20 February - Netvibes - oldephartteintraining

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The Case for Shyness - The Heimlich maneuver, in the nearly 50 years since Dr. Henry Heimlich established its protocol, has been credited with saving many lives. But not, perhaps, as many as it might have. The maneuver, otherwise so wonderfully simple to execute, has a marked flaw: It requires that choking victims, before anything can be done to help them, first alert other people to the fact that they are choking. And some people, it turns out, are extremely reluctant to do so. “Sometimes,” Dr. Heimlich noted, bemoaning how easily human nature can become a threat to human life, “a victim of choking becomes embarrassed by his predicament and succeeds in getting up and leaving the area unnoticed.” If no one happens upon him, “he will die or suffer permanent brain damage within seconds.” Something bad is happening; don’t let other people see it; you will embarrass yourself, and them: It’s an impulse that is thoroughly counterproductive and also incredibly easy to understand. Self-consciousness is a powerful thing. And there are, after all, even in the most frantic and fearful of moments, so many things that will seem preferable to making a scene. Shyness, that single emotion that encompasses so many different things—embarrassment, timidity, a fear of rejection, a reluctance to be inconvenient—is, despite its extreme commonality, also extremely mysterious. Is it a mere feeling? A personality-defining condition? A form of anxiety? While shyness is for some a constant companion, its flushes and flashes managed in the rough manner of a chronic disease, it can also alight, without the courtesy of a warning, on even the most social, and socially graceful, of people. It can manifest as the mute smile that appears, unbidden, when you’re alone with a stranger in an elevator. Or as, right before the curtain goes up, the leaden stomach and the clammy hands and the desperate desire to escape to someplace—any place—that is not the stage. Or it can come when the bite of chicken didn’t go down quite right, and your throat is closing, and the world is spinning, and everyone is watching, and all you want to do is get away from it all. Shyness, basically, is an inconsiderate monster. Or, as the cultural historian Joe Moran argues in his wonderful new book, Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness, it is an inconsiderate monster that has been a constant, if largely invisible, companion to human history. Today, in the United States, shyness is often associated with a broad jumble of related and overlapping conditions, from occasional timidness to general awkwardness, from stage fright to the DSM-recognized social anxiety disorder. This imprecision is, it turns out, fitting: Shyness isn’t a single situation or character, Moran suggests, but, instead, a regular but also irregular interloper in human affairs, affecting people across ages and countries and cultures. Shyness can be, sometimes, a curse. It can be, as Dr. Heimlich acknowledged, occasionally a deadly one. Shyness isn’t a single situation or character, but rather an irregular interloper in human affairs.But shyness can also be, Moran argues, a great gift, its impulse toward introversion allowing for the inventive thinking and creative genius that might elude the more talkatively inclined. Shrinking Violets is a sweeping work of history and anthropology and sociology, summoning Simmel and Seneca and Sontag in its exploration of diffidence; it is also, more simply, a series of short biographies of shyness and those who have lived, to varying degrees, under its influence. Alan Turing, Moran notes, was bashful as often as he was brash. Agatha Christie, so bold on the page, was painfully shy in person. So was, when he was not performing leadership, Charles de Gaulle. And so was, when he was not performing music, Morrissey. Lucius Licinius Crassus, consul of Rome and mentor of Cicero, confessed to “fainting with fear” before delivering a speech. Primo Levi told Philip Roth about “this shyness of mine.” Oliver Sacks’s first book went unpublished because he lent its only manuscript to a colleague who committed suicide shortly thereafter—and Sacks was too shy to ask the man’s widow for the book’s return. Shyness—at its core, perhaps, an uneasy acknowledgement of the vast distance that separates one human mind from another—has long been a companion to people and their endeavors.  It is silent, and it is constant. We might not all define ourselves to be among les grandes timides, as the French psychiatrist Ludovic Dugas preferred to call them; for some of us, timidity will be an only occasional visitor. But shyness, Moran suggests, however it chooses to manifest itself—and the thing about shyness is that the person who experiences it will have practically no say in the matter—can be a benefit as well as a curse. The shy are frequently thoughtful and occasionally brilliant. They are often sensitive to the needs, and the gaze, of others. The problem is that they live in a world that, despite the commonality of shyness, has extremely little patience for it. Moran, who is British, counts himself among the timides; because of that he is aware of how difficult it is to be a shy in a swaggering world. He also knows what a quietly radical proposition it is to celebrate shyness. The far more fashionable thing—particularly in Britain, where Shrinking Violets was initially published, and even more so in the United States—has been to treat shyness as a problem to be treated and then, if at all possible, never mentioned again. Shyness, so emotionally adjacent to shame, is, too often, regarded as a cause for it. Within a culture that so deeply values self-confidence—and that takes for granted that social skills are external evidence of one’s internal self-regard—shyness is seen with suspicion. Quietness, in a world that is loud, can make for an easy enemy. In 1997, at a meeting of academics in Cardiff, Wales, that doubled as the first international conference on shyness, Philip Zimbardo, the eminent psychologist, made an argument that was at once provocative and unsurprising: Shyness, he contended, was becoming an epidemic. Under the influence of digital technology and its attendant affordances—internet, email, ATMs—the “social glue” that had bound earlier generations into networks of enforced community and cooperation was dissolving. The insights Zimbardo had gleaned from his Stanford Prison Experiment had taken a new turn: Channeling the work of Sherry Turkle and Robert Putnam, he had begun to worry that technology, all the ways humans had invented to avoid each other, would ultimately exacerbate shyness. By the year 2000, Zimbardo figured, it would be possible to go for a day without talking to another living person. We were entering, he warned, “the new ice age.” Related Story Saving the Lost Art of Conversation It remains to be seen whether the gossamer outgrowths of the World Wide Web will liberate or ensnare us. But “the new ice age,” as a concept, Moran suggests, tapped neatly into long-standing ideas about the nature of shyness: that it is not just an emotional response to others, but, more specifically, an emotional response to the conditions of modern life. In this reading of human history, shyness is an emotion that was also, to some extent, an invention. The scholar Ormonde Maddock Dalton, an archaeologist and a curator at the British Museum in the early 20th century, believed shyness, along these lines, to be a byproduct of civilization. Beasts and barbarians, Dalton pointed out, do not have the luxury of timidity if they are to survive in their respective wilds; people who are concerned merely with the most basic of needs—food, shelter, reproduction—will have little practical use for the self-consciousness required of shyness. (Charles Darwin, who nurtured throughout his career an interest in the emotions of animals, remained perplexed about the evolution of shyness—“this odd state of mind,” he called it—in humans. How had evolution, Darwin wondered, bequeathed humanity with a condition that had so little obvious use in nature? Darwin was led to such wonderings, in part, because he, too, found himself occasionally plagued with shyness.) For Dalton, shyness was the result not just of civilization itself, but of one of its byproducts: life lived as a kind of never-ending performance. It was an idea inspired not by Erving Goffman (or, for that matter, by his fellow sociologist Norbert Elias, who would offer a similar shyness-is-modern argument around the same time); instead, for his inspiration, Dalton looked to the large group of people he considered partially responsible for the rise of all artifice: women. Their tendency to turn life into a series of staged scenes, Dalton believed, would—it was only logical—create conditions within which those shows could fail. Thus, shyness, which is among so much else the self-conscious awareness of the many, many ways that human interaction can go wrong. Dr. Zimbardo warned that shyness, given all the ways humans have invented to avoid each other, was becoming an epidemic.Dalton’s ideas live on, today, in the broad recognition, within anthropology and far beyond, that shyness will have cultural components as well as physiological. They also live on, however, in the notion that shyness is best understood not just as the complicated interplay between the human brain and the social world, but also, more simply, as a deviation. Sociability is normal; shyness, it must follow, is abnormal. After all, we humans are—it is a cliché because it is so deeply true—social animals. We define ourselves as a species through our shared garrulousness as much as our shared DNA, through the fact that we put our opposable thumbs to work not just building shelter and creating art, but also writing letters and grasping phones and punctuating the making of evening plans with some enthusiastic dancing-lady emojis. We are human, in some small but profound part, because we are human together. It is on those social-evolutionary grounds, though, that shyness is sometimes suspected, and sometimes pathologized. Shy people, the sociologist Susie Scott argued, are not merely choosing solitude over companionship, or small groups over larger ones; they are conducting, each time they beg off or turn away, an “unintentional breaching experiment.” They are, in their very shyness, deviating from the broader social order. And so, they—and the diffidence they exhibit—are suspected. Thomas Browne, the English philosopher, referencing shyness’s common association with embarrassment, referred to it as pudor rusticus, or “rustic shame.” Plutarch preferred to think of shyness as a “loss of countenance.” Henrik Ibsen, who drank heavily in part to cure his own timidity, condemned the coldness of his fellow Norwegians by remarking that they suffered from “shyness of the soul.” Jane Austen, in a typically sardonic letter to her sister, placed shyness within the broader scope of the “Moral as well as natural Diseases.” And Sigmund Freud, for this part, so trustful of talk as a therapy and a social good, mistrusted timidity: He considered it to be evidence of displaced narcissism. And so. To be shy, because of all that, is not merely to walk into the party and head directly for the refuge of the wall, or to rehearse a greeting a dozen times before finally picking up the phone, or to look out onto the audience and feel that familiar clutch of dread, even after its members have been dutifully imagined to be free of their clothing. To be shy is also to be misunderstood. The shy are commonly mistaken as cold, or aloof, or arrogant, or muted by Browneian shame. They are sometimes mistaken as worse. The American psychologist Josiah Morse, in the early 20th century, was convinced of the mental connection between shyness and stupidity. The writer Tom Wolfe, blessed as he was with the good fortune of extroversion, took delight in mocking William Shawn, the brilliant and beloved editor of the New Yorker, for his extreme social diffidence. This, Moran suggests, is where Dr. Zimbardo may have been wrong—or at least extremely premature—in his pronouncement that the new century will have brought with it “the new ice age.” Yes, we have automated checkout now. Yes, we have Seamless. Yes, we can definitely get through a day, should we choose to, without the warm frictions of human contact. But we also have so many more ways of talking, and connecting, and being social, and being human. The world of the current moment, overlaid though it may be by the cool cords of the internet, is just as hot and busy and noisy as it ever was—more so, really. And it remains, at least in the United States, generally biased toward those who are willing to match it in heat and zeal and volume. That is the paradox that animates Shrinking Violets. Shyness, that feeling that is so common, is uncommonly—and indeed willfully—misunderstood. It is an extremely normal condition that has yet, despite it all, to be normalized. Moran, in his book, has summoned insights from the ancients to their successors to prove what he, as a shy person, has already lived and known, all too well: that the world, for all the strides it has made when it comes to progress and acceptance, still does not look kindly on timidity. Freud considered shyness to be evidence of displaced narcissism.In that sense, Shrinking Violets—in its portrayal of the world’s insistence that the violets in question would be so much better if they would just exert themselves a little more, and stand a little taller—is reminiscent of Susan Cain’s 2012 book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Shrinking Violets considers a common emotional condition, but it is more insistently, if more obliquely, a condemnation of a world that treats that condition with ambivalence, suspicion, and confusion. Just as schools and businesses, as Cain argued, are generally built for extroverts—because, indeed, they are so often built by extroverts—so, too, Moran suggests, are the world’s social structures generally most accommodating of the lusty and the loud. Squeaky wheels, as it were, get the cultural primacy. And that may be especially so now, as American culture not only offers more ways to talk than ever before, but also as it tends to emphasize talking as a panaceatic requirement of modern life. Good and constant communication, many assume (or hope), will help to ensure successful business ventures, and successful romantic partnerships, and successful educational performance. Extroversion will save us. Those corporate posters helpfully reminding their viewers that teamwork is good, and that there is no “i” in “team,” and that rowing crew is a really great metaphor for life in general? They make the point efficiently. Suck it up. Join in. Get in the boat. Perhaps we would all do a little better, though, were we in general just a little more accommodating of those who prefer, at least occasionally, to do their rowing alone. Perhaps we would do better if we were more open-minded about what constitutes charisma, and creativity, and social success. Perhaps we should all heed Moran’s advice, offered as it is with the compelling confidence of the timid. “Humans are social animals by instinct and by default setting,” Moran writes; “shyness simply makes us social in peculiar and circuitous ways.” It deserves to be celebrated for that—and maybe even to be given, in that boatful of straining, smiling rowers, just a small space of its own. 03:00

Your 2017 Oscars Crash Course - As Hollywood’s biggest night looms and the Academy Award predictions pour in, you may find yourself feeling out of the Oscars loop. Maybe you don’t like awards shows but are being dragged to a viewing party. Perhaps you aren’t sure about this year’s controversies, or maybe you haven’t seen any of the Best Picture nominees. With all the sequels, remakes, and bad superhero movies that crowded screens in 2016, it’s easy to have missed some of the films in contention for cinema’s most coveted prize. In light of that, we’ve prepared a crash course of the best Oscars-related pieces from Atlantic writers over the last few months, that should help you out for when the big night rolls around on February 26. (We will be updating this post throughout the week with links to our official predictions and stories about Fences, Fire at Sea, and more.) A still from Moonlight (A24)The Big Players Leading the race with a record 14 nominations this year is Damien Chazelle’s nostalgic, musical love-letter to Hollywood, La La Land, which won attention early on in awards season. Perhaps its closest competitor is the word-of-mouth hit Moonlight, a gorgeous and intimate low-budget film from Barry Jenkins that tells the story of a boy growing up black and gay in Miami. Aside from La La Land and Moonlight, which both swept the 2017 Golden Globes, the other movies in the running for Best Picture include Denis Villeneuve’s epic sci-fi film Arrival, which may not only be one of the best “first-contact” films ever made but also asks timely questions about empathy in a geopolitical context. Kenneth Lonergan’s heartbreaking drama Manchester by the Sea, which makes Amazon the first streaming service to enter the Oscars playground, is also a competitor. Rounding out the list are the neo-Western Hell or High Water, which makes some relevant points about economic mistrust in America today; the groundbreaking Hidden Figures, centering on three pioneering African American women mathematicians whose calculations were integral to NASA in the 1960s; Mel Gibson’s war drama Hacksaw Ridge, which sees the disgraced star return to the spotlight; Garth Davis’s inspirational, true-life drama Lion; and Denzel Washington’s adaptation of August Wilson’s Fences. Loving’s Ruth Negga at the Academy Award Nominees Luncheon (Jordan Strauss / Invision / AP)The Individual Honors The race for Best Actor is led by Casey Affleck for Manchester by the Sea, albeit in rather controversial circumstances; Andrew Garfield, Viggo Mortensen, Denzel Washington, and Ryan Gosling are also vying for the prize. The Best Actress category sees the return of Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy in Pablo Larrain’s vivid, manicured new film. Ruth Negga’s emotional performance in Jeff Nichols’s Loving, about the couple behind the Supreme Court case that struck down bans on interracial marriage, earns her a nod. Somewhat surprisingly, Annette Bening misses out for a strong performance in 20th Century Women, which earned the writer-director Mike Mills a single nomination for Best Original Screenplay. For the third time, Viola Davis is in the running for Best Supporting Actress, this year for Fences, while 2012 winner Octavia Spencer is also nominated for Hidden Figures. Moonlight’s Mahershala Ali is a favorite for Best Supporting Actor, and Michael Shannon got a nod for Nocturnal Animals over his co-star Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who surprisingly won a Golden Globe. I Am Not Your Negro. (Magnolia Pictures / Amazon Studios)The Docs The nominees for Best Documentary Feature made powerful arguments about real-life issues, particularly about race in America. Raoul Peck’s imperfect, but powerful film I Am Not Your Negro adapts an unfinished work by one of America’s great essayists, James Baldwin. The ever-versatile Ava DuVernay gets a nod for her Netflix-released 13th, which rewrites America’s history of mass incarceration as a new form of slavery. In a year that saw an FX adaptation of the O.J. Simpson trial, there’s also O.J.: Made in America, a vital, five-part documentary that blurs the lines between a TV show and a movie. A still from Moana (Disney)The Animated Wonders If you’re tuning in for more otherworldly or fantastical reasons, then you’ll probably want to keep an eye on the Best Animated Feature category. Disney, for the first time since 2002, has two films in the running for this one, with the beautiful, Polynesian-set Moana (also nominated in the Best Original Song category for Hamilton star Lin Manuel-Miranda’s “How Far I’ll Go”) going up against the delightful Zootopia. The Oscar-winning animator and director Michaël Dudok de Wit’s sparse, elegant Studio Ghibli-produced The Red Turtle gets a nod, too, along with Laika’s visually stunning stop-motion, Kubo and the Two Strings. The Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (center) and the co-stars of his film The Salesman, Taraneh Alidoosti (left) and Shahab Hosseini at the 69th Cannes Film Festival in in May 2016. (Yves Herman / Reuters)The Politics Of course it’s hard to keep politics entirely out of this year’s ceremonies, particularly in the wake of a divisive election of a largely unpopular president. It’ll be interesting to watch the Best Foreign-Language Film category, where despite the nomination of Maren Ade’s remarkably unique comedy Toni Erdmann, all eyes will be on the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s Arthur Miller-inspired drama The Salesman. Farhadi, who previously picked up the award in 2011 for A Separation, announced that he won’t be attending this year’s ceremony because of Trump’s recent executive order on immigration, which was later hobbled by a series of federal court decisions. Somewhat conspicuously absent from the ceremony will be Nate Parker’s historical film The Birth of a Nation, which earned early praise from critics at last year’s Sundance, but was mired by resurfacing rape allegations against Parker. The misguided parallels between Casey Affleck and Nate Parker undoubtedly clouds the former’s Best Actor nod, while the contentious figure of Mel Gibson also returns to mainstream Hollywood’s fold after years away from the spotlight for repeated bigoted remarks. And while the #OscarsSoWhite criticism appears more subdued this year than in the past thanks to a more diverse slate of nominees, the awards’ overwhelmingly male focus remains a problem: No women were nominated for directing, and just one (Allison Schroeder for Hidden Figures) made it to the Screenplay categories. Questions about the Oscars’ political relevance will continue to loom: Will the night go down the same outspoken route as the SAG Awards? Or will Hollywood’s introverted politics reign again, as they did at the Golden Globes? While watching, you may find yourself questioning if there should even be an Oscars in the first place. For now, prepare your ballots. 19 Feb

Trump Returns to the Campaign Trail - After his first four weeks in office, Donald Trump left the the White House for Florida, where he soaked up the cheers of thousands of adoring fans. It has not been an easy month for Trump, with a federal judge blocking his travel ban, the resignation of his national security advisor, Michael Flynn, and the constant intelligence leaks. But Saturday was a chance to move beyond that, to lay out his agenda and air his grievances in the campaign-rally style he seems to enjoy most. Trump spent his third weekend in Florida, at his Mar-a-Lago resort, which he has now taken to calling the “Southern White House.” He was working again, interviewing candidates for the role of national security advisor, which Flynn left earlier this week after it was reported that he’d misled Vice President Mike Pence about his conversation with the Russian ambassador. That was just the latest episode in a tumultuous start for Trump. Amid reports of constant squabbles in his inner circle, Trump seems to be increasingly frustrated with the bureaucracy and the judiciary, which he has complained seem bent on opposing his agenda. The campaign trail, on the other hand, is where Trump has always seemed happiest, ad-libbing in front of a crowd that cheers his every word. “I want to be among my friends,” Trump told the crowd Saturday evening, “and among the people.” The rally began a little after 5 p.m. with a succession of surrogates firing up the crowd, repeating Trump’s campaign slogans to make the country safer, to put America first, and to keep the country safe by keeping certain people out. Nearly an hour later Air Force One pulled up in front of the hangar like a limo at a red-carpet event. A jet bridge motored toward the plane’s door, and down stepped Trump and the first lady. Ivanka opened the rally by reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Shortly after Trump took over, stepped in front of the mic and told the crowd why he’d come: “I want to speak to you without the filter of the fake news—the dishonest media which has published one false story after another.” That was a major theme of the rally. The road bumps he’s hit, he seemed to be saying, were either unscrupulous lies invented by the media, or are part of its agenda to attack him. The media has its own agenda, he said, “and it’s not your agenda.” He had a prepared text, and at times he stuck to the script, which listed all the policies he’d tried to implement in his first 30 days in office. He talked most about the travel ban, which a federal judge in Seattle has blocked. As he has before, Trump said that it was wrong for a judge to be able to limit his power to block certain people—people Trump has called potentially dangerous—from entering the country. But in style he often deviated from his prepared remarks, often to castigate the press, which he called “part of the corrupt system.”  He even read from a note Thomas Jefferson sent to a newspaper editor and senator from Michigan, John Norvell. “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper,” Trump quoted Jefferson saying. “Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.” (Before he ascended to the presidency, Jefferson wrote: “And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”) Trump, as he has ever since inauguration day, also complained that the media seems bent on minimizing the size of his fan base. So he made sure to point out what “a massive hangar” hosted the rally, and that a huge crowd was jam-packed inside it. But, he complained to the bank of cameras broadcasting the event around the world, the media would never show how many people turned up to his rally. “Do you think one media network back there will show this crowd?” he asked to raucous cheers. “Not one!” Then Trump recognized a man in the crowd. It was someone he’d seen earlier, he said, one of his supporters interviewed on TV. The man, who CNN identified as Gene Huber, said earlier that he’d arrived at the hangar at 4 a.m. to make sure he was the first in line. Trump told him to come on stage, directing him to hop the fence and waving him past Secret Service. “He’s been all over television, saying the best things,” Trump told the crowd, which burst out in applause.   On stage, the man spoke briefly and fawningly about Trump and the great movement he had created. Trump smiled.   Trump did take some time to talk about the policies he hoped implement. He said he would revoke Obamacare and replace it with something better, that costs less—although he did not go into any details. He said he planned to repeal regulations placed on oil, gas, and coal companies. “The miners are going back to work!” Trump said. He also promised to bring back jobs, then talked about how he’d already forced GM, Ford, and Chrysler to pull out of deals that would’ve shipped jobs out of the country—although the details of those deals are more complicated. He also mentioned a new Intel plant set to open in Arizona that would create 10,000 jobs. That factory has been under construction for several years, but Intel’s CEO announced it would invest $7 billion into the plant that would create even more positions right after a meeting with Trump earlier this month. These portions of the speech largely repeated points Trump has repeatedly emphasized, including in his most recent press conference. But he also took the opportunity to unburden himself of the many grievances he’s built up in his first 30 days as president. The energy of the crowd seemed to recharge Trump. He returned to his campaign-trail form, standing behind the podium and in front of thousands of people who loved him, and not in Washington D.C. before a room packed with the lying, dishonest press. Trump closed out the rally the way he always did last summer, with his vow to make America great again. Then he walked back to Air Force One, with the Rolling Stones’ “You can’t always get what you want” playing in the background. 18 Feb

Fences and Fake News: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing - Why Fences Should Win the Best Picture Oscar Nosheen Iqbal | The Guardian “It’s theatrical cinema—the film is confined to a handful of backdrops inside the Maxson home and backyard; all the flourishes and drama unfurl from Wilson’s dense, poetic dialogue, a gift to both Washington (here as actor, director and producer) and Viola Davis, who plays Troy’s wife Rose. Washington could be on course to become one of only seven actors ever to win three acting Oscars for his showboaty turn here, but it’s Davis who is the film’s solid, steely anchor. Her performance is subtle and heartbreaking, and keeps the film from tipping into easy sentimentality.” How Yayoi Kusama Channels Mental Illness Into art Anna Fifeld | The Washington Post “In 1957 she managed to get a passport and a visa, and sewed dollars into her dresses to circumvent postwar currency ­controls … Making matters worse, she found herself in abject poverty. Her bed was an old door, and she scavenged fish heads and old vegetables from dumpsters and boiled them into soup. But this situation made Kusama throw herself into her work even more. She began producing her first trademark Infinity Net paintings, huge canvases—one was 33 feet high—covered with mesmerizing waves of small loops that seemed to go on and on. ‘White nets enveloping the black dots of silent death against a pitch-dark background of nothingness,’ is how she described them.” The True History of Fake News Robert Darnton | The New York Review of Books “In the long history of misinformation, the current outbreak of fake news has already secured a special place, with the president’s personal adviser, Kellyanne Conway, going so far as to invent a Kentucky massacre in order to defend a ban on travelers from seven Muslim countries. But the concoction of alternative facts is hardly rare, and the equivalent of today’s poisonous, bite-size texts and tweets can be found in most periods of history, going back to the ancients.”Is Travel Writing Dead? Karan Mahajan | Granta “The estrangement that travel engenders is far more profound than the images consumed on a trip. I would prefer to see American writers who have spent significant time abroad magnifying and expounding on problems at home. Too often, a kind of travel writing—especially the novel set abroad in an exotic locale —feels like a way of allegorizing and escaping problems at home. Travel literature should go local and micro, but with international heft.” How Sportswriting Became a Liberal Profession Bryan Curtis | The Ringer “Of course, labels like ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ don’t translate perfectly to sports. Do you have to be liberal to call Roger Goodell a tool? So maybe it’s better to put it like this: There was a time when filling your column with liberal ideas on race, class, gender, and labor policy got you dubbed a ‘sociologist.’ These days, such views are more likely to get you a job.” Is Apathy the Key to J.M. Coetzee’s Novels? Christian Lorentzen | Vulture “It’s an astonishing idea—apathy as a source of, not an obstacle to, seriousness. We know writers who write in quest of ecstasy, out of mimetic fidelity to ordinary life, out of a quasi-therapeutic impulse, out of personal or political rage (D.H. Lawrence, Philip Roth), out of narcissism, or even out of hostility to the task (Thomas Bernhard). But apathy? Surely it’s an anti-novelistic quality, but it rings true to Coetzee’s work and the cold, cerebral, disinterested character of many of his heroes: an apathy of self-protection.”Vogue’s Race Problem Is Bigger Than Karlie Kloss Jennifer Hope Choi | BuzzFeed “While the geisha is traditionally considered a female entertainer in Japan (performing music, dance, and hostess duties for guests), her coquettish and submissive manners have congealed into a haunting stereotype Asian American women have, for decades, attempted to divorce. Vogue’s diversity problem isn’t Karlie Kloss but rather the geisha image itself, and the persistent desire to exoticize otherness in its storied pages.” Against Fame: On Publishing, Popularity, and Ambition Manjula Martin | Catapult “If you go by dictionaries, being famous just means being very popular. If you go by cultural experience, it’s much more. Unless you’ve been living in some blessedly boring and naive parallel universe, fame is basically the greatest thing a person can aspire to, especially in America, especially if you’re a creative person. When I interviewed famous authors for Scratch, I always asked about their experiences of fame, mostly because it’s a question that tends to lead to good quotes. What every writer I’ve interviewed has told me is that fame is just a side effect of success. It’s not success itself. To reach for it is to invite misery, distraction, and inauthenticity.” Rescuing Norman Rockwell’s Progressive Legacy From a Right-Wing Cartoonist Angus Johnson | Hyperallergic “Rockwell understood that the idyllic America he depicted was fragile, and that its embrace didn’t extend to everyone. Later in his career he made that point with growing explicitness, as in the 1961 Golden Rule, which depicts people of a wide variety of ages, religions, and nationalities—everyone in the Four Freedoms series is a white American—standing shoulder to shoulder behind the phrase ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’” Can AI Make Musicians More Creative? Hazel Cills | MTV News “Life in 2017 does feel a little like The Jetsons, as people install digital assistants named Alexa in their homes, buy ‘smart fridges’ that tell you what you’re missing in your kitchen, and welcome self-driving cars into existence. And while it's easy to see how computers can help you buy a T-shirt through voice command or calculate how many calories you consume in a meal, when it comes to AI and art, the lines are blurrier. Many remain skeptical of a machine’s ability to create something that rivals or replaces human creativity.” 18 Feb

The Atlantic’s Week in Culture - Don’t Miss On Not Saying His Name—Elizabeth Limbach explores why the president’s critics have taken to talking about him without actually using the words “Donald Trump.” HBOTelevision John Oliver Is Buying Ads on Cable News to Talk to President Trump—Megan Garber discusses the Last Week Tonight host’s plan to communicate with the chief executive. Homeland’s Crisis of Conscience—Sophie Gilbert asks whether the Showtime series is facing its toughest hurdle yet. Galentine’s Day: How a Beloved Fiction Became a Beloved Tradition—Megan Garber traces how the the pseudo-holiday from Parks and Recreation has become a part of Valentine’s Day celebrations. Is The Walking Dead’s Villain Killing the Show?—David Sims casts doubt over the effectiveness of the AMC show’s tyrannical antagonist. ABC Has Finally Cast a Black Bachelorette—Megan Garber questions why it’s taken so long for the reality show to have an African American lead. What The Young Pope Preached About Love—Spencer Kornhaber weighs in on the first season of the HBO show, as it came to a close last week. Game Theory—Megan Garber examines The Wall, one of many TV game shows currently winning over primetime audiences. Big Little Lies: Sex and Murder in Monterey—Sophie Gilbert watches the compelling new mystery series from HBO. Saturday Night Live, Lobbyist—Megan Garber recaps the latest, politically charged episode of the sketch show. Jimmy Fallon Tries to Take on Trump—David Sims explains how the Tonight Show host is struggling to stay relevant in 2017. Crashing Is an Antidote to Cynical Comedy Shows—Robert O’Connell argues that Pete Holmes’s new HBO series is a refreshing break from similar shows about the lives of stand-ups. Lucy Nicholson / Reuters2017 Grammy Awards Adele, Beyoncé, and the Grammys’ Fear of Progress—Spencer Kornhaber analyzes another regressive night at the music awards, which saw a black visionary work sidelined for a white traditionalist one. The Biggest Moments From the 2017 Grammys—Spencer Kornhaber highlights the awards, performances, and controversies from the ceremony. Two Shades of #Resistance at the Grammys—Spencer Kornhaber compares Katy Perry’s tentatively political performance to A Tribe Called Quest’s outspoken denunciation of the president. The Sad State of Rock at the Grammys—Derek Thompson believes the year 1991 may reveal why the genre that once dominated the popular music charts has fallen from such great heights. Sean Rayford / GettyMedia Miss Manners on Rudeness in the Age of Trump—Judith Martin, the renowned etiquette columnist, offers an alternative list of virtues for a time when the president has violated all traditional expectations of statesman-like behavior.   FoxFilm A Cure for Wellness Is a Malevolent Thrill Ride, With Eels—David Sims reviews Gore Verbinski’s new movie, which may be one of the most demented things Hollywood has produced in recent years. The Disappointments of The Great Wall—Christopher Orr bemoans Zhang Yimou’s epic new CGI film starring Matt Damon. Bettmann / GettyBooks How The Blood of Emmett Till Still Stains America Today—Vann R. Newkirk II dissects the pressing relevance of a new history on the most famous lynching in the country. George Saunders on Chekhov’s Different Visions of Happiness—Joe Fassler chats with the author of Lincoln in the Bardo about the masterful Russian writer’s story, “Gooseberries,” as part of The Atlantic’s ongoing “By Heart” series. Ali Smith’s Autumn Is a Post-Brexit Masterpiece—Sophie Gilbert reviews the dazzling new novel from the Scottish author, who seems to be responding to a particularly tumultuous moment. Ellika HenriksonMusic Music to Celebrate the 30-Something Blues—Spencer Kornhaber listens to the uplifting new record from Jens Lekman. How Hans Zimmer Became a Rock Star—David Sims charts the meteoric rise of the ubiquitous film composer. Rebecca FanueleArt Steve McQueen’s Unblinking Look at Life and Afterlife—Spencer Kornhaber unpacks the 12 Years a Slave director’s video installation Ashes, on display at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. 17 Feb

Crashing Is an Antidote to Cynical Comedy Shows - “This is great,” says the comedian Pete Holmes, early in one episode of his new HBO series Crashing, which premieres Sunday. He’s talking to a group of fellow stand-up strivers who are about to spend the afternoon handing out comedy-club fliers to earn stage time for their own performances; unlike him, they look miserable. “West Village, look at us!” Pete continues. “Standing on the corner, eating street food. We’re gonna do a set tonight at a club in Manhattan. I love this.” One of the crew tilts his head at Pete. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” The exchange more or less sums up Pete’s relationship with the world of comedy, and the world at large, within Crashing. The show, which was executive produced by Judd Apatow, revs up its plot with a development that would level a less starry-eyed protagonist: Pete walks in on his wife cheating on him. After a requisite period of self-pity, though, what unfolds is an account of irrepressible cheeriness. Pete, a floppy-haired gentle giant and a fictionalized younger version of Holmes himself, seems incapable of sustained anger or malice. He apologizes to a man towing his car and is so unthreatening that his wife’s lover, “Leaf,” treats him in the head-patting manner of a guidance counselor. But as he moves from couch to couch—his wife supported him financially while he “worked” for free at comedy clubs, so his imminent divorce comes with a side of homelessness—he starts to forge connections and professional footholds, largely by way of the same too-kind disposition that gets him mocked in initial encounters. Via Pete’s headlong, wide-grinned adventures, Crashing turns a familiar conceit into a delightful extended riff on the power of positive thinking that’s hilarious and hopeful in equal measure. Crashing has many of the hallmarks of one of 21st-century TV’s defining genres: the comedy about comedians, the peek behind the laugh-factory curtain. Guest stars abound, most immediately with Artie Lange playing a kind of hoarse, vulgar guardian angel. Shop-talk flows constantly, as characters rehash sets and rework bits, and roasting is lingua franca. “You look like you work for a homeless person,” T.J. Miller, a real-life Holmes associate best known for his work on Silicon Valley, tells Lange backstage before a show. “Are you interning on Skid Row? What cargo are you carrying in cargo pants? Nostalgia for the ’90s?” Crashing feels distinct from recent comedian-centric shows like Louie and Maron and movies like Don’t Think Twice that have traded in a certain darkness—the agonized performer, humor as an outlet for the world-weary. Despite his troubles, the character of Pete isn’t a tortured genius; he’s a gleeful dweeb. (“I like Albany,” he says to one crowd by way of an opener. “It’s all of the bany. It’s not some of the bany, I like that.”) His ambition is coated heavily in fandom, and he practically melts whenever he meets an industry A-lister. You sense, even as Pete’s private life is a wreck and his professional one makes what might objectively be called meager gains, that he has to fight off an urge to pinch himself at his good fortune. He’s telling jokes and rubbing elbows with his heroes—how cool is that!? Every aspect of the show seems informed by its main character’s—and creator’s—joy.  Plots unfold with rollicking energy, actors ham it up, and the script seems sometimes to read only, “Chuckles abound,” as when Pete and some pals spend a montage mock-surprising one another with excellent news. Comedy also has room for figures like Holmes, for whom the craft is less a burden than a blast.It’s a sensibility that fans of Holmes’s other work will recognize. You Made It Weird, his podcast on the Nerdist network, features Holmes talking with guests in multi-hour geek-out sessions, complete with improvised bits and microphone-distorting laughter. The Pete Holmes Show, a Conan follow-up that lasted for 80 episodes from 2013 to 2014 on TBS, similarly mined its host’s obsessions and sunny tendencies. He performed monologues that were more like miniature stand-up sets than the usual “You heard about this?” news fare, donned costumes for superhero spoofs, and once wrapped the famous mixed martial artist Ronda Rousey in a bear-hug, saying, “That’s my signature move.” Pete’s eager-to-please style isn’t for everyone, and Crashing’s detractors will supply their own adjectives. “Charming” will turn to “cloying,” “sweet” to “sappy.” A generation has learned that television comedy can involve real psychic stakes, and some viewers used to seeing Louis C.K. deal with the true-to-life travails of parenthood might not enjoy the less weighty sight of, say, Pete intruding clumsily on his wife’s yard sale. Preferences between the two modes will say more about predilection than merit, but in certain moments one does almost glimpse Holmes standing just outside the shot, laughing a little too hard at himself. At its best, though, Crashing is a kind of corrective, and an honest one at that. Comedy need not be only the refuge of the cynic. It also has room for figures like Holmes, for whom the craft is less a burden than a blast. “I want to make people happy,” Pete says, but his words feel almost redundant. If prestige TV has lately been home to some of stand-up’s prickliest denizens, Holmes bounds in with a smile, steadfast in a belief that laughter does more than serve as a bitter tonic. It renders life whole, it eases troubles, it makes good things happen and bad things go away.  This is great, indeed. 17 Feb

100,000 National Guardsmen Mobilized to Deport Immigrants? The Anatomy of a News Cycle - Friday morning, the Associated Press dropped a bombshell report: “Trump administration considers mobilizing as many as 100,000 National Guard troops to round up unauthorized immigrants,” the new agency’s Twitter account announced. The hubbub that followed, as the White House denied the report, is a case study in the strange dance between the press and the Trump administration, and the complicated environment of information asymmetry, and misinformation, that characterizes the current moment in American politics. And it shows how the Trump administration deflects genuine reporting by caricaturing it, sometimes clumsily, as “fake news.” The AP tweet came at 10:12 a.m. Eastern time, with the full story coming a few minutes later: The Trump administration is considering a proposal to mobilize as many as 100,000 National Guard troops to round up unauthorized immigrants, including millions living nowhere near the Mexico border, according to a draft memo obtained by The Associated Press. The 11-page document calls for the unprecedented militarization of immigration enforcement as far north as Portland, Oregon, and as far east as New Orleans, Louisiana. The story is a classic Trump administration story: a sweeping, surprising move; a leaked memo substantiating the story, emerging from a very leaky administration; and a policy in keeping with the president’s campaign promise to deport illegal immigrants. The story quickly mushroomed online and in social media, with stunned reaction at the idea of the U.S. government deploying a hundred thousand armed troops around the country, away from the border. Reporters scrambled to figure out what the legal authority for the move would be, and to figure out how state governments might react. And yet some people immediately sensed that something about the story seemed off: How long before this turns out to be highly exaggerated/not true at all? https://t.co/inuI9vIhYL — neontaster (@neontaster) February 17, 2017 Within minutes, in fact, Trump officials denied the story, on the record, to reporters. Press Secretary Sean Spicer spoke to a White House reporters as President Trump prepared to leave for a trip to South Carolina, saying, “That is 100% not true. It is false. It is irresponsible to be saying this. There is no effort at all to round up, to utilize the National Guard to round up illegal immigrants.” But Spicer’s comment added two interesting wrinkles. First, he scolded the AP for not seeking comment before publishing the story. But as a reporter responded, the AP had asked both the White House and the Department of Homeland Security for comment multiple times before publication, and had received nothing. Spicer also said, “It is not a White House document.” That statement was intriguing, because Spicer wasn’t denying that the memo was real; he was only saying it came from outside the White House. But that didn’t conflict with the AP report, which said the memo was written by Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly.  “I don’t know what could potentially be out there, but I know that there is no effort to do what is potentially suggested,” Spicer added. Meanwhile, other reporters were trying to get DHS to explain what was going on. DHS confirms that the memo reported by AP did exist; but they said it was "never seriously considered" https://t.co/4kB6rLfyCX — Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) February 17, 2017 In other words, the memo was in fact real. The full text was available online within about 90 minutes of the original AP tweet. It is hardly a skimpy document—it’s full of bullet points, legal citations, and footnotes. Still unresolved is the question of how serious a proposal it may be, or whether it remains under active consideration. There are a range of possibilities: It had been considered but rejected as outlandish. It’s part of a plan that’s still in drafting. Maybe someone asked Kelly what it would take to expel a huge number of immigrants, and this was his back-of-the-envelope calculation. This is a question that DHS could have resolved by commenting to the AP before publication. Spicer and the Trump administration were quick to dismiss the report as shoddy work, just more example of the “fake news” that the president so enjoys deriding. But underneath his denials, there is the uncomfortable fact that DHS confirmed the memo as real. The press comes out of this looking bad, too, offering more fodder to critics who are convinced that reporters will go to any length to tear down the Trump administration. Yet, again, the memo was real, and the AP sought comment. As with so many other incidents, it’s a Rorschach test for views on the administration. If you’re inclined to view the Trump team as bumbling and incompetent, then this shows their foolishness in not simply resolving the AP’s questions ahead of time, and suggests that Spicer is out of the loop on what’s going on inside the government. If you’re inclined to view the Trump team as evil geniuses, then it’s a brilliant gambit, suckering the AP into looking bad by reporting the memo, and only denying it after the fact, thus undermining trust in the media. The DHS memo is not the first time we’ve seen this pattern. In January, The New York Times obtained a draft memo about reinstituting CIA “black sites” and potentially bringing back torture programs. Then, too, Spicer said it was “not a White House document” and said he had “no idea where it came from.” Little has been heard about the black-site plan since then. The challenge for the press, operating in a low-information environment where the White House comments slowly or never, is challenging. If the administration were really considering deploying 100,000 National Guard troops, it would be a major story, of importance to all readers. Washington veterans are inclined to see this memo, like the black-site one, as a trial balloon, in which the administration allows a proposal to leak, gauges reaction, and then either disclaims it or moves forward depending on what sort of reception the idea receives. But just because something is possibly a trial balloon doesn’t mean that it’s not newsworthy and important. Yet there’s a risk, too, of outrage exhaustion. Having big blowups over draft memos, which Spicer can then deny, goes some way to inoculating the administration against further damage, because the story has already been in the public domain. The final result may not be quite as outlandish as it initially appeared, but it might be important—yet by then, exhaustion has set in. Here’s a pithy summary of the cycle: Leak Outrageous Thing Outrage Fake news!!! Fake news outrage Actual thing is 35% of original Outrageous Thing Outrage all burned up https://t.co/CpAaF1a9SP — Kilgore Trout (@KT_So_It_Goes) February 17, 2017 The rub is that the exhaustion is real whether the outrage is justified or not. It’s hard to divine whether this is the White House’s intent, but it is clearly the case that the constant stream of scandal and controversy emitting from the president has in some ways helped him. As a candidate, Trump survived multiple scandals and gaffes that were worse than fatal missteps for other candidates. Yet he kept plugging, in part because there was never time for a story to really settle in before the next one arrived. As for the memo itself, it is probably most interesting as a window into how Kelly will try to turn Trump’s campaign promises, and his notably vague border-security executive order, into actions. Some of them will likely prove impossible, beginning with a true wall along the dimensions Trump suggested during the campaign. Others, like the memo’s discussion of adding 5,000 new border guards, are fairly easily realizable. These questions will determine whether Trump can keep his promises about the border, and the memo is one useful tool in trying to answer them. But it’s hard to puzzle those answers out when the memo has already been weaponized in the war between press and president. 17 Feb

Steve McQueen's Unblinking Look at Life and Afterlife - The miracle of filmmaker Steve McQueen’s work is the miracle of not blinking. For 2008’s Hunger, he recorded a 17-minute uninterrupted shot of a tormented political dissident in Northern Ireland; for 2011’s Shame his camera stayed with a sex addict through every excruciating pause in conversation on a first date; for 2013’s cinematic landmark 12 Years a Slave he depicted the abuse of black men and women in bondage so exhaustively that it dared the audience to turn away. Even his Kanye West video simply trained its eye on the rapper for nearly 10 minutes as he performed alone in a room. McQueen’s approach is not just Birdman-like formal daring. He holds his lens steady to achieve a truer sense of bodies in real time, and to give the viewer no choice but to let their mind unravel the implications behind the images. The purest expression of this ethos is now on display at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art in the first American mounting of McQueen’s 20-minute video piece Ashes, which debuted at the 2015 Venice Biennale. With two loops playing simultaneously on a double-sided screen hanging in a darkened room, McQueen pays close attention to a few moments in one man’s life—and even closer attention to that same man’s death. The installation’s origins are rooted more than 15 years in the past, when McQueen was making his 2002 short film Caribs’ Leap in Grenada, the island his parents immigrated from. There, he and a cameraman met and spent a few hours at sea with a local fisherman who went by the name Ashes. The footage from that voyage, shot in the evocative fuzz of 8mm film, makes up one side of the Ashes diptych. The young man sits on the bow of an orange boat, often looking back and smiling; he stands up, balancing over choppy waters; at one point he falls into the sea and pulls himself back onboard.   Ashes is luminous: grinning constantly, his bleached dreads picking up the orange of the hull, his bathing suit ruffling in the wind. The water shimmers a different blue than the sky that’s dotted with just a few clouds. As you watch, the sound of waves wash from speakers behind you. You’re almost there with him. Francesca BuccaroBut you also hear incongruous noises. The sound of scraping, clanging. A voice, heavily accented, explaining something. A snatch of singing. This is the soundtrack to what’s on the other side of the screen—Ashes’s burial. McQueen revisited Granada years after filming Caribs’ Leap and asked around about Ashes. Locals told him that the fisherman had been killed in an altercation over drugs just two months after McQueen had met him. He lay buried in a pauper’s grave; McQueen arranged his transfer to a nicer site and filmed the process of his reinterment. And it was, indeed, a process. Shot in crisp 16mm, this side of Ashes follows workers as they dig, pour concrete, trace letters, bevel, clean, and paint. In lengthy close-up shots you watch nails being hammered and hands working cement. You see goats and a dog wandering among the greens and browns of the cemetery. You see the fabrication of the name plate—careful stenciling, chemical finishing, a laminate peeled off revealing the words “Ashes ... Entered Into Rest … 30th May 2002 ... Age: 25 Yrs.” Steve McQueenIn voiceover, a friend relates what became of Ashes. They all lived together in “the ghetto”; Ashes was “a good guy, a brilliant guy in the ocean”; one day he happened across a stash of drugs that he believed would make him rich. Instead, he was shot over them, first in the hand, then in the back, then in the belly. It’s on this side of Ashes that McQueen’s unrelenting documentarian approach starts to force questions. There is the painstaking labor, laid out for the viewer: How often does one considered the physical work that goes into a grave marker? The rebar, the paint, the man-hours? Then there are the existential questions. At certain points, McQueen steps back to proffer a wide shot of the graveyard. You see the other tombs; you think of the labor they took, and the lives they signify. Ashes’s murder connects to larger fault lines of race, poverty, and colonization, and an air of tragedy is undeniable in these videos. But the murder itself is not the subject—his passing is invisible, taking up only the space between two sides of a flat surface. Such is the case for death in general: It’s an instant, much shorter than life and certainly much shorter than what’s after. It’s also a generator of story—an ending that gives shape to what came before it. But McQueen’s films often evade the traditional strictures of stories, and this project almost seems to actively reject narrative. A news account or novelization might focus on the grisly facts of Ashes’s demise but Ashes keeps them in parentheses. There is only the grainy memory of wondrous life, playing on loop. There is only the clear and undeniable fact of what’s left behind, and the people, like McQueen, who create monuments to those gone. 17 Feb

Jimmy Fallon Tries to Take On Trump - For the first time since he took a late-night hosting job in 2009, Jimmy Fallon seems on rocky ground. His Tonight Show, which has led in the ratings almost every week since he took it over, is suddenly falling behind Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. Fallon’s brand of celebrity and pop culture-focused comedy, which leans on jubilantly silly games and sketches, suddenly seems out of step with a moment dominated by political news. Worst of all, his YouTube views—a bedrock of his popularity with younger audiences who don’t tune in to broadcast TV—are lagging behind rivals like Colbert and Trevor Noah (though he still has a significant subscriber edge). So it’s no surprise that Fallon, who has strived for impartiality in a late-night world dominated by partisan figures like Seth Meyers, John Oliver, and Samantha Bee, is now trying to be tougher on Donald Trump. It’s perhaps equally unsurprising that he isn’t very good at it. Thursday night, after the president’s much discussed 77-minute press conference, practically every late-night host leapt on the opportunity to satirize it, but only Fallon went for a full impression, donning his Trump wig and bronzer for a three-minute cold open. It hit a lot of the major touchstones for any Trump impression. “First of all, you’re all fake news,” Fallon groused as he took the podium, later reserving some praise for Fox News (or, as he dubbed it, “Faux News”). He took a sip of water with a tiny puppet arm. He joked that he had made “so much progress ... I’ve managed to make the last four weeks feel like four years.” He shook a Magic 8 Ball that prompted him to yell catchphrases like “Big League.” Other lines fell especially flat, like a joke about Elon Musk building a giant Roomba to clean up the country, or Beyoncé being named Secretary of Labor because she’s pregnant with twins. It felt like a solid reminder of why Fallon has largely avoided political humor at The Tonight Show—it’s never been his forte. As an impressionist, going back to his time on Saturday Night Live, he’s always been strong, but he’s better at nailing a celebrity’s cadence than his overall spirit. While Alec Baldwin’s Trump impression has always felt genuinely loaded with nastiness, Fallon just works to get the President’s voice right and then delivers a performance that otherwise feels empty. The Tonight Show is better when it defers to other performers for more hard-hitting material. The blisteringly funny New York standup comic Jo Firestone, whom the show hired as a writer in December, has done several segments as the new Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, skewering the perceived incoherence of her confirmation hearings. “I’m Betsy Dee-Vose,” she starts one appearance, mispronouncing her own name (and ignoring Fallon’s attempts to correct her), “And I’m exited to be your new Secretary of Edu-Cake Boss.” She later proposes a switch to a “pamphlet-based education system.” But still, the show’s efforts feel half-hearted and almost unnecessary given the amount of political humor already thrown at viewers every night by Fallon’s competitors. On Late Night with Seth Meyers, which airs directly after The Tonight Show, Meyers launched into a 10-minute breakdown of the press conference, which had finished just three hours before his show taped. As the host ruefully noted, his prepared “Closer Look” segment for that night on the efforts to repeal Obamacare had to be junked because of the news impact of Trump’s remarks. Late Night has become so practiced at digging into current events that the segment nonetheless felt as seamless as Fallon’s felt very tossed-off. (Meyers also got more than 1 million YouTube views within 12 hours, to Fallon’s 280,000). No doubt, The Tonight Show is in a tough position. There’s no sign that viewer fascination with the Trump administration will let up anytime soon, but the late-night field seeking to lampoon it is only growing more crowded. Fallon’s ratings have dipped below Colbert’s, but he does maintain a narrow edge with the 18-49 year old “demo” prized by advertisers, toward whom his pop culture-focused material has always been tightly aimed. Ever since Fallon’s notorious interview of the now-president last September, which culminated in Fallon ruffling Trump’s hair with a delighted cackle, his credibility as a political satirist has been thin at best. Fallon may be best served by sticking to his strengths, and concentrating on the lighter side of the news. Unfortunately for him, in recent weeks there hasn’t been much of that to go around. 17 Feb

The Disappointments of The Great Wall - It’s probably safe to presume that, had he known the political climate into which he would be dropping his debut English-language film, the legendary Chinese director Zhang Yimou would have chosen a subject other than the heroism of warriors defending an immense national wall against an invasion of horrifying aliens. But, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to the cineplex with the army you have. The Great Wall, a Chinese-American co-production starring Matt Damon as a European mercenary fighting (literal) monsters during the Song dynasty, could have been a marvel. Zhang has directed sophisticated dramas (Ju Dou, Raise High the Red Lantern) and thrilling action pictures (Hero, House of Flying Daggers). The cast includes talented American actors in Willem Dafoe and Pedro Pascal (who was magnificent as Oberyn Martell on Game of Thrones); and Chinese stars both relatively new (Jing Tian) and firmly established (the great Andy Lau). And as a general rule, Damon is as reliably excellent a lead actor as you’ll find anywhere in Hollywood. Alas, rather than multiply these talents productively, The Great Wall reduces them to their lowest common denominator. It’s not a terrible movie, exactly. (For one thing it’s too short to be, clocking in at a merciful 104 minutes in an era when CGI epics frequently approach twice that.) But it’s certainly not a good one. Damon plays William, a rogue who makes the perilous journey to China in search of “black powder,” a fabled substance that can “turn air into fire.” The others in his mercenary band are all killed en route, save for Tovar (Pascal), who with William discovers an unimaginably vast wall garrisoned by selfless warriors called the “Nameless Order.” Their mission, he learns, is to protect China against the Tao Tei, hideous quadrupeds with eyeballs in their shoulder blades. (Envision a pitbull as reimagined by H.R. Giger, and you won’t be far off.) These toothy creatures hurl themselves at the wall by the thousands every 60 years, like really, really ornery cicadas. As in the past—even in his second-tier films such as Curse of the Golden Flower—Zhang’s palette is a chromatic marvel. The defensive forces are resplendent in brightly laminated armor that would not be out of place in Marvel’s Asgard: black for foot-soldiers; red for archers; and, best of all, an all-female cadre of “crane warriors” led by Lin Mae (Jing), who take lances in hand and hurl themselves down from the high parapets like bungee-jumping amazons. There are conspicuous echoes of movies as varied as Lord of the Rings, Starship Troopers, How to Train Your Dragon, and Mulan. Alas, Zhang’s moments of visual splendor—a battalion of hot-air balloonists, the queen-monster and her royal guard of fan-frilled monstrosities—are weighed down by a script and performances almost dutiful in their dullness. Virtually every plot development is telegraphed in advance, and to call the supporting characters two-dimensional would be to insult planar surfaces. Perhaps the greatest disappointment is Damon, who for the first time in memory seems to have absolutely no idea what he’s doing onscreen. His character is meant to be Irish, but I would never have guessed it from his accent, which sounds like the flattened-out grumble that one occasionally gets when British actors try to play Americans. Memo to Zhang: If you’re looking for “generic white action hero” go the Pacific Rim/Godzilla route and hire Charlie Hunnam/Aaron Taylor-Johnson. (Or was it the other way around? Who among us can confidently recall?) Indeed, Pacific Rim and Godzilla are in some ways forbears to Zhang’s disappointing film. There was a brief, misplaced controversy over whether Damon’s casting was an example of “whitewashing” akin to Tilda Swinton’s portrayal of the Tibetan “Ancient One” in Doctor Strange. It isn’t: Zhang always intended a Western actor for the role in order to broaden the film’s appeal beyond Asia. Instead, The Great Wall is a disheartening reminder (like Pacific Rim, Godzilla, the last Transformers movie, and other recent Hollywood product) of the dangers of aggressively tailoring a film to a “global audience.” The difference, of course, is that in this case the tailoring is principally coming from a novel direction: an Asian filmmaker trying to make it big in the American market, rather than the other way around. Nonetheless, the result is comparable: dialogue, motivations, and characterizations are are simplified that they defy cultural misinterpretation—but also lack any meaningful resonance or connection. And they are all in the thrall of a relentless parade of explosions and CGI effects that translate the same way into every language. Indeed, what is most interesting about The Great Wall apart from is its occasionally brilliant visuals, are the explicitly Zhangian elements that still remain, in both aesthetics—this could not be mistaken for an American movie—and ethos. (The theme of obeying orders for the greater good, taken to a fault in his previous works, is present in less ominous form here.) Zhang’s film is still unlikely to make much of a dent in the U.S. box office. It’s a pity that he seems to have so intently compromised his artistic vision in a misplaced effort to do just that. 17 Feb

CBC News

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West White Rose extension project to get sanction as early as March - Husky Energy is just weeks away from officially sanctioning the long-awaited West White Rose extension project, sources say.13 min

'You don't go against a mother's gut feeling': Mom gets answers on crash that killed her son - “You don’t go against a mother’s gut feeling,” said Donna Stevenson, the mother of two boys who were hit by a car in 2013, one of whom was killed.33 min

Ottawa to overhaul victims' fund, where administrative costs far outstrip benefits - A federal fund designed to give financial help to parents whose children have been murdered or gone missing has spent more than 14 times as much on administration costs as it has on actual grants.47 min

How saying yes to that free WiFi could make 'you the product' to businesses - More and more businesses are turning to wifi marketing, where users give permission to be targeted with ads in exchange for free internet.04:26

Quebec increases maple syrup production amid internal revolt, foreign competition - Despite a 30 per cent increase in production over the last decade, Quebec's share of global output has fallen. The problem, some say, lies with the tight grip that the Quebec Maple Syrup Federation has over the province's maple syrup producers.04:04

'My only goal is to get justice': Sue Caribou heads to MMIW inquiry's 1st family advisory circle - Susan Caribou will be sharing the stories of her family who have been murdered or disappeared in Manitoba at the first meeting of the family advisory circle in Toronto with the missing and murdered Indigenous women inquiry.04:00

Don't go changing? Alberta MLA wants to drop daylight saving time - Does it continue to make sense for Albertans to change their clocks twice a year? An Alberta MLA is asking that question.03:55

Homeless man's 'tragic' death unrelated to shelter staff cuts, Toronto mayor says - Toronto Mayor John Tory is calling the death of a homeless Indigenous man earlier this week "tragic," but says it's unrelated to last week's city budget vote to cut 10 front-line shelter staff.03:55

'Feeling squeezed out': Will a move to save Vancouver's housing past compromise its future? - In a city where "bulldozer-bait" homes can fetch close to $3 million, Vancouver's chief planner is faced with a choice that could shape the city for decades to come.03:00

The old ways of trying to fix the military aren't working. The Canadian Armed Forces should unionize - This would mean giving the military rank and file the right, as a group, to self-advocate and negotiate for improved salary, benefits and working conditions within government-approved parameters.03:00

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Photo: Long exposure 38/52, by Gauthier DELECROIX – 郭天 - Long exposure 38/52 © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Gauthier DELECROIXDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall19 Feb

New Report Details Torture and Criminalization of Human Rights Advocacy - A new report released this week by Chinese Human Rights Defenders highlights the widespread use of systematic torture by Chinese security agencies as a key tactic aimed at extracting forced confessions from detained human rights activists. The report notes that this phenomenon is part of a broader move by the Chinese state to legalize repressive measures and criminalize human rights advocacy. Benjamin Haas at The Guardian reports: “The Chinese government seems intent on eliminating civil society through a combination of new legislation restricting the funding and operations of NGOs, and the criminalisation of human rights activities as a so-called threat to national security,” Frances Eve, a researcher at CHRD, told the Guardian. “What stands out is the almost institutionalised use of torture to force defenders to confess that their legitimate and peaceful human rights work is somehow a ‘crime’.” Reports of torture while in detention in 2016 were rampant, with methods including beatings, attacks by fellow inmates on the orders of prison guards, stress positions, deprivation of food, water and sleep, inhumane conditions and deprivation of medical treatment.   […] “There are no more ‘grey areas’,” an unnamed human rights activist said in the report. “To advocate for human rights in China today, you must be willing to accept the reality that the government views your work as ‘illegal’.” [Source] In response to the torture revelations, a number of Chinese lawyers and activists from both within China and abroad have announced the establishment of the China Anti-Torture Alliance, a grassroots organization with a goal towards promoting the implementation of the United Nation’s Convention Against Torture in China. Chinese rights lawyers are especially vulnerable to prosecution and state violence as the country’s human rights situation continues to deteriorate. Nearly 300 human rights lawyers and activists have been interrogated, detained, or charged in the so-called 709 crackdown, which refers to the start of the crackdown in July of 2015. At the Associated Press, Nomaan Merchant reports on the plight of China’s dissident lawyers: Lawyers who defend human rights activists and dissidents targeted by China’s communist government have increasingly themselves become subject to political prosecutions, violence and other means of suppression, according to a report released Thursday. The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a coalition of groups working within and outside China, identified six occasions last year that lawyers were beaten by plaintiffs, police officers or assailants likely hired by authorities. In more than a dozen cases, the report found, detainees were pressured to fire their own lawyers and accept government-supplied attorneys. […] Wang Quanzhang, who defended members of the Falun Gong meditation sect banned by China, was charged with subversion of state power in January 2016 after previously being beaten and detained. His wife, Li Wenzu, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Wang is now under indictment and being held without access to family or lawyers. […] Four people associated with Wang’s law firm, Fengrui, were convicted in August of charges that they incited protests and took funding from foreign groups. [Source] Veteran rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang, who was taken into custody during the 709 crackdown, is scheduled to stand trial in a court in Tianjin, where prosecutors have formally charged him with subversion earlier this week. Nectar Gan at South China Morning Post reports: Prosecutors in Tianjin charged Wang Quanzhang with “inciting subversion of state power” on Tuesday, his wife, Li Wenzu, said on Wednesday. Wang will be tried in the Tianjin No 2 Intermediate People’s Court, where three other lawyers and an advocate rounded up in the “709 crackdown” were tried in August. They were sentenced to three to seven years in jail on subversion charges. […] The China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group said last month that Wang and another 709 lawyer, Li Heping, had been subjected to various form of ­torture, including electric shocks, while in custody. Li said she feared for her husband’s well-being, but she did not think the authorities would let her or his lawyers visit him because they would not want him to reveal the extent of his torture. [Source] At Hong Kong Free Press, human rights advocate Michael Caster looks at how Wang’s case illustrates the “emptiness of China’s rhetoric on the rule of law.”  Since August 2015, Wang has been denied contact with his family and lawyers. We won’t know the full extent of his suffering until he is permitted to speak freely. Still, Wang’s case is emblematic of everything wrong with China’s empty rhetoric of being a country governed by the rule of law. […] Chinese law provides the right to meet with legal representation and family members, but allows for exceptions for national security crimes. There is a sick contradiction for the State to accuse Wang of threatening national security while it terrorizes its own citizens. […] Not only has Wang been denied his right to meet with his lawyers, in early August Tianjin police posted a statement claiming Wang had dismissed his own lawyer in favor of one appointed by the authorities. This claim is absurd for those of us who know Wang, who has been insistent since at least 2010 that he would never accept a State-appointed lawyer. Since 2012, Wang has arranged for lawyer Cheng Hai to represent him. Wang even left a note with friends that under no circumstances would he dismiss his lawyer. So absurd are the charges against Wang that even the police can’t seem to conjure evidence without resorting to authoritarian measures of collective intimidation and reprisal against friends, family members, and lawyers. When another former colleague, Peter Dahlin, was held for three weeks in January, his interrogators tried to convince him to denounce Wang, repeatedly calling him a criminal. Further demonstrating their contempt for legal independence, police have even attempted to pressure Wang’s lawyers to incriminate their client, that is before they decided to just illegally dismiss them. [Source] Despite the grim human rights condition in China, the country was re-elected last year to the United Nations’ Human Rights Council. A number of  international and regional non-governmental organizations have sent a joint letter to Permanent Missions to the UN in Geneva, calling on member governments of the UN Human Rights Council to hold China accountable for its human rights violations. © cindyliuwenxin for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Black Friday 2015, Black Friday trials, civil society, human rights activists, rights lawyers, tortureDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall17 Feb

Photo: Mending shoes, by dietertimmerman - Mending shoes © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall17 Feb

UCSD Stands By Dalai Lama Invite Despite Protest - On February 2, the University of California San Diego announced confirmation of their invited commencement speaker for 2017: Tenzin Gyatso, also known as the 14th Dalai Lama. From UCSD: Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama to Speak at UC San Diego Commencement The exiled spiritual head and leader of the Tibetan people will address graduating students at commencement in June 2017. He will also speak at a second event on campus open to the public. The University of California San Diego, one of the top 15 research universities in the world and recognized for its contributions to the public good, in partnership with The Friends of the Dalai Lama Foundation, founded by Ven. Lama Tenzin Dhonden the Personal Emissary for Peace to His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, today announced that the exiled spiritual head and leader of the Tibetan people will offer the keynote address at the invitation-only UC San Diego All Campus Commencement June 17, 2017. His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama will also speak June 16 at a second event, which will be open to the public. This will be his first 2017 U. S. tour stop. “We are honored to host His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama at UC San Diego and thankful that he will share messages of global compassion with our graduates and their families, as well as with a broad public audience,” said Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla. “A man of peace, the Dalai Lama promotes global responsibility and service to humanity. These are the ideals we aim to convey and instill in our students and graduates at UC San Diego.” […] [Source] While the Dalai Lama is perhaps known more widely among Western university students as a spiritual leader who advocates compassion even in the most difficult of situations, a global ambassador for Buddhism, and a climate awareness spokesman, those were not the factors that came to mind for some members of the university’s growing population of Chinese students. Outraged that a man Beijing considers to be a separatist and fundamental enemy of Chinese sovereignty would be speaking at commencement, a group of Chinese UCSD students mobilized in opposition. On February 7, UCSD’s student paper ran an op-ed by Ruixian Wang, a Chinese student who opposes the Dalai Lama’s invite, making a case for why: What I am writing cannot represent all Chinese students’ thoughts, but most of us share the same disappointment about the university’s invitation of the 14th Dalai Lama to speak at this year’s commencement. The main reason why many Chinese students are upset is that our university shows little consideration about cultural respect, as he is a politically sensitive person in China. We admire all his achievements in promoting education and raising awareness on environmental issues, and we admire the fact that he won the Nobel Peace Prize. We respect free speech no matter what he is going to say at the commencement. However, we also want to address our concerns. Commencement is a landmark of our life. Our family members are coming all the way from China, flying for more than 10 hours to celebrate with us. The Dalai Lama, as a political icon, is viewed differently in our country. We want to spend a fantastic time with our family during the commencement, but his presence will ruin our joy. What we want to say is that objectively, he will be an excellent speaker for the commencement. Nonetheless, culturally speaking, his selection to be a presenter is inappropriate in such a situation, considering how many Chinese students and their families are going to attend this commencement. […] [Source] Wang’s objection, that inviting the “politically sensitive” Dalai Lama lacks “cultural respect,” can be situated into a long tradition of controversial tactics for policing speech in the name of tolerance that have been increasingly used on college campuses in recent years. At Quartz, Josh Horwitz reports further on how the movement at UCSD has attempted to present the Dalai Lama invite as an assault on diversity and inclusiveness. While this isn’t the first time overseas Chinese students have gathered to oppose the Dalai Lama, the methods being used by those opposed to his UCSD speech are new: The announcement triggered outrage among Chinese students who view the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader as an oppressive figure threatening to divide a unified China. A group of them now plans to meet with the university chancellor to discuss the content of the upcoming speech. The awkwardness doesn’t end there. As the aggrieved students have trumpeted their opposition, their rhetoric has borrowed elements from larger campus activist movements across the United States. The upshot: What Westerners might perceive as Communist Party orthodoxy is mingling weirdly with academia’s commitment to diversity, political correctness, and other championed ideals. […] This is not the first time that overseas Chinese students at US colleges have voiced opposition to certain campus events perceived as disrespectful to China. In 2008, hundreds gathered at the University of Washington to rally against the Dalai Lama’s acceptance of an honorary degree. But typically, criticism is couched in familiar tropes like “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people,” rather than failing to account for diversity. “If there were an objection to the Dalai Lama speaking on campus 10 years ago, you would not have seen the objection from Chinese students being framed within the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion,” says professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom, who researches modern Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine. “There is a borrowing of rhetorical strategies.” […] John Li, a UCSD student and principal member of the CSSA who requested Quartz not use his real name, says the chancellor invited a group of overseas Chinese students for a meeting on Feb. 15. According to him, the group won’t ask the chancellor to disinvite the Dalai Lama. But it will request that he “send out statements that clarify the content of Dalai Lama’s speech,” “make sure his speech has nothing to do with politics,” and “stop using words like ‘spiritual leader’ or ‘exile’” to describe the Dalai Lama. […] [Source] Quartz’ Horwitz has also translated segments of WeChat statements made by the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) and a UCSD Chinese alumni group, and archives Facebook comments from students offended by the invite. Horwitz also notes suspicion among some academics that Chinese consulates use the CSSA to spread Party propaganda on campuses abroad. On Twitter, another U.S.-based Chinese student who doesn’t agree with the CSSA on the Dalai Lama opposition posted a screenshot from an Initium article which claims that CSSA has admitted to taking Chinese government funds. At Inside Higher Ed, Elizabeth Redden quotes a statement of support for UCSD’s invite from the International Campaign for Tibet, and also a warning from Tibet scholar Robert Barnett about the principles at stake and an encouragement for dialogue: [From the Internation Campaign for Tibet’s statement:] “By objecting to the invitation to the Dalai Lama, the CSSA of UC San Diego is doing the work of the Chinese government,” the organization said. “The University of [California], San Diego’s invitation to the Dalai Lama is a reflection of the tremendous American public interest in and support for his thoughts and vision for the broader world; unfortunately, the CSSA is serving the shortsighted political agenda of the current Chinese leadership.” Robert Barnett, the director of the modern Tibetan studies program at Columbia University, said there are major principles at stake. “Does the university accept to be bullied by the foreign government in terms of who it selects as a speaker, especially when that subject of that foreign government’s bullying is almost certainly, without any serious question of all, not deserving of that bullying and is certainly being misrepresented and indeed demonized by the Chinese government?” he asked. “Do we allow the Chinese government’s propaganda to dictate major cultural decisions in other countries?” “What’s interesting is San Diego hasn’t backed down; that’s an important position,” said Barnett. “But the way to move forward is dialogue, not grandstanding.” […] [Source] Previous incidents have shown how complicated such dialogue can be. In 2008, Grace Wang, a Chinese student at Duke University, attempted to mediate an on campus conflict between pro-Tibetan and pro-Beijing protesters. Her laudable efforts attracted herself and her family harassment from nationalists who saw her as a traitor. Politics was likely not what the Dalai Lama planned on preaching in San Diego: climate scientists are scheduled to share the stage with him in June, and he has in recent years been known to sideline political issues—especially ones concerning the Tibet question—in favor of environmental ones. Nevertheless, the students’ talk with the UCSD administration did result in a promise that he wouldn’t brush upon the political at the June commencement. The state-affiliated tabloid Global Times reports, using language that very much reflects the official CCP line on the Dalai Lama: Pradeep K. Khosla, the UCSD chancellor, met with three groups of Chinese overseas students, namely the Chinese Union, Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) and the Chinese Business Society, Fan Da (pseudonym), a member of the Chinese Union, told the Global Times on Thursday. “The university said that they would not disinvite the Dalai Lama but will stop using words like ‘freedom fighter’ and ‘spiritual head and leader of the Tibetan people’ to describe him,” Fan said. Fan added that the chancellor promised that the Dalai Lama would not include any political content in his speech and the university would soon publish a notice about the issue. “When we asked the chancellor if he knew that the university’s invitation to the Dalai Lama hurt Chinese people’s feelings, the chancellor said he only knew that the Dalai Lama is a ‘religious activist’ but had no idea about what he did,” noted Fan. […] [Source] At the Taiwan Sentinel, editor-in-chief J. Michael Cole puts the UCSD/Dalai Lama case in the context of other recent Chinese “student movements” at overseas campuses, describing this trend as in line with Beijing’s efforts to “condition” the West on controversial political issues long settled by the CCP: The most recent example occurred at Durham University in the U.K., where the PRC Embassy in London was reportedly in contact with a student debating society at the university to raise concerns about Anastasia Lin, a former Miss World Canada and a fierce critic of the CCP. An embassy official is said to have told the student group that inviting Lin could “harm” relations between China and the UK. […] […] In 2015, the Chinese embassy in Canada reportedly mobilized protesters against a talk at the University of Ottawa (UO) by Andrew Yang, a former minister of national defense and adviser to president Ma Ying-jeou at the time. The university was bombarded by e-mails and phone calls “at all levels of the UO administration,” according to a source at the university. Chinese officials ostensibly feared that Yang’s talk, which focused on the 70th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II, was a veiled attempt to promote the Republic of China, Taiwan’s official name. Though we cannot conclude from those isolated incidents that the tens of thousands of PRC students abroad agree with this type of activism in foreign lands, there nevertheless are worrying indications that such behavior is becoming more frequent, at least among those whose exposure to Western liberal democracy hasn’t, as had been hoped, subdued their nationalistic fervor and attachment to the PRC’s territorial claims. […] […] By dint of repetition, nationalistic Chinese students could accomplish what the PRC’s diplomatic missions have done at the political level: condition Western authorities to adopt a policy of risk-avoidance on issues that are regarded as “controversial” by the CCP — Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, human rights … and Taiwan. [Source] In the diplomatic sphere, some of this conditioning—especially concerning the Tibet question and the Dalai Lama—has already successfully occurred. Despite the Dalai Lama’s decades of advocating not for Tibetan independence but for genuine cultural autonomy within China, Beijing continues to consider him a separatist. Regular protest from the Foreign Ministry over foreign leaders’ meetings with the aging Tibetan spiritual leader has resulted in less diplomatic engagement with leaders keen to avoid problems with Beijing over recent years. Last October, The Guardian ran an editorial calling for resistance to Beijing’s anti-Dalai Lama diplomatic efforts on the world stage. Meanwhile, as some of UCSD’s Chinese students prepare for inevitable anti-Dalai Lama protests in June, Sixth Tone’s David Paulk reports on another, far less politically charged campaign to defend diversity by Chinese students at Columbia University: Around the end of January, several East Asian students who used Romanized or pinyin versions of their given names returned to their rooms to find that their name cards had been ripped off, while those bearing Western names remained intact. According to Columbia’s student news website, the attacks on Asian name cards began earlier in the semester at one dorm and spread to others during the holiday. An investigation has been launched into whether the incidents were racially motivated, and [associate dean of multicultural affairs] Aquino has called for any information on the parties responsible while expressing concerns about the “growing climate of xenophobia” and its effects on the university community. Less than a week after the initial reports, Columbia undergraduate Yan Huhe published a video he made on Facebook of himself and fellow Chinese international students talking about the meaning of their names, as well as the hopes and dreams their parents had when they chose them. The video, titled “Say My Name,” had been viewed over 253,000 times as of Tuesday afternoon. […] [Source] © josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: california, Dalai Lama, diplomacy, overseas Chinese students, protests, Tibet, universityDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall17 Feb

Photo: Untitled, by Anthony Anastas - Untitled © Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Anthony AnastasDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall17 Feb

Black Mirror or Red Herring? Shazeda Ahmed on China’s Social Credit System - Over the past two years, China has seen a proliferation of state-endorsed experiments representing early stages towards a national social credit system. These pilots evaluate citizens based on opaque formulae reportedly incorporating financial, social, behavioral, and legal data; and reward or penalize them by, for example, facilitating or restricting travel, credit, and shopping. The final system, officials hope, will “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” Such resounding language, together with suspicions about political metrics and the schemes’ eye-catchingly dystopian long-term potential, have tended to overshadow the pilots’ relatively limited, piecemeal, and provisional current state. But the nascent social credit system is indeed part of “a broader Chinese government push to harness big data as a resource for social control,” according to Shazeda Ahmed, a UC Berkeley PhD student and former fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. Ahmed has previously written about her investigations of the social credit pilots and related issues at Citizen Lab, and discussed them this week with CDT: CDT: Who is conducting these pilots? How and when did they start? What are the goals? Shazeda Ahmed: Right now there are two types of pilot testing, private and public. The Chinese government has given eight companies official permission to do experimental testing of social credit systems, and the one that’s publicly available is Sesame Credit, owned by Alibaba subsidiary Ant Financial. The public social credit pilots are being conducted at a city level in over thirty cities around the country, with a prominent example being Shanghai. I think the testing started sometime in late 2014 or 2015, when the first drafts of regulations suggesting how such a system could work were issued and when the first Western media articles critiquing the system were published. The purported goals of what the state is hoping will one day be a nationwide social credit system differ depending on what you read. I’ve seen government officials cast social credit as a way to reinstate trust in people and institutions. Both individuals and businesses get social credit scores, and there is an emphasis on the notion that data produced from their transactions can be used to accurately monitor how reliably they adhere to laws and social norms. I’ve even seen a few Chinese editorials where people make the complete opposite argument that’s common to Western condemnatory takes on social credit, and insist that social credit would actually protect civil liberties. This is related to one of the other alleged goals of the system, which is to issue credit to traditionally “unbanked” populations– migrant workers, college students, rural citizens who all seek to take out loans. Although they may stand to gain opportunities through social credit schemes, they are also highly vulnerable and could end up in debt, among other consequences. CDT: But they wouldn’t have to resort to nude selfies to get loans? SA: I’ve read about this type of loan collateral before and can’t say I know much about it, but yes, that is definitely another way that less well-off and potentially less tech-savvy individuals who need to borrow money are exploited. I remember the first time I read about it and hoped it wasn’t true! To me, making loan disbursement conditional on something that can be used to blackmail people seems to defy some of the (admittedly vague) concepts of morality that are loosely articulated in the social credit system. I sincerely hope that at the intersection of still-developing privacy protections and regulations about “indecent” content that can’t be posted online in China, protections against this sort of harassment emerge. CDT: How do the various pilot schemes differ? SA: At present I don’t have a clear sense of how the private company-owned social credit programs differ from the municipal government-run ones, although it seems that through the former users of financial technology or “fintech” apps can access their scores instantly, whereas with the city-level social credit systems one might need to show up at a specific office to find out one’s credit score. I have a lot of unanswered questions about the variance between these separate systems, how they may or may not converge if the goal is to create a unified system, and whether or not this is intentional on the state’s part to have a variety of results to compare after the pilot testing ends. CDT: What kind of data feeds into the system? SA: Taking the concrete example of Sesame Credit, within the app there’s a visual that breaks the credit score down into five components: users’ credit history, behavioral habits, ability to pay off debts, personal information, and social networks. Recently I’ve seen articles that suggest data including criminal and other government-held records will also be included. The actual algorithms that compute credit scores are black boxed, which means that it would be illegal to do experimental testing to figure out which transactions and behaviors would cause a score to rise or fall. When I wrote about this for the Citizen Lab, I sought out statements from Alipay and Sesame Credit company representatives about which inputs affect scores, and found many peculiar and highly specific factors including hours of video game play (score declines) or purchasing diapers (assumption that user is a parent, thus score increases). These statements seemed to suggest that contrary to the language of objectivity the state uses to describe this system, social credit is (surprise) based on subjective Chinese social norms and practices. CDT: Without incriminating yourself, have you been able to do much independent exploration of how the scores are calculated? SA: All of the research I have done on this so far is based on openly available sources such as Chinese news media, Sina Weibo, IT industry journals, and web forums. I can’t say I’ve seen many fully fleshed-out theories of how the system works, though I have come across more than a few Chinese articles and threads suggesting that the way to raise one’s Sesame Credit score is to do more shopping using Alipay. This reinforces my own hunch that the story in the shadows of the Western media portrayals of “social credit as Big Brother” is actually one of social credit being about spurring consumerism in a country where people have historically saved more than they’ve spent. In a way this is a banal point about how social credit encourages capitalism in China, because of course this is the point of credit scoring. Yet it’s still worth raising because I think social credit will be inextricably linked with fintech, and it’s important to consider how mechanisms of reward and punishment that are tied to one’s personal finances and behavior (online and offline) will develop in light of this bundling. CDT: What are some of the current consequences of high or low scores? SA: Since I last checked, high Sesame Credit scores open up access to expedited security checks at the Beijing domestic airport, as well as a faster visa application process to places like Singapore and Luxembourg (with other countries having expressed interest in this as well.) Speaking to my point about consumerism above, it’s not particularly shocking that the countries that currently are or plan to partner with this express visa process are also ones where Alipay users can pay for products using the app. So to reiterate, we can imagine a scenario in which someone has a high credit score that gets them a visa to one of these countries relatively quickly, and once they’re in said foreign country they can open up the Alipay app to find out about local sights and shops, as well as make payments using Alipay (and potentially rack up a higher credit score in the process). Other benefits include having online purchases delivered to one’s home to try out before paying for them, and renting cars or booking hotels without putting down a deposit. Punishments are less clear at the moment, but primarily include blacklisting and fines. An example I’ve seen mentioned in a few places is the Supreme People’s Court’s list of people in extreme debt, which is apparently shared with Alipay so that those people cannot make “luxury purchases” (undefined) in the app or board flights or high-speed trains. I’m not clear on how this would affect their credit score, but it would appear to fall under the Sesame Credit category about fulfilling commitments and obligations. CDT: Some comments from Ant Financial suggest that the system is not just about passive tracking, but active “social sculpting.” Beyond encouraging consumption in the way you’ve discussed, this seems to include incentivizing activities like charitable donations, and discouraging others like late night web browsing and excessive video gaming. In your Citizen Lab piece, you even mentioned “the possibility of social credit and mobile finance access being blocked to penalize citizens for acts of protest.” SA: Yes, while I have no hard evidence of this sort of blocking having yet occurred, it’s certainly not difficult to imagine how easy it would be to instate. In their article about social credit The Economist raised this point as well. There is definitely a drive to change people’s behavior, and one of the questions I’m hoping to explore through interviews with social credit users is whether they are behaving differently in their daily lives to try and raise their scores. After all, it’s not yet a nationwide system, the benefits may not appeal to everyone, and the punishments seem to thus far be quite minor. This also raises the question of if hackers have figured out how to artificially raise their scores and are riding the benefits of that. China’s not known for designing hacker-proof tech, and Alipay in particular could do with better cybersecurity practices. Pretty recently a friend told me about how Alipay had a feature where if you forgot your password, you could identify a few of your friends and recent purchases to reset it, whether on your phone or someone else’s. [Facebook uses similar verification features.] Naturally people took advantage of this, and Alipay’s quick fix was to keep this feature but only limit it to the phone the user had registered with the app. Similar events are bound to occur, and lax security precautions make me wonder if in the future people will be able to purchase pre-curated accounts that already have high scores built into them. CDT: How far beyond the kinds of tracking commonplace in the West do the Chinese systems look set to go? SA: I think that depends on how well-integrated the private company-run systems become with government bureaus. While the municipal-level social credit systems are worth paying attention to, I think the range of data points a source like Sesame Credit has access to is far greater and can be put to any number of uses that the company and the state may not have even realized or articulated yet. It’s also imperative to pay attention to what gets tracked through fintech and social credit apps when users are abroad, as I mentioned above. The power to monitor citizens while they travel shouldn’t be underestimated. Finally, I’m really interested in seeing how this kind of system might serve as a model to developing countries that see China as an exemplar of social control. If digital citizenship initiatives were to become more popular along with social credit scores proliferating in other countries, it wouldn’t surprise me if scores were someday used to make decisions about immigration and international travel, for example. CDT: Western coverage of the social credit system has not always been entirely sober. How have observers been most carried away? SA: I have to admit that I’m growing tired of seeing social credit compared to 1984, especially because it’s not been rigorously researched yet and is bound to change in ways we can’t predict. There are several comparisons to the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive” that are funny but make the assumption that somehow everyone is already receiving a social credit score and that they’ve structured their lives around raising it. CDT: What do we know so far about how users feel about the schemes, and how seriously they take them? SA: The few interviews I’ve seen with Chinese citizens who are using it suggest that they’re either reserving judgment or not adversely affected. This too can change, and while I think drawing attention to social credit is incredibly important, I’d like to see more impressions from average users to get a sense of how it will spread and be received across China. I’ve poked around some Chinese forums where techies congregate to talk about how to raise scores, with a notable example being Zhihu (kind of like Quora). People there seem to think of social credit as being more of a game, and have made claims about raising scores by making specific purchases. While these are definitely interesting takes on the system, it’s hard to know how seriously to take them and how accurate these findings may be. CDT: Is there a risk that, despite claims that the schemes will extend credit to people who haven’t had it before, they might end up exacerbating existing inequalities? That you’ll need to have social credit to accumulate social credit? SA: This is another concern I’ve seen raised in web forums, and I’m not sure how that’s played out so far. It’d be great to gather some empirical evidence of this, because it seems highly possible that the system is cyclical as you’re suggesting. There has been minimal discussion of how to address such an issue, or the related problem of contesting a score change that someone feels is an inaccurate reflection of their behavior. CDT: What are the other privacy implications? What kind of protections are in place for all this pooled data? SA: One that comes to mind is that there is inadequate transparency around which inputs determine a credit score, which could mean that users are being judged based on factors they did not consent to sharing for this specific purpose. I think the greater privacy infringements right now can be found in the local investigatory services through which one can easily buy Chinese citizens’ data, which David Bandurski and the Southern Metropolis Daily recently wrote about in depth. There are some privacy provisions under the new cybersecurity law that will go into effect in June, but there appears to be far greater concern with keeping data on Chinese citizens stored in China than there is for who within China has access to that data. To me the biggest concern is about who the data-collecting companies share citizens’ personal information with– third parties? The state? It’s still unclear. © Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: alibaba, credit, privacy, Shanghai, social credit system, surveillance, trust crisisDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall16 Feb

Person of the Week: Cai Xia - CDT is expanding its wiki beyond the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon to include short biographies of public intellectuals, cartoonists, human rights activists, and other people pushing for change in China. The wiki is a work in progress. 蔡霞 Cai Xia. (Source: China Elections and Governance) From her position at the Central Party School, Cai Xia has argued for the protection of individual rights under the law and for internal reform of the Chinese Communist Party. Cai was born into a military family and has served in the People’s Liberation Army. In 1988 she earned her Ph.D. in law from the Central Party School, which is run by the Central Committee explicitly for the purpose of training Party officials. Cai is currently on faculty at the Department of Party Construction and Education Research. She is the author of the 2002 book “Globalization and Chinese Communist Party Values” (全球化与中国共产党人价值观), for which she won the Prize for National Party Building Reading Material. Cai has drawn on her deep understanding of Chinese law and the CCP to criticize law-bending by the authorities and the silencing of debate within the Party. When Chinese-American businessman Charles Xue was detained on suspicion of soliciting a prostitute in August 2013, Cai wrote on Weibo that “the relationship between the prostitute and man who solicited her was a private transaction that is not within the scope of the law,” and that the authorities had therefore infringed on the rights of both Xue and the Ms. Zhang whom he had allegedly called. In February 2016, when Ren Zhiqiang was excoriated by the Party and removed from social media in punishment for criticizing state media, Cai spoke out on his behalf in an online opinion piece. She said state media’s attack on Ren violated the constitution of the Chinese Communist Party, and lamented the lack of channels for communication inside the Party. Cai’s article quickly disappeared from Chinese social media. Censorship has not stopped Cai from voicing her opinion online. She rebuked the Beijing court in December 2016 after it decided not to bring charges against the officers involved in the case of Lei Yang, an educated, middle class man whose death shocked the country: The end of Lei Yang’s case shatters what little credibility the authorities had left. It shreds the last scraps of illusion and hope that the righteous had clung to… An authoritarian government cannot impartially enforce the law for the people. Dictators will go on flaunting the law, without shame or restraint, in the name of the people. [Chinese] CDT Chinese has archived a number of Cai’s essays. Entry written by Anne Henochowicz. Can’t get enough of subversive Chinese netspeak? Check out our latest ebook, “Decoding the Chinese Internet: A Glossary of Political Slang.” Includes dozens of new terms and classic catchphrases, presented in a new, image-rich format. Available for pay-what-you-want (including nothing). All proceeds support CDT. © josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Cai Xia, Central Party School, lawyers, Lei Yang, Ren Zhiqiang, word of the weekDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall16 Feb

Photo: Al final del tunel, by Javi Prieto - Al final del tunel © Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Javi PrietoDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall16 Feb

Rebel Pepper: Who’s Afraid of the Big Banned Book? - Cartoonist Rebel Pepper comments on the case of Guangxi Normal University Press social media editor Dai Xuelin, who received a five-year prison sentence earlier this month for running an “illegal business operation.” Dai and his business partner Zhang Xiaoxiong, who was sentenced to 3.5 years, had been independently distributing unauthorized books from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Their case was reportedly handled by the same Ningbo police who pursued one of their sources, the five Causeway Bay booksellers who went missing in late 2015. Dai holds a copy of “How The Red Sun Rose,” one of the books he was prosecuted for selling: a history of the civil war-era Communist Party by former Nanjing University professor Gao Hua, who died in 2011. The book is published in English by Hong Kong’s Chinese University Press, which describes it as follows: This work offers the most comprehensive account of the origin and consequences of the Yan’an Rectification Movement from 1942 to 1945. The author argues that this campaign emancipated the Chinese Communist Party from Soviet-influenced dogmatism and unified the Party, preparing it for the final victory against the Nationalist Party in 1949. More importantly, this monograph shows in great detail how Mao Zedong established his leadership through this party-wide political movement by means of aggressive intra-party purges, thought control, coercive cadre examinations, and total reorganizations of the Party’s upper structure. The result of this movement not only set up the foundation for Mao’s new China, but also deeply influenced the Chinese political structure today. [Source] Chinese authorities have been waging an intense campaign against unapproved history or “historical nihilism,” including the takeover last summer of the formerly liberal journal Yanhuang Chunqiu. RFA notes that the former head of Guangxi Normal University Press, who had published and sold “How The Red Sun Rose” on the mainland, was detained for alleged bribery last May. The U.S.-backed broadcaster also spoke with Shenzhen-based author Tian You, who said he had been detained for five days over the past year. “I just criticized their stupidity by saying that nobody would pay any attention to those books if they just allowed them to go on sale,” Tian said. “As soon as they start arresting people, they are pretty much doing the selling for them, aren’t they?” © Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: banned books, book ban, cartoons, Causeway Bay booksellers, historical nihilism, history, hong kong publishing, Mao Zedong, Ningbo, political cartoons, publishing, Rebel Pepper, yananDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall15 Feb

Badiucao: One Love, One China - In recent cartoons for CDT, Badiucao puts a Valentine twist on President Trump’s emerging relationship with President Xi Jinping, which took a step forward in a recent phone call: Valentines, by Badiucao: A second drawing focuses on Trump’s effort to patch up relations with Beijing by acknowledging the “one China” policy, which declares that Taiwan is part of China. Trump had earlier stated that he was “not committed” to the longstanding policy. One China, by Badiucao Since his inauguration in January, President Trump’s policy toward China has been elusive and unpredictable. He ignited a firestorm of controversy soon after taking office by accepting a phone call from President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan and later saying that he may choose not to adhere to the “one China” policy, which has defined the U.S.-China-Taiwan trilateral relationship for decades. These actions seemed to indicate that he would live up to campaign rhetoric to take a tougher line on China than his predecessors. Yet after two weeks of silence between the two leaders, Trump switched tacks by promising to uphold the one China status quo in a phone call with President Xi Jinping. From Simon Denyer and Philip Rucker of the Washington Post: In a statement issued late Thursday, the White House said the two men had held a lengthy and “extremely cordial” conversation. “The two leaders discussed numerous topics and President Trump agreed, at the request of President Xi, to honor our one-China policy,” the White House statement said. In return, Xi said he “appreciated his U.S. counterpart, Donald Trump, for stressing that the U.S. government adheres to the one-China policy,” which he called the “political basis” of relations between the two nations, state news agency Xinhua reported. [Source] The call has been taken by many as a sign of acquiescence by Trump to Xi, as he acknowledged that his mention of the “one China” policy was at Xi’s request. From Jane Perlez of The New York Times: But in doing so, he handed China a victory and sullied his reputation with its leader, Xi Jinping, as a tough negotiator who ought to be feared, analysts said. “Trump lost his first fight with Xi and he will be looked at as a paper tiger,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University of China, in Beijing, and an adviser to China’s State Council. “This will be interpreted in China as a great success, achieved by Xi’s approach of dealing with him.” Mr. Trump’s reversal on Taiwan is likely to reinforce the views of those in China who see him as merely the latest American president to come into office talking tough on China, only to bend eventually to economic reality and adopt more cooperative policies. That could mean more difficult negotiations with Beijing on trade, North Korea and other issues. [Source] Some have attributed the change in stance toward Taiwan to newly sworn in Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former CEO of Exxon Mobil, as well as National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who has since resigned. Reuters reports: The abrupt course adjustment, made public in a White House statement on Thursday after a phone call between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, followed White House meetings this week involving Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the U.S. officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Tillerson joined Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn and others in what one administration official described as a concerted effort to persuade the president that “this is the right way to go, this is right for the relationships and regional stability – and they won the day.” The successful intervention by Tillerson, a former Exxon Mobil chief executive with no previous diplomatic experience who was confirmed just nine days ago, suggests that in a White House-dominated administration, the new secretary of state could help drive decisions on some geopolitical issues. Tillerson’s emerging role suggests that he could be a moderating influence with both friends and adversaries who have been unnerved at times by Trump’s rhetoric and unpredictability. [Source] While official media in China welcomed Trump’s stated commitment to the “one China” policy, some observers caution that it is too soon to declare Xi the winner this round as future unpredictability from the Trump administration should be expected. Ben Blanchard at Reuters reports: Xi has put great personal political capital into seeking a solution over Taiwan, an issue that has festered since 1949 when defeated Nationalist forces fled to the island after losing the civil war to the Communists. China has never renounced the use of force to bring Taiwan under its control. But in its relations with Washington, the risk for Beijing remains that its diplomatic win over “one China” will be short lived, as Trump will not want to be seen as having caved in. “What he’s shown the Chinese is he’s willing to touch the ‘third rail’ of U.S.-China relations,” said Dean Cheng, China expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington. “Beijing can’t predict what he’ll do next – and he’s only been in office three weeks. What is he going to do on trade and other economic issues?” [Source] In a ChinaFile conversation titled, “Did Xi Just Outmaneuver Trump?” MIT’s M. Taylor Fravel follows up on the theme of unpredictability: The initial response to the call has been to declare Xi the “winner” and Trump the “loser,” based on Trump’s reversal. The New York Times declared that Trump’s move “gives China an upper hand.” Yet diplomacy is not a boxing match. The rush to keep score is premature for several reasons. First, Trump only referred to the policy. In all the available readouts of the call, no mention exists of Trump repeating the components of the one China policy, which include the three communiqués (1972, 1979, 1982), the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, and the 1982 “six assurances” given to Taiwan. Although a helpful affirmation of the foundation of U.S.-China relations, Trump’s general reference to the one China policy left him room to interpret it broadly. Second, with Tsai’s election as Taiwan’s President, Beijing has pressed her to affirm the “1992 consensus” about one China. Her reluctance to do so means Beijing is growing ever more suspicious of her intentions regarding independence. In this context, if Trump decides to significantly alter U.S. relations with Taiwan, even if he does so while remaining under the umbrella of a one China policy, tensions in U.S.-China relations will likely increase significantly. Third, talk is cheap. Trump is an unconventional president, with a transactional orientation and impulse. He may change his mind, or offer a new interpretation. China will also push to cement his pledge in the call in other meetings and joint statements between U.S. and Chinese officials. Trump may decide to push back. [Source] Meanwhile, in Taiwan, some were relieved that the return to status quo might mean Taiwan would not be used as a bargaining chip in Trump’s dealings with China. For background on the complex protocol governing relations between China, Taiwan, and the United States, see guides from Joanna Chiu of AFP and WMUR. Many thorny issues remain between China and the U.S., and so far it remains unclear how Trump will navigate them; relations with North Korea are now the focus of attention after Pyongyang launched a missile over the weekend to which Trump responded in an uncharacteristic low-key manner. The Trump administration is continuing to threaten a trade war with China, though there is some indication that they may moderate their stance on that as well. The Chinese financial ties of some of his top advisors, including son-in-law Jared Kushner and incoming Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, have also raised questions about how the administration will proceed to deal with bilateral trade issues. The recent decision by a Chinese court to grant Trump intellectual property rights to his name in China, where products from toilets to condoms bear the Trump name, have also raised the specter of the president’s conflicts of interests. © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: badiucao, donald Trump, One China Principle, political cartoons, Taiwan status, U.S. relationsDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall15 Feb

The Eyeopener from CBC Radio Calgary (Highlights)

Eyeopener Podcast for Feb. 16, 2017 - Today's podcast: Aviation expert comments on MRU plane crash; Lexin Resources forced to shut down; a conversation with Measha Brueggergosman; Calgary Police Commission chair Brian Thiessen.15 Feb

Eyeopener Podcast for Feb. 14, 2017 - Today's podcast: 70th anniversary of Leduc No. 1; jury deliberations set to begin in Douglas Garland trial; we ask if diamonds are losing their lustre for millennials.13 Feb

Eyeopener Podcast for Feb. 13, 2017 - Today's podcast: Calgary test pilot could become Canada’s next astronaut; cleaning up the environment with fungi; 89-year-old Calgary yodeler; budget travel suggestions for the upcoming Family Day long weekend.12 Feb

Eyeopener Podcast for Feb. 10, 2017 - Today's podcast: John Gilchrist reviews OEB Breakfast Co.; Eya-Hey Nakoda performs at the Block Heater festival; Crown presents closing arguments at Garland trial; parents upset over changes to school programs. 9 Feb

Eyeopener Podcast for Feb. 9, 2017 - Today's podcast: How to use a naloxone kit; Sylvan Lake Mayor Sean McIntyre; Calgary judge to decide whether junior hockey lawsuit can proceed; Tom Keenan on cell phone plans and prices. 8 Feb

Eyeopener Podcast for Feb. 8, 2017 - Today's podcast: Brian Pincott decides against running for re-election; Earls on Stephen Avenue moves away from mandatory tipping; This is That co-host Pat Kelly. 7 Feb

Eyeopener Podcast for Feb. 7, 2017 - Today's podcast: Keystone Excavating closes its doors; Advocates for Alberta transgender youth ask for more support; Marcello di Cintio on “Walls: Travels Along the Barricades." 6 Feb

Eyeopener Podcast for Feb. 6, 2017 - Today's podcast: Olds College student discovers innovative way to grow mushrooms; are RRSPs the best place to put your money; why advocates believe drug users should help create drug policy; Calgary runner conquers Triple 7 Quest. 5 Feb

Eyeopener Podcast for Feb. 2, 2017 - Today's podcast: Rick Hanson on Olympic bid exploration committee; Lethbridge assault victim released from hospital; Calgary Opera presents Filumena; long-time Calgary shoe store closes. 1 Feb

Eyeopener Podcast for Feb. 1, 2017 - Today's podcast: Panel of Calgary Muslims talk about events of the past week; Unconventionals on whether Facebook is bad for your mental health; surprising new discovery at the Burgess Shale.31 Jan

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Report: Trump’s Lawyer Involved With Secret Plan to Lift Russian Sanctions - The other two people involved with the plan were a pro-Putin Ukrainian lawmaker and a Trump business associate with links to the mafia. 19 Feb

McCain Keeps Criticizing Trump, Warns Against Attacks on Press - He warned that suppressing the media is “how dictators get started,” though he mostly avoided direct references to the president. 19 Feb

Sweden Confused After Trump Appears to Mistake Fox News Segment for Terrorist Incident - Trump’s fake Swedish news reflects a misleading right-wing narrative about refugee-perpetrated crime. 19 Feb

Trump Attempts Reset with Recycled Campaign Stump Speech in Florida - Trump has already chosen his 2020 opponents: the press and any version of reality that doesn’t come from him. 18 Feb

Report: Senior National Security Council Aide Fired After Criticizing Trump - Meanwhile, Trump is still looking for his next national security adviser. 18 Feb

Trump’s Presidency ‘Enhances’ a $200,000 Mar-a-Lago Membership - But the White House insists nobody is getting enhanced access to the president. 18 Feb

John McCain the Republican vs. John McCain the Patriot - The senator (ambivalently, agonizingly) takes on the president. 18 Feb

Upper East Side Parents Are the Latest Trump Resisters - An elite boarding school allegedly had to cancel a field trip to the Central Park’s Trump-affiliated Wollman Rink. 17 Feb

Trump Might Be Planning to Deploy the National Guard Against Undocumented Immigrants, or He Might Not, Who Can Say? But It Definitely Seems Like He’s Been Thinking About It - The Associated Press has a draft of a memo that suggests deploying as many as 100,000 National Guard troops. 17 Feb

Senate Confirms Leading Opponent of Environmental Regulation As Head of the EPA - Scott Pruitt will spearhead the Trump administration’s efforts to increase water pollution and accelerate man-made climate change. 17 Feb

Daily Kos

Open thread for night owls: In Boston, scientists rally for 'objective reality' - In Boston: Hundreds of scientists and their supporters rallied in historic Copley Square on Sunday, demanding that the Trump administration accept empirical reality on issues such as climate change and highlighting the centrality of objective information to making policy. “We did not politicize science,” said Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard science historian who spoke at the rally, which unfolded on a surprisingly warm February day that left the square filled with mud puddles from the melt of a recent blizzard. “We did not start this fight.” [...] The event, which covered much of Copley Square, seemed to be a promising sign for a far larger March for Science event, scheduled for April 22, Earth Day. That event has more than 800,000 Facebook group members at present and, if such momentum continues, could lead to an unprecedented demonstration by scientists against the new administration. QUOTATION OF THE DAY “The anti-suffragists can gather more statistics than any other person I ever saw, and there is nothing so sweet and calm as when they say, "You cannot deny this, because here are the figures, and figures never lie." Well they don't but some liars figure. When they start out they always begin the same. She started by proving that it was no use to give the women the ballot because if they did have it they would not use it, and she had statistics to prove it. If we would not use it then I really cannot see the harm of giving it to us, we would not hurt anybody with it and what an easy way for you men to get rid of us. No more suffrage meetings, never any nagging you again, no one could blame you for anything that went wrong with the town, if it did not run right, all you would have to say is, you have the power, why don't you go ahead and clean up.”                     —Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, “The Fundamental Principle of a Republic,” June 21, 1915 TWEET OF THE DAY xWhat you are hearing from Trump right now isn't spin, it's delusion— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) February 18, 2017 BLAST FROM THE PAST At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—Blair faces party revolt; US loses Canada: It is clear that the governments of the UK, Spain, and Italy have real decisions to make -- to represent the will of their people or risk losing power in defense of Bush's invasion. In England, support for Blair and the war are plummeting despite a months-long PR campaign to prop up popular support. And, Labor's left wing is openly talking revolt if Britain goes to war without UN Security Council approval. "This is crunch time for Tony Blair," said Alan Simpson, a leader of Labor's antiwar faction in the House of Commons. "He can lead the war party or the Labor Party, but he can't lead both. It's quite clear if he goes off to war, he will have left the party behind him." Blair's political difficulties seem to have convinced the US to seek a second resolution, even while publicly arguing it doesn't require one. THE WEEK’S HIGH IMPACT STORIES • HIGH IMPACT STORIES • TOP COMMENTS Monday through Friday you can catch the Kagro in the Morning Show 9 AM ET by dropping in here, or you can download the Stitcher app (found in the app stores or at Stitcher.com), and find a live stream there, by searching for "Netroots Radio.” 19 Feb

War: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing - By the time you read this essay, it may be old news. The content might seem hopelessly outdated, or we will have troops on their way to Syria, or something in between. That is how fast and furious the news cycle has been since Trump took office: something written on Wednesday may be irrelevant by Sunday. But this was the news as of midweek: "It's possible that you may see conventional forces hit the ground in Syria for some period of time," one defense official told CNN. Donald Trump has not even been in office for one month, and the drums of war are already beating. It’s easy to wonder if the people who make these decisions have any skin in the game. You can guarantee that we will not see Tiffany, Ivanka, Eric, Junior, or Barron at the recruiting office anytime soon. My 17-year-old son Everett wants to work in the space program, so he is looking at the Air Force ROTC. The young men on his high school wrestling team—well, there is a good chance some of them will end up in any war Trump starts. in 1946, then-Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower stated, "I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity." There is no better description of war. It is something Trump would not understand. He and his family have never made sacrifices, despite his laughable claims: “I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices,” Mr. Trump said to Mr. Stephanopoulos. “I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I’ve had tremendous success. I think I’ve done a lot.” That is not sacrifice. Sacrifice is sleeping in a foxhole in some backwater of the world with nothing but a poncho liner for warmth. Sacrifice is spending Thanksgiving and Christmas away from home. Sacrifice is sending your son or daughter off to war, not knowing if they will come home. The human costs of the civil war in Syria are almost incomprehensible. The human suffering is unfathomable. But this is not our fight. Sending troops into a confusing mishmash of changing alliances is not something we should even be considering. We already made a mess of that part of the world with an unnecessary war. Going back there is not going to make things better. 19 Feb

How to turn trolls into your best friends - In the movie Thank You For Smoking, the main character Joey Naylor, a lobbyist for the tobacco industry, has a great scene with his son that talks about how he wins.  His son asks him what happens when he’s wrong. Here’s the quick transcript of the scene:  Joey Naylor: What happens when you’re wrong? Nick Naylor: Whoa, Joey I’m never wrong.Joey Naylor: But you can’t always be right…Nick Naylor: Well, if it’s your job to be right, then you’re never wrong.Joey Naylor: But what if you are wrong?Nick Naylor: OK, let’s say that you’re defending chocolate, and I’m defending vanilla. Now if I were to say to you: ‘Vanilla is the best flavour ice-cream’, you’d say…Joey Naylor: No, chocolate is.Nick Naylor: Exactly, but you can’t win that argument… so, I’ll ask you: so you think chocolate is the end all and the all of ice-cream, do you?Joey Naylor: It’s the best ice-cream, I wouldn’t order any other.Nick Naylor: Oh! So it’s all chocolate for you is it?Joey Naylor: Yes, chocolate is all I need.Nick Naylor: Well, I need more than chocolate, and for that matter I need more than vanilla. I believe that we need freedom. And choice when it comes to our ice-cream, and that Joey Naylor, that is the defintion of liberty.Joey Naylor: But that’s not what we’re talking aboutNick Naylor: Ah! But that’s what I’m talking about.Joey Naylor: …but you didn’t prove that vanilla was the best…Nick Naylor: I didn’t have to. I proved that you’re wrong, and if you’re wrong I’m right.Joey Naylor: But you still didn’t convince meNick Naylor: It’s that I’m not after you. I’m after them. [points into the crowd] This scene illustrates one of the greatest issues that I see liberals struggle with in the public sphere:  We think we win when we win a logical argument. Professionals like Nick Naylor understand that you win when you win someone over.  19 Feb

The 2017 legislative elections and the post-Trump map - While many eyes (and with justification!) are already on the 2018 midterm elections, it is worth noting that some very important elections on the statewide level are on tap for this November. So, it is fair to say that the first chance to assess the electoral impact of Donald Trump will come in just nine short months. The two states that headline the 2017 election cycle are two states that, on the surface, did not seem to change much in 2016. Virginia, which arguably will get the most attention in this off-year cycle, went from a 3.9 point victory for Barack Obama in 2012 to a 5.3 point win for Hillary Clinton this past year. Meanwhile, New Jersey moved marginally in the direction of the GOP, with an 17-point Obama win in 2012 to a 14-point Clinton win in 2016. Beneath the surface, however, there were some much more substantial shifts on a more granular level. It might surprise folks to learn, for example, that there were legislative districts in Virginia that shifted more than 20 points in either direction between 2012-2016. Quite a few of those “big-shift” districts, in fact, are likely to be pivotal to any shifts in the outsized Republican legislative majority in the House of Delegates in the state. New Jersey, meanwhile, had a smaller number of large shifts, but that is owed in part to the fact that there are far fewer districts (40) in the state than there are in Virginia (where there are 100 districts in the lower chamber). Still, there are a handful of districts where the size of the shift could surely matter. New Jersey is the converse of Virginia—there, any movement is likely to benefit the GOP.  The bottom line is that, in both cases, more than one-quarter of the state’s legislative districts shifted far more substantially than the state at large. And those shifts could (repeat: could) result in large changes to the legislative balance of power. 19 Feb

Trump allies deliver plan to lift Russian sanctions—by helping to topple the Ukrainian government - The hits just keep on coming: A week before Michael T. Flynn resigned as national security adviser, a sealed proposal was hand-delivered to his office, outlining a way for President Trump to lift sanctions against Russia. The players involved are a who’s who of Trump-connected pro-Russian figures. Mr. Flynn is gone, having been caught lying about his own discussion of sanctions with the Russian ambassador. But the proposal, a peace plan for Ukraine and Russia, remains, along with those pushing it: Michael D. Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, who delivered the document; Felix H. Sater, a business associate who helped Mr. Trump scout deals in Russia; and a Ukrainian lawmaker trying to rise in a political opposition movement shaped in part by Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul D. Manafort. Cohen is under investigation by the FBI as part of the query into Russian influence in Trump's election; Sater is Mafia-linked. A key part of the plan, led by pro-Russian Ukrainian lawmaker, Andrii Artemenko, would be releasing alleged evidence of corruption by the current not-pro-Russian-enough Ukrainian leader, thus allowing fine men like Andrii Artemenko to take over the government and negotiate a long term Russian "lease" of Crimea, and so forth. (Artemenko even offered up that he had “received encouragement for his plans from top aides to Mr. Putin”, which is apparently something would-be government topplers are willing to brag about these days.) The end result: If the current Ukrainian government was disposed of and a more Russia-tolerant faction took its place, thus achieving a peace with Russia that may or may not absolve Russia of their military invasion and capture of Crimea, than the way would be clear for the Trump administration to lift the sanctions on Russia that resulted. Which would, in turn, allow deals like now-Secretary-of-State Rex Tillerson's $500 billion oil deal between ExxonMobil and Russia to go forward. All it requires is a more complaint Ukrainian government, with the assistance of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Paul Manafort’s pals. This is an actual plan these people were willing to put down on paper. 19 Feb

Trump's amazing and dangerous world of alternative facts—and alternative truth - Here’s what John Oliver recently said when describing why it’s hard to cover Donald Trump: "What does it mean when he says words?” Clearly, Trump doesn’t mean what he’s actually saying. Facts are optional. They are fungible.  \For example his signature building, Trump Tower in Manhattan, is advertised as being 68 stories tall, but in reality is only 58 stories high. Select floors are missing in order for them to claim the 45th floor is really the 53rd floor—and get a much higher rate of return than he normally would when leasing office space or condos. This is just a perfect example of Trump’s reality warping field in effect. Things aren’t what they truly are: they are what Trump claims they are. This may be one of the key sources of Trump’s ability to succeed against all reasonable odds.  It’s also why his efforts are ultimately doomed to failure. 19 Feb

Reince Priebus takes to the Sunday shows to retell the lies Kellyanne and Spicer already told - Today was a slow day on the nation's Sunday Shows, thanks to the either intentional or unintentional absence of each of the Trump administration's most dedicated and egregious liars. Perhaps they were tuckered out, or perhaps nausea has set in at the various networks and they've decided that even if their viewers don't necessarily deserve a break from the authoritarian Dear Leaderisms of a Kellyanne or the stubborn Sean insistence on alternative facts, the cameras themselves can only take so much. Regardless, it was up to White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to make the rounds, artfully shedding whatever stray scraps of dignity that still clung to him after a half-year of toadying up to, objectively, the worst man he's ever worked for. So Reince obligingly went out and did all the lying on his own. White House chief of staff Reince Priebus on Sunday flatly denied any involvement between President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian officials. [...] Priebus said he’s spoken with high-level intelligence officials in Washington who have told him that no such involvement occurred. Which directly contradicts multiple reports of exactly that involvement taking place. His main task, however, was to confirm that when Donald Trump said that our nation's free press was "the enemy" of the American people, he meant it. "I think you should take it seriously. I think that the problem we've got is that we're talking about bogus stories like the one in the New York Times, that we've had constant contact with Russian officials. The next day, the Wall Street Journal had a story that the intel community was not giving the president a full intelligence briefing," Priebus said. "Both stories grossly inaccurate, overstated, overblown, and it's total garbage." 19 Feb

No Trump tax returns? No GOP tax cuts - Over the past week, the White House has been completely overwhelmed by the Trump administration’s mushrooming medley of Moscow outrages. But to what Vox labeled the “3 Trump-Russia Scandals”—potential Trump collusion with Russia against the Hillary Clinton campaign, possible Trump lies about Michael Flynn’s outreach to the Putin government, and purported kompromat Russian intelligence may be holding over the American president—must be added a fourth: What are the conflicts of interest created by the Trump Organization’s extensive business ties to Putin’s kleptocratic petro-state? With the Trump empire cut off by American banks, the family business has become dependent on Germany’s Deutsche Bank and investors from Russia. As Donald Trump, Jr. summed up in 2008: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” That alone provides one powerful reason why President Trump must release his tax returns to the American people. It’s not just a matter of following four decades of presidential practice. Simply put, we need to know if our president is being paid in rubles. But there’s another reason President Trump must come clean about his finances. In recent days, Trump has promised he will soon unveil a “phenomenal” tax reform plan that calls for “lowering the overall tax burden of American businesses, big league.” But that isn’t the only promise The Donald has made to American taxpayers about his reform scheme. The self-proclaimed "voice" of "the forgotten men and women of our country”—the same man praised by family and friends as a “blue-collar billionaire”—made this pledge last year: "It reduces or eliminates most of the deductions and loopholes available to special interests and to the very rich. In other words, it's going to cost me a fortune -- which is actually true -- while preserving charitable giving and mortgage interest deductions, very importantly." [Emphasis mine.] To which the only appropriate response to the pathological liar-in-chief is: “Prove it.” 19 Feb

Senate Intelligence committee asks agencies to preserve materials related to Russian election ties - On Friday, members of the Senate Intelligence committee received a classified briefing on the investigation into Russian interference in the November election from FBI Director James Comey. It was notable primarily for the stone-faced silence with which senators sidled by the press after the meeting. That same evening, though, the committee took action. The Senate intelligence committee has sent formal requests to more than a dozen organizations, agencies and individuals, asking them to preserve all materials related to a probe the panel is conducting on Russian interference in the 2016 election and related issues, a congressional aide said Saturday. Among those "related issues": Alleged contact during the campaign between Trump campaign officials and Russian intelligence figures, as well as conversations between now-resigned Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador. As for what the move "means", it means that the committee does indeed expect to delve into Russian interference and what various agencies and individuals did or did not know. As for how seriously the Republican-led committee truly presses? We don't know. 19 Feb

Trump-Russia scandal: Like Watergate and Iran-Contra—only worse - It took Richard Nixon more than two years to own up to the Watergate scandal. Facing impeachment, he resigned, and top aides spent time in jail. Ronald Reagan’s administration traded arms to Iran for the release of a few American hostages in 1985, using profits from those arms sales to fund a war in Nicaragua, and it took several years and three investigations to unravel the whole mess. Reagan escaped direct punishment for the Iran-Contra affair, but several on his team were convicted (and pardoned by Reagan’s successor). It has taken Donald Trump less than one month for his administration to be embroiled in a scandal that’s just as bad—and perhaps much worse. No one knows when we’ll get the full story about the Russian infiltration that reached high levels and inner circles of both the Trump campaign and the Trump White House. The scandal combines the power-grabbing paranoia of Watergate (interfering with an election, this time by a foreign power) with the illegal foreign policy workarounds of Iran-Contra (calling a Russian ambassador with inside info, and who knows what else). Legendary newsman Dan Rather says Trump’s Russia scandal could end up being as bad as Watergate. “It may become the measure by which all future scandals are judged,” Rather wrote on a Facebook post that quickly went viral. On his Meet the Press Daily show, NBC’s Chuck Todd said, “Welcome to Day One of what is arguably the biggest presidential scandal involving a foreign government since Iran-Contra,” further describing it as a “class-five political hurricane that’s hitting Washington.” Three scandals of different magnitudes, with different details. What do they have in common? 19 Feb

Democracy Now!

Does New Labor Secretary Nominee Alex Acosta Have the Perfect Résumé to Sabotage a Federal Agency? - President Trump has named longtime Republican lawyer Alex Acosta to be his new nominee to head the Labor Department after his first pick, fast-food CEO Andrew Puzder, withdrew Wednesday. We look at Acosta’s record with Alan Pyke, an editor with ThinkProgress, who argues Trump’s backup choice "has skeletons in his closet, too." Acosta has drawn scrutiny for his time as a division leader at the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division under President George W. Bush, where he oversaw a senior official who hired conservative lawyers who were actively opposed to the division’s mission, including the prosecution of voting rights violations and police abuse. In 2004, he played a key role in Bush’s final push to win the state of Ohio by backing Republican election officials accused of seeking to suppress voter turnout among blacks and Latinos.17 Feb

Denver Church Gives Sanctuary to Immigrant Mother Facing Deportation: "We Are Not Breaking Any Laws" - We go to Denver to speak with Reverend Mike Morran, senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Denver, where an immigrant mother of four has has taken sanctuary to avoid deportation. "We believe that we are not breaking any laws by having her in the church," Rev. Morran says. He describes how the church came to host Jeanette Vizguerra, and explains their protocol for how to respond to immigration agents if they come to arrest her.17 Feb

Undocumented Mother in Sanctuary in Denver Church: I've Paid Taxes for 20 Years, Why Hasn't Trump? - We go inside the First Unitarian church in Denver to interview Jeanette Vizguerra, an immigrant mother of four children who has taken refuge there out of fear she would be arrested and deported to Mexico if she went to her scheduled check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Vizguerra came to the U.S. from Mexico in 1997 and is one of the founders of the Metro Denver Sanctuary Coalition. She previously won five postponements of deportation, but said she doubts she could win a similar reprieve under the Trump administration.17 Feb

Why Did ICE Arrest & Imprison a 23-Year-Old DREAMer and DACA Recipient Living Legally in the U.S.? - President Trump said he would "show great heart" when considering whether to deport recipients of DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. So why is Daniel Ramirez Medina sitting in jail? We look at the case of a 23-year-old father who was detained by ICE one week ago in Des Moines, Washington, even though he has permission to live and work in the United States under DACA. His supporters have maintained a vigil at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, where he is being held. It’s a private detention center owned by the for-profit prison company GEO Group. We go to Seattle, Washington, to speak with Councilmember Lorena González, a civil rights attorney who is the city’s first Latino councilmember.17 Feb

In First Solo Press Conference, Trump Attacks Media, Claims Admin Running Like "Fine-Tuned Machine" - On Thursday, Donald Trump held his first solo press conference as president. He began by announcing he had nominated Alexander Acosta to be labor secretary nominee, but then soon began an extended attack on the media, accusing CNN and other outlets of pedaling fake news. We air excerpts of the press conference, which went on for 77 minutes.17 Feb

Headlines for February 17, 2017 - President Trump Assails Media in Combative, Rambling News Conference"Day Without Immigrants" Protests Target Trump Immigration CrackdownPresident Trump to Issue New Order on Refugees, Muslim TravelersProtesters Call for Release of DACA Recipient Daniel Ramirez MedinaTrump Opponents Stage Nationwide "Strike4Democracy"Trump Nominates GOP Lawyer Alex Acosta as Secretary of LaborProtests at Hearing for Ambassador to Israel Nominee David FriedmanNational Security Nominee Declines "S*** Sandwich" Cabinet PostOklahoma Judge Orders EPA Nominee Scott Pruitt to Make Emails PublicEPA Employees Campaign Against Scott Pruitt's ConfirmationPakistan: Suicide Blast at Sufi Shrine Kills 77, Injures HundredsPentagon Admits It Used Depleted Uranium Munitions in SyriaHouse of Representatives Moves to Defund Planned ParenthoodFlorida Supreme Court Halts Law Requiring Abortion Waiting PeriodHarlem Library Named for Civil Rights Icon Harry Belafonte17 Feb

Glenn Greenwald: Trump Seems to Be Committed to Escalating Violence in Yemen - White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has warned journalists and lawmakers against criticizing a botched raid by U.S. commandos on a Yemeni village last month that left 25 civilians and one U.S. Navy SEAL dead. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports the January 28 assault killed nine children under the age of 13, with five other children wounded. The attack came as the United Nations appealed for $2.1 billion in emergency aid to Yemen, warning 12 million people face the threat of famine brought on by a U.S.-supported, Saudi-led war and naval blockade.16 Feb

Trump Is Asked About Rising Anti-Semitism in U.S., He Responds by Boasting About Election Victory - During Wednesday’s press conference, President Trump was asked about a rise in anti-Semitic attacks and vandalism across the U.S. An Israeli reporter asked, "What do you say to those among the Jewish community in the states and in Israel and maybe around the world who believe and feel that your administration is playing with xenophobia and maybe racist tones?" Trump responded by bragging about his election victory.16 Feb

Greenwald on Trump-Netanyahu Meeting & How Israel Is Turning into an Apartheid-Like State - President Donald Trump on Wednesday ended a long-standing U.S. commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state, saying he had no preference for either a one-state or two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The remarks came as Trump welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, and represented a break from 20 years of official U.S. support for an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. We speak with Glenn Greenwald, who says, "Donald Trump is empowering some of the worst extremists in the world when it comes to Israeli policy."16 Feb

Greenwald: Empowering the "Deep State" to Undermine Trump is Prescription for Destroying Democracy - Some supporters of Trump, including Breitbart News, have accused the intelligence agencies of attempting to wage a deep state coup against the president. Meanwhile, some critics of Trump are openly embracing such activity. Bill Kristol, the prominent Republican analyst who founded The Weekly Standard, wrote on Twitter, "Obviously strongly prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to it, prefer the deep state to the Trump state." We talk about the deep state with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept.16 Feb

John Perkins

This Spring: A Special Webinar for Writers - How to Write a Bestseller in Times of Crises: Using the Power of Story to Accelerate Change By John Perkins We’ve entered the greatest revolution in history: The Consciousness Revolution. People around the world are waking up to the fact that we are facing huge crises. We must change. What is your role in this revolution? If you are a writer, you have an incredible opportunity to spread important messages, share thought-provoking ideas, and inspire revolutionary change through the power of story. Fiction and non-fiction. In addition to doing my own writing, I decided to create a small community of writers who intend to use their medium to accelerate change. We will come together in this Spring’s webinar: How to Write a Bestseller in Times of Crises: Using the Power of Story to Accelerate Change. Limited to just 2 dozen participants, this course is uniquely designed to help you hone your skills through writing exercises and discussions in an intimate salon. As a New York Times bestselling author, I will share my experiences of decades of writing bestsellers to help you improve your skills, get published, and reach large audiences. The webinar will take place every Tuesday evening over the course of one month, making it easy for you to journey into this portal of writing your bestseller. You will learn how to: Hone your skills to inspire, entertain, and motivate audiences; Open your heart and soul to the muses of writing; Utilize effective techniques to captivate audiences – as well as agents and publishers; Learn the pros and cons of marketing tools, including the use of publicists and social networking; Work with an intimate salon of talented writers; and Much more. You will have the option of breaking into smaller groups to discuss and critique each other’s work and spend an additional hour-long session with me. At the end of the course, you will also have the opportunity to arrange to join me in private mentoring sessions. Session Dates & Times: Session 1: Tuesday May 30 – 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM EST Session 2: Tuesday June 6 – 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM EST Session 3: Tuesday June 13 – 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM EST Session 4: Tuesday June 20 – 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM EST This webinar is for people who want to be part of a powerful salon of writers and who intend to channel their passions and skills into articles, books, and blogs that will inspire transformation. If you are such a person, please sign up now. Space is limited. Cost:  $780 for all 4 sessions. To see the course syllabus and purchase your tickets, click here. 9 Feb

How to Be a Democracy Under Trump - I watched President Trump’s inauguration from an airport TV in Guatemala. I’d just finished leading 22 people on a pilgrimage to live, study and participate in ceremonies with Mayan shamans at sacred sites. For me, it was the first leg of a two-month working-journey. I am still in Latin America, teaching and speaking at a variety of venues. In the days since that inauguration, I, like so many, have felt the horror of the emerging Trump policies. Latin Americans cannot understand why so few of us voted in the last election and why so many who did, voted for Trump. A larger percentage of people vote in most Latin American countries than in the US; in several countries, voter turnout exceeds 90%. Many of these countries have a history of brutal dictatorships. Once free of these dictatorships, they revel in their rights to hold democratic elections; they see their ability to vote for their leaders as both a responsibility and a privilege. They wonder why such a relatively small percentage of voters would elect a potential dictator. And moreover, why those non-voters did not vote against him. The participants on the Guatemala trip ranged from successful business executives to community organizers and healers – with lots of other professions in between. They came from Canada, Ecuador, England, France, Indonesia, Italy, the United States, and Guatemala. Many – especially those from the US – arrived in Guatemala feeling disenfranchised, disempowered, depressed, and – yes, horrified – by the election. However, as we moved through the shamanic ceremonies, they grew increasingly convinced that the election is a wakeup call for Americans. We have been lethargic and allowed our country to continue with policies that hurt so many people and destroy environments around the world (including Washington’s involvement in the genocidal Guatemalan Civil War against the Mayas that raged for more than three decades). This election exposed a shadow side. It stepped us out of the closet. Many people expressed the realization that Americans had failed to demand that President Obama fight harder to end the wars in the Middle East, vacate Guantánamo, reign in Wall Street, confront a global economic system where eight men have as much wealth as half the world’s population, and honor so many of the other promises he had made. They recognized that he was up against strong Republican opposition and yet it was he who continued to send more troops and mercenaries to the Middle East and Africa, brought Wall Street insiders into his inner circle, and failed to inspire his party to rally voters to defeat Trump and what is now a Republican majority in both houses. We talked about how throughout the world, the US is seen as history’s first truly global empire. Scholars point out that it meets the basic definition of empire: a nation 1) whose currency reigns supreme, 2) whose language is the language of diplomacy and commerce everywhere, 3) whose economic expansions and values are enforced through military actions or threats of action, and 4) whose armies are stationed in many nations. The message became clear: we must end this radical form of global feudalism and imperialism. Those who had arrived in Guatemala disillusioned and depressed now found themselves committed to transforming their sense of disempowerment into actions. At the end of WWII, Prime Minister Churchill told his people that England could choose the course of empire or democracy, but not both.  We in the US are at such a crossroads today. For far too long we have allowed our leaders to take us down the path of empire. President Franklin Roosevelt ended a meeting with union leaders by telling them that now they knew he agreed with them, it was their job to get their members to force him to do the right thing. FDR understood that democracy depends on We the People insisting that our leaders do what they promise to do. We failed with our last president. Let’s not repeat that mistake with the new one. It is extremely important that We the People force Trump and his band of corporatocracy henchmen to keep the promises we heard in his inaugural address.  Let us hear “making America great” as “making America a true democracy!”  Let us hear “we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People” and “we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to follow” as an echo of Prime Minister Churchill’s contention that a country cannot be both a democracy and an empire. It is up to us to insist upon democracy. It is essential that we continue to demonstrate and march, to bombard Trump and our other elected officials with tweets, posts, phone calls, and emails; to rally, clamor, and shout; and in every way to get out the word that we must end the wars, feudalism, economic and social inequality, and environmental destruction; we must become the model democracy the world expects of us. When General George Washington was hunkered down with extremely depressed troops at Valley Forge in the bleak winter of 1777, he ordered that an essay by Thomas Paine be read to all his men. Some of the most famous lines are as applicable today as they were then: These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he who stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.  .  . A generous parent should say, “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace” . . .I love the man who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection.  By perseverance and fortitude we have the prospect of a glorious future. We have arrived at such a time again. We must each do our part. Let’s here and now commit to taking positive actions. I commit to writing and speaking out at a wide variety of venues. I commit to supporting the Love Summit business conference, a powerful event that is committed to bringing love and compassion into business and politics, to transforming a Death Economy into a Life (Love) Economy. What are your commitments? We have arrived at a time that tries our souls. We must gather strength from distress, grow brave by reflection, and know that by perseverance and fortitude we can achieve a glorious future. Let’s make sure that the combined legacies of Presidents Obama and Trump will create the opportunity – indeed the mandate – to show the world how a country can be a true democracy. These are the times. . . Featured Event: Writing a Bestseller: How to Tell & Sell Your Story with John Perkins 4 Sessions | May 30-June 20, 2017 | Limited to 24 Participants | Register Here31 Jan

What Will 2017 Bring? - It’s a question on many minds as we begin this new year. It is perhaps asked more now than ever before in my life-time – and that spans 7 decades. All we can say for sure is that we are in for big changes . . . on many fronts. Each of us is faced with the decision: Will we sit back and accept changes imposed by Washington, Moscow, Beijing, and Big Business? Or will we take actions that guide humanity to a saner world? I’ve had the opportunity to travel across this magnificent planet, speaking at a wide variety of events and talking with individuals from a multitude of jobs and lifestyles. Everywhere, I encounter more and more people who are committed to taking actions that will change consciousness. They realize that consciousness change is the key to altering what we call objective reality. They know that the big events in this world are molded by the ways we perceive ourselves and our relationship to all that is around us. By changing perceptions, we change the world. In a few days, I leave for a two-month journey that will take me to venues in the United States, Guatemala, Costa Rica, the Bahamas, and Ecuador. I will be speaking at the Conscious Life Expo, the Heartbeat Summit, and many other places. Every one of these is oriented toward using changes in our perceived reality to influence the way human beings impact each other and the world. What will 2017 bring? That depends on you. I encourage each and every one of you to make a New Year’s resolution right now that will commit you to taking the path that leads to action. The events of this past year, including those in the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, and the US serve as wakeup calls. One of the facts we awaken to is that business is the driving force behind politics and governments. Whether a leader’s name is Trump or Putin, Merkel or Xi Jinping, he or she serves at the pleasure of banks and other global corporations. And those banks and corporations depend on us – you and me – to buy their goods and services, work for, manage, and invest in them. Without us, they go the way of Woolworth’s, Polaroid, Pan Am, Bethlehem Steel, and so many others that have become corporate dinosaurs. However you feel about the new Oval Office occupant, know that his power base is the business community. However you feel about climate change, pipelines, vanishing forests, urban violence, wars, and just about every other issue, know that the twists and turns of that issue are shaped by business. However you feel about Monsanto, Exxon, Nike or any other business know that that business depends on its customers, workers, managers, and investors – us. Consumer movements work. They ended apartheid, installed seat belts, cleaned up polluted rivers, labelled fats, sugars, calories, and proteins in our foods, opened corporate doors wider to women and minorities, and so much more. In each of these areas we need to go further and we also need to expend these movements. We must insist that every company we support in any way be committed to serving us, the public, the world, future generations – not simply the bottom line. We must change the perception of what it means to be successful. That is our job and our pleasure. You have the power. Social networking makes it easier – and more fun – than ever to launch campaigns that will change the perception of what it means to be “successful.” It’s time for you and me to use all the tools at our disposal to show those who would drive us down a path of distraction, lethargy, depression, and mayhem that we simply will not stand for it. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for and we are here now. 2017 is our year! It will bring what we demand. Best wishes, John The Love Summit organized by the nonprofit Dream Change that John founded nearly 30 years ago is a powerful example of a movement that is going global to change businesses. 1 Jan

Message from the Legendary Elder Siblings - I write this in-flight, returning from a magical trip to the Kogi of Colombia. I write this having seen and heard the airport TV reports of the trauma that continues to dominate US politics, as well as those in many other countries. Last year my Ecuadorian partner, Daniel Koupermann, and I took a group to the amazing lands of the Kogi – people who have a message for us all. They came down from their mountain hideaways to meet us and to spread their message of the need for change. They were so impressed by the deep spirituality and commitment of that 2015 group that they invited us to bring another similar group – and this time to be the first ever to live among them, to sleep in their community, and to sit in their sacred ceremonial lodges. For the 19 of us it was a life-changing trip. We were surrounded by breathtaking scenes: the emerald Caribbean and palm-fringed beaches, the Sierra Nevada mountains that rise 18,000 feet up from the ocean to glacier-covered peaks, the rain forests, and the sparkling rivers that cascade from the glaciers into the Caribbean. But most of all it was the Kogi who impressed us! I have to admit that I was shocked – ecstatically – by the extent to which the Kogi invited us to share their lives and ceremonies. These up-til-now illusive people totally opened the doors to their homes and hearts to us. They invited us to come and learn from their Mamos (wise elders/teachers/shamans/spiritual leaders), to answer a call that dates back to a time when their forefathers retreated from the onslaught of Spanish conquistadors and the destructive nature of European cultures. Their Mamos told us of how their ancestors had fled up the valleys of the glacial rivers into the mountains. Choosing to remain isolated for centuries, they developed a new dream of the Earth, a revelation that balances the brilliant potential of the human mind, heart and spirit with all the forces of nature. To this day they remain true to their ancient laws and traditions—the moral, ecological, and spiritual dictates of a force they identify as “the Mother”—and are still led by sacred rituals. In the late 1900s, their Mamos understood that they are the Elder Siblings and that they had to come down and share that powerful message with the modern world, the people they call the Younger Siblings – us. They have shared their history with others. What was unique this time was their enthusiasm for embracing this group on very personal levels. I write this while flying home and it is all too close to me to be able to express in detail at this moment (a book to come, I think!) but I will say that the bonding we all felt is symbolized by a ceremony when a Mamo and his wife in whose community we had spent the night invited us to witness their 5-year-old son training to become a Mamo. We traveled many miles down from their community and stood with them on the bank of a glacial river where it meets the Caribbean while the young man gently offered the river the commitments we had all made and blown into tiny pieces of cotton from a local plant. The Kogi message, although similar to the one I received more than 40 years ago when I was a Peace Corps volunteer living with the Shuar in the Amazon and then again 20 years later from the Achuar, is more urgent now than ever. It is the message that birthed nonprofits, including Dream Change and the Pachamama Alliance. It is the message of the North American indigenous people and all those who join them at Standing Rock. It is a message that now has issued forth from indigenous cultures and organizations around the world. It is a message of hope, one that says we can transformer ourselves from societies that adhere to systems that threaten to destroy us to ones that will sustain us and future generations. I’ve written many times about the necessity to move from a Death Economy, based on warfare and ravaging the very resources upon which it depends, to a Life Economy, based on cleaning up pollution, regenerating destroyed environments, and developing new technologies that recycle and life-styles that give back more than they take from our Living Earth. Now, flying back from the Kogi, I feel rejuvenated and recommitted to spreading the message that is the underlying principle behind that economic shapeshift that needs to happen. We know we are facing severe crises. We know the climate is changing and that we humans are devastating the air, water, and land that support all life on this planet. We know that our government is incapable or unwilling to turn things around. It is easy to be discouraged. EXCEPT we also now know what our Elder Siblings understood long ago, that We the People must transform ourselves and our institutions. That is the message of the Kogi. It is the message of the Shuar, the Achuar, the people at Standing Rock and all our brothers and sisters around the globe. It is the message of the rising oceans, flooding rivers, melting glaciers, the hurricanes, the political traumas, and all the other crises. We are blessed to be hearing this message, to be inhabitants of this incredible organism that is our Living Earth and to be able to understand that the crises are themselves the message that it is time for us to come out of our isolation and create the change we want and know in our hearts, minds, and souls is necessary.13 Dec 16

Channel NewsAsia Singapore News

Budget 2017: Mixed views on help for businesses, with trade groups seeing hits and misses - Representatives of the various organisations say they were looking for more help in the short-term, with the Singapore Business Federation noting that local firms require "immediate stimulus".15 min

Rosa Huey Daniel appointed National Arts Council CEO - Mrs Daniel will continue as CEO of NHB to oversee the completion of key projects until a new CEO is appointed.19 min

Singapore Budget 2017 aims for innovative economy, quality environment and inclusive society - Highlights include an enhanced corporate income tax rebate, a 30 per cent hike to the price of water and an increase in CPF housing grants. 34 min

Budget 2017: New tiered Additional Registration Fee for motorcycles - The tiered fee rate is a response to a small but growing number of buyers who purchase expensive motorcycles04:12

Budget 2017: More support for people with disabilities and those with mental health conditions - In delivering his Budget statement on Monday (Feb 20), Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat spoke of the need to foster a caring and inclusive society. 03:30

China bicycle-sharing startup Mobike gets funding from Temasek, others - Chinese bicycle-sharing startup Mobike said on Monday it has raised funding in a new round led by Singapore state investor Temasek Holdings and hedge fund Hillhouse Capital, bringing its total new funding in 2017 to more than US$300 million.02:52

Budget 2017: Taxes on diesel vehicles restructured based on usage - Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat says the Government will restructure diesel taxes to focus on usage and volume, instead of continuing with the current lump sum special tax on diesel vehicles. 02:46

Budget 2017: Water prices to rise by 30% over 2 years - The increase in price is a reflection of rising costs of producing water, says Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat in his Budget speech.02:44

As it happens: Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat delivers Budget 2017 - Budget 2017 is expected to touch on measures to implement some of the recommendations of the Committee on the Future Economy report.02:42

Drug trafficker denies Metro scion worked with him to traffic cannabis - Convicted drug trafficker Mohamad Ismail Abdul Majid says Ong Jenn never asked where his supply of cannabis was from, nor would he have revealed that information to him. 02:40

Channel NewsAsia Front Page News

Philippine bus crash kills 13 students on camping trip, driver - Thirteen Philippine college students on a camping holiday and a bus driver were killed and dozens injured on Monday when their bus slammed into an electricity post in a mountainous region, police said.28 min

Son of murdered North Korean due in Malaysia - airline source, media report - The son of Kim Jong Nam, the estranged half-brother of the North Korean leader who was murdered in Kuala Lumpur last week, will arrive in the Malaysian capital late on Monday, according to an airline source and a media report.34 min

Budget 2017: Mixed views on help for businesses, with trade groups seeing hits and misses - Representatives of the various organisations say they were looking for more help in the short-term, with the Singapore Business Federation noting that local firms require "immediate stimulus".39 min

Pension deficit at GM's British operations stands at up to 1 billion pounds: source - The pensions deficit at General Motors' British division stands at up to 1 billion pounds (US$1.25 billion), a source told Reuters on Monday, amid fears over the future of its Vauxhall plants as Peugeot explores a European buyout.04:20

Budget 2017: New tiered Additional Registration Fee for motorcycles - The tiered fee rate is a response to a small but growing number of buyers who purchase expensive motorcycles04:12

Kremlin says Ukraine peace plan mooted by lawmaker 'absurd' - The Kremlin said on Monday it had no prior knowledge of a Ukrainian lawmaker's peace plan for his country, which was detailed in the New York Times newspaper, and called it absurd anyway.04:05

Analysis - China wields stick with North Korea, but is still pushing for talks - With the suspension of all North Korean coal imports, China has wielded a big stick against its reclusive neighbour, but there is no sign it will cut off all critical links and Beijing is still promoting talks to solve the dispute over Pyongyang's programme to develop nuclear weapons.04:05

Turkish soldiers accused of Erdogan assassination attempt go on trial - The trial of more than 40 Turkish soldiers accused of attempting to assassinate President Tayyip Erdogan during last year's failed coup started on Monday, with prosecutors seeking life sentences, according to the indictment obtained by Reuters.04:00

Chinese news agency warns South Korea's Lotte over THAAD - South Korea's Lotte Group will face severe consequences if it allows the South Korean government to deploy a U.S. anti-missile system on land that now forms part of a golf course it owns, China's state-run Xinhua news agency has warned.03:55

Kremlin says Ukraine peace plan mooted by lawmaker 'absurd' - The Kremlin said on Monday it had no prior knowledge of a Ukrainian lawmaker's peace plan for his country, which was detailed in the New York Times newspaper, and called it absurd anyway.03:50

Channel NewsAsia World News

Trump's defence chief, in Iraq, says - We're not here for your oil - The U.S. military is not in Iraq "to seize anybody's oil", Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said, distancing himself from remarks by President Donald Trump at the start of a visit to Iraq on Monday.44 min

Kremlin denies plotting coup, assassination in Montenegro - The Kremlin on Monday rejected "irresponsible" allegations by Montenegro that Russia was involved in a plot to assassinate its prime minister.48 min

Kremlin says Ukraine peace plan mooted by lawmaker 'absurd' - The Kremlin said on Monday it had no prior knowledge of a Ukrainian lawmaker's peace plan for his country, which was detailed in the New York Times newspaper, and called it absurd anyway.04:05

Retired Philippine policeman says Duterte ordered 'death squad' hits - Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte operated a "death squad" while mayor of Davao city, giving cash and orders for police and assassins to murder criminals, according to a former policeman who said he was involved in the clandestine killings.04:00

Turkish soldiers accused of Erdogan assassination attempt go on trial - The trial of more than 40 Turkish soldiers accused of attempting to assassinate President Tayyip Erdogan during last year's failed coup started on Monday, with prosecutors seeking life sentences, according to the indictment obtained by Reuters.04:00

Pence in Brussels, seeking 'deeper' ties with EU - U.S. Vice President Mike Pence told senior European Union officials in Brussels on Monday that the Trump administration was looking at ways to "deepen our relationship" with the EU.03:55

Kremlin says allegations Moscow had role in Montenegro coup are absurd - The Kremlin on Monday dismissed allegations by Montenegro that Russia was involved in an attempted coup in the Adriatic republic last October as absurd and unsubstantiated.03:35

Trump's defense chief, in Iraq, says - We're not here for your oil - The U.S. military is not in Iraq "to seize anybody's oil", Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said, distancing himself from remarks by President Donald Trump at the start of a visit to Iraq on Monday.03:30

Cambodia PM empowers court to dissolve rival parties - Cambodia's parliament passed a law on Monday giving judges sweeping powers to dissolve political parties, a move seen as a brazen attempt by premier Hun Sen to checkmate his opponents ahead of next year's polls.03:30

Trump's defense chief, in Iraq, says - We're not here for your oil - The U.S. military is not in Iraq "to seize anybody's oil", Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said, distancing himself from remarks by President Donald Trump before arriving on an unannounced visit to Baghdad on Monday.03:20

Channel NewsAsia Asia Pacific News

Analysis - China wields stick with North Korea, but is still pushing for talks - With the suspension of all North Korean coal imports, China has wielded a big stick against its reclusive neighbour, but there is no sign it will cut off all critical links and Beijing is still promoting talks to solve the dispute over Pyongyang's programme to develop nuclear weapons.04:05

Retired Philippine policeman says Duterte ordered 'death squad' hits - Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte operated a "death squad" while mayor of Davao city, giving cash and orders for police and assassins to murder criminals, according to a former policeman who said he was involved in the clandestine killings.04:00

Chinese news agency warns South Korea's Lotte over THAAD - South Korea's Lotte Group will face severe consequences if it allows the South Korean government to deploy a U.S. anti-missile system on land that now forms part of a golf course it owns, China's state-run Xinhua news agency has warned.03:55

Cambodia PM empowers court to dissolve rival parties - Cambodia's parliament passed a law on Monday giving judges sweeping powers to dissolve political parties, a move seen as a brazen attempt by premier Hun Sen to checkmate his opponents ahead of next year's polls.03:30

North Korean envoy says cannot trust Malaysian probe - In response, Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak says it has "no reason to paint North Korea in a bad light" and "will be objective" in its investigation of Kim Jong Nam's death. 03:15

North Korean fugitives planned and executed Kim Jong Nam's death: Sources - Four North Korean fugitives, wanted by police, allegedly planned and executed Kim Jong Nam's assassination before escaping back to Pyongyang on Feb 17, according to a senior police source who told Channel NewsAsia03:10

North Korean fugitives planned and executed Kim Jong Nam's death: Sources - Four North Korean fugitives, wanted by police, allegedly planned and executed Kim Jong Nam's assassination before escaping back to Pyongyang on Feb 17, according to a senior police source who told Channel NewsAsia03:01

China jails former senior Beijing official for graft - A court in China on Monday jailed for 13 years a former deputy Communist Party boss of the capital, Beijing, after finding her guilty of corruption, state television said.02:40

Retired Philippine policeman says Duterte ordered 'death squad' hits - Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte operated a "death squad" while mayor of Davao city, giving cash and orders for police and assassins to murder criminals, according to a former policeman who said he was involved in the clandestine killings.02:34

Former Hong Kong leader remanded in custody ahead of sentencing - Former Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang, the highest-ranking ex-official to be charged in the city's history, was remanded in custody on Monday ahead of his sentencing later this week for misconduct in public office.02:25

Media Monarchy

#NewWorldNextWeek: Out Like Flynn, Dam Bursts, Car Talk (Audio) - This week on the New World Next Week: Dems pretend to care about the Logan Act and Repubs pretend to care about government spying as Flynn quits; America's crumbling infrastructure continues to crumble; and some good news pushback on the road to a police state.18 Feb

#BookSmarts: “But What If We’re Wrong?” - "Klosterman conducts a series of intriguing thought experiments in this delightful new book about how we conceive of the future."18 Feb

#PumpUpThaVolume: February 17, 2017 - Media Monarchy plays The Shins, Oddisee, Sam Rae and more on #PumpUpThaVolume for February 17, 2017. ♬17 Feb

#MorningMonarchy: February 17, 2017 - Boycott culture, real enemies and getting things wrong + this day in history w/Voice of America and our song of the day by Nikki Lane on your Morning Monarchy for February 17, 2017.17 Feb

#NewWorldNextWeek: What No One Is Telling You About Flynn’s Resignation (Video) - This week on the New World Next Week: Dems pretend to care about the Logan Act and Repubs pretend to care about government spying as Flynn quits; America's crumbling infrastructure continues to crumble; and some good news pushback on the road to a police state.16 Feb

#PumpUpThaVolume: February 16, 2017 - Media Monarchy plays Run The Jewels, Lusine, Kid Koala + Emiliana Torrini and more on #PumpUpThaVolume for February 16, 2017. ♬16 Feb

#MorningMonarchy: February 16, 2017 - Fake predictions, unsolved crimes and the twinning + this day in history w/Britney shaves her head and our song of the day by The Holy on your Morning Monarchy for February 16, 2017.16 Feb

#PumpUpThaVolume: February 15, 2017 - Media Monarchy plays Strangeletter, Chuck Prophet, Gary Calamar and more on #PumpUpThaVolume for February 15, 2017. ♬15 Feb

#MorningMonarchy: February 15, 2017 - Future farms, drug sharks and the Maryjane Report + this day in history w/the USS Maine and our song of the day by Thievery Corporation on your Morning Monarchy for February 15, 2017.15 Feb

#PumpUpThaVolume: February 14, 2017 - Media Monarchy plays Mac DeMarco, Emel, The Bostweeds and more on #PumpUpThaVolume for February 14, 2017. ♬14 Feb

NATO Latest News

NATO Parliamentary Assembly visit to NATO Headquarters - On Monday, 20 February 2017, the Members of the Standing Committee of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly will visit NATO Headquarters for the annual joint meeting with the North Atlantic Council.17 Feb

NATO Secretary General: need for transatlantic bond stronger than ever - Arriving at the Munich Security Conference on Friday (17 February 2017), NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the need for Europe and North America to work together was stronger than ever in times of turmoil and unpredictability. The Secretary General stressed the importance of fair burden-sharing, noting that all 28 Allies have made clear commitments to increase defence spending.17 Feb

NATO Defence Ministers take steps to strengthen the Alliance - NATO Defence Ministers wrapped up two days of talks in Brussels on Thursday (16 February 2017), focused on the Alliance’s adaptation to a more demanding security environment.16 Feb

Visit to NATO by a Delegation of the United States Congress - NATO Secretary General, M. Jens Stoltenberg, will meet with a delegation of the United States Congress, headed by Senator McCain, at NATO Headquarters on Friday, 17 February 2017.16 Feb

NATO and Finland step up cyber defence cooperation - In the face of a rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape, strong partnerships play a key role in effectively addressing cyber challenges. Today (16 February 2017), NATO and Finland stepped up their engagement with the signing of a Political Framework Arrangement on cyber defence cooperation. The arrangement will allow NATO and Finland to better protect and improve the resilience of their networks.16 Feb

NATO to enhance its presence in the Black Sea region - NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg outlined on Thursday (16 February 2017) how the Alliance will strengthen its air and maritime presence in the Black Sea region. The Secretary General also told a press conference that NATO was modernising its Command Structure in response to new security challenges.16 Feb

Allies join multinational fleet of tanker-transport aircraft - NATO has taken another important step forward to improve its ability to refuel aircraft in mid-air, with three Allies looking to join a European programme to acquire new refuelling aircraft. Today (16 February 2017), Defence Ministers from Belgium, Germany, and Norway signed a Declaration of Intent to join a European multinational fleet of Airbus tankers, created by the Netherlands and Luxembourg. The two countries launched this initiative in July 2016 and a first order was made for two Airbus A330 Multi Role Tanker Transport aircraft, which are due to be delivered in 2020. The new agreement allows other Allies to join the programme with the provision to enlarge the fleet to up to eight aircraft.16 Feb

Germany, Romania and the Czech Republic deepen defence ties - Today (15 December 2017), Defence Ministers from Germany, Romania and the Czech Republic signed arrangements to deepen defence ties. As part of this, the Czech Republic’s 4th Rapid Deployment Brigade and Romania’s 81st Mechanized Brigade will work closely with Germany’s 10 Armoured Division and Rapid Response Forces Division.15 Feb

Secretary General: NATO continues to adapt - NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed US Secretary of Defense James Mattis to the meetings of NATO Defence Ministers on Wednesday (15 February 2017). Praising the US commitment to NATO, Mr. Stoltenberg stressed that the Alliance will continue to adapt to evolving challenges, including terrorism, with fairer burden-sharing among Allies.15 Feb

NATO Secretary General: We are all safer when we stand together - NATO Allies agreed on the importance of the transatlantic bond in facing key security challenges on Wednesday (15 February 2017). Addressing the media, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg noted that Ministers discussed the Alliance’s continuous adaption and how to sustain and speed up the positive momentum on defence spending.15 Feb

National Post

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Car bomb kills 34 in Somalia marketplace: ‘It was a horrific and barbaric attack’ - MOGADISHU, Somalia — Somalia’s new president visited victims wounded by the Mogadishu car bomb that on Sunday killed 34. President Mohamed Abdulahi Mohamed offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of those who planned the blast. The explosion hit a busy marketplace in the western part of the capital, said police Capt. Mohamed Hussein. “It was a horrific and barbaric attack only aimed at killings civilians,” he said from the scene of the blast. Sabriye Abdullahi, an ambulance driver told The Associated Press that some of the injured victims died on their way to the hospitals. “Many of them suffered extensive third degree burns and others were burned beyond recognition,” he said. The blast from a car parked near a restaurant went off when shoppers and traders were gathered inside the market, said district commissioner Ahmed Abdulle. Someone had parked the car here and left before it was detonated Mohamed Haji, a butcher who suffered shrapnel wounds, pointed to a clothes shop devastated by the blast. “Someone had parked the car here and left before it was detonated,” he said. Pieces of wood and metal sheets on the ground were all that remained of the shop. Women sobbed and screamed outside the market as rescue workers moved bloodied bodies and wounded victims into ambulances. “It’s a painful carnage.” said Ali Mire, a government soldier who was helping a friend with shrapnel wounds The powerful explosion was the first major attack since Somalia’s new president was elected on Feb.8. Although no group has yet claimed responsibility, it bears the hallmarks of Somalia’s Islamic extremists rebels, al-Shabab. In addition to visiting the wounded in hospital, President Mohamed condemned the blast in a tweet, saying that it shows the “cruelty” of al-Shabab. A few hours before the blast, al-Shabab denounced the new president as an “apostate” and vowed to continue fighting against his government. Italian Foreign Minister Angelino Alfano, in a statement condemning the attack, said that “Italy remains solidly on Somalia’s side in the process of the country’s stabilization.” He added that “together we will act so that the terrorists don’t succeed in stopping the path of peace and reconciliation that is underway.” 19 Feb

Watch Brian Mulroney serenade Donald Trump with When Irish Eyes are Smiling at Mar-a-Lago club - David Foster performing at Mar a Lago tonite – as Donald Trump looks on with Melania.https://t.co/f2iFOHJllw — Douglas Kass (@DougKass) February 19, 2017 PALM BEACH, Fla. — Former prime minister Brian Mulroney apparently sang to U.S. President Donald Trump at the Mar-a-Lago in Florida Saturday night. A video posted on social media that appeared to be taken from a fundraising event shows Mulroney singing When Irish Eyes are Smiling on the stage at the Mar-a-Lago club. Canadian songwriter David Foster was headlining the fundraiser for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at the Mar-a-Lago, which Trump has called the “winter White House.” I would never presume to say that I could go to the president of the United States and ask him to sing, so I won’t do that “I would never presume to say that I could go to the president of the United States and ask him to sing, so I won’t do that,” Foster joked before calling Mulroney to the stage. The Palm Beach Daily News said that Mulroney had been sitting with Trump and his wife Melania, who are his longtime neighbours in Palm Beach, Fla. “Mr. President, I hope this doesn’t fracture U.S.-Canada relations for decades,” Mulroney quipped in Saturday’s video shortly before he started singing. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Palm Beach Daily News-Shannon Donnelly Former prime minister Brian Mulroney talks with U.S. President Donald Trump in Palm Beach, Fla., Saturday, Feb.18, 2017. Mulroney apparently sang to Trump during the fundraising event. But Saturday wasn’t the first time Mulroney sang When Irish Eyes are Smiling in the presence of an American president. He and his wife Mila joined Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy in singing the song during a meeting in Quebec City in 1985 that was then dubbed the “Shamrock Summit.” Representatives for Dana-Farber, Mulroney and Foster did not immediately respond to requests for comment. RelatedSenior Trump appointee fired after he criticized the president and his administration'What has he been smoking?' Swedes mock Trump for suggesting there was a terror attack in their countryJohn Ivison: Flattery gets Justin Trudeau everywhere with Donald Trump 19 Feb

‘He was anxious, he was scared’: U.S. woman shocked friend walked to Canada after asylum claim rejected - MINNEAPOLIS — Saciido Shaie says something seemed to be weighing on her friend Mohamed Badal in the days before he vanished. Badal, a Somali man who spent months trekking four continents before landing in the United States, had been preparing to appeal a rejected asylum application when Donald Trump became president. “For an entire week he was anxious, he was scared,” Shaie says over tea at Daalo Grill, a Minneapolis East African restaurant where she, Badal and a big group of friends would regularly hang out. “You can read from his face.” The Trump administration’s hardline views on immigration have rattled many in the Midwestern city’s large Somali community, regardless of their immigration status, says Shaie, a community activist. For an entire week he was anxious, he was scared Trump singled out Somali newcomers at a campaign rally in Minneapolis two days before November’s election, saying the city had “suffered enough” from their presence. Somalia was also among seven Muslim-majority countries targeted in a travel ban imposed suddenly last month, which has since been halted in court. Shaie says her friend, who had been authorized to work night shifts in a warehouse, feared he could be arrested and deported at any moment. She says he feared having to return to the war-torn homeland he had fled. “You don’t want to go back to Somalia right now. There’s no opportunity. There’s nothing there,” she says. “You have people who are 20-something who have not even been to school.” THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward Saciido Shaie, founder and President of the Umma Project tries to call her close friend Mohamed Badal. She noticed Badal hadn’t stopped by Daalo Grill in a while and when she tried calling, his phone was disconnected. No one else in their circle of friends seemed to know where he was. When Badal finally reached Shaie, he was in Winnipeg. “You’re kidding me,” she recalls saying. “How did you end up there?” He told her he walked for hours in the freezing cold through a snowy field in order to cross from North Dakota into Manitoba. He left his car in Minneapolis, so Shaie figures he must have gotten a lift to a town near the border. RelatedChris Selley: As Trump’s refugees stream into Canada, will our immigration policies hold up?Cab rides to the border: Refugee claimants ‘gouged’ to escape U.S. into CanadaRCMP say 21 people arrested for illegally crossing border at Emerson, Manitoba‘Trump was going to deport me’: Migrants are losing fingers to frostbite while fleeing to Canada By the time Canadian authorities found Badal, one of his legs was swollen from the cold and he could barely speak. “He told me that he thought he was going to die,” Shaie says, recounting their conversation a few days after he entered Canada. “He was just telling me he was thinking about his mom because his mom was telling him ‘at least if you want to die, come die in your country because I want to see your body.’ “So if he died, no one would have known where he’d end up.” Badal was among dozens of refuge-seekers found trudging through snow-covered prairie along the border near the town of Emerson, Man., in recent weeks. Most of the people are from Somalia, Ghana and other African countries. He told me that he thought he was going to die On Sunday, RCMP said in a news release that 22 people were intercepted overnight illegally crossing the border near Emerson. There’s nothing new about people eschewing official border crossings between the U.S. and Canada, though RCMP say the numbers have been on the rise in recent months. The tactic is a way to get around the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement, which would cause anyone who had already applied for refugee status in the U.S. to be turned away at an official border crossing in Canada. But if a person crosses somewhere else and applies as a refugee, the case is heard by Canadian authorities. It’s a dangerous gamble to jump the border in the winter. Two men lost fingers to frostbite after a 10-hour trek across Manitoba fields of waist-high snow in sub-zero temperatures over Christmas. Since Badal was found by police in Canada, he can stay in the country while his paperwork is sorted out. Shaie says her friend is doing fine and has since travelled to Toronto, where he has family. She wishes she knew beforehand what he was planning to do. “I would have said ‘you’re crazy.’ I wouldn’t have let him go,” she says. “I would have said ‘we’ll figure out something, we’ll advocate for you, find something for you.’ But walk to Canada?” 19 Feb

Father writes open letter about drug use in Kanata, Ont.: At least eight teens have overdosed in two months - In light of the recent death of popular Kanata teenager Chloe Kotval from an apparent drug overdose, and warnings from Ottawa police and Ottawa Public Health about counterfeit prescription drugs they suspect have been the cause of “recent life-threatening overdoses” in the city, on Saturday, concerned father Sean O’Leary posted an emotional Facebook message about teen drug overdoses in Kanata. Below is the full text of his message: To all whom are concerned, As many if not all of you are aware from news reports a beautiful 14-year-old Kanata girl passed away this week as a result of a drug overdose. What hasn’t been reported as of yet is that Chloe Kotval was the third Kanata teenager to die of a drug overdose in the last eight weeks. Many of you that are receiving this initial email are aware of this. The two other children that have died were a 17-year-old girl and a 16-year-old boy. At this time the families of these two other children do not want the publicity of having their children’s names and causes of death known and unless I am told otherwise I will respect their wishes. If I know of three in Kanata you can be assured there are many more. My 16-year-old daughter Paige is also a drug addict/abuser. I feel so sad for the parents of the children that have died. But even worse than the sadness I have for them is the fear I/we and many others live with every day that is so real. My first thought every morning is to check that Paige is alive. It is a nightmare of a way to live life especially when you have other children and have to try to make their lives as normal as possible. Related‘Chloe had a spark of life in her that was pure sunshine’: Ottawa-area school mourns death of teen in apparent overdoseEight overdoses in 20 minutes: The night fentanyl-tainted cocaine almost devastated a B.C. town Paige has been an addict/abuser for about 20 months. Our family dealt with it the best we could with the limited resources that are available to families in situations like ours. The nightmare that we have lived for 18 months was nothing compared to the nightmare our lives turned into starting on December 31 at 10:30 p.m. At that moment I arrived home to find a 17-year-old boy dead in my garage. Thankfully I arrived when I did and that one kid was not high and she had called 911, we performed CPR, eventually got his heart going and then the paramedics arrived. I put a post on “Bell’s Let Talk.” Since then I can’t even to begin to explain what we have been through. I personally know the names of eight Kanata teens whom have overdosed in the last two months Sadly the deaths that have occurred are only the beginning. If you look at statistics from any other communities where the kids started getting hooked on counterfeit opioids the prognosis for our community and our children does not look promising. The point of this letter is not to discuss my family’s problems and/or the problem in general. Most of us know there is a problem. We have spent thousands upon thousands of dollars on psychologists, counsellors etc. etc. Our daughter has spent 10 weeks at the Dave Smith Youth Treatment Centre. I have locked her at home, chased her around, grabbed her off the streets, walked in to people’s homes uninvited to take my daughter out of there, we have had paramedics and police to our home numerous times. But here we sit not knowing day to day whether our beautiful little girl will be alive tomorrow. I have talked to a few parents of other addict/abusers in Kanata and their stories are all the same. I do not know the answer nor am I any closer to finding the answer than when I first started seeking it. I do know that when any of us have questions or need help having 2 families asking is better than one. Having 10 families is better than 2 and so on. The only people that really know what is going on are the kids and they need help. My goal is not to try and solve the drug problem. It has been going on for many decades but never before right now have the drugs been indiscriminately taking our children’s lives. I do not know how many families are suffering the same fate as us right now but I know there are many. The first thing I would like to do is have a meeting with as many parents of addicts/abusers as I can find. We have all experienced the futility of dealing with this scourge on our own. We the parents of these kids and future kids need to unite for ourselves and for our kids. Please forward this to as many people you know whom have teenage kids. I will keep all replies confidential unless permission is granted otherwise. If they want to come to the meeting great or I can send them notes after our discussion. Primary focus will be making sure everyone is aware of what resources are available, what treatments are available, use of Suboxone and if it is working. Ottawa Health will give us full support and supply Naloxone kits, training, etc. Then we can have an open discussion of ideas, questions to be asked, etc. The days of the saying “They need to hit rock bottom before getting better” are over. Sadly in most cases today rock bottom is a slab at the morgue. 19 Feb

U.S.-backed Iraqi forces launch major air-and-ground offensive to drive ISIL from western Mosul - HAMAM AL-ALIL, Iraq — U.S.-backed Iraqi forces launched a major air-and-ground offensive Sunday to retake western Mosul from ISIL militants and drive the extremist group from its last major urban bastion in Iraq. Ground units pushed into a belt of villages outside the country’s second-largest city, and plumes of smoke rose into the sky early in the morning as U.S.-led coalition jets struck militant positions southwest of Mosul and militarized Iraqi police fired artillery. “This is zero hour and we are going to end this war, God willing,” said Mahmoud Mansour, a police officer, as he prepared to move out. The United Nations warned that hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped inside their homes in Mosul “are at extreme risk,” with dwindling fuel, food and water and scarce electricity. AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP/Getty ImagesTanks and armoured vehicles of the Iraqi forces, supported by the Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitaries, advance towards the village of Sheikh Younis, south of Mosul, after the offensive to retake the western side of Mosul from ISIL commenced on Feb. 19, 2017. Iraq declared eastern Mosul “fully liberated” last month after three months of fierce fighting, but the militants have continued to stage attacks there, including two suicide bombings against government forces on Sunday. The battle for western Mosul promises to be even more daunting, as the half of the city west of the Tigris River has older, narrower streets and is still heavily populated. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the start of the latest operation on state TV. Using the Arabic acronym for ISIL, he said government forces were moving to “liberate the people of Mosul from Daesh oppression and terrorism forever.” Police units quickly entered the village of Athba, about 5 kilometres southwest of Mosul’s international airport, encountering only light resistance. Separately, the Iraqi Army’s 9th Division moved into the village of Bakhira, also southwest of the city, the Ministry of Defence said. The U.S.-led coalition has been providing close air support throughout the 4-month-old Mosul offensive and carried out nine airstrikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant near Mosul on Saturday, Central Command said. U.S. special operations forces are embedded with some Iraqi units, and thousands of American soldiers are in Iraq to provide logistical and other support. “We are very close to it, if not already engaged in that fight,” U.S. Defence Secretary Jim Mattis told reporters in Abu Dhabi. He declined to go into further detail, saying he owed “confidentiality” to the troops. Citing witnesses in western Mosul, the United Nations said nearly half of all food shops were closed and bakeries had shut down for lack of fuel and an inability to purchase costly flour. Prices of kerosene and cooking gas have skyrocketed, and many of the most destitute families are burning wood, furniture, plastic or garbage for cooking and heating. “The situation is distressing. People, right now, are in trouble,” Lise Grande, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for Iraq, said in a statement. “We are hearing reports of parents struggling to feed their children and to heat their homes.” RelatedLiberated from extremists, east Mosul still preps for attacks from sleeper cells and ISIL sympathizersRussian drone shows extent of damage by Islamic State fighters to Palmyra’s Roman amphitheatreFireballs and booby traps: On the front lines with the oil workers battling ISIL Peter Hawkins, of the UN agency for children, said: “Three out of five people now depend on untreated water from wells for cooking and drinking as water systems and treatment plants have been damaged by fighting or run out of chlorine.” The humanitarian agencies were gearing up to aid 250,000 to 400,000 civilians who may flee because of the fighting, the statement said. The UN estimates 750,000 civilians may be left in western Mosul. Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, a top U.S. commander in Iraq, said the Iraqi forces are an “increasingly capable, formidable and professional force.” “Mosul would be a tough fight for any army in the world, and the Iraqi forces have risen to the challenge,” he said in a statement. Bram Janssen / APA federal police officer stands inside a damaged house after it was hit by an air strike, in Hamam al-Alil, Iraq, Sunday, Feb. 19, 2017. Iraqi forces drove ISIL from eastern Mosul last month, but the militants appear to have left behind sleeper cells to carry out attacks. Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasool, an Iraqi military spokesman, said a suicide bomber struck a patrol of government-allied Sunni tribal fighters in the Zihoor neighbourhood, while another targeted Iraqi troops in Nabi Younis. ISIL claimed responsibility for both attacks. Rasool declined to provide casualty figures. Two policemen said one Sunni fighter was killed and nine were wounded in the first attack, while the second attack wounded five soldiers. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release information. Iraqi special operations forces, regular army and federal police units are taking part in the offensive along with government-approved paramilitary forces, mainly consisting of Shiite militias, which are operating on the city’s outskirts. Mosul fell to ISIL in the summer of 2014, along with large swaths of northern and western Iraq. 19 Feb

Senior Trump appointee fired after he criticized the president and his administration - WASHINGTON — A senior Trump administration official was fired following criticism in a private speech of President Donald Trump’s policies and his inner circle of advisers. Craig Deare, whom Trump appointed a month ago to head the National Security Council’s Western Hemisphere division, was on Friday escorted out of the Executive Office Building, where he worked in Washington. A senior White House official confirmed that Deare is no longer working at the NSC and has returned to the position he previously held at the National Defence University. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an incident not otherwise made public, and provided no further details. But current and former administration officials say Deare’s termination was linked to remarks he made Thursday at a private talk at the Wilson Center, a Washington think-tank. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. Jabin Botsford / The Washington PostPresident Donald Trump's tumultuous first weeks have been marked by controversial executive orders and conflicts with the media. According to one person who attended the discussion, Deare slammed the Trump administration for its policies on Latin America, specifically its rocky start to relations with Mexico. That person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a private event. Trump signed an order in the first week of his presidency to build a border wall with Mexico, jumpstarting a campaign promise. The move prompted Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto to cancel his trip to Washington in late January. The person who attended the Wilson Center discussion also said that Deare openly expressed frustration over being cut out of most of the policy discussions about Mexico, saying that members of Trump’s inner circle, including chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, have not consulted with NSC directorates as the White House formulates policy. Deare has been on the faculty of National Defence University in Washington since 2001. He joined the university’s College of International Security Affairs in 2010 and most recently served as dean of administration. Related‘Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking?’ Swedes confused by Trump ’s commentsMcCain slams Trump — without using his name — in speech warning of ‘flirting with authoritarianism’Charles Krauthammer: Flynn had to go because of the coverup — but where was the crime? The person who attended the Wilson Center talk also noted that Deare made several remarks about how attractive Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, appeared, remarks that person described as “awkward.” Deare did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Officials with the Wilson Center also declined a request for information, saying the discussion was off the record. Deare is the second senior NSC official to leave in under a week. On Monday, Trump’s national security adviser, retired Gen. Michael Flynn, resigned after revelations that he discussed sanctions with a Russian diplomat before Trump was sworn in, then misled Vice-President Mike Pence about the nature of those conversations. 19 Feb

‘Oh! F— off’: Milo Yiannopoulos found a bromance with Bill Maher. Then he met his other guests - [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lImHh7fqrQo&w=640&h=390] After much hype over Bill Maher’s invitation to host Breitbart provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos on his show Real Time on Friday, the two got along famously, bonding over their shared love of free speech and the unifying power of humour in a one-on-one conversation. It seemed that Yiannopoulos had found a warm embrace on Maher’s set – but then the broadcast ended and Yiannopoulos sat down with Maher’s other panelists for the post-show Overtime segment, which airs on YouTube. Two of those guests told the far-right prince what they’d like to see him do to himself. (Hint: It rhymes with “cuck.”) Maher had come under fire for booking Yiannopoulos, an openly gay, self-described libertarian who once led a Twitter campaign to trash comedian Leslie Jones after her appearance in the Ghostbusters reboot. One of Maher’s previously scheduled panelists, journalist Jeremy Scahill, refused to appear alongside Yiannopoulos, writing that the show gave the Breitbart editor “a large, important platform to openly advocate his racist, anti-immigrant campaign.” Maher said he didn’t see it that way. At the start of his conversation with Yiannopoulos, the host explained: “I think you’re colossally wrong. But if I banned everyone from my show who I thought was colossally wrong, I’d be talking to myself.” Maher’s guest agreed, saying, “If you don’t show up to debate, you lose.” If you don’t show up to debate, you lose Yiannopoulos, in pearls, camo pants and stacked bracelets, quickly taunted Maher’s audience with sweeping negative statements about gays and women, laughing when the crowd booed. “I’m kidding,” he chided. “You’re very easily triggered. It’s pathetic.” Then the conversation shifted to an easygoing back-and-forth about the role of unfiltered comedy in a freethinking society. “Humour’s what drives people together, not breaks them apart,” Yiannopoulos said. But when he insulted Amy Schumer and Sarah Silverman – comics Yiannopoulos said he admired, until they “contracted feminism” – Maher checked him. Same for Yiannopoulos’s derision of Lena Dunham, but for a different reason. “Let’s not bash fellow HBO stars,” Maher joked. Maher challenged Yiannopoulos when he said that Catholicism was the only acceptable religion. “When you recognize that you are a Catholic, I hope you say to yourself, ‘Gee, I’m also capable of bulls— stupid thinking,'” Maher said. Finally, Maher advised Yiannopoulos, who is British, to “get off the Trump train.” “For a guy who loves free speech,” he said, “you picked a weird boyfriend.” Janet Van Ham/HBO via APBill Maher, left, listens to Breitbart News' Milo Yiannopoulos on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, Friday, Feb. 17, 2017, in Los Angeles. But Yiannopoulos didn’t take any real heat until he met Maher’s other panelists. After a debate about the laws restricting transgender people from using certain bathrooms, during which Yiannopoulos suggested that transgender people “have a psychiatric disorder,” he went on to insult Maher’s guests, specifically comedian Larry Wilmore and former U.S. intelligence officer Malcolm Nance. “You always invite such awful people on your show. They’re so stupid,” Yiannopoulos told Maher. “You need to start inviting higher IQ guests or this is going to be a disaster.” This provoked a swift response from Wilmore: “You can go f– yourself, all right?” Wilmore also voiced a defense of Jones, saying the Saturday Night Live star is not “barely literate,” as Yiannopoulos had once written. “Go f– yourself for that one, OK?” RelatedBarbara Kay: Enter Milo Yiannopoulos, progressivism’s spawn and history’s pendulum in actionAndrew Coyne: Free speech needs to be guided by judgment and conscience, not rulesRex Murphy: There are fascists on campus. Protesters don’t realize it’s them, not Milo Yiannopoulos A few minutes later, after Yiannopoulos said he preferred Russian spies to Saudis, Nance asked, “Are you American?” “No, he’s not American,” Maher answered. “Oh! F– off,” Nance responded. When Maher expressed confusion over how so many ultraconservative Americans had made a flamboyant British man their ideological leader, Yiannopoulus explained that many had not. “The worst people on the very far left and the very far right hate me,” he said. Wilmore had the perfect rejoinder to that: “I think you’re leaving out a lot of people.” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cDLflyQ8TA&w=640&h=390] 19 Feb

SpaceX launches rocket carrying space station supplies from NASA’s historic moon pad - CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A SpaceX rocket soared from NASA’s long-idled moonshot pad Sunday, sending up space station supplies from the exact spot where astronauts embarked on the lunar landings nearly a half-century ago. It was the first flight from NASA’s legendary Launch Complex 39A since the shuttle program ended almost six years ago, and SpaceX’s first liftoff from Florida since a rocket explosion last summer. The crowds at Kennedy Space Center watched eagerly as the unmanned Falcon 9 rocket took flight with a cargo ship bound for the International Space Station. They got barely 10 seconds of viewing before clouds swallowed up the Falcon as it thundered skyward. As an extra special treat, SpaceX landed its leftover booster back at Cape Canaveral several minutes after liftoff, a feat accomplished only twice before. Most of the company’s booster landings — rocket recycling at its finest — have used ocean platforms. As they did during the shuttle era, sonic booms heralded the booster’s return. NASA TVIn this image from NASA TV, the SpaceX Falcon rocket launches from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, Feb. 19, 2017. It's carrying a load of supplies for the International Space Station. Flight controllers at SpaceX headquarters in Southern California cheered as the 15-story booster landed upright at its designated parking spot at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. SpaceX chief Elon Musk celebrated the successful touchdown via Twitter. “Baby came back,” he tweeted. The celebratory roar grew when the Dragon cargo ship successfully reached orbit a few minutes later. It will reach the space station Wednesday, delivering 5,500 pounds of food, clothes and experiments. It was SpaceX’s second launch attempt in a row. Saturday’s effort was foiled by last-minute rocket concerns. The repairs paid off, and even the clouds parted enough to ensure a safe flight. Red Huber / Orlando SentinelA Space X Falcon9 rocket sits on the launch pad, Saturday, Feb. 18, 2017 at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla Last-minute rocket trouble forced SpaceX on Saturday to delay its inaugural launch from NASA's historic moon pad. Musk said he’s honoured to use Launch Complex 39A. The company hopes to launch astronauts from this very spot next year, bringing U.S. crew launches back to home soil after a longer-than-intended hiatus. SpaceX Mars missions, first robots then people, could follow from here. Kennedy Space Center’s director Robert Cabana, a former shuttle commander who flew four times from 39A, is thrilled to see the pad used for commercial flights like this “instead of just sitting out there and rusting away.” It’s a stark contrast, he noted, to the depression that followed the final shuttle mission in 2011. “It’s just really an exciting time,” Cabana said minutes before liftoff. It was a momentous comeback for SpaceX. The last time SpaceX had a rocket ready to fly from Florida, it blew up on a neighbouring Cape Canaveral pad during prelaunch testing on Sept. 1. Although the company successfully returned to flight last month from California, the focus was on getting leased Launch Complex 39A ready for action given that the pad with the accident was left unusable. Built in the mid-1960s for the massive Saturn V moon rockets, Launch Complex 39A has now seen 95 launches. Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins left Earth from here on July 16, 1969, on the first moon-landing mission. The very first space shuttle pilots, John Young and Robert Crippen, soared from here on April 12, 1981. And in a grand shuttle finale, Atlantis took off from here on July 8, 2011. NASA signed over 39A to SpaceX in 2014 under a 20-year lease. Last week, the U.S. Government Accountability Office warned the commercial crew launches by SpaceX and Boeing are at risk of slipping into 2019. “The hell we won’t fly before 2019,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told reporters in response. In a tweet Saturday, Musk said the company has already “retired” so much research and development risk on the crew Dragon capsule “that I feel very confident of 2018.” As for the second-stage steering issue that cropped up Saturday, SpaceX hustled to replace an engine part before Sunday morning’s try. Musk said he personally called Saturday’s launch off, saying he was unwilling to risk something going wrong. SpaceX has spent tens of millions of dollars to make 39A Falcon-ready. By the time astronauts climb into a Dragon capsule for liftoff, Shotwell said, pad renovations will exceed $100 million. 19 Feb

‘Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking?’ Swedes confused by Trump’s comments - HELSINKI — Swedes have been scratching their heads and ridiculing President Donald Trump’s remarks that suggested a major incident had happened in the Scandinavian country. During a rally in Florida on Saturday, Trump said “look what’s happening last night in Sweden” as he alluded to past terror attacks in Europe. It wasn’t clear what he was referring to and there were no high-profile situations reported in Sweden on Friday night. The comment prompted a barrage of social media reaction on Sunday, with hundreds of tweets, and a local newspaper published a list of events that happened on Friday that appeared to have no connections to any terror-like activity. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Catarina Axelsson said that the government wasn’t aware of any “terror-linked major incidents.” Sweden’s Security Police said it had no reason to change the terror threat level. “Nothing has occurred which would cause us to raise that level,” agency spokesman Karl Melin said. Former Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt tweeted, “Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking? Questions abound.” The Aftonbladet tabloid addressed Trump in an article Sunday, “This happened in Sweden Friday night, Mr President,” and listed in English some events that had happened in Sweden, including a man being treated for severe burns, an avalanche warning and police chasing a drunken driver. After the terrible events #lastnightinSweden , IKEA have sold out of this: pic.twitter.com/Bs1XI7ffKG — Jeanna Skinner (@JeannaLStars) February 19, 2017 One Twitter user said “After the terrible events #lastnightinSweden, IKEA have sold out of this” and posted a mock Ikea instruction manual on how to build a “Border Wall,” saying the pieces had sold out. At the rally, Trump told his followers to look what was happening in Germany, and also mentioned Paris, Brussels and Nice, in apparent reference to the terror attacks there. He didn’t specify what was supposed to have happened in Sweden, simply saying “Sweden, who would believe this, Sweden.” Sweden, which has a long reputation for welcoming refugees and migrants, had a record 163,000 asylum applications in 2015 and it has since cut back on the number it annually accepts. Its most recent attack was in the capital, Stockholm, in December 2010, when an Iraqi-born Swede detonated two devices, including one that killed him but no one else. RelatedMcCain slams Trump — without using his name — in speech warning of ‘flirting with authoritarianism’ Although Sweden views itself as increasingly isolated in regard to its pro-immigration stance, the country found widespread cross-European support on social media Sunday. “Dear @realDonaldTrump,” Alexander Stubb, the former prime minister of Finland tweeted. “Sweden is immigration friendly, international & liberal. One of the most prosperous, richest, safest places on earth.” The White House already faced criticism this month after it included an incident in the Swedish city of Malmö on its list of allegedly underreported attacks. In October, arson caused smoke damage at an Iraqi community center in Malmö. A judge, however, decided that there was no evidence for treating the incident as a “terror attack” – months before the White House released the list that referred to the incident. Over the past few weeks, Trump counsellor Kellyanne Conway has also referred to a Bowling Green Massacre that never occurred, and she was caught up in a public feud with CNN. With file from the Washington Post when u live in sweden and wondering what happened in sweden #lastnightinsweden pic.twitter.com/Ly2Qaq1qIK — Khrys (@dolceroyale) February 19, 2017 About #lastnightinsweden …my pop corn making almost ended up in a serious disaster pic.twitter.com/wgpnCGuVqS — Mikaela Fernandez (@kmikfernandez) February 19, 2017 It was only a matter of time. #swedenincident #lastnightinsweden pic.twitter.com/4wmmC9VIwg — Jamie Durand (@jamesond23) February 19, 2017 #lastnightinsweden details emerging: ABBA threatened a reunion pic.twitter.com/GRGbF3Yaty — Jenny Lee (@ironmite) February 19, 2017 Today in Sweden – desperately trying to puzzle the whole picture together #lastnightinsweden pic.twitter.com/TzmUwgEv4w — Anne Marit Godal (@annemgo) February 19, 2017 This is what really happened. #lastnightinsweden #swedenincident Them #mooselambs are dangerous!! pic.twitter.com/vfefdftBOM — KyaniteD (@kyanited) February 19, 2017 Alternative theory: a man was found after midnight. #lastnightinsweden #swedenincident pic.twitter.com/aNxk8HO9r9 — Anthony M. Kreis (@AnthonyMKreis) February 19, 2017 19 Feb

Cambridge, Ont., councillor to be reprimanded for twice calling constituent a ‘sexy gramma’ - The mayor of Cambridge, Ont., will publicly reprimand a city councillor who admitted to making lewd comments to one of his constituents. The city’s integrity commissioner ruled earlier this month that Coun. Mike Devine violated the harassment section of the code of conduct for councillors under the Municipal Act after he called a woman a “sexy gramma” on two separate occasions. In the decision, the commissioner said Devine’s comments were “undignified, disrespectful and discourteous.” Mayor Doug Craig said Devine will be reprimanded Tuesday at city hall and will be apologizing publicly to the complainant. Craig also said Devine will receive sensitivity training. In a Facebook post, Devine wrote he’s “deeply ashamed” of his behaviour and apologized to the woman, his family and the community. My behaviour was completely unacceptable “My behaviour was completely unacceptable,” the councillor wrote. “I recognize it is even more inappropriate as a city councillor and for that I am very sorry.” In her complaint to the commissioner dated Sept. 12, 2016, the woman — whose name was removed from the report for privacy — said she was introduced to Devine at a local restaurant, where he then made a remark about her age and called her a “sexy gramma.” The woman said she could smell alcohol on Devine’s breath and noticed him slurring. She said they met again in August at the Hespeler Village Market, where she was participating as a vendor with her husband. During that interaction, she said Devine told her “you are (expletive) hot” and again called her a “sexy gramma.” The report says he then gave her his business card and said, “call me if you need anything.” She noted again that she could smell alcohol on his breath. In an interview, Craig said city council members were “quite surprised and disappointed” by Devine’s behaviour. “Sexual harassment of any sort is unacceptable,” Craig said. “As leaders in the community, we need to set the example, and that’s exactly what we are doing.” 19 Feb

Greg Palast

Join NAACP Voter Fund for Facebook LIVE broadcast of my film on How Trump Stole It - I have a simple request. I’m asking that, this Thursday, at 8pm ET/5pm PT, you join the NAACP-National Voter Fund, Rainbow/PUSH, Josh Fox of Climate Revolution and many, many more–and “share” the Facebook LIVE broadcast of my documentary–the film that exposes exactly how Trump and his cronies attacked the voting rights of a million minority voters to steal the White House. That’s all we are asking: Between 8pm and 9pm Eastern, on Inauguration Eve, you “share” the live-stream with your Facebook followers. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, follows my crew’s undercover investigations for Rolling Stone and BBC-TV. "...Mainstream journalism has often struggled to cover the manipulation of data and the distortion of reality driven by billionaires like the Koch brothers or even Donald Trump... Palast slices through all the B.S.”- The Village Voice Pass this on to your friends, your organizations, and anyone who wants to get un-stupid about the theft of the 2016 election. I’ll be leading an online discussion right after the broadcast: What do we do now? Starting now you can share the trailer on Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/GregPalastInvestigates/videos/10154917384607128/ And share the trailer on Twitter simply by retweeting this tweet:https://twitter.com/Greg_Palast/status/820218502405619712 Please also indicate that you are "going" to our virtual event on Facebook — and share it with your friends: https://www.facebook.com/events/980244978772589/ On Thursday, January 19 at 8pm ET, go to https://www.facebook.com/GregPalastInvestigates/. (If you’re late, you can scroll back to the beginning.) The film (with the help of my friends Rosario Dawson, Shailene Woodley Ice-T, Willie Nelson and more), tells the story of the GOP’s weapon of mass vote destruction – and exposes the billionaires behind Trump and the vote trickery. The film was updated just this week. I guarantee: you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll get revved up to resist. Trump didn’t win––his billionaire backers swiped it. We can take it back. Will you join me? - Greg Palast and the investigations team Make a tax-deductible donation to our Stolen Election Investigation *  *  *  *  * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie.Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Support The Palast Investigative Fund and keep our work alive. Or support us by shopping with Amazon Smile.AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Sustainable Markets Foundation for the benefit of The Palast Investigative Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com The post Join NAACP Voter Fund for Facebook LIVE broadcast of my film on How Trump Stole It appeared first on Greg Palast.17 Jan

I get the Blues too… - A note to all who’ve made a donation to our Investigative Fund You are not only keeping us alive financially, but emotionally. Eventually, our stories make national news, but, in those months while the mainstream resists, your encouragement really means a lot. People ask me how I keep my sense of humor when I see all these horrors, from lost votes to lost lives. The truth is, I get the blues too. Support, good wishes, and remembering the tough world I came from are what gets me back on track. And here’s something they can’t steal from us:  a Happy New Year, from my family to yours. Thank you, Greg Palast, reporting Make a tax-deductible donation to our Stolen Election Investigation *  *  *  *  * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie.Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Support The Palast Investigative Fund and keep our work alive. Or support us by shopping with Amazon Smile.AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Sustainable Markets Foundation for the benefit of The Palast Investigative Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info.   The post I get the Blues too… appeared first on Greg Palast.30 Dec 16

A note in the snow - Last week, I flew to Detroit with my team at the request of a major west coast publication. When I landed, they got cold feet; assignment cancelled. Without funding to continue, I should have headed home. But I was getting tips of nasty doings with the ballots in Motown. I could get the evidence that Trump’s victory was as real as his tan. So I tucked my long-johns under my suit, put on my fedora, and headed out to meet the witnesses, see the evidence and film an investigative report on the Theft of Michigan. With almost no sleep (and no pay), my producer David Ambrose and I put together an investigative film—and donated it, no charge, to Democracy Now! and several other outlets. As to the airfares, hotels, cars, camera batteries, sound equipment, local assistants and the rest, the bills have piled high as the snow and uncounted ballots. So, here I was, literally out in the cold, hoping you'd see the value of top-flight investigative reporting. So, buddy, can you spare a dime? Or $100 or so? For that, I’ll send you my new film, the one that, back in September, told you exactly how Trump would steal it. Or a signed copy of the book that goes with it: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a tale of billionaires and ballot bandits. I want to thank all of you who donated to get me to Washington DC to testify at the ad hoc Congressional hearing and to speak with the Justice Department about the suppression of minority votes. (On Monday, I was joined at the Washington Press Club by the nation’s top voting rights attorney, Barbara Arnwine; civil rights legend Ruby Sales; Muslim activist Sameera Khan. They announced plans to take legal and political action against Crosscheck, the Trumpistas’ latest Jim Crow tactic, the one our team uncovered for Rolling Stone. Khan joined me at Justice to present them 50,000 signatures (we unloaded reams of paper on them) gathered by 18 Million Rising, the Asian American advocacy group, to light a fire under Justice. On Tuesday, I joined the presidents of the NAACP chapters of Michigan and Wisconsin and other front-line voting rights leaders, to plan next steps for this week, for this year, for this decade. My presentation to Justice, to Congressmen and rights advocates, to the press, was so much more powerful because I arrived in DC with the goods, the evidence, the film, the facts from Michigan, from the scene of the electoral crime. So, in the end, my assignment wasn’t cancelled: I went to work for YOU. Because I have faith that my readers agree that this work is important, that I’m not on some fool’s errand. The US media doesn’t want to cover the vote theft—because, hey, the count is over—and we should get over it. I am not over it. I am standing my ground. Let me know if you think I’ve made the right decision. Feed the team. I have nothing to offer you in return except some signed discs and books (or the Combo)— and the facts. Continue Supporting the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation because it ain’t over and we’re not done. – Greg Palast   * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post A note in the snow appeared first on Greg Palast.18 Dec 16

The Republican Sabotage of the Vote Recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin - By Greg Palast for Truthout Photo of Michigan ballot with bubble. (Image courtesy of Palast Investigative Fund, 2016)Michigan officials declared in late November that Trump won the state's count by 10,704 votes. But hold on – a record 75,355 ballots were not counted. The uncounted ballots came mostly from Detroit and Flint, majority-Black cities that vote Democratic. According to the machines that read their ballots, these voters waited in line, sometimes for hours, yet did not choose a president. Really? This week, I drove through a snowstorm to Lansing to hear the official explanation from Ruth Johnson, the Republican secretary of state. I was directed to official flack-catcher Fred Woodhams who told me, "You know, I think when you look at the unfavorability ratings that were reported for both major-party candidates, it's probably not that surprising." Sleuthing about in Detroit, I found another explanation: bubbles. Bubbles? Michigan votes on paper ballots. If you don't fill the bubble completely, the machine records that you didn't vote for president. Susan, a systems analyst who took part in the hand recount initiated by Jill Stein, told me, "I saw a lot of red ink. I saw a lot of checkmarks. We saw a lot of ballots that weren't originally counted, because those don't scan into the machine." (I can only use her first name because she's terrified of retribution from Trump followers in the white suburb where she lives.) Other ballots were not counted because the machines thought the voter chose two presidential candidates. How come more ballots were uncounted in Detroit and Flint than in the white 'burbs and rural counties? Are the machines themselves racist? No, but they are old, and in some cases, busted. An astonishing 87 machines broke down in Detroit, responsible for counting tens of thousands of ballots. Many more were simply faulty and uncalibrated. I met with Carlos Garcia, University of Michigan multimedia specialist, who, on Election Day, joined a crowd waiting over two hours for the busted machine to be fixed. Some voters left; others filled out ballots that were chucked, uncounted, into the bottom of machine. When the machine was fixed, Carlos explained, "Any new scanned ballots were falling in on top of the old ones." It would not be possible to recount those dumped ballots. This is not an unheard of phenomenon: I know two voters who lost their vote in another state (California) because they didn't fill in the bubble – my parents! Meet mom and dad in my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: How did Detroit end up with the crap machines? Detroit is bankrupt, so every expenditure must be approved by "emergency" overlords appointed by the Republican governor. The GOP operatives refused the city's pre-election pleas to fix and replace the busted machines. "We had the rollout [of new machines] in our budget," Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey said. "No money was appropriated by the state." Same in Flint. GOP state officials cut the budget for water service there, resulting in the contamination of the city's water supply with lead. The budget cuts also poisoned the presidential race. The Human Eye Count There is, however, an extraordinary machine that can read the ballots, whether the bubbles are filled or checked, whether in black ink or red, to determine the voters' intent: the human eye. That's why Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, paid millions of dollars for a human eyeball count of the uncounted votes. While labeled a "recount," its real purpose is to count the 75,355 votes never counted in the first place. Count those ballots, mostly in Detroit and Flint, and Trump's victory could vanish. Adding to the pile of uncounted ballots are the large numbers of invalidated straight-ticket votes in Detroit. In Michigan, you can choose to make one mark that casts your vote for every Democrat (or Republican) for every office. Voters know that they can vote the Democratic ballot but write in a protest name – popular were "Bernie Sanders" and "Mickey Mouse" – but their ballot, they knew, would count for Clinton. However, the Detroit machines simply invalidated the ballots with protest write-ins because the old Opti-Scans wrongly tallied these as "over-votes" (i.e., voting for two candidates). The human eye would catch this mistake. But Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette stymied Stein's human eye count. The Republican pol issued an order saying that no one could look at the ballots cast in precincts where the number of votes and voters did not match – exactly the places where you'd want to look for the missing votes. He also ordered a ban on counting ballots from precincts where the seals on the machines had been broken – in other words, where there is evidence of tampering. Again, those are the machines that most need investigating. The result: The recount crews were denied access to more than half of all Detroit precincts (59 percent). I met with Stein, who told me she was stunned by this overt sabotage of the recount. "It's shocking to think that the discounting of these votes may be making the critical difference in the outcome of the election," she said. This story was repeated in Wisconsin, which uses the same Opti-Scan system as Michigan. There, the uncounted votes, sometimes called "spoiled" or "invalidated" ballots, were concentrated in Black-majority Milwaukee. Stein put up over $3 million of donated funds for the human eye review in Wisconsin, but GOP state officials authorized Milwaukee County to recount simply by running the ballots through the same blind machines. Not surprisingly, this instant replay produced the same questionable result. Adding Un-Votes to the Uncounted Stein was also disturbed by the number of voters who never got to cast ballots. "Whether it's because of the chaos [because] some polling centers are closed, and then some are moved, and there's all kinds of mix-ups," she said. "So, a lot of people are filling out provisional ballots, or they were being tossed off the voter rolls by Interstate Crosscheck." Interstate Crosscheck is a list that was created by Donald Trump supporter and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to hunt down and imprison voters who illegally voted or registered in two states in one election. An eye-popping 449,092 Michiganders are on the Crosscheck suspect list. The list, which my team uncovered in an investigation for Rolling Stone, cost at least 50,000 of the state's voters their registrations. Disproportionately, the purged voters were Blacks, Latinos and that other solid Democratic demographic, Muslim Americans. (Dearborn, Michigan, has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the US.) The Michigan Secretary of State's spokesman Woodhams told me the purpose of the mass purge was, "to clean our voter lists and ensure that there's no vulnerability for fraud. We've been very aggressive in closing vulnerabilities and loopholes to fraud." While Woodhams did not know of a single conviction for double-voting in Michigan, the "aggression" in purging the lists was clear. I showed him part of the Michigan purge list that he thought was confidential. The "double voters" are found by simply matching first and last names. Michael Bernard Brown is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Anthony Brown. Michael Timothy Brown is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Johnnie Brown. Woodhams assured me the GOP used the Trump-Kobach list with care, more or less. He said, "I'm sure that there are some false positives. But we go through it thoroughly, and we're not just canceling people." As to the racial profiling inherent in the list? Did he agree with our experts that by tagging thousands of voters named Jose Garcia and Michael Brown there would be a bias in his purge list? The GOP spokesman replied, "I've known a lot of white Browns." Jill Stein didn't buy it. Responding to both Michigan's and Trump's claim that voter rolls are loaded with fraudulent double voters, Stein said, "It's the opposite of what he is saying: not people who are voting fraudulently and illegally, but actually legitimate voters who have had their right to vote taken away from them by Kris Kobach and by Donald Trump." Crosscheck likely cost tens of thousands their vote in Pennsylvania as well. "It is a Jim Crow system, and it all needs to be fixed," Stein concluded. "It's not rocket science. This is just plain, basic democracy." * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Support the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation After investigating the REAL story of the recount, we stopped by the Department of Justice and handed them our Crosscheck petition, signed by 50,000 people. We have a lot more work to do and thankfully, our efforts are starting to get notice. We're not done... Join us bySupporting the Stolen Election Investigation Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post The Republican Sabotage of the Vote Recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin appeared first on Greg Palast.18 Dec 16

Palast Report for Democracy Now!:By Rejecting Recount, Is Michigan Covering up 75,000 Ballots Never Counted? - Investigative reporter Greg Palast has just returned from Michigan, where he went to probe the state’s closely contested election. Trump won Michigan by fewer than 11,000 votes out of nearly 4.8 million votes cast. Green Party presidential contender Dr. Jill Stein attempted to force Michigan to hold a recount, but a federal judge ordered Michigan’s Board of Elections to stop the state’s electoral recount. One big question remains: Why did 75,335 ballots go uncounted? Support the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation My team and I just returned from Michigan to report the REAL story of the recount. I’ve also been responding to urgent requests in the recount states for our technical files and analysis. We're in Washington and stopped by the Department of Justice yesterday and handed them our Crosscheck petition, signed by 50,000 people. Join us by Supporting the Stolen Election Investigation Last stop for Democracy • PLEASE, say, "Count me in to count the votes" by supporting the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation for a donation of any size no matter how small or large • Stay informed and get a signed DVD of my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a signed copy of the book with the same title or better still - get the Book & DVD combo  • Be listed as a producer ($1,000) or co-producer ($500) in the credits of the broadcast version of the updated, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:  THE THEFT OF 2016. * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post Palast Report for Democracy Now!:By Rejecting Recount, Is Michigan Covering up 75,000 Ballots Never Counted? appeared first on Greg Palast.13 Dec 16

Crosscheck Is Not Just Crooked, It’s Criminal - After reading my report on the Kobach/Koch/Trump operation, which has removed tens of thousands of minority voters from the rolls in the swing states that surprisingly shifted to Trump, former federal judge (and now Congressman) Alcee Hastings told me Crosscheck is a criminal violation of federal law. Hastings has called for criminal indictments and written an official Congressional member letter to ask for investigation. hastings-crosscheck-letter-to-ag-lynch Hastings’ demand for justice is backed by a petition to expose and end Crosscheck’s racist attacks on voting rights. So far it's been signed by 50,000 people, including 29,507 members of 18 Million Rising, the Asian-American rights group. The group is joined by co-signers Rep. Keith Ellison, Bill Gallegos of Climate Justice, Martin Luther King III and others. On Tuesday, December 13 I will join the leaders of 18 Million rising in Washington, D.C. to present the petition to Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Stopping Crosscheck is the Standing Rock of racist vote suppression.  If we don’t open the investigations now, by January 21, Kris Kobach will be Homeland Security chief and Jeff Sessions Attorney General. Demand an investigation into Crosscheck, sign our petition — and then share it! For the full story, see the film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, the story of my investigation of Crosscheck. * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. The post Crosscheck Is Not Just Crooked, It’s Criminal appeared first on Greg Palast. 5 Dec 16

The No-BS Inside Guide to the Presidential RecountSorry, no Russian hacker hunt - by Greg Palast for Truthout There's been so much complete nonsense since I first broke the news that the Green Party would file for a recount of the presidential vote, I am compelled to write a short guide to flush out the BS and get to just the facts, ma'am. Nope, they’re not hunting for Russian hackers To begin with, the main work of the recount hasn't a damn thing to do with finding out if the software programs for the voting machines have been hacked, whether by Putin’s agents or some guy in a cave flipping your vote from Hillary to The Donald. The Green team does not yet even have the right to get into the codes. But that's just not the core of the work. The ballots in the electoral “dumpster” The nasty little secret of US elections, is that we don't count all the votes. In Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania—and all over America—there were a massive number of votes that were simply rejected, invalidated, and spoiled. They were simply, not counted.  Officially, in a typical presidential election, at least three million votes end up rejected, often for picayune, absurd reasons. The rejects fall into three big categories:  provisional ballots rejected, absentee and mail-in ballots invalidated and in-precinct votes “spoiled,” spit out by a machine or thrown out by a human reader as unreadable or mis-marked. So, as Robert Fitrakis, lead lawyer for the recount tells me, their first job is to pull the votes out of the electoral dumpster—and, one by one, make the case for counting a rejected provisional, absentee or “spoiled” ballot. Spoiled:  over-votes and under-votes How does a vote spoil? Most fall in the categories of “over-votes” and “under-votes.” In Michigan, the Green team has found a whole lot of people who voted for TWO candidates for President.  These are the “over-vote”—votes that will count for neither candidate. How odd.  While the schools in Detroit are not stellar, its graduates do know that they can only have one president. Then, some folks didn’t vote at all.  They are the “under-voter.” But, Fitrakis and team suspect, many of these under- and over-voters meant to vote for a candidate but the robot reader couldn’t understand their choice. Here’s how it happens.  Voters in Michigan and Wisconsin fill in bubbles next to their choice.  The cards, filled up with darkened bubbles for each race, are gathered and fed through an “optical scanner.” These robotic eyeballs mess up all the time. This is what Fitrakis, an old hand at vote-machine failures (both deliberate and benign), calls “the calibration problem.” Are machines calibrated with a Republican or Democratic bias? No, that's not how it works. But just as poor areas get the worst schools and hospitals, they also get the worst voting machines. The key is an ugly statistic not taught in third grade civics class:  According to the US Civil Rights Commission, the chance your vote will be disqualified as “spoiled” is 900% more likely if you’re Black than if you’re white. So the Green Party intends to review every single one of the six million bubble-filled cards. They’ll use the one instrument that can easily tell one bubble from two, or one bubble from none: the human eye. As you can imagine, This will require several thousand eyes.  The good news is, Fitrakis reports, that well over a thousand volunteers have already signed up.  Training by Skype begins Tuesday morning. Support the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation The team and I are off to Ground Zero:  Michigan. Wisconsin. Pennsylvania. To report the REAL story of the recount. I’m also responding to urgent requests in the recount states for our technical files and analysis. And then it’s on to Washington—to the Department of Justice—while there’s a bit of Justice left. Join us by Supporting the Stolen Election Investigation Last stop for Democracy Provisional or “placebo” ballots According to the US Elections Assistance Commission (EAC), Americans cast 2.7 million provisional ballots in the last presidential election.  About a million were simply discarded.  What?! Yes.  Discarded, not counted.  You show up at your normal polling station and they can’t find your name, or they don’t like your ID, or you’re supposed to vote in another precinct.  Instead of letting you vote on a regular ballot, you fill out a “provisional” ballot and place it in an envelope, sign your name, and under penalty of jail time for lying, affirm you’re a properly registered voter. The polls close—then the magic begins.  It’s up to highly partisan election officials to decide if your vote counts.  Hillary Clinton only won one swing state, Virginia, notably, the only one where the vote count was controlled by Democrats.  She lost all swing states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida—where the GOP set the rules for counting these ballots and their hacks acted as the judge and jury on whether a ballot should be counted. Wisconsin generally rejects votes cast in the wrong precinct, even if they’re legal voters—and, says Fitrakis, “even if their official precinct was just another table in the same high school gym—and they were mis-directed by poll workers.” (That’s why I sometimes call “provisional” ballots “placebo” ballots.  They let you feel you’ve voted, even if you haven’t.) In Wisconsin, provisional ballots were handed to voters—mostly, it appears, students—who didn’t have the form of ID required under new Wisconsin law. These ballots were disqualified despite zero evidence even one voter was an identity thief. Fitrakis says the Stein campaign will fight for each of these provisional votes where this is clearly no evidence the vote is fraudulent. Mail-in, Early and Absentee Ballots go Absent If you’ve gone postal in this election, good luck!  According to EAC data, at least half a million absentee ballots go absent, that is, just don’t get counted.  The cause: everything from postage due to “suspect signature.” Fitrakis told me that in his home state of Ohio, you need to put your driver’s license number on the envelope, “and if you don’t have a driver’s license and leave the line blank—instead of writing ‘no driver’s license’—they toss your ballot. From Palast's book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits by Ted Rall It’s a “gotcha!” system meant to knock out the ballots the officials don’t want to count.  (Remember, your mail-in ballot is anything but secret.)  Team Green will try to fight for each absentee ballot rejected for cockamamie reasons. If the recount doesn’t change the outcome, can we feel assured the election was honest? Sadly, no.  As Fitrakis says, “If a student is given a provisional ballot because they didn’t have the right ID, or the state simply lost their registration, we can fight for the ballot to be counted.  But most students who voted off campus didn’t know their right to get a provisional ballot and most probably didn’t get offered one. Students and others were discouraged from voting because they lacked the proper ID (300,000 by the estimate of the experts with the ACLU—that’s thirty times Trump’s plurality).  But if you didn’t cast any ballot, provisional or otherwise, no one can fight for it. And final decisions may come down to the vote of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, God forbid.  As Norman Stockwell, the editor of Madison-based The Progressive explained to me, formerly, elections law adjudications were made by a panel of non-partisan judges.  These were replaced by this new commission of partisan shills appointed by GOP Governor Scott Walker. Trump says millions voted illegally. Is he crazy? Crazy like a fox.  There’s a method in his madness that affects the recount. While the media dismisses Trump’s claim that there are "millions of people that voted illegally," they have not paid attention to the details of his claim.  Trump explains that millions of people are “voting many, many times,” that is, voting in two states in the same election. Trump’s claim is based on a list of “potential duplicate voters” created by his operative, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.  Kobach (a top dog in Trump’s transition team)  directs a program for hunting down fraudulent voters using a computer system called, “Crosscheck.” It’s quite a computer:  Crosscheck identified a breathtaking 449,922 Michiganders who are suspected of voting or registering in a second state, a felony crime, as are 371,923 in Pennsylvania. I spent two years investigating the Trump/Kobach claim for Rolling Stone.  We obtained the “confidential” suspect list of several million citizens accused of voting twice.  In fact, it was no more than a list of common names—Maria Hernandez, James Brown, David Lee—that is, common to voters of color.  Read: Democrats.  A true and typical example: Michael James Brown of Michigan is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Kendrick Brown of Georgia. Page from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (FREE) Comic book penned by Keith Tucker About 54,000 voters in Michigan, five times Trump’s plurality, lost their right to vote based on this nutty double-voter accusation.  In Pennsylvania, about 45,000 were purged. The problem for Fitrakis:  While he eventually plans to file suit against Crosscheck purges, in the meantime, it’s not clear he can challenge someone whose lost their vote because of a false accusation of double voting.  And those who found their names missing and didn’t demand a provisional ballot—there’s no hope at all of recovering their vote. Is Jill Stein going to get rich? Fitrakis laughs at this one.  “The FEC [Federal Elections Commission] has very strict rules on recounts. The donations for the recount are sequestered in a specially designated account and all spending is restricted to the recount.” The big problem is that the cost is somewhat out of Stein’s control.  Each state will bill the campaign for the “pro-rated salaries and benefits” of its county and state officials working on the recount. To add to the cost and just plain drive the Green team crazy, the Wisconsin Election Board announced on Monday that each separate county elections clerk will decide if they’ll even let the Green volunteers directly view the ballots.  Fitrakis and partners will have to get a court order to get into each county.  How does one recount ballots without seeing them?  (Hmm, is the Wisconsin board, stooges appointed by the GOP Governor, fearful that the viewing the ballots will expose the game?) Hillary joins the fray What will the Clinton camp add to the recount? “Lawyers,” said Fitrakis, though he’s yet to see them.  The Clinton campaign is apparently helping find one voter in each Pennsylvania county, as one is required in each jurisdiction to file for a recount of that state. And what about that hack job? While Fitrakis is not looking for Russkies in the computer code, he says, “We’re more concerned with the private companies that control the keys to the kingdom—to match what’s on paper to the official count.”  The “keys” are the little machines, memory cards and other electronic gewgaws that are used to suck the data from the voting machine—which are carried off to another state for tabulation by a private contractor.  Will these tabulations at each step match what the volunteers find in the on-the-ground recount? One problem is that the tabulation software is “proprietary.”  A private company owns the code to the count—and the privateers will fight fiercely, with GOP help, to keep the ballot counting code their commercial secret. Push and Pray Pennsylvania In the end, the single biggest impediment to a full and fair recount is that 70 percent of Pennsylvania voters used what are called, “Push and Pray” voting machines—Direct Recording Electronic touch-screens.  Push the screen next to your choice and pray it gets recorded. Pennsylvania is one of the only states that has yet to require some form of VVPAT (“vee-pat”) or voter-verified paper audit trail that creates an ATM-style receipt. Therefore, the Keystone State recount will have to rely on hopes of access to the code, statistical comparisons to counties that used paper ballots—and prayer. Maybe it IS the Russians The possibility that a Putin pal hacked the machines was championed by University of Michigan computer sciences professor J. Alex Halderman who proposed, “The attackers would probe election offices well in advance in order to find ways to break into their computers…and spread malware into voting machines.” I imagine some squat, middle-pay-scale civil servant in chinos and a pocket protector who works in the Michigan Secretary of State’s office approached, one late overtime night, by some FSB agent in high heels and a slinky dress split halfway up her thigh. The svelte spy would lean against the bureaucrat provocatively and whisper, “My handsome dahling, would you mind sticking this little thumb drive into that big old computer of yours?” Professor Halderman, if you want to help the recount, put down the James Bond novels and pick up some Opti-Scan ballots.  We’ve got a lot of bubbles to read.  End PLEASE, say, "Count me in to count the votes" by supporting the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation for a donation of any size no matter how small or large Stay informed and get a signed DVD of my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a signed copy of the book with the same title or better still - get the Book & DVD combo Be listed as a producer ($1,000) or co-producer ($500) in the credits of the broadcast version of the updated, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:  THE THEFT OF 2016. * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post The No-BS Inside Guide to the Presidential RecountSorry, no Russian hacker hunt appeared first on Greg Palast.30 Nov 16

Exclusive: Jill Stein just called, Green Party filing for recount in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania - by Greg Palast Jill Stein just called to say that I am the first one to be informed that the Green Party is formally petitioning for a recount in 3 states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Trump’s margin is less than 11,600 in Michigan, 27,200 in Wisconsin and 68,000 in Pennsylvania. If just a few thousand votes are found in Wisconsin and Michigan, Hillary Clinton becomes president by 276 electoral votes verses 264 for Trump. Support the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation Stein told me “We’re filing in Wisconsin Friday because the votes were cast on proven hack-prone machines. This has been a hack-ridden election.” She said that it will be most difficult to recount the machines in Pennsylvania. When asked why the democrats are not bringing this action, Stein told this reporter that “Democrats do not act to protect the vote even when there is dramatic evidence” of tampering. The Green Party told us that Stein will be represented by experienced voting rights attorney’s John Bonifaz, Boston, MA and Robert Fitrakis, Columbus, OH. Stein said, “our voting system is on life support.” The presidential candidate also said, “The Green Party will continue to be the go to advocate for voting rights. That includes fighting vote suppression tactics such as the Interstate Crosscheck system.” Interstate Crosscheck is the program which wrongly purged hundreds of thousand of minority voters in this election, according to the investigation this reporter fro Rolling Stone Magazine. Stein received 50,700 votes in Michigan, five times Trump’s winning plurality, and 30,980 in Wisconsin, more than Trump’s margin. When asked the "Nader" question, "Isn’t it true that your votes in Wisconsin and Michigan, if they went to Clinton, would have blocked Trump?", Stein answered, "Not at all. Our polls showed that 61% of our voters would have simply sat out the election, and one-third of the remaining voters would have voted Trump." The candidate insisted, "We are the ‘un-spoilers.’" Stein said she acted when Clinton turned silent because, "Only candidates may formally demand a re-count and we have standing." * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post Exclusive: Jill Stein just called, Green Party filing for recount in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania appeared first on Greg Palast.23 Nov 16

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U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office: Russia’s Military Strategy Impacting 21st Century Reform and Geopolitics - Russia is a nation that has always been blessed with creative minds, whether it be literary giants like Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy, artists such as Peter Carl Faberge, composers such as Pyotr Tchaikovsky, or the military genius of an Aleksander Svechin or Aleksander Suvorov. Russia also has been blessed with the work of innovators in military equipment, such as Mikhail Kalashnikov, who created the world-renowned AK-47. Today’s military innovators are the modern-day scientists and engineers who assist in the creation of contemporary and new concept weaponry; and the military theorists who study changes in the character of war. Digital specialists understand how to develop and employ the capabilities of electronic warfare equipment, satellite technology, and fiber optic cables. While Kalashnikov’s fame is imbedded in Russia’s culture, it may be harder to find a current digital entrepreneur whose legacy will endure as long as his: there are simply too many of them, and their time in the spotlight appears to be quite short, since even now we are about to pass from the age of cyber to that of quantum. It is difficult to predict whose discoveries will be the most coveted by tomorrow’s military-industrial complex, not to mention the decision-making apparatus of the Kremlin and General Staff. Military theorists are playing an important role as well. They are studying how new weaponry has changed the correlation of forces in the world, the nature of war, and the impact of weaponry on both forecasting and the initial period of war. Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov noted in March 2015 that the military’s main tasks are to maintain the combat readiness of the Armed Forces and to ensure the Russian Federation’s defensive capability. Russia’s military heritage will assist this process tremendously. Combat readiness includes updated strategic thought, new equipment revelations, and future-war projections. Defensive capability includes not just protecting Russia’s territory, but also the security of the nation’s national interests and conduct of geopolitics. Capturing the essence of these developments is the goal of this book. In the process a few templates for understanding Russian military thought and actions are offered for further consideration and use. The work is divided into three parts. They address Russian methods of approaching strategy, future war (focusing on new weapons and organizations), and geopolitics. All three are important for foreign analysts to consider when attempting to predict the vector (s) in which Russian military capabilities and actions are heading. It is vital to remember that events that have transpired over the past 25 years have greatly affected Russia’s view of the world today and its strategic thought. Both the military and President Vladimir Putin’s colleagues in the Russian security complex are keen to overcome what they perceive as feelings of national humiliation and insecurity that they say were imposed upon them by the West. Part One of this book contains three chapters. They are focused on the personality of President Vladimir Putin, the development of Russian strategic thought over the past several decades, and contemporary military thought on the use or non-use of force, to include how Russian military officers think. Chapter One provides details on how Putin thinks and how he has been affected by specific issues. Ideology, politics, and military issues affecting his decision-making are discussed. Included in the assessment are several thoughts from some US and Russian specialists with key insights into political thought in Moscow. Chapter Two represents a detailed look at the development of Soviet and now Russian military strategy. The chapter examines strategic thought from the time of Svechin to the present, highlighting, in particular, those elements of strategic thought that continue to influence how forces will be used even today. Chapter Three offers a look at how Russia utilizes indirect, asymmetric, and nonmilitary operations, as well as how this differs from most Western interpretations of the General Staff’s use of strategy. In particular, the chapter examines how Russian military officers think and offers commentary on cross-domain deterrence thinking in Russia, which is a topic usually discussed only as a nuclear issue. Here several other potential adaptations of deterrence theory are reviewed. The chapter offers a differing view than some on the issue of hybrid war as a Russian concept and ends with a look at Russian reflexive control theory. Part Two examines Russia’s preparation for future wars. Included in the discussion are new military equipment and aerospace developments, future-war organizations, and digital expertise. Chapter Four deals with several new items of equipment that are now in the Russian inventory, including an extensive look at Russian unmanned aerial vehicles and electronic warfare equipment. Chapter Five is dedicated to the new Aerospace Force and the Strategic Rocket Forces. Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu has stated, “Their creation was prompted by a shift of the ‘center of gravity’ in combat struggle to the aerospace sphere.” The discussion includes the rationale behind Russia’s decision to integrate the Air Force, Air Defense Forces, and Space Forces into an Aerospace Force and to declare aerospace a new theater of military operations. The continued development of the Strategic Rocket Forces is covered, since it has found new impetus from the strategic guidance of President Putin. Chapter Six considers several organizational aspects of future-war thought, including equipment under development, organizational and doctrinal changes, and future-war thinking. Equipment under development includes robotics and laser research. Organizationally there is a look at Russia’s new science companies and the Advanced Research Foundation (the Russian military’s DARPA equivalent), followed by a summary of several articles discussing the future contours of conflict and the changing character or war. Chapter Seven discusses Russia’s cyber thinking and organizational development. This includes a review of a Russian-authored cyber book, recent cyber developments in Russia, treaties that Russia has made with other nations, and several policy efforts directed by the Kremlin and the Federal Security Service (FSB) to monitor cyber compliance. A section on military thinking on cyber issues is included, along with Russian efforts to control the international cyber environment. China is a main partner of Russia in this regard. Part Three is an examination of the application of military power and strategy to Putin’s geopolitical goals, specifically as applied to military operations in the Arctic and Ukraine. Chapter Eight investigates the ongoing militarization of the Arctic. The two goals of the military in the region appear to be to establish an overarching monitoring capability and a quick response, powerful military deterrent. Russia has continued to improve its military presence and infrastructure in the region. The buildup includes two light brigades, two airborne divisions that are on-call, new Borei- and Yasen-class nuclear missile submarines, rebuilt airfields, and new aerospace defense units. Meanwhile, Russian administration officials are working feverishly with the United Nations and other organizations to establish legal claims to the Arctic. Putin has made the Arctic a region of his personal interest, noting that the Arctic has been under “our sovereignty for several years. This is how this will be in the future.” This does not bode well for the future of the Arctic’s peaceful development. Chapter Nine discusses how and why Russia became engaged in the conflict in Ukraine, to include the interventions into both Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Russia’s strategy and use of new concepts (new reality, self-determination, use of surrogates, nonmilitary issues, indirect and asymmetric thinking, etc.) are examined. The end of the chapter focuses on Russian actions in Crimea, as it appears Russia is doing one of two things there with its massive military buildup: either it is ensuring that Crimea can never be given back to Ukraine due to all of the military equipment it now has stationed there; or it is preparing a bridgehead from which it can launch a pincer operation against Mariupol or advance quickly on Odessa or Transdniester. Chapter Ten provides conclusions drawn from this study. … 12 Feb

(U//FOUO) DHS-FBI Intelligence Assessment: Baseline Comparison of US and Foreign Anarchist Extremist Movements - (U//FOUO) This joint DHS and FBI Assessment examines the possible reasons why anarchist extremist attacks in certain countries abroad and in the United States differ in the frequency of incidents and degree of lethality employed in order to determine ways US anarchist extremists actions might become more lethal in the future. This Assessment is intended to establish a baseline comparison of the US and foreign anarchist extremist movements and create new lines of research; follow-on assessments will update the findings identified in the paper, to include the breadth of data after the end of the reporting period (as warranted by new information), and identify new areas for DHS and FBI collaboration on the topic. This Assessment is also produced in anticipation of a heightened threat of anarchist extremist violence in 2016 related to the upcoming Democratic and Republican National Conventions—events historically associated with violence from the movement. By comparing violence in the United States with Greece, Italy, and Mexico—countries historically exhibiting anarchist extremist violence targeting persons—from January 2010–July 2014, we identified factors that could explain differences in targeting and tactics by selected foreign anarchist extremists and United States. The study examines 110 anarchist extremist incidents occurring within the United States and these selected foreign countries. Only those incidents determined to be violent (i.e., involving threats of bodily harm) were included in the dataset. Our ability to analyze relevant details of attacks depended heavily on the quality of sourcing for these incidents—which almost solely derived from the media. Additionally, although US anarchist extremist attacks noted in this study occurred in multiple states, the majority of incidents occurred in the Pacific Northwest region. (U//FOUO) This Assessment was produced to assist federal, state, local, and tribal government agencies and private sector infrastructure and security officers in the deterrence, prevention, preemption of, or response to terrorist attacks against the United States conducted by anarchist extremists. Some of the activities described in the study may involve activities that are, by themselves, lawful or constitutionally protected, and the study’s findings should be considered within the existing framework of laws, regulations, and operating procedures that govern a particular enforcement entity. Additionally, conduct deemed potentially suspicious and indicative of terrorist activity should be taken in conjunction with other indicators and possible preoperational activity. (U) Key Judgments (U//FOUO) Our examination of anarchist extremist violence in the United States and in Greece, Italy, and Mexico revealed several prominent features that may inform strategies to counter domestic terrorism: » (U//FOUO) DHS and FBI assess the primary factor explaining the difference in targets between foreign and US anarchist extremists is foreign anarchist extremists’ focus on specific economic and governance issues relative to their geographic area, while US anarchist extremists tend to focus on symbols of capitalism. We assess the likely primary factor explaining foreign anarchist extremists’ greater willingness to use more violent tactics than their US counterparts is that these foreign anarchist extremist movements are often more organized—allowing for more complex attacks—and have a well-established tradition of lethal violence not currently seen in the United States. » (U//FOUO) The vast majority of US anarchist extremist attacks targeted property likely due to the location’s accessibility and as a symbol of capitalism and globalization. Most foreign anarchist extremist attacks targeted persons likely because of the cohesiveness of the movement and greater emphasis on issues that can be blamed on local, individual targets. US anarchist extremists targeted the banking/finance sector most often, as these perceived soft targets of capitalism are possible to attack with tactics that are non-lethal yet cause significant economic damage and pose significant public safety risks. Foreign anarchist extremists most often targeted government entities, likely due to the emphasis placed on local domestic issues by foreign anarchist extremists and their capabilities to commit attacks against hardened targets. » (U//FOUO) Arson was the most common violent tactic used by US anarchist extremists—approximately 70 percent (19 of 27) of attacks—while foreign anarchist extremists used arson in only a third of their attacks. US anarchist extremists likely use this tactic based on their intention to cause economic and property damage, which can be accomplished by arson with relatively limited resources and specialized skills. Unlike US anarchist extremists, foreign anarchist extremists frequently used explosives, likely due to their capability to develop more advanced explosive devices as a result of their more organized structure, having a history of using such tactics, and because their targets are hardened. … (U) Social Justice (U//FOUO) Social justice issues––specifically opposition to gentrification and opposition to perceived racism and fascism––were the second most common driver of violence for US anarchist extremists, as they accounted for 26 percent (7 of 27) of attacks. Social justice issues accounted for 12 percent of violent foreign anarchist extremist attacks, although these incidents occurred only in Greece and were all against perceived fascism. Although social justice issues can motivate anarchist extremists to violence, they are often a driver for violence if a social justice issue occurs within a location that also has an anarchist extremist presence. (U//FOUO) Social justice issues often result in legal protest activities, and historically, in both the United States and abroad, anarchist extremists have been known to co-opt legal protests as a cover to commit violence against their targets. However, a review of data in this study indicated in the seven social-justice motivated violent incidents committed by US anarchist extremists, only one of those incidents exploited otherwise legal protest activity. The reasons for this finding are currently a reporting gap. … (U//FOUO) Signposts of Change—How US Anarchist Extremists Could Become More Lethal (U//FOUO) We assess the following future occurrences could potentially lead US anarchist extremists to adopt more violent tactics: » (U//FOUO) Fascist, nationalist, racist, or anti-immigrant parties obtain greater prominence or local political power in the United States, leading to anti-racist violent backlash from anarchist extremists. » (U//FOUO) A charismatic leader emerges among US anarchist extremists advocating criminal activity and unifies the movement, possibly increasing motivation to commit violence. » (U//FOUO) Incendiary or explosive devices constructed by anarchist extremist(s) become more sophisticated. » (U//FOUO) Anarchist extremist(s) retaliate violently to a violent act by a white supremacist extremist or group. » (U//FOUO) Anarchist extremist(s) retaliate to a perceived act of violence or lethal action by law enforcement during routine duties, creating a martyr for the movement. » (U//FOUO) Anarchist extremist(s) with financial means travel abroad where they learn and acquire more violent tactics and return to teach others and/or conduct actions on their own. » (U//FOUO) Anarchist extremists acquire or arm themselves with legal and/or illegal weapons. » (U//FOUO) Multinational corporation or bank becomes involved in public scandal, leading to focused targeting campaign by US anarchist extremists against the entity. » (U//FOUO) A successful US or foreign anarchist extremist event disruption such as at the 1999 Seattle WTO riots motivates copycat and/or follow-on actions domestically. » (U//FOUO) A foreign intelligence service attempts to foment US unrest by facilitating anarchist extremist violence domestically. … 4 Feb

(U//FOUO) U.S. Army FM 2-22.2 Counterintelligence - This manual provides doctrinal guidance, techniques, and procedures for the employment of counterintelligence (CI) special agents in the Army. It outlines— • CI investigations and operations. • The CI special agent’s role within the intelligence warfighting function. • The importance of aggressively countering foreign intelligence and security services (FISS) and international terrorist organizations (ITO). • The roles and responsibilities of those providing command, control, and technical support to CI investigations and operations. • The need for effective dissemination of CI reports and products and the importance of cross-cueing other intelligence disciplines. • The significance of cultural awareness as a consideration to counter the foreign intelligence threat. This manual expands upon the information in FM 2-0 and supersedes FM 34-60. It is consistent with doctrine in FM 3-0, FM 5-0, FM 100-15, and JP 2-0. When published, FM 2-22.2 will provide further information on CI activities when Army forces are employed in tactical operations. … ARMY COUNTERINTELLIGENCE 1-1. CI focuses on negating, mitigating, or degrading the foreign intelligence and security services (FISS) and international terrorist organizations (ITO) collection threat that targets Army interests through the conduct of investigations, operations, collection, analysis, production, and technical services and support. 1-2. CI analyzes the threats posed by FISS and the intelligence activities of nonstate actors such as organized crime, terrorist groups, and drug traffickers. CI analysis incorporates all-source information and the results of CI investigations and operations to support a multidiscipline analysis of the force protection threat. COUNTERINTELLIGENCE SPECIAL AGENT 1-3. The CI special agent has the distinct mission of detecting, identifying, countering, and neutralizing FISS and ITO threats directed towards the Army through the execution of all CI functions. CI special agents should not be confused with human intelligence (HUMINT) collectors, military occupational specialty (MOS) 35M, and warrant officer (WO) area of concentration (AOC) 351M. They are specifically trained and certified for, tasked with, and engage in the collection of information from individuals (HUMINT sources) for the purpose of answering HUMINT-specific requirements. Although CI and HUMINT personnel may use similar methods, their missions are separate and distinct. Commanders should not use them interchangeably. Using CI personnel for HUMINT missions degrades the Army’s ability to protect its forces, information, and critical technology that provides the Army operational and technological superiority over existing and future adversaries. … COUNTERINTELLIGENCE MISSION 1-17. The mission of Army CI is to conduct aggressive, comprehensive, and coordinated operations, investigations, collection, analysis and production, and technical services. This CI mission is conducted worldwide to detect, identify, assess, counter, exploit, or neutralize the FISS and ITO collection threat to the Army and DOD to protect the lives, property, or security of Army forces. Army CI has four primary mission areas: • Counterespionage (CE). • Support to protection. • Support to research and technology protection (RTP). • Cyber CI. COUNTERESPIONAGE 1-18. CE detects, identifies, counters, exploits, or neutralizes the FISS and ITO collection threat targeting Army and DOD equities or U.S. interests. CE programs use both investigations and collection operations to conduct long-term operations to undermine, mitigate, or negate the ability of FISS and ITO to collect effectively on Army equities. CE programs also affect the adversarial visualization and decisionmaking concerning the plans, intentions, and capabilities of U.S. policy, goals, and objectives. The goal of CE is to— • Limit the adversary’s knowledge of U.S. forces, plans, intentions, and capabilities through information denial. • Limit the adversary’s ability to target effectively U.S. forces by disrupting their collection capability. COUNTERINTELLIGENCE SUPPORT TO PROTECTION 1-19. CI support to protection ensures the survivability and mission accomplishment of Army and DOD forces. 1-20. CI’s objective in supporting protection is to— • Limit the compromise and exploitation of personnel, facilities, operations, command and control (C2), and operational execution of U.S. forces. • Negate, mitigate, or degrade adversarial planning and targeting of U.S. forces for exploitation or attack. • Support the war on terrorism. SUPPORT TO RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY PROTECTION 1-21. Support to RTP is focused on preventing the illegal diversion or loss of critical technology essential to the strategic advantage of the U.S. 1-22. CI’s objective in supporting RTP is to— • Protect critical technology information from adversarial countermeasures development. • Ensure U.S. technological overmatch against existing and future adversaries. CYBER COUNTERINTELLIGENCE 1-23. Cyber CI protects information networks and provides an offensive exploitation capability against adversarial networks to ensure information superiority of U.S. forces. 1-24. CI’s objective in conducting cyber CI activities is to— • Maintain U.S. forces information dominance and superiority over existing and future adversaries. • Protect critical information networks from adversarial attack or exploitation. • Undermine adversarial information operations, systems, and networks. … COUNTERINTELLIGENCE INVESTIGATION OBJECTIVES 2-4. CI investigations are essential to counter threat collection efforts targeting Army equities. CI places emphasis on investigative activity to support force and technology protection, homeland defense, information assurance, and security programs. CI investigations focus on resolving allegations of known or suspected acts that may constitute national security crimes under U.S. law or the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). 2-5. The initial objective of CI investigations is to identify people, organizations, and other entities engaging in national security crimes and to determine the full nature and extent of damage to national security. The intent is to develop information of sufficient value to permit its use in the appropriate civil or military court. However, investigations should not be limited to the production of evidence. Investigative reports should include all relevant information as it pertains to the person or incident involved in the investigation. CI investigations are conducted to— • Identify people, organizations, and other entities engaging in national security crimes that impact Army equities. • Determine the full nature of national security crimes within the authority and jurisdiction of Army CI. • Prove or disprove allegations or indications that person or persons are engaged in national security crimes or incidents of CI interest. • Prevent the loss, control, or compromise of sensitive or classified defense information and technology. • Protect the security of Army personnel, information, operations, installations, and technology. • Acquire and preserve evidence used to support exploitation, prosecution, or any other legal proceedings or punitive measures resulting from CI investigations. • Detect and identify terrorist activities that may present a threat to Army, DOD, and national security. 2-6. CI investigations must conform to applicable U.S. laws and DOD and DA regulations. CI special agents must report information accurately and completely. They maintain files and records to allow transfer of an investigation without loss of control or efficiency. Coordination with other CI or law enforcement organizations ensures that investigations are conducted as rapidly as possible. It also reduces duplication and assists in resolving conflicts when jurisdictional lines are unclear or overlap. CI investigative activity must be discreet, ensuring the rights and privacy of individuals involved, as well as the preservation of all investigative prerogatives. This is required to protect the rights of individuals and to preserve the security of investigative techniques. 2-7. CI special agents need to have a thorough understanding of all investigative techniques and planning, approval processes, and legal requirements before requesting and initiating any type of CI investigative activity. A lack of understanding in any one of these areas may potentially invalidate any investigation from a prosecutorial standard and may jeopardize the ability to exploit a threat to the United States. … PRIMARY AUTHORITY 2-12. Army CI has investigative primacy for the national security crimes and incidents of CI interest listed below when they are committed by persons identified as subjects. If either the subject, potential subject, incident, or crime falls outside Army CI jurisdiction, Army CI may still retain joint investigative responsibilities. • Sedition. • Aiding the enemy by providing intelligence to the enemy. • Spying. • Espionage. • Subversion. • Treason. • Terrorism activities or materiel support to a known or suspected terrorist organization or person (DCS G-2, G-2 Memorandum (S//NF), 24 August 2005). • Incidents of CI interest. … INCIDENTS OF COUNTERINTELLIGENCE INTEREST 2-17. The following is not an all-inclusive list of incidents of CI interest: • The activities of ITO or material support to an ITO or person. Terrorist organizations are specified in DCS, G-2 Memorandum (S//NF), dated 13 February 2007, Operational Planning List (OPL) 2005 (U), as revised. • Unreported contact with foreign government personnel, persons or groups involved in foreign terrorism or intelligence, or unauthorized requests for classified or sensitive unclassified information. • Unauthorized disclosure of classified information or material. Not all incidents in this category may meet the threshold for a CI investigation. However, those that do will often include other indicators of espionage that are identified associated with the incident or when there are acts which are known methods of operations of FISS and ITO entities. Investigations are conducted to ascertain those entities involvement. CI special agents may also act to secure classified material and to determine if the actions of the subject were an act of omission or commission. The command requirements to report compromises or conduct inquiries as specified in AR 380-5, chapter VI, may also apply to these incidents. • Matters developed as a result of counterintelligence scope polygraph (CSP) examination as specified in AR 381-20. • Military personnel or DAC employees who perform unofficial travel to those countries designated in the operational planning list, who have unauthorized contact with official representatives of foreign countries, or who contact or visit foreign diplomatic facilities without authorization. • Attempts by authorized users of information systems to gain unauthorized access. • Known, suspected or attempted intrusions into classified or unclassified information systems when there is reasonable suspicion of foreign involvement or it has not been ruled out. • Unauthorized removal of classified material or possession of classified material in unauthorized locations. • Special category absentees (SCAs), which include those absent without leave (AWOL), deserters defectors, and military absentees who have had access to TS, SCI, SAP information, or TS cryptographic access or an assignment to a special mission unit within the year preceding the absence. CI special agents will conduct investigations of the circumstances surrounding the absences of SCA personnel using the guidelines presented in this manual. • Army military, civilian, or overseas contractor personnel declared AWOL and deserters who had access within the preceding year to TS, SCI, critical military technology as defined in AR 381-20, chapter 7, SAPs; personnel who were assigned to a special mission unit; personnel in the DA Cryptographic Access Program (DACAP); and personnel with access to critical nuclear weapons design technology. • Army military, civilian, or overseas contractor personnel who go absent without authority, AWOL, or deserters who do not have assignments or access; however, there are indications of FISS and ITO contact or involvement in their absence. • DA military and civilian personnel who defect and those persons who are absent without authorization and travel to or through a foreign country other than the one in which they were stationed or assigned. • DA military and civilian personnel detained or captured by a government, group, or adversary with interests inimical to those of the United States. Such personnel will be debriefed upon return to U.S. control. • Attempted or actual suicide or suspicious death of a DA member if they have an intelligence background, were assigned to an SMU, or had access to classified information within the year preceding the incident, or where there are indications of FISS and ITO involvement. • Suspected or actual unauthorized acquisition or illegal diversion of military critical technology, research and development information, or information concerning an Army acquisition program. If required, Army CI will ensure all appropriate military and civilian intelligence and LEAs are notified. Army CI will also ensure Army equities are articulated and either monitor the status of the agency with primary jurisdiction or coordinate for joint investigative authority. • Impersonation of intelligence personnel or unlawful possession or use of Army intelligence identification, such as badge and credentials. • Communications security (COMSEC) insecurities, except those which are administrative in nature. (See AR 380-40, chapter 7.) • Suspected electronic intrusions or eavesdropping devices in secure areas which could be used for technical surveillance. DA personnel discovering such a device will not disturb it or discuss the discovery in the area where the device is located. • Willful compromise of clandestine intelligence personnel and CI activities. … DECEPTION IDENTIFICATION AND DETECTION (BIOMETRICS) 6-38. Biometrics as a characteristic is a measurable biological and behavioral characteristic that can be used for automated recognition. Biometrics as a process is an automated method of recognizing a person based on a physiological or behavioral characteristic. Among the features measured are face, fingerprints, hand geometry, handwriting, iris, retinal, vein, and voice. Biometric technologies are becoming the foundation of an extensive array of highly secure identification and personal verification solutions. As the level of security breaches and transaction fraud increases, the need for highly secure identification and personal verification technologies is becoming apparent. 6-39. Identification specific mission areas that CI detection and identification processes and technologies support include, but are not limited to, the following: • Countering foreign intelligence through the detection, identification, and neutralization of espionage activities. • Support to military readiness and conduct of military operations through protection, including— • Surveillance of air, land, or sea areas adjacent to deployed U.S. forces, sufficient to provide maximum warning of impending attack. • Indication of hostile intelligence penetration or attempts at penetration. • Support to law enforcement efforts to suppress CT. • Identification and affiliation of terrorist groups. • Assessment of group capabilities, including strengths and weaknesses. • Locations of terrorist training camps or bases of operations. • Weapons and technologies associated with identified terrorist elements. … COMPUTER FORENSICS 6-43. Computer forensics is conducted to— • Discover and recover evidence related to espionage, terrorism, or subversion against the Army. • Develop CI investigative leads. • Collect and report intelligence. • Support exploitation efforts. 6-44. Processing and examining digital media evidence is a tedious and time-consuming process which requires specialized training and equipment. Failure to properly process and examine digital media evidence could corrupt the evidence or yield the evidence inadmissible during future legal proceedings. Due to the complexities of cyber investigations, computer forensics support to CI investigations will only be conducted by specially trained and qualified personnel assigned to cyber CI elements in each theater. 6-45. Requests for computer forensic support will be made through the appropriate ATCICA. Requests for assistance will include detailed descriptions of the digital media evidence to be seized and examined and will be germane to the approved CI investigative objectives. 6-46. Every CI special agent is responsible for identifying the need for computer forensics support to their investigations. Computer forensics examinations involve a methodical process which, depending on the size and complexity of the digital media evidence, may take a significant amount of time to complete. Computer forensic operations cannot be rushed and therefore investigative time lines may need to be adjusted to accommodate the time required to complete the support. If a CI special agent is in doubt about the capabilities of, or when to leverage, cyber CI units, the agent should contact his ATCICA for guidance. … COUNTERINTELLIGENCE NETWORK INTRUSION INVESTIGATIONS 7-10. CI network intrusion investigations involve collecting, processing, and analyzing evidence related to adversarial penetrations of Army information systems. These specialized CI investigations are generally conducted independently of other traditional CI investigations. However, given the jurisdictional issues which involve the Internet, network intrusion investigations may require coordination with other U.S. and foreign government intelligence and law enforcement entities. 7-11. Threats to Army information systems can range from exploitation of vulnerabilities in information systems which allow adversaries to penetrate Army computers and collect critical information, to trusted insiders who either willingly or unwittingly enable adversarial forces to exploit these critical infrastructure resources. Any adversary with the motive, means, opportunity, and intent to do harm poses a potential threat. Threats to Army information resources may include disruption, denial degradation, ex-filtration, destruction, corruption, exploitation, or unauthorized access to computer networks and information systems and data. Cyber CI units are uniquely qualified to investigate and counter these threats. 7-12. All CI network intrusion investigations will be coordinated, to the extent necessary, with the USACIDC, specifically the Cyber Criminal Investigations Unit (CCIU). This coordination is necessary to ensure that investigative activities are not duplicated and that each organization does not impede or disrupt each other’s investigative or prosecutorial options. 7-13. A CI network intrusion investigation may be initiated under, but not necessarily be limited to, the following circumstances: • Known, suspected, or attempted intrusions into classified or unclassified information systems by unauthorized persons. • Incidents which involve intrusions into systems containing or processing data on critical military technologies, export controlled technology, or other weapons systems related RDT&E data. • Intrusions which replicate methods associated with foreign intelligence or adversary collection or which involve targeting that parallels known foreign intelligence or adversary collection requirements. 7-14. The purpose for conducting a CI network intrusion investigation will be to— • Fully identify the FISS and ITO entity involved. • Determine the FISS and ITO objectives. • Determine the FISS and ITO tools, techniques, and procedures used. • Assist the appropriate authorities with determining the extent of damage to Army and Department of Defense equities. … 7-32. The trusted insider is the most serious threat to DOD information systems security. The following list of indicators that could be associated with an insider threat should be addressed during threat briefings to CI customers: • Unauthorized attempts to elevate privileges. • Unauthorized sniffers. • Suspicious downloads of sensitive data. • Unauthorized modems. • Unexplained storage of encrypted data. • Anomalous work hours and/or network activity. • Unexplained modification of network security-related operating system settings. • Unexplained modification of network security devices such as routers and firewalls. • Malicious code that attempts to establish communication with systems other than the one which the code resides. • Unexplained external physical network or computer connection. • Unexplained modifications to network hardware. • Unexplained file transfer protocol (FTP) servers on the inside of the security perimeter. • Unexplained hardware or software found on internal networks. • Network interface cards that are set in a “promiscuous” or “sniffer” mode. • Unexpected open maintenance ports on network components. • Any unusual activity associated with network-enabled peripheral devices, such as printers and copiers.29 Jan

U.S. Army War College Strategic Cyberspace Operations Guide - 1. This publication provides a guide for U.S. Army War College students to understand design, planning, and execution of cyberspace operations at combatant commands (CCMDs), joint task forces (JTFs), and joint functional component commands. It combines existing U.S. Government Unclassified and “Releasable to the Public” documents into a single guide. … 1. This guide follows the operational design methodology and the joint operation planning process (JOPP) and applies these principles to the cyberspace domain. Cyberspace is a global domain within the information environment consisting of the interdependent networks of information technology infrastructures and resident data, including the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers. Cyberspace operations (CO) are the employment of cyberspace capabilities where the primary purpose is to achieve objectives in or through cyberspace. Commanders must develop the capability to direct operations in the cyber domain since strategic mission success increasingly depends on freedom of maneuver in cyberspace (see Figure 1-1). 2. The President and the Secretary of Defense (SecDef) provide strategic guidance to the joint force. This guidance is the common thread that integrates and synchronizes the planning activities and operations. It provides purpose and focus to the planning for employment of military force. 3. The commander and staff develop plans and orders through the application of the operational design methodology and by using JOPP. Operational design results in the commander’s operational approach, which broadly describes the actions the joint force needs to take to reach the end state. The commander and staff translate the broad operational approach into detailed plans and orders using JOPP.5 Planning continues during execution, with an initial emphasis on refining the existing plan and producing the operations order and refining the force flow utilizing employed assigned and allocated forces. 4. Commanders integrate cyberspace capabilities at all levels and in all military operations. Plans should address how to effectively integrate cyberspace capabilities, counter an adversary’s use of cyberspace, secure mission critical networks, operate in a degraded environment, efficiently use limited cyberspace assets, and consolidate operational requirements for cyberspace capabilities. While it is possible that some military objectives can be achieved by CO alone, CO capabilities should be integrated into the joint force commander’s plan and synchronized with other operations during execution. … 29 Jan

Department of State International Security Advisory Board Report on Gray Zone Conflict - The study addresses the challenges facing the United States from the increasing use by rivals and adversaries – state and non-state alike – of what have come to be called “Gray Zone” techniques. The term Gray Zone (“GZ”) denotes the use of techniques to achieve a nation’s goals and frustrate those of its rivals by employing instruments of power – often asymmetric and ambiguous in character – that are not direct use of acknowledged regular military forces. The report is organized according to the specific subjects the ISAB was directed to consider by the Terms of Reference (TOR) – Characteristics of GZ Operations, Policy Options and Concepts, and Deterrence/Dissuasion. I. Characteristics of GZ Conflict Perhaps the most widely used definition of Gray Zone conflict is that established by the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM): “gray zone challenges are defined as competitive interaction among and within state and non-state actors that fall between the traditional war and peace duality. They are characterized by ambiguity about the nature of the conflict, opacity of the parties involved, or uncertainty about the relevant policy and legal frameworks.” Read too broadly, this definition would embrace practically all international interaction, most of which is directed in some degree at affecting the actions or view of other countries. However, it is possible to describe the problem without seeking a universal and precise definition. The term “Gray Zone” may be new; the phenomenon is not. Although many of the techniques used now are based on modern technology, notably cyber and networked communication, many are as old as history. What are now being called GZ methods have been conducted in the past under such names as “political warfare,” “covert operations,” “irregular or guerrilla warfare,” “active measures,” and the like. In some sense, the Cold War was one protracted GZ campaign on both sides on a global scale. The Trojan Horse exploited many of the instruments of a GZ operation – creating confusion and division in enemy opinion, extending ostensible inducements, implanting hidden military forces, deception, and clandestine infiltration of enemy territory. The central characteristic of GZ operations is that they involve the use of instruments beyond normal international interactions yet short of overt military force. They occupy a space between normal diplomacy and commercial competition and open military conflict, and while often employing diplomacy and commercial actions, GZ attacks go beyond the forms of political and social action and military operations with which liberal democracies are familiar, to make deliberate use of instruments of violence, terrorism, and dissembling. Moreover, they often involve asymmetry in magnitude of national interests or capabilities between the adversaries. GZ techniques include: Cyber, information operations, efforts to undermine public/allied/local/ regional resistance, and information/propaganda in support of other hybrid instruments; Covert operations under state control, espionage, infiltration, and subversion; Special Operations Forces (SOF) and other state-controlled armed units, and unacknowledged military personnel; Support – logistical, political, and financial – for insurgent and terrorist movements; Enlistment of non-governmental actors, including organized criminal groups, terrorists, and extremist political, religious, and ethnic or sectarian organizations; Assistance to irregular military and paramilitary forces; Economic pressures that go beyond normal economic competition; Manipulation and discrediting of democratic institutions, including electoral system and the judiciary; Calculated ambiguity, use of /covert/unacknowledged operations, and deception and denial; and Explicit or implicit threat use, or threats of use of armed force, terrorism, and abuse of civilian populations and of escalation. Currently, the United States can reasonably be said to face GZ campaigns in a range of theaters: Russia has mounted a variety of GZ operations, not only in Ukraine where it actually employed thinly disguised military force and support for local militias as well as other instruments, but also targeting the Baltics, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the United States, and a range of European countries with a massive campaign (including expansive use of cyber) to spread its narratives, undermine confidence in legal, economic, and electoral systems, and manipulate political action, exemplified by the FSB/GRU cyber operation that hacked into networks used by U.S. political figures and organizations in what is assessed by the U.S. intelligence community and the FBI as an effort intended to influence the recent U.S. presidential election. China is aggressively advancing its disputed maritime claims in the South and East China Seas, by both incremental establishment of “facts on the ground,” by construction and occupation of disputed features, providing material incentives to accommodate to Chinese desires, and undermining confidence in U.S. credibility by an extensive media effort. Iran in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, and from Daesh and other radical Islamist groups in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere using terror, exploiting sectarian and ethnic divisions, and otherwise seeking to disrupt the established order in the region. North Korea has over the years, repeatedly used ostensibly deniable violence, political infiltration, intimidation by threats of massive escalation, and hostage-taking to divide the Republic of Korea and the United States and protect its failing system. 28 Jan

(U//FOUO) DHS Intelligence Note: Germany Christmas Market Attack Underscores Threat to Mass Gatherings and Open-Access Venues - (U) A 25-ton commercial truck transporting steel beams from Poland to Germany plowed into crowds at a Christmas market in Berlin at about 2000 local time on 19 December, killing at least 12 people and injuring 48 others, several critically, according to media reporting citing public security officials involved in the investigation. The truck was reportedly traveling at approximately 40 miles per hour when it rammed the Christmas market stands. Police estimate the vehicle traveled 80 yards into the Christmas market before coming to a halt. (U) German authorities are calling the attack a terrorist incident, with the attacker still at large. German authorities are warning that it is unclear if the attacker was a lone offender, acted as part of a cell, or if he received any sort of direction by a FTO, and expressed concern that additional attacks are possible. An individual who was initially detained on 19 December was released on 20 December, and is no longer considered a suspect, according to German police. The truck may have been stolen or hijacked with the original driver overpowered or murdered. The original driver, found dead in the truck cab, appears to have died from stabbing and shooting wounds, according to media reporting citing law enforcement officials. The truck tracking location system indicated repeated engine stalls in the time leading up to the attack, leading the owner of the vehicle to speculate this was unlikely if a veteran driver was operating the truck, unless there was some sort of mechanical trouble. In response to the incident, German authorities, as part of their heightened security posture, will place concrete barriers around access points at Christmas markets across Germany. … (U//FOUO) Vehicle Ramming Featured in Recent Terrorist Messaging (U//FOUO) I&A assesses that the 19 December likely terrorist attack at one of the largest Christmas markets in Berlin highlights terrorists’ continued use of simple tactics and is consistent with recent calls by the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) for attacks in the West using “all available means.” In an early December audio statement, ISIL spokesman Abu Hassan al-Muhajir called for attacks in “their homes, markets, street gatherings and anywhere they do not think of.” Vehicle ramming has been featured in recent violent extremist publications and messaging—including in ISIL’s al Rumiyah magazine and al-Qaʻida in the Arabian Peninsula’s (AQAP) Inspire magazine—especially since the mid-July vehicle ramming attack in Nice, France. The early-November third issue of Rumiyah highlighted applicable targets for vehicle ramming attacks such as “large outdoor conventions and celebrations, pedestrian-congested streets, outdoor markets, festivals, parades, and political rallies.” The most recent Homeland attack featuring this tactic occurred at Ohio State University in Columbus on 28 November, where Abdul Razak Ali Artan ran over pedestrians and then continued the attack with an edged weapon after the vehicle came to a stop. (U//FOUO) On 20 December, ISIL’s A’maq News Agency called the attacker “an Islamic State soldier” consistent with previous instances of quickly posting claims of credit for operations. While the attack bears the hallmarks of ISIL’s tactics and targets, we have not been able to determine a definitive link to the group at this time. … (U//FOUO) I&A has no information indicating a specific or credible threat against individuals, locations or events in the Homeland, but several recent plots and attacks in the United States and overseas involving shopping malls, mass transit, and mass gatherings, including sporting events, have shown that homegrown violent extremists (HVEs) and terrorist groups are interested in attacking these types of targets. I&A assesses that commercial facilities—such as festivals, concerts, outdoor events, and other mass gatherings—remain a potential target for terrorists or HVEs, as they often pursue simple, achievable attacks with an emphasis on economic impact and mass casualties. The most likely tactics in a hypothetical terrorist attack against such events likely would involve edged weapons, small arms, vehicular assaults, and possibly improvised explosive devices. The 19 December events underscore the difficulties the private sector and law enforcement face in securing venues that are pedestrian-friendly, particularly in light of the large number of such areas.16 Jan

National Intelligence Council Global Trends Assessment: Paradox of Progress - We are living a paradox: The achievements of the industrial and information ages are shaping a world to come that is both more dangerous and richer with opportunity than ever before. Whether promise or peril prevails will turn on the choices of humankind. The progress of the past decades is historic—connecting people, empowering individuals, groups, and states, and lifting a billion people out of poverty in the process. But this same progress also spawned shocks like the Arab Spring, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, and the global rise of populist, anti-establishment politics. These shocks reveal how fragile the achievements have been, underscoring deep shifts in the global landscape that portend a dark and difficult near future. The next five years will see rising tensions within and between countries. Global growth will slow, just as increasingly complex global challenges impend. An ever-widening range of states, organizations, and empowered individuals will shape geopolitics. For better and worse, the emerging global landscape is drawing to a close an era of American dominance following the Cold War. So, too, perhaps is the rules-based international order that emerged after World War II. It will be much harder to cooperate internationally and govern in ways publics expect. Veto players will threaten to block collaboration at every turn, while information “echo chambers” will reinforce countless competing realities, undermining shared understandings of world events. Underlying this crisis in cooperation will be local, national, and international differences about the proper role of government across an array of issues ranging from the economy to the environment, religion, security, and the rights of individuals. Debates over moral boundaries—to whom is owed what—will become more pronounced, while divergence in values and interests among states will threaten international security. It will be tempting to impose order on this apparent chaos, but that ultimately would be too costly in the short run and would fail in the long. Dominating empowered, proliferating actors in multiple domains would require unacceptable resources in an era of slow growth, fiscal limits, and debt burdens. Doing so domestically would be the end of democracy, resulting in authoritarianism or instability or both. Although material strength will remain essential to geopolitical and state power, the most powerful actors of the future will draw on networks, relationships, and information to compete and cooperate. This is the lesson of great power politics in the 1900s, even if those powers had to learn and relearn it. The US and Soviet proxy wars, especially in Vietnam and Afghanistan, were a harbinger of the post-Cold War conflicts and today’s fights in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia in which less powerful adversaries deny victory through asymmetric strategies, ideology, and societal tensions. The threat from terrorism will expand in the coming decades as the growing prominence of small groups and individuals use new technologies, ideas, and relationships to their advantage. Meanwhile, states remain highly relevant. China and Russia will be emboldened, while regional aggressors and nonstate actors will see openings to pursue their interests. Uncertainty about the United States, an inward-looking West, and erosion of norms for conflict prevention and human rights will encourage China and Russia to check US influence. In doing so, their “gray zone” aggression and diverse forms of disruption will stay below the threshold of hot war but bring profound risks of miscalculation. Overconfidence that material strength can manage escalation will increase the risks of interstate conflict to levels not seen since the Cold War. Even if hot war is avoided, the current pattern of “international cooperation where we can get it”—such as on climate change—masks significant differences in values and interests among states and does little to curb assertions of dominance within regions. These trends are leading to a spheres of influence world. … Competing Views on Instability China and Russia portray global disorder as resulting from a Western plot to push what they see as self-serving American concepts and values of freedom to every corner of the planet. Western governments see instability as an underlying condition worsened by the end of the Cold War and incomplete political and economic development. Concerns over weak and fragile states rose more than a generation ago because of beliefs about the externalities they produce—whether disease, refugees, or terrorists in some instances. The growing interconnectedness of the planet, however, makes isolation from the global periphery an illusion, and the rise of human rights norms makes state violence against a governed population an unacceptable option. One consequence of post-Cold War disengagement by the United States and the then-USSR, was a loss of external support for strongmen politics, militaries, and security forces who are no longer able to bargain for patronage. Also working against coercive governments are increased demands for responsive and participatory governance by citizens no longer poor due to the unprecedented scale and speed of economic development in the nonindustrial world. Where political and economic development occurred roughly in tandem or quick succession, modernization and individual empowerment have reinforced political stability. Where economic development outpaced or occurred without political changes—such as in much of the Arab world and the rest of Africa and South Asia—instability ensued. China has been a notable exception. The provision of public goods there so far has bolstered political order but a campaign against corruption is now generating increasing uncertainty and popular protests have grown during the past 15 years. Russia is the other major exception—economic growth—largely the result of high energy and commodity prices—helped solve the disorder of the Yeltsin years. US experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown that coercion and infusions of money cannot overcome state weakness. Rather, building a stable political order requires inclusiveness, cooperation among elites, and a state administration that can both control the military and provide public services. This has proved more difficult than expected to provide. … 15 Jan

DoD Cybersecurity Discipline Implementation Plan February 2016 - Inspections and incidents across the Department of Defense (DoD) reveal a need to reinforce basic cybersecurity requirements identified in policies, directives, and orders. In agreement with the Secretary of Defense, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the DoD Chief Information Officer (CIO) identified key tasks needed to ensure those requirements are achieved. The DoD Cybersecurity Campaign reinforces the need to ensure Commanders and Supervisors at all levels, including the operational level, are accountable for key tasks, including those identified in this Implementation Plan. The Campaign does not relieve a Commander’s and Supervisor’s responsibility for compliance with other cybersecurity tasks identified in policies, directives, and orders, but limits the risk assumed by one Commander or Supervisor in key areas in order to reduce the risk to all other DoD missions. As part of the Campaign, this Implementation Plan is grouped into four Lines of Effort. The requirements within each Line of Effort represent a prioritization of all existing DoD cybersecurity requirements. Each Line of Effort focuses on a different aspect of cybersecurity defense-in-depth that is being exploited by our adversaries to gain access to DoD information networks. The four Lines of Effort are: 1. Strong authentication – to degrade the adversaries’ ability to maneuver on DoD information networks; 2. Device hardening – to reduce internal and external attack vectors into DoD information networks; 3. Reduce attack surface – to reduce external attack vectors into DoD information networks; and 4. Alignment to cybersecurity / computer network defense service providers – to improve detection of and response to adversary activity In conjunction with this Implementation Plan, a DoD Cybersecurity Scorecard effort led by the DoD CIO includes prioritized requirements within these Lines of Effort. Although similar to and supportive of one another, they maintain two distinct reporting mechanisms with two distinct targets. Commanders and Supervisors at all levels will report their status with the requirements in this Implementation Plan via the Defense Readiness Reporting System (DRRS), allowing leadership to review compliance down to the tactical level. In contrast, the Cybersecurity Scorecard is a means for the Secretary of Defense to understand cybersecurity compliance at the strategic level by reporting metrics at the service tier. Securing DoD information networks to provide mission assurance requires leadership at all levels to implement cybersecurity discipline, enforce accountability, and manage the shared risk to all DoD missions. By including cybersecurity compliance in readiness reporting, this campaign forces awareness and accountability for these key tasks into the command chains and up to senior leadership, where resourcing decisions can be made to address compliance shortfalls. The Cybersecurity Discipline Implementation Plan and Cybersecurity Scorecard efforts are critical to achieving the strategic goal of Defending DoD information networks, securing DoD data, and mitigating risks to DoD missions as set forth in the 2015 DoD Cyber Strategy. The aforementioned line of efforts and associated tasks shall be linked to DoD Cyber Strategy implementation efforts whenever possible. The DoD Cybersecurity Campaign, reinforced by the USCYBERCOM Orders, will begin as soon as possible. Reporting on cybersecurity readiness in the scorecard and DRRS will begin as soon as possible.15 Jan

(U//LES) Homeland Security Investigations Presentation: Criminal Exploitation of Digital Currencies - What is a Virtual Currency? • An alternative financial value system involving the exchange of funds to purchase precious metals or other value base which can later be used in exchange for products and services. • Is not registered anywhere and it is not governed by any law other than arbitration private forums. • Personal data is not required. • The system focuses strictly on activities of the forum. • Information stored for two months and then permanently deleted. Types of Virtual Currencies E-Currency / E-Wallets Digital Gold Virtual World Virtual Games Merchants (FB, Amazon) Crypto-Currencies ** … 13 Jan

(U//FOUO) U.K. Ministry of Defence Guide: Understanding the Arab People - The Arab World is a vast area which is home to people from diverse cultures. The way in which people behave and interact with you will therefore vary greatly across the region. This guide discusses aspects of Arab culture that you might experience in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, the Palestinian Territories, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Yemen. Further reading on individual countries is recommended before you deploy. Most Arabs are Sunni Muslims who speak Arabic. However, there are many different religions, ethnic and social groups in the Arab world, among them Christians, Jews, Shi’a and Sunni Muslims, Kurds, Turks and Berbers. Some of these groups have suffered oppression in their countries, but many live happily as Arabs and as part of Arab society. While some Arab countries are very conservative and have strict rules about the role of women, others are more permissive in their approach to issues like alcohol, religion and education. The familiar stereotype of the Bedouin Arab with his camel, tent, robes and blood feuds is only a small part of Arab identity and history. In fact, this traditional way of life has died out in many parts of the Arab world, and is not significant today in areas like North Africa. With the improvement in technology and social media in recent years, people across the Arab World have been exposed to other cultures to a much greater degree than previous generations. Approximately 70% of the Arab World are under the age of 30 and so the entire region is undergoing a transformation as people try to find ways to integrate their traditional cultures into the modern world. … Religious Practice. Islam affects almost every aspect of life as a Muslim Arab. People use Islamic symbols to decorate their homes and cars, carry miniature Qur’ans with them, and go on pilgrimage to various holy shrines around the Arab world. Most Arabs follow a pattern of daily prayer, celebrate Islamic festivals and holidays, and adhere to the rules of Islam. Verses from the Qur’an are memorised. In most Arab countries, Islam also affects politics and law, influencing marriage, inheritance and divorce law, as well as many aspects of business and banking. It is common to see a copy of the qu’ran on car dashboards in Muslim countries. Sharia. Sharia is the law as revealed by God and based on the philosophy laid out in the Qur’an and Hadith (the sayings of the Prophet Muhammed). It provides the legal basis for all public rituals but also guides an individual in their personal life, such as how to wash and how to behave in relationships. Sharia is interpreted for the people by religious scholars (collectively known as an Ulema). In Saudi Arabia and Sudan, sharia is interpreted very strictly and encompasses all aspects of domestic and civil law. In other countries it is integrated with other influences. For example, Tunisia is a former French colony and during that period French civil law applied. Since gaining independence the law has developed and evolved to incorporate sharia into the existing framework, resulting in a more liberal interpretation. Christians. There are an estimated 12-16 million Christians in the Arab world, representing 5-7% of the total population. Larger communities are located in Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Jordan and Iraq. The Coptic church is the most important Christian denomination in the Middle East, and suffers from discrimination in Egypt and elsewhere. A significant minority of these Christians do not consider themselves Arabs. … 8 Jan

Sunlight Foundation Blog

Online search for Obama-era White House visitor logs goes offline - Over the past eight years, the White House visitor logs represented a meaningful window, if a flawed one, into what was happening at the White House. The data enabled reporters like Sunlight’s Paul Blumenthal to report on the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying in 2010, lobbying on healthcare reform, and who visited former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. More recently, reporters used the visitor logs to as evidence to report on Google’s relationship with the Obama administration. Today, the Web-based interface for the archive of the Obama White House’s visitor logs hosted by the National Archives is gone. The embedded Web application, which was provided by Seattle-based Socrata, is now a broken plug-in. The logs are still available as open government data on the Obama White House archive, compressed into ZIP files that expand into comma-separated value data sets. If you have Excel or can set up a database, you can search through them. (Google Spreadsheets and Apple Pages can’t handle a million row data set.) Given the continued availability of the open data on the page, we have not added this to our list of data removed from the Internet, but the change is still significant. What’s now missing reduces the accessibility of this open data for non-technical users. It’s no longer possible to simply visit a Web page, enter in the name of an individual and see when he or she visited the White House, who was visited, and when. You have to download the data to do so. In practice, this represents a reduction in government transparency. It may be that this change is the result of mistake, a technical error, the result of the National Archives not continuing a contract with Socrata as part of their budget for keeping archived websites online. We’ve asked NARA for comment and will update this post if and when we receive an answer. Putting the issue of this broken embed aside, it remains unclear if the Trump administration will continue the practice of disclosing visitor logs as open government data on the Internet, or indeed to continue disclosing them at all. A line about data coming “soon” at the new open.whitehouse.gov and a dedicated section on the disclosure section of the Trump White House website suggest data is coming, someday. As of today, however, we can neither trust nor verify today that will be the case in April, nor has the Trump White House used its blog or social media platforms to inform the public of its plans in this area or on other open government questions. “We hope to see the Trump Administration make full use of the White House’s open data platform,” Hudson Hollister, the executive director of the Data Coalition, told Sunlight. “In addition to visitor logs, staff lists, and financial data sets, like those the Obama administration published, White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney suggested in his confirmation hearings that he wants to publish an open data version of the President’s proposed budget that matches the DATA Act’s format so that it can be electronically compared to the previous year. We’d love that, too.” Sunlight join Hollister in hoping that the Trump administration will see the value of open government data in the 21st century and continues the standard for disclosure set to date. 17 Feb

The crisis of public trust in the presidency of Donald J. Trump - In 1932, President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt confronted a nation in crisis. Some 25% of Americans were unemployed and many Americans had lost faith in their economy and institutions. Roosevelt knew his Administration would have to take bold steps to maintain America’s stability and get the country back on trade. He decided he could not act without gaining the trust of the American people, as measured by confidence in his reliability and ability. Roosevelt’s subsequent efforts to build trust, his empathy for the American people, and his focus on collective solutions to shared problems contrasts dramatically with the distrust and dissension fomented by President-elect Donald J Trump. Rooselvelt recognized that many Americans feared big government and such fears could undermine his Administration’s efforts on their behalf. Some Americans thought he was a radical socialist, while others thought socialism was the only answer to capitalism’s peaks and valleys. Thus, he knew he must build trust in his integrity and his actions. Roosevelt told the public he would be honest about the nation’s economic peril. He declared himself open to trying a wide range of solutions to stimulate growth. He argued that he had taken similar steps as Governor of New York, and these policies had helped New Yorkers. Moreover, he signaled that he would not take their trust for granted. He made it clear that voters could hold him to account by rejecting him if his plans failed to help them. To Roosevelt, trust was a confidence and competence feedback loop. If he could gain Americans’ confidence, they would be willing to risk the new ideas he proposed. If he could show government was competent, they would accept a more activist role for government in the economy. To that point, Roosevelt proposed that the United States government employ Americans in temporary jobs such as building roads or teaching the arts. Although these new jobs would directly benefit only a few Americans, they would have important spillovers for the economy and social stability. As the newly employed gained income, these workers would buy more goods and services, and in so doing, would encourage private firms to hire more personnel as well. In turn, these private sector employees would purchase more goods and services. Society as a whole would benefit from greater consumer demand. In short, by collaborating, Americans could create a cycle of growth and confidence. President Donald J. Trump also wants to bring change, but in contrast with Roosevelt, Trump has fomented distrust and division. He has bullied a wide range of corporations, by his actions and tweets. He has signaled that the president will be the main negotiator and sole authority. He has put forward plans for massive deregulation of the economy and to eliminate the centrality of the United States as a global force for democracy, free markets, and political stability. He has refused to make his business interests or tax returns public, ignoring potential conflicts of interests and making it almost impossible for citizens to hold him to account. Moreover, he creates distrust among Americans by fostering hostility among various ethnic, racial and interest groups. By constantly criticizing longstanding institutions, whether trade agreements, American intelligence agencies, or historical alliances, he effectively says our government has failed us. He signals that he is the only one who can fix these problems because while others are losers, he is confident and competent. But he never fully delineates how his ideas such as replacing trade agreements with protectionism, fomenting distrust of intelligence agencies, or ending membership in the United Nations or North Atlantic Treaty Organization will make Americans more prosperous and secure. Not surprisingly, many Americans remain unconvinced of his confidence and competency. On January 3, 2017 the polling organization Gallup reported that as only 46% of Americans polled are confident in his ability to handle an international crisis. Only 47% think he would use military force wisely. Trust in the Trump presidency has fallen in the month since. Presidents Obama, Bush and Clinton, in contrast, received confidence ratings of 70% regarding crises and the use of force. Roosevelt set his Presidency on a path to success from the beginning by working to build trust among government officials and the people they serve. Trump puts his future Presidency at grave risk by his inexplicable failure to build trust. By fomenting distrust and dissonance, he guarantees many Americans with respond with gridlock and animosity, unwilling to take a leap of faith in his ideas. Susan Ariel Aaronson is Research Professor and Cross Disciplinary Fellow at the George Washington University, where she teaches corruption and good governance. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation.13 Feb

Protecting Data, Protecting Residents - Today, the Sunlight Foundation is publishing a new white paper that lays out ten principles for responsible municipal data management for local government employees who want to be responsible stewards of sensitive data for their communities. Individual residents’ citizenship status, nationality, and religion have all become much more politically salient in 2017. Sharing data with the federal government pertaining to vulnerable members of a community creates new potential risks for local residents. Our principles aim to help local governments craft thoughtful practices and policies to protect their residents in difficult times through appropriately protecting their data. The creation of this resource was driven by increased interest from civil servants about their role and responsibilities under the Trump administration.  If upheld by the courts, President Donald Trump’s January 25 Executive Order: Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States would change the relationship between the federal government and state and local governments on immigration enforcement. Local governments will need to quickly identify the right way to balance local policy obligations and the preferences of their communities with the Trump administration’s expectations for local assistance for federal immigration enforcement. While it’s easy to find an executive order when it’s posted online, processing the actual content of this order is much more complicated. Responding to it will require some immediate and thoughtful work from local governments. We appreciate the magnitude of what local governments and their communities are being called on to do. We hope that this resource proves helpful in that work. We are very grateful to many partners who provided their comments and thoughts on this resource, including staff from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Civil Liberties Union, the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology, Center for Popular Democracy, Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Datamade, and MuckRock. You can read, download and share our paper below. 10 Feb

You don’t have to be tech-savvy to benefit from open data - Open data can help you even if you know nothing about data, because it can power tools and resources that are usable by anyone. This was on clear display recently at TransportationCamp, an unconference that focuses on the intersection of transportation and technology. Several developers from Mapzen ran a session presenting some of the open-source mapping tools they’ve been working on recently. One in particular, the Mobility Explorer, allows users to visualize and understand local transportation networks. For example, here’s a map of all transit lines around Washington, D.C.: Note that this map is showing routes across multiple transit agencies — this is possible thanks to all transit providers using a common data standard for their schedule and route data. My favorite feature is the isochrone generator. Isochrones show you how far you can travel from a given point in a given amount of time. Isochrone maps can be used by businesses, other organizations, and residents to make location decisions — and they can even be considered maps of your freedom. For example, here at Sunlight, we were recently deciding on a new office location. One thing we wanted in our office was accessibility to both current and prospective employees who live all over the city and region. Here’s Mobility Explorer’s isochrone map for our new office: The successive color rings show 15-, 30-, 45- and 60-minute travel times on a weekday morning. So this map shows where in the region employees can live and have a reasonable commute time. What if we had instead located ourselves in suburban Tysons Corner? Our isochrone map would look like this: Our office would be transit-accessible to significantly fewer employees, potentially limiting our hiring pool. These maps could also help someone who’s moving to the region decide where to live based on what jobs and other opportunities they’ll be able to access, or they can tell a prospective business owner what kind of a customer pool would be able to access a given store location. Mobility Explorer can also generate isochrones for driving, biking and walking, and can be produced for any time or day. Here’s the thing: all of these features are powered by open data, but you don’t need to worry about that data! You don’t need to know what GTFS or CSVs are to be able to use these tools. We definitely need to keep working to make open data more accessible to the public, but we should also remember that just because the public may not be directly looking at a certain data set, that doesn’t mean it’s not useful or valuable to the public. Here on Sunlight’s Local team, we’re trying to increasingly focus on open data for impact and not just open data for open data’s sake — so we’re excited to see practical, user-friendly tools that anyone can use, like Mobility Explorer. 7 Feb

State of Open Corporate Data: Wins and Challenges Ahead - For many people working to open data and reduce corruption, the past year could be summed up in two words: “Panama Papers.” The transcontinental investigation by a team from International Center of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) blew open the murky world of offshore company registration. It put corporate transparency high on the agenda of countries all around the world and helped lead to some notable advances in access to official company register data. The Panama Papers is the biggest data leak of our time to date, comprised of 2.6 terabytes of data with 11.5 million files containing information about more than 210,000 companies in 21 offshore jurisdictions. The top jurisdictions for registering shell companies were the British Virgin Islands, Panama, Bahamas, Seychelles, Niue, Samoa, British Anguilla, Nevada, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom. While most companies are created and operated for legitimate economic activity,  there is a small percentage that aren’t. Entities involved in corruption, money laundering, fraud and tax evasion frequently use such companies as vehicles for their criminal activity. “The Idiot’s Guide to Money Laundering from Global Witness” shows how easy it is to use layer after layer of shell companies to hide the identity of the person who controls and benefits from the activities of the network. The World Bank’s “Puppet Masters” report found that over 70% of grand corruption cases, in fact, involved the use of offshore vehicles. For years, OpenCorporates has advocated for company information to be in the public domain as open data, so it is usable and comparable.  It was the public reaction to Panama Papers, however, that made it clear that due diligence requires global data sets and beneficial registries are key for integrity and progress. The call for accountability and action was clear from the aftermath of the leak. ICIJ, the journalists involved and advocates have called for tougher action on prosecutions and more transparency measures: open corporate registers and beneficial ownership registers. A series of workshops organized by the B20 showed that business also needed public beneficial ownership registers. Progress in 2016 Last year the UK became the first country in the world to collect and publish who controls and benefits from companies in a structured format, and as open data. Just a few days later, we were able to add the information in OpenCorporates. The UK data, therefore, is one of a kind, and has been highly anticipated by transparency skeptics and advocates advocates alike. So fa,r things are looking good. 15 other countries have committed to having a public beneficial ownership register including Nigeria, Afghanistan, Germany, Indonesia, New Zealand and Norway. Denmark has announced its first public beneficial ownership data will be published in June 2017. It’s likely to be open data. This progress isn’t limited to beneficial ownership. It is also being seen in the opening up of corporate registers . These are what OpenCorporates calls “core company data”. In 2016, more countries started releasing company register as open data, including Japan, with over 4.4 million companies, Israel, Virginia, Slovenia, Texas, Singapore and Bulgaria. We’ve also had a great start to 2017 , with France publishing their central company database as open data on January 5th. As more states have embracing open data, the USA jumped from average score of 19/100 to 30/100. Singapore rose from 0 to 20. The Slovak Republic from 20 to 40. Bulgaria wet from 35 to 90.  Japan rose from 0 to 70 — the biggest increase of the year. The rise of open company data to power investigations At OpenCorporates, we are passionate about the potential for open corporate data to create a hostile environment for criminal use of companies and to power investigations, whether into corruption, fraud, organised crime, or asset recovery. Here are some of the highlights. Shortly after the Panama Papers came out, journalists from El Pais broke a story that led to the resignation of José Manuel Soria, the Minister for Trade & Industry of Spain. The story (see details here and here) is that Soria was discovered in the Panama Papers, but denied any connection to the Bahamas company in referenced in them. It turns out that a company of the same name, UK Lines Limited, had been incorporated in the UK, with officerships linked to him and his family. Further investigation into this company and another UK one, Oceanic Lines Limited, used company filings and shareholder documents to show that these were indeed connected with Soria and his family. Newspaper El Mundo nailed the case, showing Soria was also director of a Jersey company when he was already a politician. While the main credit goes to the journalists who tracked the story down, there is an irony in Soria being brought down in part by open data. The Spanish Company Register is locked behind a paywall! You can’t even search to see if a company exists without giving your credit card. They have been adamant that they will not open up the register, much less make it available as open data. Not surprisingly they score zero on the Open Company Data Index. Research by Thomson Reuters and Transparency International UK using OpenCorporates data, data from World-Check, Offshore Leaks from the ICIJ, and the UK Land Registry) found that there is no data available on the real owners of more than half of the 44,022 land titles owned by overseas companies in London. This is concerning. Nine out of ten of these properties were bought through jurisdictions like those found in the Panama Papers. Another powerful story was from La Presse Canada. By running the records of video lottery terminal licenses through the OpenCorporates data, they found organized crime controls parts of the Québec’s video lottery terminal (VLT) industry.  There are an disproportionate amount of terminals in vulnerable communities. This story went viral and led to the government committing to investigate it further. Setbacks Despite such investigations, calls for more transparency into the affairs of the corporate world, and some significant advances, company data continues to be one of the least open datasets in the world. The work of OpenCorporates is changing that, country by country. While we saw many significant advances in access to data in 2016,  there have also been a few backwards steps. This year, for example, Gibraltar and Tanzania shut down their doors to transparency, with the latter moving behind a paywall. With Gibraltar, it’s even worse: not only is it no longer possible to access data from Gibraltar corporate register, they’ve also made it difficult to access gazettes anymore. Gazettes are supposed to be public notices! It’s a highly irregular move. This action should be a red flag to anyone doing business with Gibraltar-incorporated companies. Spain remains a black hole for public access to company data. In October, Spain hosted the International Open Data Conference. Spanish civil society had been skeptical of this move because of the lack of movement from Spain on open data. Despite revelations in Panama Papers and campaigning from civil society , however,  the company register remains closed. Spains open data portal lacks any substantive open data sets and has many PDFs, the lowest form of open data. Despite the signs of lack of commitment and poor performance we observed, speakers from Spanish government at the conference insistedthat  Spain was one of the best performers in Europe. OpenCorporates, Web Foundation, Transparency International joined many Spanish civil society groups, including Civio and Info Access, on an open letter to ask Spain to do more. No official response has been received to this day, despite the letter being hand delivered — twice. In the area of beneficial ownership, often talk by politicians has not been failed followed by actions. After the European Commission recommended that beneficial ownership registers should be public in every European member state as part of the revision to the 4th Anti-Money Laundering Directive, the national governments watered it down.  Notably, the removed mandatory public access, thus enabling precisely the sort of behavior the Panama Papers exposed. This makes life easier for criminals, corrupt politicians and fraudsters, and more difficult for legitimate business. It’s so critical that the world continues to push for genuine corporate transparency and access to company registers as open data in 2017. Hera Hussein is the Community and Partnerships Manager at OpenCorporates, the world’s largest open database of company information. She’s an advocate for open data and open culture. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation. Interested in writing a guest post for Sunlight? Email us at guestblog@sunlightfoundation.com 7 Feb

How Data Refuge works, and how YOU can help save federal open data - Editor’s Note: Last week, Sunlight joined Abbie Grotke, a digital library project manager at the Library of Congress, and professor Bethany Wiggin, from the University of Pennsylvania, at a Transparency Caucus briefing in the U.S. House of Representatives to discuss archiving federal open government data. (You can watch video of the event online.) At the event, Wiggin shared what’s happening with Data Refuge, a distributed, grassroots effort around the United States in which scientists, researchers, programmers, librarians and other volunteers are working to preserve government data.  Her prepared remarks are below. Thank you for inviting me; it is an honor to be here. I am an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach a seminar on censorship and technology in history; and I also research and write about Philadelphia’s urban waters—including the great lack of much environmental data about those waters. I am also the Founding Director of Penn’s Program in Environmental Humanities. This academic program works at the intersection of the natural and human sciences, otherwise known as the humanities. We take an integrated, interdisciplinary approach spanning the arts and sciences to understand how humans have profoundly remade the natural world, fundamentally altering earth systems. Working at the intersection of academic disciplines, we can foster resilience in era of human-caused global climate change. Public engagement lies at the very heart of the program’s mission. One recent example of our public engagement work is the project called Data Refuge. What is Data Refuge? Working with partners, especially with our librarians at Penn, Data Refuge aims to accomplish three goals: Use our trustworthy system to make research-quality copies of federal climate and environmental data. The types of public data we copy range from satellite imaging to PDFs, and we augment the work of webcrawling by our partners at End of Term Harvest and the Internet Archive by developing tools to download and describe “uncrawlables” that can be put in the public server space available at www.datarefuge.org Advocate for environmental literacy with storytelling projects that showcase how federal environmental data support health and safety in our local communities; and advocate for more robust archiving of born-digital materials as well as for more reliable access to them. They are, after all, paid for by American taxpayers. Build a consortium of research libraries to scale data refuge’s tools and practices to make copies of other kinds of federal data beyond the environment. This budding consortium, supported by the Association of Research Libraries, will supplement the existing system of federal depository libraries, where printed documents are “pushed.” This new consortium could actively “pull” public materials, i.e., copy them, from federal agencies. How much data has Data Refuge archived? Data Rescue events have downloaded roughly 4 terabytes of data. Related libraries’ efforts have captured petabytes of open data. Data Rescue events, as of 1/31/17, have also seeded more than 30,000 urls to put into the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine. As of 1/31/17, some 800 people have participated in Data Rescue events. Since beginning this project in November of last year, we have helped support six data rescue events, including a two-day event in Philadelphia, the first to tackle data that cannot go into the Wayback Machine. We’ve now supported a seventh in Cambridge, Mass; an eighth at UC Davis; a ninth in Portland, OR; a tenth in NYC. Data Refuge organizers hosted a webinar for future event organizers attended by well over one hundred participants. More than twenty additional Data Rescue events in locations ranging from the SF Bay area, to Atlanta, Austin, two additional Boston events, Boulder, Chapel Hill, DC, Denver, Haverford (PA), Miami, another NYC event, Seattle, Twin Cities, and Wageningen, Netherlands. How do we know how to prioritize the data to save? Since December, with the help of the Union of Concerned Scientists, we have circulated a survey that invites researchers to identify those data sets most valuable for their work. It also asks them to consider how vulnerable those data sets might be. If they are stored in multiple locations, they are less vulnerable; if in only one location, it is far easier to limit or even block their access. Data Rescue events also use a comprehensive approach to webcrawling developed by the Environmental Data Governance Initiative, a newly-formed coalition of individual researchers: surveying climate and environmental data across multiple locations. (I serve on the steering committee). This method allows people without deep content knowledge to participate in data rescue events, as does the work of the storytelling teams. What happens at a Data Rescue event? Participants select one of “Four Trails” through the Refuge. These trails are in essence working groups, with trained Trail Guides coordinating the work across the different local Data Rescue events. The Trails are: Feed Internet Archive Federal Internet materials that can go to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine go there. Feed Data Refuge Suspected “uncrawlables” are added to a master list on a spreadsheet the Data Refuge team manages and project participants do additional research. (An app will soon replace the spreadsheet and the associated workflow with its multiple checks for quality assurance.) Storytellers and Documentarians Create social media about data rescuers and events. Develop use cases in partnership with city and municipal government partners as well as other community partners and NGOs. The Long Trail Build a library consortium and advocacy for better policy on federal open data management Why good copies of data are so important Data Refuge Rests on a Clear Chain of Custody. The documentation of a clear “chain of custody” is the cornerstone of Data Refuge. Without it, trust in data collapses; without it, trustworthy, research-quality copies of digital datasets cannot be created. Libraries always say: “Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe” (LOCKSS). That’s very true. But consider what happens if a faulty copy is made — whether by accident or technical error or deliberate action–and then proliferates. Especially in a digital world, an epidemic can be the result. Instead of keeping “stuff safe,” we have spread lots of bad copies. Factual-looking data can in fact easily be fake data. But how do we safeguard data and ensure that a copy is true to the original? Especially if the original is no longer available, we must find another way to verify the copy’s accuracy. This is where a clear, well-documented “chain of custody” comes in. By documenting this chain–where the data comes from originally, who copied them and how, and then who and how they are re-distributed–the Data Refuge project relies on multiple checks by trained librarians and archivists providing quality assurance along every link in the chain. Consider this extreme case: What happens if an original dataset disappears, and the only copy has passed through unverified hands and processes? Even a system that relies on multiple unverified copies can be gamed if many copies of bad data proliferate. This practice of documenting whose hands have been on information goes back across hundreds, even thousands, of years. Instilling trust in information is a universal human concern. Unfortunately, it’s imperfect. The workflow devised for data refuge is similarly not 100% foolproof. But we can increase our trust in the copies by including librarians trained in digital archiving and metadata as the final instance of quality control before we make anything public. At this end link in the chain, we verify the quality with the Data Refuge stamp of approval. How we verify data for Data Refugue After the data is harvested, it gets checked against the original website copy of the datay by an expert who can answer: “Will this data make sense to a scientist or other researcher who might want to use it.” This guarantees the data are useable. Then, digital preservation experts check the data again, make sure that the metadata reflect the right information, and create a manifest of technical checksums to enclose with the data in a bagit file so that any future changes to the data will be easily recognizable. The bagit files move to the describers who open them, spot check for errors, and create records in the datarefuge.org catalog, adding still more metadata. Each actor in this chain is recorded. Each actor in effect signs off, saying yes, this data matches the original. And each actor also checks the work of the previous actor and signs off on it. This is the best way we have to ensure this copy is the same as the original, even if the original goes away. Libraries Today, building on decades of work, many libraries are taking fast action to advocate for open data and to promote better access. Many libraries have hosted Data Rescue events and are working quickly with their communities to harvest and save data. But, the fragility of government information on the internet is a problem that has already gained considerable traction in the library community. Coordinated efforts, like EoT, but also less well-known consortia are actively working to map the landscape of new government information. Together, with various research communities, we are strategizing on how to manage that information landscape responsibly and systematically. This will require deep and sustained collaboration of the type that is difficult to create quickly. Nonetheless, Data Refuge has done much to accelerate, responsibly, those collaborations. Last week, with two librarians from Penn, I met with the Association of Research Libraries headquartered here in Washington. In response to the overwhelming number of requests that we’ve received from colleagues at universities across the US who want to help, we propose an additional scaling strategy: Leveraging existing capacity within libraries — in staff and expertise — to archive web sites immediately. Many academic research libraries have web archiving systems in place with knowledgeable librarians engaged in this work. If a fraction of those skills and systems are directed to address a small slice of this challenge, together we can make substantive and critical progress toward preserving federal websites. You can learn more about out Data Refuge at ppehlab.org, including how to get involved as an individual. If you want to host a Data Rescue event, check our guide “How to Host a Data Rescue Event” which also includes a useful Toolkit. Bethany Wiggin is the Founding Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Program in Environmental Humanities and holds appointments in German, English, and Comparative Literature. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation. Interested in writing a guest blog for Sunlight? Email us at guestblog@sunlightfoundation.com 6 Feb

Crowsourcing a Constitution: Mexico City’s experiment in collaborative drafting - Editor’s Note: In 2016, Mexico City had the opportunity to collect a public input on a 142 page-long draft constitution that was delivered to the city’s first Constitutional Assembly. One of the the world’s largeest, busiest cities then set up about collaboratively editing the draft. Over the course of the year, traditional institutions and political practices clashed using the new tools, in the midst of a generalized public distrust in the constitutional process itself. This is the story of Mexico City’s efforts to crowdsource a constitution, as told by Bernardo Rivera-Muñozcano, a political advisor in General Counselor’s Office. The essence of any constitution is to capture a set of fundamental principles and rules that will shape public life and interactions within a society for any given moment in time. Drafting Mexico City’s constitution required a collective reflection on who we are as a city, and what we imagine for our city’s future. Having the same rights and liberties as any other State in the Republic has been a long fought social and political battle in the democratization process of Mexico’s capital city. It was not until 1997, that chilangos – as locals of Mexico City are called – got to elect their Mayor for the very first time (the head of government was previously appointed by the President) and their first local Congress. Twenty years later, the promulgation of the first local Constitution was supposed to be seen as another milestone towards the democratization of the city. But a complex local political scenario and a nationwide distrust in government raised some questions about the real utility of a new constitution for Mexico’s biggest city. In January 2016, both chambers of Congress approved a Constitutional amendment, presented by Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera, that would grant Mexico City more autonomy regarding federal authorities (though not sovereignty), through its first Constitution. This achievement was the result of a questionable negotiation process between political parties with almost no civic participation that threatened a lack of legitimacy of the Constitutional Assembly, and in general, in the whole constitutional process.  We knew that having people to participate and get involved in any public interest issues might be complicated in a society where 77% of its members don’t trust at all or show little trust in its government. Engaging people in the analysis and proposal of constitutional topics was a huge challenge given the current political and social circumstances. Acknowledging there was some public distrust in the process, the Mayor’s first action in drafting a constitution was to appoint a group of 30 individuals representing diverse spheres of the City’s life, that during 7 months would discuss and work in the first constitutional draft (called the Drafting Group). Our initial approach to generate social participation in the drafting process was to develop a collaborative editing tool where members of the Drafting Group would post essays on specific subjects with the comments and feedback generated by citizens and other experts. The Mayor instructed the city’s General Counsel to develop a mechanism that would channel opinions, ideas, and proposals generated by the people about the Constitution, with assistance from the Laboratorio para la Ciudad, Mexico City’s innovation and creativity department. The outcome was a digital platform we used for our first approach, designed both as an informative resource on the constitutional process and as a tool that would promote civic participation and systematize all citizen input on the constitution. Through an iteration process, the essays would eventually give way to the articles of the constitutional project. The support of the MIT Media Lab and the IT team of the Laboratorio was essential in adapting the PubPub platform for this task.   But the members of the Drafting Group weren’t fully convinced of the usefulness and reliability of the digital tool, and we found that essays on subjects as complex as constitutional topics proved to be unappealing to a general public. If we wanted to generate a broad and rich call for proposals,  we had to explore alternative participation channels besides the traditional collaborative editing approach to crowdsourcing. We then proposed the survey Imagina tu Ciudad as a way to materialize a collective reflection process and generate systematic inputs for the constitutional draft. In a 15-question survey, we asked participants to describe the three things that came to their minds when they thought about Mexico City. After they had identified the main obstacles for their ideal city to become a reality, the participant was asked to describe what they had to do for this vision of the City to become a reality. As expected, the results showed a big distrust in government; corruption, transportation and air pollution were identified as the city’s main challenges; and cultural sites, history and diversity, as Mexico City’s most valuable assets. Even though we thought the survey would gather the highest number of participants for our constitutional project, it was our collaboration scheme with Change.org Mexico that got the most participation. The idea behind the Change.org movement “Voces Ciudadanas en la Constitución CDMX” was simple: the Drafting Group would consider petitions launched through the Change.org platform and would give different levels of feedback to the petition-maker based on the number of signatures the petition gathered. At 5,000 signatures, the Group would send a legal and constitutional analysis of the proposal to the petition-maker. At 10,000, the participant could present their proposal to three members of the Drafting Group. The four petitions that exceeded 50,000 signatures were presented to the Mayor. This threshold-based scheme represented the first time in Mexican history that any government agency or authority had committed to react to online petitions. As of December 2016, there were more than 279,000 unique signers on more than 340 petitions with specific proposals for the Constitution. This feedback loop we generated between petition makers and top-level government officials, was highly appreciated and recognized by the participants. The collective reflection process we intended to start in our platform materialized in 76 articles of a constitutional project. Our original idea for an innovative collaborative editing tool ended up becoming a platform that would funnel different kinds of citizen input towards the co-creation of a constitutional project. During the seven months the platform was active, we learned that even if participatory channels are open, people won’t occupy them unless they’re given different mechanisms to express their opinions – participatory mechanisms that match their levels of public engagement and interest in public affairs. To me, a strong believer in open government, the lack of widespread interest in the collaborative editing tool came as disappointing but somewhat unsurprising news. When talking about the future of co-creation tools and processes in public affairs, and maybe the future of open government itself, we might want take some time to think who these tools and processes are intended for. If we don’t, the gap between the sophistication of our tools and the real interest they generate in the general public will just keep getting bigger, and the open government agenda might burst to disappointment in times of democratic effervescence, just when it is needed the most. Bernardo Rivera-Muñozcano is a Political Advisor in Mexico City’s General Counselor’s Office, where he is part of the team that oversaw the city’s first Constitution drafting. Bernardo has, as a public servant, designed and promoted innovation and open government projects, both in the legislative and executive branches. He’s a keen runner and passionate cities enthusiast. You can reach him at bernardo.riveramunozcano@gmail.com. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation. If you’re interested in writing a guest post for Sunlight, please email us at guestblog@sunlightfoundation.com 3 Feb

What we told Congress about oversight, ethics and open government - This week, the Sunlight Foundation joined a roundtable of nonprofits, Members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and their staff in Congress to discuss ethics and open government. Sunlight has spoken out repeatedly on these issues in recent months, calling for the House Oversight Committee to do oversight, not threaten the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) and the presidential candidates to adopt ethical code of conduct prior to the election, as well as advocating for President Donald Trump to address his global conflicts of interest by disclosing and divesting. We were honored to be invited to share our views and hear from the Committee and other open government advocates on Tuesday. We were pleased to hear Chairman Jason Chaffetz and Ranking Member Elijah Cummings agree that the Office of Government should be fully funded, staffed and reauthorized. The House Oversight Committee has asked for specific recommendations to improve the OGE. We intend to do exactly that in the near future. Following is a summary of what Sunlight told the roundtable on Tuesday. First, we spoke about the chilling effects that comments by White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and the letter from the committee have on OGE specifically and federal civil servants in general, as documented in our list of agencies secretly directed not communicate with the public. Part of OGE’s mission is to inform the public about ethics, a matter of considerable public concern, given the number of billionaires nominated to lead agencies and the president’s conflicts of interest. We also opposed the Trump administration’s is attacks on the American free press, including repeated public attempts to delegitimize the New York Times and other publishers and media outlets as “fake news.”   Second, we said that President Trump’s recent executive order on ethics was a step backwards for open government, as it removed a mechanism requiring ethics waivers to be publicly disclosed and published online and allowed former executive branch officials to lobby the agencies they served in.   Third, we highlighted how the Trump administration’s initial approach to WhiteHouse.gov has not only failed to provide information about government staff, operations or policy, but lagged in disclosing executive actions to the public and affected government agencies when the president signs them, leading to misreporting and confusion, as the world saw this past weekend.   Finally, we brought up how President Trump’s decision to break four decades of democratic norms by refusing to disclose his tax returns set a diminished tone on ethics from the top of the federal government. We noted that without full disclosure, neither the public nor Congress will know whether the president has addressed his known conflicts or if hidden foreign entanglements have followed him into the White House. As a remedy, we recommended what we advocated for since May 2016: Congress should mandate tax return disclosure for presidential candidates. What the American public sees today in the Trump administration is the appearance of corruption created by the failure of President Trump to address the unprecedented conflicts of interest with which he entered the White House. We urged the House Oversight Committee to take preventative actions to ensure that the public does not see the reality of corruption in our federal government tomorrow. 2 Feb

Tracking collaborative policy for open data - Buffalo used the OpenGov Foundation’s Madison platform to solicit public feedback on their draft open data policy.There’s a rising trend in municipal open data. Local governments are increasingly looking for substantive ways to engage stakeholders online in the collaborative design and drafting of open data policy and programs. Sunlight has created an open spreadsheet — our Open Data Policy Crowdlaw Tracker — for tracking cases of these types of collaborative efforts (also called “crowdlaw”), and we hope this will provide inspiring examples for government officials. In 2016, Sunlight’s work on the What Works Cities initiative has included responding to local governments’ desire for support in undertaking crowdlaw practices, and we are excited to continue researching and supporting this work in 2017 and beyond! From access to collaboration As we think critically about the open data movement’s spread across US cities, it’s clear that significant progress has been made in increasing both technical and legal access to government data in cities across the country. However, the promise of open data has always been about more than simply access to datasets; it’s been about a new kind of relationship between city hall and the public, one that breeds positive community outcomes through collaboration. While we are not always seeing as many compelling examples as we would like of open data programs going beyond mere access toward something more like substantive collaboration for impact, one arena where this ethos is playing out successfully is in the collaborative development of open data policy and program-design through practices known (at least in the wonkish corner of the world that Sunlight inhabits) as “crowdlaw”. Open data crowdlaw on the rise According to the NYU GovLab, crowdlaw is “open, collaborative crowdsourced lawmaking”, further defined as “a tech-enabled approach for drafting [public policy], that offers an alternative to the traditional method of policymaking, which typically occurs behind closed doors and with little input from the people it affects.” As we have written previously, Sunlight believes that crowdlaw and open data policy make a perfect match, and, if 2016 is any indication, local governments agree. In 2016 alone, we saw examples of six local jurisdictions undertaking open data crowdlaw efforts, resulting in eight collaboratively developed open data policy drafts, nearly as many as the nine open data policy documents we had seen opened up for online feedback and co-creation in all local US governments prior to 2016. Here are those jurisdictions and the relevant policy drafts: Washington, D.C. – Although none have been adopted as of writing, in 2016 the District shared three draft open data policies online for collaborative public feedback via drafts.dc.gov, an instance of the OpenGov Foundation’s Madison tool: the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO)’s “Draft Open Data Policy”, Councilman David Grosso’s “Strengthening Transparency and Open Access to Government Amendment Act”, and the OCTO’s “District of Columbia Data Policy 0.1 (Draft)”. Las Vegas, Nev. – Adopted in April, Las Vegas’s “Policy and Procedure on Open Data” was first developed online as an open policy draft on Google Docs to allow for collaborative public feedback. Wichita, Kan. – Adopted in early September, Wichita’s “Administrative Regulation 8.4 – IT Open Data Policy” was first developed online with a “Draft Open Data Policy” version available for collaborative public feedback on drafts.wichita.gov, an instance of OpenGov Foundation’s Madison. Naperville, Ill. – Adopted in mid September, Naperville’s Open Data Policy City Council Resolution was first developed online with a draft “Open Data Policy” shared online via Madison for collaborative public and internal feedback. Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) – Adopted in October, the “San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District Open Data Resolution” was shared online in draft form via Madison for collaborative public feedback. Buffalo, N.Y. – Having made plans for online collaborative open data policy development in late 2016, the draft “City of Buffalo Open Data Policy” is now available online via Madison for collaborative public feedback, with Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown set to join city staff (as well as Sunlight and What Works Cities experts) to read, consider, and respond to public feedback during a televised work session. Largely thanks to our work on the What Works Cities initiative, Sunlight is thrilled to have been involved in directly facilitating and indirectly advising/contributing in all six of these jurisdictions’ open data crowdlaw efforts. Because of the success of this involvement, we have worked hard in 2016 to position our team to continue support for this practice in 2017 and beyond. Help us keep track of open data crowdlaw! Part and parcel with supporting open data crowdlaw practice is understanding open data crowdlaw practice and how it is shaping out in the real world. To that end, we are excited to share that Sunlight is now tracking all instances of online collaborative open data policy making in US local governments from the very first example we could find (Cook County, Ill. and Smart Chicago Collaborative’s use of RapGenius–now simply Genius–to annotate the county’s open data policy online in 2011) to the most contemporary (Buffalo, N.Y.’s use of Madison as part of a collaborative policy development process that is ongoing through January of 2017) and everything in between. Fittingly, we’d love to collaborate online with any and everyone interested as we continue to document these efforts, so we’ve compiled each instance of open data crowdlaw in an open google sheet we’re calling our “Open Data Policy Crowdlaw Tracker”. Take a look below, and please don’t hesitate to comment or email us at local@sunlightfoundation.com if you know of any instances of open data crowdlaw that we may have missed! It is our goal that in documenting this practice we will not only help our team better understand the trends, best practices, and benefits of open data crowdlaw, but will also help inspire other jurisdictions to join the list of places making online collaboration with public stakeholders an increasingly standard practice in open data policy and program design. 30 Jan

White House Office of Management and Budget missing from Trump WhiteHouse.gov - Every new administration has put its own spin on Whitehouse.gov since the website first went online way back in the 1990s. When a new President swings in, an archived version of the old site maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration remains online, but the incoming administration takes over the domain. President Donald Trump’s transition team decided to stick with the same design developed by his predecessor, but fill it with information about his administration and its policy priorities, which are — unsurprisingly — pretty different from those espoused on the Obama administration-era version of the site. But the Trump team did make at least one pretty shocking change to Whitehouse.gov: they appear to have banished some basic information about how the government works from the site — including the White House Open Government Initiative. Here’s one striking example: the entire section of the White House website devoted to the Office of Management and Budget was digitally wiped off the map. Trying to find OMB’s homepage now returns a page unavailable message urging visitors to “stay tuned” as the administration continues to update the website. Trying to navigate to the site via budget.gov re-directs to the same error message. That’s a big deal because OMB isn’t some minor part of the White House universe — it’s traditionally the largest entity within the Executive Office of the President. While OMB’s most prominent job is helping the President develop a budget, it also issues memorandums that advise federal agencies on how to carry out their roles in compliance with administration policies. Those memos provide key insights into how the government functioned in the past and still functions today. But when the Trump administration took the digital reins on January 20th, a digital archive of select memos going back to 1995 was removed from the White House website, along with everything else related to OMB other than two scant mentions on a page generally outlining the Executive Branch. This is a massive departure from how information about the office was handled over the past eight years. OMB’s online home was available via Obama’s version of Whitehouse.gov from the first day of his presidency, as shown by snapshots collected by the Internet Archive. Archives from near the beginning of President George W. Bush’s first term suggest his office also preserved a place for OMB when he took over the site, even though the Internet wasn’t yet the juggernaut it became by the time Obama took over. To be fair to Trump’s digital transition team, it’s not clear if they actually meant to erase OMB’s primary digital presence. The White House press team did not respond to an inquiry about if the office’s pages were removed on purpose and if the administration has plans to restore the information. The evidence available so far suggests that Trump’s digital team wasn’t equipped to handle the basics of transitioning the White House website — leaving open the possibility that they just didn’t realize they left out something important. For one thing, the site launched without a Spanish-language version and the related Twitter account — @LaCasaBlanca — has been silent since the inauguration. The transcripts of the three press briefings aren’t up: there is only the statement delivered by the Press Secretary on January 21st. Archived video of the briefings are available on the White House YouTube channel, as you can see below. Some features of the new Whitehouse.gov also have problems. Take the email button that appears on the Press Briefing page and some other places throughout the site, for example: clicking it turns up a “page unavailable” message rather than offering a way to sign up for email updates. (Sunlight asked a White House press secretary directly to add us to this list. We did not receive confirmation.) Broken jump links on the Executive Branch section, meant to help users more easily navigate to different parts of the page, suffer from the same problem. The White House “We the People” epetition platform remains live but there’s no associated Twitter account or comms channel. User accounts for the site also appear to have been deleted and new users have reported problems signing new petitions. Although previous administrations marked inaugurations with freshly designed digital digs, Trump’s Whitehouse.gov continues to use an open source code dubbed “FourtyFour” designed for the Obama WhiteHouse.gov. That last part isn’t necessarily a problem on its own– after all, why fix something that isn’t broken? But in the first few days of Trumps’ presidency, the administration seemed to have a hard time disclosing information about presidential actions online to the public in a timely manner. For example, although President Trump signed two executive orders on his first day in office, it took until January 23rd for even one of them to be published on Whitehouse.gov. Things had improved as of Wednesday evening — by that point information about two executive orders and eight memoranda were up — but the fact that they appear to have launched without a process for making basic online updates does not inspire confidence.  And — as the OMB example shows — the Trump transition team didn’t prioritize keeping non-political content that provides important transparency about government operations online when they inherited Whitehouse.gov. Besides OMB, pages for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) also do not appear to exist — meaning there’s no real public record of who, if anyone, actually works on those teams or is leading them now. Some of those decisions have broken incoming links from external government sites — such as those that relied on the OMB memo archive — and the broader World Wide Web, causing disruptions that ripple out beyond just Whitehouse.gov. All of those hiccups point to a new administration that wasn’t prepared to digitally hit the ground running. That said, the Trump administration reportedly does have plans to give Whitehouse.gov a facelift  —  eventually. Ory Rinat, who provided digital strategy advice to Trump’s transition team, recently told Politico that the redesign in the works will take months because the team “wanted to make sure this was done right and with the people who are going to be running the website involved.” Getting the redesign “done right” will means returning things like the OMB memos purged from Whitehouse.gov in the initial digital transition online and either using the previous URLs or setting up redirects. If it doesn’t, the good news is that the information is still available elsewhere through online caches and archives, perhaps most easily through the National Archives and Records Administration’s archive of Obama’s version of Whitehouse.gov. The bad news is that the Trump administration started its digital tenure by making it much harder for average citizens to find information about how our government actually works directly from the source. That’s a major step back for transparency. It’s a series of decisions that are stark against the background of how the Trump administration is approaching communications and disclosure of actions with the public so far. The White House and President of the United States are making claims that are baseless or easily proven false. Transition officials have issued directives for media blackouts to federal agencies, only for the Press Secretary to deny them to reporters after the directives have already been publicly confirmed by transition officials and disavowed or clarified by agencies. The Internet has an amazing capacity to open up governments to their citizens. Modern technology enables transparency, accountability, participation and engagement that was impossible before every connected person could look up information with just a few keystrokes or taps. Every administration in the Internet-era has taken some steps to expand the government’s engagement with the digital world, building on the progress of their predecessors. Continued progress in open government in the United States depends on having an administration with both the political will and the technical ability to not only be good stewards of platforms, processes and policies that make our government more accessible and accountable to the public. Judging by the Trump’s version of Whitehouse.gov to date, it’s unclear whether the new administration has either.26 Jan