a culture that just wanted to laugh online. But after massive disruptions in digital advertising and on social media platforms, those companies find themselves imperiled. Did th
via The Ringer: https://www.theringer.com/2018/3/26/17157020/online-comedy-the-onion-funny-or-die-digital-media
It was more than five years ago when Lance Armstrong went on Oprah, looked her in the eye, and admitted to the world that his iconic comeback story was fueled by the most comprehensive doping regimen in cycling history. The seven-time Tour de France winne
via Deadspin: https://deadspin.com/the-ridiculous-saga-of-lance-armstrong-the-cheater-who-1802288537
