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newstfionline · 3 years

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Wednesday, December 9, 2020

Millions of hungry Americans turn to food banks for 1st time (AP) Hunger is a harsh reality in the richest country in the world. Even during times of prosperity, schools hand out millions of hot meals a day to children, and desperate elderly Americans are sometimes forced to choose between medicine and food. Now, in the pandemic of 2020, with illness, job loss and business closures, millions more Americans are worried about empty refrigerators and barren cupboards. Food banks are doling out meals at a rapid pace and an Associated Press data analysis found a sharp rise in the amount of food distributed compared with last year. Meanwhile, some folks are skipping meals so their children can eat and others are depending on cheap food that lacks nutrition. Those fighting hunger say they’ve never seen anything like this in America, even during the Great Recession of 2007-2009. The first place many Americans are finding relief is a neighborhood food pantry, most connected to vast networks of nonprofits. Tons of food move each day from grocery store discards and government handouts to warehouse distribution centers, and then to the neighborhood charity. An AP analysis of Feeding America data from 181 food banks in its network found the organization has distributed nearly 57 percent more food in the third quarter of the year, compared with the same period in 2019.

Covid Nomads (WSJ) Alan Frei lives the life of a backpacker. That is, all 62 of his belongings fit into a single backpack, which he carries with him as he travels and lives in different cities around the world—a total of 53 countries over the past three years. The 38-year-old Swiss entrepreneur in October got rid of his apartment near Zurich and all his furniture. Items he kept include his watch, a toothbrush, seven pairs of underwear, and sunglasses. Mr. Frei is an extreme version of a digital nomad, a person with no fixed address, who lives and works while traveling the globe. Today, their ranks are small, but they could become more common in the years ahead. “There will definitely be more digital nomads,” says Nicholas Bloom, professor of economics at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Before the pandemic, only about 2% of Americans worked from home full-time, Mr. Bloom says, but he expects that will rise to about 8% to 10% of workers. If just 10% of them travel and work remotely, that will still be enormous, he says. Scott Cohen, a professor at the University of Surrey’s School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, expects more countries will cater visa and tourism programs to digital nomads, as they seek an alternative to the standard business travel market. Chekitan S. Dev, a professor at Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business, School of Hotel Administration, says the trend was first driven by millennials; now older millennials are taking their families with them when they move around. By normalizing remote work and school, the pandemic has supercharged a trend. In the future, digital nomads may be middle-aged, rent or own homes for less time, want to go to more exotic destinations and move more quickly between destinations.

California Water Futures Begin Trading Amid Fear of Scarcity (Bloomberg) Water joined gold, oil and other commodities traded on Wall Street, highlighting worries that the life-sustaining natural resource may become scarce across more of the world. Farmers, hedge funds and municipalities alike are now able to hedge against—or bet on—future water availability in California, the biggest U.S. agriculture market and world’s fifth-largest economy. The contracts, a first of their kind in the U.S., were announced in September as heat and wildfires ravaged the U.S. West Coast and as California was emerging from an eight-year drought. They are meant to serve both as a hedge for big water consumers, such as almond farmers and electric utilities, against water prices fluctuations as well a scarcity gauge for investors worldwide. “Climate change, droughts, population growth, and pollution are likely to make water scarcity issues and pricing a hot topic for years to come,” said RBC Capital Markets managing director and analyst Deane Dray.

‘It’s a free-for-all’: how hi-tech spyware ends up in the hands of Mexico’s cartels (The Guardian) Corrupt Mexican officials have helped drug cartels in the country obtain state-of-the-art spyware which can be used to hack mobile phones, according to a senior DEA official. As many as 25 private companies—including the Israeli company NSO Group and the Italian firm Hacking Team—have sold surveillance software to Mexican federal and state police forces, but there is little or no regulation of the sector—and no way to control where the spyware ends up, said the officials. “It’s a free-for-all,” the official told the Cartel Project, an initiative coordinated by Forbidden Stories, a global network of investigative journalists whose mission is to continue the work of reporters who are threatened, censored or killed. “The police who have the technology would just sell it to the cartels.” [And then the cartels would use it against their enemies or those investigating them.] The nexus between state and criminal forces has fuelled a wave of targeted violence which have made Mexico the most dangerous country for journalists in the world, outside a war zone. At least 119 media workers have been killed in Mexico since 2000, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the inevitable fear for reporters is that surveillance could lead to more tangible dangers.

Pope makes surprise early morning prayer visit in rainy Rome (AP) Pope Francis on Tuesday made a surprise early morning visit to the Spanish Steps in Rome to pray for people worldwide struggling in the pandemic. With rain falling and dawn breaking, Francis popped up in the square at the foot of the Spanish Steps at 7 a.m. (0600 GMT), two hours after the end of Italy’s overnight curfew. Before heading back to Vatican City, where he resides in a hotel, Francis stopped to pray some more and celebrate Mass in St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome. Early in the pandemic, Francis made a similar pop-up visit to a little-frequented church in the heart of downtown Rome to pray, startling the few Romans who were in the area during exceptionally tight lockdown measures. In separate, written comments, Francis stressed the need for all to have employment when the world emerges from the pandemic. “How can we speak of human dignity without working to ensure that everyone is able to earn a decent living?” the pope wrote. He urged people to “find ways to express our firm conviction that no person, no person at all, no family should be without work.” As he has previously during the pandemic, the pope praised what he called the “ordinary people” who have kept the world functioning as it reels under the strain of the global pandemic. He cited those providing essential services—health care workers and shopkeepers, cleaners and caregivers and “so very many others.”

The Kremlin Is Offering Russians Free Vaccines, but Will They Take Them? (NYT) Aleksei Zakharov, a Moscow economics professor, got the Russian coronavirus vaccine injected into his upper arm over the weekend. Getting the shot was an easy decision, he said—not because the Russian government said it was safe, but because scores of Russians have shared their experience with it on social media. “I trust the grass roots collection of information far more, of course, than what the state says, at least before the testing results are available and published in a medical journal,” Mr. Zakharov, 44, said in a telephone interview Monday, already clear of a mild fever—a side-effect of the vaccine. Russia made its coronavirus vaccine available for free in recent days to teachers, medical workers and social-service employees younger than 61 in Moscow. But even more than in the West, a lack of trust is hobbling Russia’s rollout of a vaccine: the country’s scientists may well have made great strides in battling the pandemic, but many Russians are not ready to believe it. That distrust looms large as Russia races to roll out the vaccine while facing the fiercest onslaught of the pandemic yet, with some 500 deaths per day.

Mt Everest grows by nearly a metre to new height (BBC) The world’s highest mountain Mount Everest is 0.86m higher than had been previously officially calculated, Nepal and China have jointly announced. Until now the countries differed over whether to add the snow cap on top. The new height is 8,848.86m (29,032 ft). Everest stands on the border between China and Nepal and mountaineers climb it from both sides. Officials at Nepal’s foreign ministry and department of survey said surveyors from both countries had co-ordinated to agree on the new height.

China condemns new US Hong Kong sanctions, Taiwan arms sale (AP) China on Tuesday lashed out at the U.S. over new sanctions against Chinese officials and the sale of more military equipment to Taiwan. The U.S. actions are part of what critics see as an effort by the Trump administration to put in place high-pressure tactics toward Beijing that could make it more difficult for President-elect Joe Biden to steady relations. The Cabinet’s office for Hong Kong affairs expressed “strong outrage and condemnation” over the sanctions leveled against 14 members of the standing committee of China’s legislature, which passed a sweeping Hong Kong National Security Law earlier this year. Foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying, meanwhile, demanded the U.S. cancel its latest arms sale to Taiwan and said China would make a “proper and necessary response.” President Donald Trump’s administration has incensed Beijing with 11 separate arms sales and closer military and political ties with the self-governing island democracy that Beijing claims as its own territory, to be annexed by force if necessary. China has stepped up military flights near the island and pledged to punish U.S. companies involved in the arms deals in response.

Libya’s east-based forces seize Turkish-owned vessel (AP) Forces of a Libyan commander who rules the eastern half of the country and who was behind a year-long military attempt to capture the capital, Tripoli, have seized a Turkish vessel heading to the western town of Misrata. The development by Khalifa Hifter’s forces could escalate tensions in the conflict-stricken Libya, since Turkey is the main foreign backer of Hifter’s rivals, the U.N.-backed administration in Tripoli, in western Libya. Hifter’s forces stopped the Jamaica-flagged cargo vessel, Mabrouka, on Monday off the eastern port town of Derna, said Ahmed al-Mosmari, the spokesman for Hifter’s forces. Al-Mosmari said the vessel entered a “no sail” zone and did not respond to calls from the naval forces. It’s the second Turkish-owned vessel seized by Hifter’s forces this year, according to Ambrey Intelligence, a British private maritime intelligence firm. In 2020, Hifter’s forces have seized at least six ships.

#headlines #news

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annychristine831 · 4 years

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5 Best News Apps for Android

Before smartphones came to existence, we all used to be dependent upon newspapers and tv for getting news about the latest happening in the world. But not anymore. In today’s world, we can access the latest news and the latest happenings around the world by simply using our mobile devices and a news app. Keeping this in mind today, we are going to share with you five best news apps that are available in the market that you can use on your mobile devices to get easy and quick access to the latest news around the world. Let’s learn about them.

Google News

Google News app by Google is a smart news app that organizes what’s happening all over the world and helps you stay up to date on the things that you care about. The app has a very user-friendly interface and is very easy to use. Using the apps “Headline” tab, you can get quick access to top headlines and news articles from all over the world. Similarly, by using the “For You” tab, you get quick access to the news about topics that you care about. You can also access your favorite news and magazines using the “Newsstand “tab in the app. Overall it is very helpful and an easy to use app.

AP News

AP News app is another famous news app with more than 1 million downloads on the Google play store. The app sources its news from the Associated Press and hundreds of trusted local sources. The app has a very clean and user-friendly interface. Using the app, you can find news on different topics like sports, entertainment, travel, lifestyle, business, and more. The only downside of the app is that it contains many ads, which can sometimes be very annoying.

Microsoft News

Microsoft News is another famous news app that delivers trusted news from the world’s best journalists. By using the app, you can discover the latest news from all over the world. When you open the app for the very first time, it will ask you to select your favorite news topics. Once you select your favorite topics, the app will show you the latest news about your favorite topics under the “My News” tab. The app is very clean and user friendly. Additionally, the app supports sync and has a built-in dark mode that can be very helpful for night-time reading.

Feedly- Smarter News Reader

Feedly is another famous news app with more than 5 million downloads on the Google play store. The app is an RSS reader that allows its users to organize, read, and share content very easily. Using the app, you can read blogs, learn new things, and track companies and brands. Using the app, you can discover the latest news about your favorite topics like politics, entertainment, sports, etc. Additionally, the app has a very clean interface, which gives its users a great reading experience. The app also has a night mode for night-time reading and can be integrated with apps like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.

BBC News

BBC is the world’s most trusted and respected news organization. The official BBC News app brings you the latest news from the BBC and its global network of journalists. The app has a very clean user interface and allows its users to personalize their news feed according to areas of their interests. You can also live stream the BBC World Service Radio through the app. Additionally, the app can also be used to download and share your favorite stories with your friends by mail or any social network.

I’m Anny. I’m a social media manager living in USA. I am a fan of technology, design, and music. I’m also interested in fitness and movies. visit our Business Directory page. You can attend my event with a click on the button above.

Source: 5 Best News Apps for Android

#Apps #Android #News

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glennmalcolm · 7 years

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Believe Me, This is Clickbait: Should Students know the difference between the effects of Mandela and Meme?

"You are young yet, my friend," replied my host, "but the time will arrive when you will learn to judge for yourself of what is going on in the world, without trusting to the gossip of others. Believe nothing you hear, and only one-half that you see. Now about our Maisons de Sante, it is clear that some ignoramus has misled you." -- The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether Short story by Edgar Allan Poe 1845

History repeats itself in a way that the meaning behind the latest educational buzzwords seem to as well. One week its paradigm shift the next it’s collaborative learning. A teacher friend of mine told me that collaboration and the term ‘collaborative learning’ is a misnomer because we’ve been collaboratively learning for millennia. And, I suppose we have - cavemen, while they weren’t exactly pack animals, wouldn’t have tracked and killed larger, tastier and more agile animals alone without the inherent fear of being a raw and bloody garnish themselves. Much like the traps they would have set wouldn’t have improved over time without discussions on how to improve the efficiency of the kill or the depth of the hole to entrap the beast. However, what he really means is the term ‘collaborative’ is misplaced in today’s digital context because of the use of ‘real time collaboration’ as compared to synchronous and asynchronous protocols of, say, Docs Vs Email. Or, on the network drives we’re still using in 2017: editing files one. person. at. a. time.

Much like this little history snippet addressing technological conventions old and new, current affairs (the news - fake or otherwise), has, ever since moveable type became popular in the 18th century, changed over time ( in the Chinese timeline even more so). Not so much of course, in its purpose more so in its delivery. In some way or another posters, articles, flyers both on parchment and now direct to your feed in the palm of your hand, have tried to persuade us in as many ways as possible in some form or another. All the time mislaying fiction as facts much like Dr. Billy Bob’s Snake Tonic of 1912: “Gives you a boost to see the day through!” In 1912 it was probably the cocaine in Vin Mariani that gave you the boost.

Its modern equivalent has a very sharp blade in the hands of creatives who’ve honed their skills at the school of Ogilvy and Mather et al ready to carve the easier, if not the easiest, meat in existence. If you teach primary school children as your profession, one of the merits of good poster work is to persuade you to understand something to almost believe it regardless of your original stance. One thing to remember here is that no matter how much you call yourself a ‘free thinker’ you’re not. None of us are. Take a general understanding of global warming melting the ice caps to the point where individual pieces of ice are floating about with a sole polar bear atop this ever decreasing island. You know this imagery. We all do. Thank you Al Gore. How inconvenient is this if you’re trying to get your students to critically question headlines when the imagery is so much stronger? Is it deliberate trickery to induce a Mandela effect?

Should Students know the difference between the effects of Mandela and Meme?

Schools should teach children how to spot fake news. How very modern. One of my earliest memories of making persuasive imagery at school was one about not smoking and the other was on the effects of acid rain across european forests. Now, there are merits in both of these posters that, while they both are there to do good and teach the evils of the world to eight year old children, the sentiment behind both can persuade people to adopt the opposite of the message in hand. With selective imagery, careful copy and a poignant, catchy tagline the semi-believable becomes fact as if Groundhog Day shifted to April 1st. You, too, will have made something very similar when you were at school while still innocent and malleable enough to get fully behind the not smoking lark and thinking acid rain was about to decimate that apple tree at the end of your garden. It never did. Clever marketing and that human urge to be attracted to knowingly dangerous activities still led me to take up smoking at fourteen; I still touch wet paint. Mind you, I still ride my bicycle to work because, you know, fossil fuels and my love of apples. And, should you have had the gall or the wherewithal to question such ideals, then you would be quickly put on the right track by your teacher. Today you would be lambasted online as a denier much like you would have if you were a Christian in Rome 2000 years ago.

You see, both posters, while there to represent my understanding of the persuasive genre in the English language as a year four student, have this strange synchronicity that only now as I reflect as an adult can trace the routes back to their origin: advertising campaigns from the tobacco industry to make a few million bucks; the other a governmental campaign from lobbyists aiming to make a few million/billion bucks. And there we were blindly emulating the ‘facts’ in a similar medium to an already believing crowd from a very select source - our school library. The books of which were sourced by people who in turn were there to get us to emulate the ‘facts’ ad infinitum. Sound familiar? It’s a modern set of social networks in microcosm. At our school today we have 50m x 2.5m wall hand painted by street artists in a similar vein to those posters I made when I was eight years old except this time it’s not acid rain it’s drilling for oil in the Antarctic in 2041. However, is this just raising awareness for kids? How much will they take in? Will any of them, come 2035 think “wait a second. There’s 6 years until the Antarctic is about to be handed sole sovereignty to the oligarchy, I should do something about it!” It’s more likely they will be a cog in the machine and the organisers of the 2041 project would have disbanded ten years previous; their pensions paid for by the numerous speeches and school visits dried up in 2025. Our students can question this type of preaching however compliance is so much easier. Sometimes school less thinking and more thought.

All this sounds like the 2030 agenda for sustainable development set out by the UN which in turn sounds like Agenda 21. In the classroom it doesn’t take that much effort to guide students to search a little deeper and more precisely. Search techniques are becoming more and more important in the EdTech curriculum and beyond. Please, if you get you and your students collate your news from theGuardian.com or the BBC, cross reference the articles with Russia Today, Reuters, AP, Al Jazeera, Deutsche Welle, NY Times, the Washington Post or NHK to see how the stories differ from sources with different advertisers. Each one has a different narrative to protect based on who are are the main sources of income. This is especially important where search is involved for any students Key Stage 2 and above.

The modern equivalents of this process are prevalent in ever sneakier ways. And, while this post may get a little political in places, it has a very distinct reason because quite often the article you’re reading is, unbeknownst to you, sponsored by a very large company who’s name is synonymous with spreading broader memes and, sometimes, have very dark methods of operating (Compare Hollywood and the recent spate of terrorist's videos for example: make believe is the core model - have you seen Wag the Dog?). One of these companies for example is The Clinton Foundation (here at the bottom via Adage). And this brings me to the first modern mode of duping our everyday student (and teacher) reader or viewer: Native Advertising.

Do Our Students Know What Native Advertising Is?

Native Advertising is, for a teenager (that 13-18 bracket) and slightly beyond (18-30 too) where advertised products mean something to them as they hold social status. Take for example one of my first jobs in a school in Sandwell (the Black Country), UK. At this school I was a P.E. teacher in a relatively rough area of the Midlands. On day one the kids eyed me up and down trying to size me up to the point I was told ‘at this school we beat teachers up’. Delightful. Another lad, who had the same ‘close talker’ syndrome as Judge Reinhold’s character in Seinfeld, was several inches from my face and about to tell me (while at the same time I thought it pertinent to explain the virtues of dental hygiene) what he thought of me when he spotted my Nike Air Max 360s, stepped back to admire them and smiled. Then it was the turn of all students in the class to regale how they owned blue ones, the red LE versions and every kind of Nike Air variant for the last eighteen months. I was set. And this is the point: We’re easy prey. All of us. We believe every story that we read and hear of the artist wearing the Air 360 Limited Editions and how he or she made it to the top of the charts and then the associated links are made that the two are one of the same ideal.

The groundwork for this process of advertising and public thinking begins over a hundred years ago with famous versions such as the one for Guinness by Ogilvy. Copy cats drilled down into what worked and what didn’t and here we are - links to pages that describe experiences with carefully entwined text containing the product’s name that reaches many more eyeballs than TV and radio ever did. And that’s the crux of the matter - the methods have pretty much stayed the same but the medium has changed. The snag is, nowadays the medium is ever present in our lives because it’s constantly in our hands from inside our phones. And, it’s the same for every child who has one too. More importantly, as our example above illustrates, this is the most impressionable market to educate and understand how advertising works in the modern age.

Is there a solution to this? Yes. As any top bracket football team knows: Catch 'em early. And I mean really early, like Nursery age early. Children of this age know boundaries of what affects them directly. They know if they are getting a raw deal - just watch them react if you tried to tell them that a piece of artwork on the wall is named with someone else’s name in the class. Now, you try selling the idea that it should be Arlo’s name on that artwork over Sophia’s or marketing anyone’s name on any piece and you’d have a mutiny on your hands. If you took this further and had an ‘Editorial’ from the the headteacher selling the virtues of a new policy of ‘free naming’ all work on the wall and see what would happen. I bet you’d get some very precise language from children who are usually typecast as finger painters explaining exactly why the product have transparent ownership.

"It’s no great mystery. It ain’t like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. (Although BuzzFeed is kinda like the Bermuda Triangle of the internet.) Clickbait works because it (a) appeals to your lizard brain and (b) tickles your innate desire for curiosity." -- adespresso.com/

Do Our Students Know What Clickbait Is?

In a similar vein, clickbait is as instinctive (persuasive) but a way more impulsive process. The heading, title or thumbnail of a link is such that its sole purpose it to generate clicks or advertising revenue by misleading you to believe that there is something else to be gained. The way to think about this in an educational setting is with the persuasive language of not just posters but product packaging and understanding the age-old trick of product placement. Kids understand this only too well. Remember kids TV? Remember the targeted adverts around holiday season with those catchy tunes. What a way to learn about why this is made in such a way and why it’s on the TV at this time of day. The music, the colours, the taglines even. They’re all crafted to close in on what children of a young age are naturally and psycologically geared towards. A carefully planned couple of lessons would take, what? An hour each? Scale this over a few year groups and you could be onto a winning formula to combat the deliberate enticement of advertisers and, in some respects, steering them away from Buzzfeed’s nonsense and their kin. The whole project could be making games out of those list links and ‘Why Kardashians use coal to brush their teeth.’

The added problem is, of course is that I think our attention span has shortened. I mean, I have no proof of this except a little search here and there and I find that that I am searching for my own answers that suit me. I am merely watching my own habits over time, applying them to my habits now and comparing (amplifying) them to a teenage student. I think that if students do something similar then they might fall into the same trap. However, I look at my own trajectory in this digital age and find that my reading, my viewing and listening habits have all changed dramatically in the last 10 years. No, this isn’t age, creeping up on me, this is where my job and hobbies cross over. I am in front of (probably the main cause) at least two screens from morning till evening. I bet you are in a similar situation if not for work then without knowing it at some point in your daily/weekly routine. Do you have a phone? A smartwatch? A TV? Games console? Etc, etc… The screen list is extensive. We are all bombarded with content from our screens all the time and our students are no different. The list of items that digitally capture my attention in the last ten years are this in a roundabout list of time taken to use them:

SMS (in the early days this took a while if you all had beepers)

SMS between 2 to 30 mins

Email - it took an age to sit down and compose an email.

Facebook (the introduction of streams)- it used to take all my time up - 15mins +

Instant messaging - 3 seconds to 5 mins if in group chat.

Youtube (Russian Dashcams and Lastweek Tonight notwithstanding)

Reddit - swipe to clear function renders posts be gleaned from 2 seconds to 5 mins.

Twitter - 140 characters.

Instagram - can consume 30 mins if you’re dawdling about. But to post, 2 mins.

Snapchat - for the 8 second generation aimed at kids.

And I think we’re there. Eight seconds seems about the average time it really takes to skim a post, the related hashtags and gauge the viewership. Has it had the right number of reposts? Likes? Eyeballs? Did it have the right appeal? Was the camera set at 45° to hide the imperfections? Hell, even as I post this I’ll be sure to look over (and lament) over what I could have written better. Then I’ll put the pomposity aside and write something equally annoying probably about Apple and their mom-friendly ‘Clips’ for iOS because, you know, the older generation needs to be saturated with eight second sound bites of flannel too.

This is all part and parcel of the clickbait posterboy lifestyle and it’s one giant plug hole that honestly, our students need to be directed away from at a very early age. The tech for building and creating imagery is in their hands - it just needs a curriculum to demonstrate how the two worlds are inextricably linked and how one emulates the other. How is this proved? The changes in attitudes to recognition and their status online is a huge factor. The fear of missing out is a somewhat real thing because nobody advertises their life as an out of control downward spiralling mess on the public loudhailer that is social media. If you’re 13-24 years old (and younger of course) then there is no way that you are going to be doing this. If you’re in this age bracket then you want to have some kind of popularity in your circle of friends and, online, beyond into some kind of Instagram/ YouTube navel gazer. This recognition of ‘being there’ (basically saying, you’re not so try to one up me/us) is evident in recent purchasing trends. Younger people are apparently eschewing products over experiences. And there we have it, we’ve gone full circle on the customer being the advert themselves - Katharine Hamnett will be proud.

Students know the game, they know how it’s played therefore it’s high time to put this into a format to learn and teach from. The problem of course is that teachers have no idea how this works and this is the new frontier of tech in school. Tech in school is no longer about the device or the app it’s about the quality of the content and the psychology behind it.

As Poe once wrote “you can only believe half of this [post], unless someone speaks it to you, then you can’t believe it at all.”

#fake news #edtech #search #news #curriculum #advertising #clickbait #internet safety

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viralhottopics · 7 years

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Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing American computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network

Just over a week ago, Donald Trump gathered members of the worlds press before him and told them they were liars. The press, honestly, is out of control, he said. The public doesnt believe you any more. CNN was described as very fake news story after story is bad. The BBC was another beauty.

That night I did two things. First, I typed Trump in the search box of Twitter. My feed was reporting that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving madman. But that wasnt how it was playing out elsewhere. The results produced a stream of Go Donald!!!!, and You show em!!! There were star-spangled banner emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of Trump laying into the FAKE news MSM liars!

Trump had spoken, and his audience had heard him. Then I did what Ive been doing for two and a half months now. I Googled mainstream media is And there it was. Googles autocomplete suggestions: mainstream media is dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished. Is it dead, I wonder? Has FAKE news won? Are we now the FAKE news? Is the mainstream media we, us, I dying?

I click Googles first suggested link. It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: The Mainstream media are dead. Theyre dead, I learn, because they we, I cannot be trusted. How had it, an obscure site Id never heard of, dominated Googles search algorithm on the topic? In the About us tab, I learn CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Center, which a click later I learn is Americas media watchdog, an organisation that claims an unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture.

Another couple of clicks and I discover that it receives a large bulk of its funding more than $10m in the past decade from a single source, the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. If you follow US politics you may recognise the name. Robert Mercer is the money behind Donald Trump. But then, I will come to learn, Robert Mercer is the money behind an awful lot of things. He was Trumps single biggest donor. Mercer started backing Ted Cruz, but when he fell out of the presidential race he threw his money $13.5m of it behind the Trump campaign.

Its money hes made as a result of his career as a brilliant but reclusive computer scientist. He started his career at IBM, where he made what the Association for Computational Linguistics called revolutionary breakthroughs in language processing a science that went on to be key in developing todays AI and later became joint CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that makes its money by using algorithms to model and trade on the financial markets.

One of its funds, Medallion, which manages only its employees money, is the most successful in the world generating $55bn so far. And since 2010, Mercer has donated $45m to different political campaigns all Republican and another $50m to non-profits all rightwing, ultra-conservative. This is a billionaire who is, as billionaires are wont, trying to reshape the world according to his personal beliefs.

Donald Trumps presidential campaigned received $13.5m from Robert Mercer. Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images

Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich mans plaything the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trumps campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting liberal bias is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.

It was $10m of Mercers money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. Its bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. Its the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.

Prominent rightwing journalist Andrew Breitbart, who founded the site but died in 2012, told Bannon that they had to take back the culture. And, arguably, they have, though American culture is only the start of it. In 2014, Bannon launched Breitbart London, telling the New York Times it was specifically timed ahead of the UKs forthcoming election. It was, he said, the latest front in our current cultural and political war. France and Germany are next.

But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercers name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in election management strategies and messaging and information operations, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as psyops psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on peoples emotions.)

Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so Id read, the Leave campaign. When Mercer supported Cruz, Cambridge Analytica worked with Cruz. When Robert Mercer started supporting Trump, Cambridge Analytica came too. And where Mercers money is, Steve Bannon is usually close by: it was reported that until recently he had a seat on the board.

Last December, I wrote about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about how Googles search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites strangling the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.

On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters its USP is to use this data to understand peoples deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a propaganda machine.

A few weeks later, the Observer received a letter. Cambridge Analytica was not employed by the Leave campaign, it said. Cambridge Analytica is a US company based in the US. It hasnt worked in British politics.

Which is how, earlier this week, I ended up in a Pret a Manger near Westminster with Andy Wigmore, Leave.EUs affable communications director, looking at snapshots of Donald Trump on his phone. It was Wigmore who orchestrated Nigel Farages trip to Trump Tower the PR coup that saw him become the first foreign politician to meet the president elect.

Wigmore scrolls through the snaps on his phone. Thats the one I took, he says pointing at the now globally famous photo of Farage and Trump in front of his golden elevator door giving the thumbs-up sign. Wigmore was one of the bad boys of Brexit a term coined by Arron Banks, the Bristol-based businessman who was Leave.EUs co-founder.

Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from peoples Facebook profiles. A video on YouTube shows one of Cambridge Analyticas and SCLs employees, Brittany Kaiser, sitting on the panel at Leave.EUs launch event.

Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook like, he said, was their most potent weapon. Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.

Steve Bannon, Donald Trumps chief strategist, is an associate of Robert Mercer. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

It sounds creepy, I say.

It is creepy! Its really creepy! Its why Im not on Facebook! I tried it on myself to see what information it had on me and I was like, Oh my God! Whats scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school.

They hadnt employed Cambridge Analytica, he said. No money changed hands. They were happy to help.

Why?

Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us. He said, Heres this company we think may be useful to you. What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldnt you? Behind Trumps campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said, were the same people. Its the same family.

There were already a lot of questions swirling around Cambridge Analytica, and Andy Wigmore has opened up a whole lot more. Such as: are you supposed to declare services-in-kind as some sort of donation? The Electoral Commission says yes, if it was more than 7,500. And was it declared? The Electoral Commission says no. Does that mean a foreign billionaire had possibly influenced the referendum without that influence being apparent? Its certainly a question worth asking.

In the last month or so, articles in first the Swiss and the US press have asked exactly what Cambridge Analytica is doing with US voters data. In a statement to the Observer, the Information Commissioners Office said: Any business collecting and using personal data in the UK must do so fairly and lawfully. We will be contacting Cambridge Analytica and asking questions to find out how the company is operating in the UK and whether the law is being followed.

Cambridge Analytica said last Friday they are in touch with the ICO and are completely compliant with UK and EU data laws. It did not answer other questions the Observer put to it this week about how it built its psychometric model, which owes its origins to original research carried out by scientists at Cambridge Universitys Psychometric Centre, research based on a personality quiz on Facebook that went viral. More than 6 million people ended up doing it, producing an astonishing treasure trove of data.

These Facebook profiles especially peoples likes could be correlated across millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. Michal Kosinski, the centres lead scientist, found that with knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someones personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself. Computers see us in a more robust way than we see ourselves, says Kosinski.

But there are strict ethical regulations regarding what you can do with this data. Did SCL Group have access to the universitys model or data, I ask Professor Jonathan Rust, the centres director? Certainly not from us, he says. We have very strict rules around this.

A scientist, Aleksandr Kogan, from the centre was contracted to build a model for SCL, and says he collected his own data. Professor Rust says he doesnt know where Kogans data came from. The evidence was contrary. I reported it. An independent adjudicator was appointed by the university. But then Kogan said hed signed a non-disclosure agreement with SCL and he couldnt continue [answering questions].

Kogan disputes this and says SCL satisfied the universitys inquiries. But perhaps more than anyone, Professor Rust understands how the kind of information people freely give up to social media sites could be used.

Former Ukip leader Nigel Farage is a friend of the Mercers. Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images

The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. Its what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. Its how you brainwash someone. Its incredibly dangerous.

Its no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People dont know its happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.

Mercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, the Washington Post reported, driven in part by an assessment that the right was lacking sophisticated technology capabilities. But in many ways, its what Cambridge Analyticas parent company does that raises even more questions.

Emma Briant, a propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but its SCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.

SCL was founded by someone called Nigel Oakes, who worked for Saatchi & Saatchi on Margaret Thatchers image, says Briant, and the company had been making money out of the propaganda side of the war on terrorism over a long period of time. There are different arms of SCL but its all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.

In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population 220 million people and the Washington Post reported last week that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trumps administration. It seems significant that a company involved in engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if its the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear, says Briant.

Its the database, and what may happen to it, that particularly exercises Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has been investigating Cambridge Analytica and SCL for more than a year. How is it going to be used? he says. Is it going to be used to try and manipulate people around domestic policies? Or to ferment conflict between different communities? It is potentially very scary. People just dont understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them.

There are two things, potentially, going on simultaneously: the manipulation of information on a mass level, and the manipulation of information at a very individual level. Both based on the latest understandings in science about how people work, and enabled by technological platforms built to bring us together.

Are we living in a new era of propaganda, I ask Emma Briant? One we cant see, and that is working on us in ways we cant understand? Where we can only react, emotionally, to its messages? Definitely. The way that surveillance through technology is so pervasive, the collection and use of our data is so much more sophisticated. Its totally covert. And people dont realise what is going on.

Public mood and politics goes through cycles. You dont have to subscribe to any conspiracy theory, Briant says, to see that a mass change in public sentiment is happening. Or that some of the tools in action are straight out of the militarys or SCLs playbook.

But then theres increasing evidence that our public arenas the social media sites where we post our holiday snaps or make comments about the news are a new battlefield where international geopolitics is playing out in real time. Its a new age of propaganda. But whose? This week, Russia announced the formation of a new branch of the military: information warfare troops.

Sam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institutes computational propaganda institute tells me that one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated bots accounts that are programmed to look like people, to act like people, and to change the conversation, to make topics trend. And they were all for Leave. Before the US election, they were five-to-one in favour of Trump many of them Russian. Last week they have been in action in the Stoke byelection Russian bots, organised by who? attacking Paul Nuttall.

Politics is war, said Steve Bannon last year in the Wall Street Journal. And increasingly this looks to be true.

Theres nothing accidental about Trumps behaviour, Andy Wigmore tells me. That press conference. It was absolutely brilliant. I could see exactly what he was doing. Theres feedback going on constantly. Thats what you can do with artificial intelligence. You can measure ever reaction to every word. He has a word room, where you fix key words. We did it. So with immigration, there are actually key words within that subject matter which people are concerned about. So when you are going to make a speech, its all about how can you use these trending words.

Wigmore met with Trumps team right at the start of the Leave campaign. And they said the holy grail was artificial intelligence.

Who did?

Jared Kushner and Jason Miller.

Later, when Trump picked up Mercer and Cambridge Analytica, the game changed again. Its all about the emotions. This is the big difference with what we did. They call it bio-psycho-social profiling. It takes your physical, mental and lifestyle attributes and works out how people work, how they react emotionally.

Bio-psycho-social profiling, I read later, is one offensive in what is called cognitive warfare. Though there are many others: recoding the mass consciousness to turn patriotism into collaborationism, explains a Nato briefing document on countering Russian disinformation written by an SCL employee. Time-sensitive professional use of media to propagate narratives, says one US state department white paper. Of particular importance to psyop personnel may be publicly and commercially available data from social media platforms.

Yet another details the power of a cognitive casualty a moral shock that has a disabling effect on empathy and higher processes such as moral reasoning and critical thinking. Something like immigration, perhaps. Or fake news. Or as it has now become: FAKE news!!!!

How do you change the way a nation thinks? You could start by creating a mainstream media to replace the existing one with a site such as Breitbart. You could set up other websites that displace mainstream sources of news and information with your own definitions of concepts like liberal media bias, like CNSnews.com. And you could give the rump mainstream media, papers like the failing New York Times! what it wants: stories. Because the third prong of Mercer and Bannons media empire is the Government Accountability Institute.

Bannon co-founded it with $2m of Mercers money. Mercers daughter, Rebekah, was appointed to the board. Then they invested in expensive, long-term investigative journalism. The modern economics of the newsroom dont support big investigative reporting staffs, Bannon told Forbes magazine. You wouldnt get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. Were working as a support function.

Welcome to the future of journalism in the age of platform capitalism. News organisations have to do a better job of creating new financial models. But in the gaps in between, a determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends.

In 2015, Steve Bannon described to Forbes how the GAI operated, employing a data scientist to trawl the dark web (in the article he boasts of having access to $1.3bn worth of supercomputers) to dig up the kind of source material Google cant find. One result has been a New York Times bestseller, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, written by GAIs president, Peter Schweizer and later turned into a film produced by Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon.

This, Bannon explained, is how you weaponise the narrative you want. With hard researched facts. With those, you can launch it straight on to the front page of the New York Times, as the story of Hillary Clintons cash did. Like Hillarys emails it turned the news agenda, and, most crucially, it diverted the attention of the news cycle. Another classic psyops approach. Strategic drowning of other messages.

This is a strategic, long-term and really quite brilliant play. In the 1990s, Bannon explained, conservative media couldnt take Bill Clinton down becausethey wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber.

As, it turns out, the liberal media is now. We are scattered, separate, squabbling among ourselves and being picked off like targets in a shooting gallery. Increasingly, theres a sense that we are talking to ourselves. And whether its Mercers millions or other factors, Jonathan Albrights map of the news and information ecosystem shows how rightwing sites are dominating sites like YouTube and Google, bound tightly together by millions of links.

Is there a central intelligence to that, I ask Albright? There has to be. There has to be some type of coordination. You can see from looking at the map, from the architecture of the system, that this is not accidental. Its clearly being led by money and politics.

Theres been a lot of talk in the echo chamber about Bannon in the last few months, but its Mercer who provided the money to remake parts of the media landscape. And while Bannon understands the media, Mercer understands big data. He understands the structure of the internet. He knows how algorithms work.

Robert Mercer did not respond to a request for comment for this piece. NickPatterson, a British cryptographer, who worked at Renaissance Technologies in the 80s and is now a computational geneticist at MIT, described to me how he was the one who talent-spotted Mercer. There was an elite group working at IBM in the 1980s doing speech research, speech recognition, and when I joined Renaissance I judged that the mathematics we were trying to apply to financial markets were very similar.

Bannon scorns media in rare public appearance at CPAC

He describes Mercer as very, very conservative. He truly did not like the Clintons. He thought Bill Clinton was a criminal. And his basic politics, I think, was that hes a rightwing libertarian, he wants the government out of things.

He suspects that Mercer is bringing the brilliant computational skills he brought to finance to bear on another very different sphere. We make mathematical models of the financial markets which are probability models, and from those we try and make predictions. What I suspect Cambridge Analytica do is that they build probability models of how people vote. And then they look at what they can do to influence that.

Finding the edge is what quants do. They build quantitative models that automate the process of buying and selling shares and then they chase tiny gaps in knowledge to create huge wins. Renaissance Technologies was one of the first hedge funds to invest in AI. But what it does with it, how its been programmed to do it, is completely unknown. It is, Bloomberg reports, the blackest box in finance.

Johan Bollen, associate professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, tells me how he discovered one possible edge: hes done research that shows you can predict stock market moves from Twitter. You can measure public sentiment and then model it. Society is driven by emotions, which its always been difficult to measure, collectively. But there are now programmes that can read text and measure it and give us a window into those collective emotions.

The research caused a huge ripple among two different constituencies. We had a lot attention from hedge funds. They are looking for signals everywhere and this is a hugely interesting signal. My impression is hedge funds do have these algorithms that are scanning social feeds. The flash crashes weve had sudden huge drops in stock prices indicates these algorithms are being used at large scale. And they are engaged in something of an arms race.

The other people interested in Bollens work are those who want not only to measure public sentiment, but to change it. Bollens research shows how its possible. Could you reverse engineer the national, or even the global, mood? Model it, and then change it?

It does seem possible. And it does worry me. There are quite a few pieces of research that show if you repeat something often enough, people start involuntarily to believe it. And that could be leveraged, or weaponised for propaganda. We know there are thousands of automated bots out there that are trying to do just that.

THE war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institutes Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? Theres not a smoking gun, says Howard. There are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.

Look at this, he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like hes a consensus.

And that requires money?

That requires organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you are whats legitimate. You are creating truth.

You can take an existing trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it. You can turn it against the very media that uncovered it. Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system. Strapped to the live body of us the mainstream media.

One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of sleeper bots theyve found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all other sources of information.

Like zombies?

Like zombies.

Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then exported everywhere else. You have these incredible propaganda tools developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.

This is the world we enter every day, on our laptops and our smartphones. It has become a battleground where the ambitions of nation states and ideologues are being fought using us. We are the bounty: our social media feeds; our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes. Bots influence trending topics and trending topics have a powerful effect on algorithms, Woolley, explains, on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. Know how to manipulate information structure and you can manipulate reality.

Were not quite in the alternative reality where the actual news has become FAKE news!!! But were almost there. Out on Twitter, the new transnational battleground for the future, someone I follow tweets a quote by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the 60s. World War III will be a guerrilla information war, it says. With no divisions between military and civilian participation.

By that definition were already there.

Additional reporting by Paul-Olivier Dehaye

Carole Cadwalladr will be hosting a discussion on technologys disruption of democracy at the bluedot festival, Jodrell Bank, Cheshire, 7-9 July

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Wednesday, April 21, 2021

There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing (NYT) At first, I didn’t recognize the symptoms that we all had in common. It wasn’t burnout—we still had energy. It wasn’t depression—we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing. Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021. Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing—the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. You’re not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work. Part of the danger is that when you’re languishing, you might not notice the dulling of delight or the dwindling of drive. You don’t catch yourself slipping slowly into solitude; you’re indifferent to your indifference. When you can’t see your own suffering, you don’t seek help or even do much to help yourself.

Biden’s virtual climate summit: Diplomacy sans human touch (AP) There will be no hands to shake or backs to slap, no way to look a foreign leader in the eye. The small human moments that define statecraft will be reduced to images on a screen. President Joe Biden, a most hands-on politician, this week will host a major climate summit with dozens of world leaders—all of them stuck on Zoom. Streamed 100% live with no backroom give-and-take, the summit will be more geared to sending a message about America’s return to the climate fight and nudging the world toward a greener planet than about specific deals or action. Climate activists may hope for dramatic moments when countries like Japan, South Korea or even China are suddenly inspired by Biden and announce they will stop funding other nations’ coal power plants. But Henry “Jake” Jacoby, who cofounded the MIT Center for Global Change Science, just laughs at the idea: “On a Zoom call with 40 nations of the world watching? Yeah, not a chance.”

Chauvin guilty of murder and manslaughter in Floyd’s death (AP) Former Minneapolis Officer Derek Chauvin was convicted Tuesday of murder and manslaughter for pinning George Floyd to the pavement with his knee on the Black man’s neck in a case that triggered worldwide protests, violence and a furious reexamination of racism and policing in the U.S. Chauvin, 45, was immediately led away with his hands cuffed behind his back and could be sent to prison for decades. The verdict — guilty on all counts, in a clear-cut victory for Floyd’s supporters — set off jubilation tinged with sorrow around the city. Hundreds of people poured into the streets, some running through traffic with banners. Cars blared their horns.

Teen’s death puts focus on split-second police decisions (AP) It happened in less than a second. Thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo dropped the gun he’d been holding, turned and began raising his hands just as the officer had commanded. Then the cop fired a single shot, killing the boy in the dark Chicago alley. The graphic video that became the latest tragic touchstone in the nation’s reckoning with race and policing puts a microscope on those split-second decisions with far-reaching and grave consequences. It takes the brain about three-fourths of a second to react to a perceived threat, said Chris Burbank, a former police chief in Salt Lake City who is now with the Center for Policing Equity. Most police can then draw a gun and fire two accurate rounds in 1.5 seconds, so the pivotal portion of a confrontation can be over in less than three seconds.

Journalism problems (American Press Institute) The latest World Press Freedom Index from Reporters Without Borders found that journalism was impeded or constrained in 73% of the 180 countries that the index evaluated. The report finds that the pandemic severely curbed journalists’ access to sources and reporting in the field. Meanwhile, the he2021 Edelman Trust barometer, which surveyed people in 28 countries, found that 58% of respondents said journalists deliberately misled the public by reporting information that they knew was false. The United States ranks 44th out 180 countries in press freedom and is rated “fairly good”; the top five countries when it comes to press freedom are Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Costa Rica.

Covid in Brazil: Hunger worsens in city slums (BBC) The queue snakes around the block and each day it gets longer: hungry residents of Heliopolis, São Paulo’s largest favela, waiting in line for the handout that will keep them going until the next morning. They are given a bowl of pasta with meat and a portion of rice, two packets of biscuits and a carton of milk, shared between a whole household and usually their only meal of the day. Before the pandemic, 300 people would queue up here. Now it is over 1,000, and the charity that runs it has 650 others across São Paulo. “The vast majority of people who live in the favelas work in the informal economy, as cleaners in homes or helping to bake cakes, so when businesses close or houses stop using them, they feel the impact,” says Marcivan Barreto, the local co-ordinator. “You see people queuing up at 03:00 for food. I’m very worried that as the pandemic continues, a hungry father will start looting supermarkets. When you’re starving, despair hits.”

Argentina’s Misery Deepens in the Pandemic (NYT) Before the pandemic, Carla Huanca and her family were making modest but meaningful improvements to their cramped apartment in the slums of Buenos Aires. She was working as a hairstylist. Her partner was tending bar at a nightclub. Together, they were bringing home about 25,000 pesos ($270) a week — enough to add a second story to their home, creating extra space for their three boys. They were about to plaster the walls. “Then, everything closed,” said Ms. Huanca, 33. “We were left with nothing.” The global economic devastation that has accompanied Covid-19 has been especially stark in Argentina, a country that entered the pandemic deep in crisis. Its economy shrank nearly 10 percent in 2020, the third straight year of recession. The pandemic has accelerated an exodus of foreign investment, which has pushed down the value of the Argentine peso. That has increased the costs of imports like food and fertilizer, and kept the inflation rate above 40 percent. More than four in 10 Argentines are mired in poverty. Hanging over national life is an inevitable renegotiation later this year with the International Monetary Fund, an institution that Argentines widely detest for having imposed crippling budget austerity as part of a rescue package two decades ago.

Britcoin (Foreign Policy) The Bank of England is exploring whether to follow the lead of China in developing its own digital currency. The proposal, dubbed “Britcoin” by U.K. Finance Minister Rishi Sunak, is in early stages: A task force between the U.K. Treasury and Bank of England has been formed to investigate the viability of such a move. The European Central Bank said last week that it was also looking at electronic cash, but that implementation was years away.

A Quiet Arms Race Is Rapidly Heating Up Between the Two Koreas (NYT) Pride and jealousy have driven North and South Korea to engage in propaganda shouting matches and compete over who could build a taller flagpole on their border. Now that one-upmanship is intensifying a much more dangerous side of their rivalry: the arms race. Earlier this month, South Korea’s dream of building its own supersonic fighter jet was realized when it unveiled the KF-21, developed at a cost of $7.8 billion. The country also recently revealed plans to acquire dozens of new American combat helicopters. When President Moon Jae-in visited the Defense Ministry’s Agency for Defense Development last year, he said South Korea had “developed a short-range ballistic missile with one of the largest warheads in the world.” Unlike North Korea, the South lacks nuclear weapons. But in recent years the country has revved up its military spending, procuring American stealth jets and building increasingly powerful conventional missiles capable of targeting North Korean missile facilities and war bunkers. The impoverished North has used those moves to justify expanding its own arsenal, and has threatened to tip its short-range missiles with nuclear warheads and make them harder to intercept. Experts warn that the ensuing arms race between the two countries is jeopardizing the delicate balance of peace on the Korean Peninsula.

China Plans a Communist Birthday Bash (NYT) Movie theaters in China are being ordered to screen patriotic films with titles like “The Sacrifice” and “The Red Sun.” Elementary students in some cities are being told to create paintings and calligraphy extolling the “Chinese dream.” Buses and subways are broadcasting nationalistic messages about revolutionary heroes. China’s Communist Party is gearing up for a patriotic extravaganza to celebrate the 100th anniversary of its founding on July 1. Officials are going into overdrive to make sure commemorations go off without a hitch—and hammer home the message that the party alone can restore China to what Beijing considers the country’s rightful place as a global power. While much of the focus will be on the past, the party’s centenary will have significant repercussions for China’s future. The celebrations will give China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, a forum to present himself as a transformative figure on par with Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. “We need to educate and guide the whole party to vigorously carry forward the red tradition,” Mr. Xi said during a recent conference call with political leaders about the centenary, according to People’s Daily, an official newspaper. Chinese officials, using the slogan “Follow the Party Forever,” are keen to trumpet China’s strength in a pandemic-ravaged world and justify the party’s increasingly tight grip on daily life in China.

Beijing’s control over Hong Kong (Washington Post) For a place that has been stripped of its democratic rights during a pandemic, some days in Hong Kong still feel routine. April 15, however, was not. That occasion, the first “National Security Education Day” since China imposed a tough security law in June, was the most visible display of Hong Kong’s fall from a relatively free, boisterous territory to an Orwellian place that resembles the repressive mainland. Directed at children and designed to rehabilitate the image of the Hong Kong Police Force, last week’s campaign showed how the authorities are enforcing a single narrative of the protests—meddlesome foreign forces stirring up trouble—and how no expense will be spared to fully integrate the financial center into China’s authoritarian system. The day started with flag-raising ceremonies at most schools and the singing of the Chinese national anthem, the “March of the Volunteers.” Many schools also organized national security puzzle games and asked students to write “wish cards” pledging support for the new security law—the resulting works resembling the message-covered “Lennon Walls” synonymous with the democracy movement. Hong Kong’s best legal minds continually tell me the law is a vague catchall, creating broadly worded crimes that could land people in jail for playing a song or uttering a slogan. They call the law “one of the greatest threats to human rights and the rule of law” in Hong Kong since the handover; it has already driven out thousands of people and led some companies, most notably the New York Times, to move employees elsewhere. Now, it was being portrayed to youngsters as something universal and observant of human rights. One elementary school teacher said her 10-year-old pupils can’t comprehend this nuance—and so have become part of a “brainwashing” campaign.

Hugs, tears as Australia-New Zealand travel bubble opens (AFP) Emotions ran high Monday as excited passengers set off on the first flights to take advantage of a quarantine-free travel bubble between Australia and New Zealand, allowing families split when borders closed almost 400 days ago to finally reunite. “(I’ll) yell, scream, cry, hug, kiss, (feel) happy—all of these emotions at once,” Denise O’Donoghue, 63, told AFP at Sydney airport as she prepared to board her flight. The arrangement means that for the first time since the pandemic closed borders worldwide, passengers can fly in either direction across the Tasman Sea without undergoing mandatory Covid-19 quarantine when they arrive. “It’s a very big day and exciting for families and friends,” said New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who hailed the success of both countries in containing the virus as a key factor in allowing the travel corridor.

Fleeing a Modern War, Syrians Seek Refuge in Ancient Ruins (NYT) AL-KFEIR, Syria—As the sun set, children in dirty clothes and battered shoes herded sheep past the towering stone walls of a Byzantine settlement abandoned more than 1,000 years ago, leading them into an ancient cave nearby where the animals would spend the night. Abu Ramadan, 38, said he cared little for the site’s history as a trading and agricultural center, but appreciated the sturdy walls that blunted the wind and the abundance of cut stones that a family who had lost everything could salvage to piece together a new life. “We built these from the ruins,” he said, pointing to a chicken coop and wood-burning stove. “We, too, have become ruins.” As Syria’s 10-year civil war has displaced millions of people, families like Abu Ramadan’s have sought refuge from a modern war behind the walls of dozens of ancient villages sprinkled across the hills of the country’s northwest, a region still out of the control of President Bashar al-Assad’s government. Since their original owners left them between the eighth and 10th centuries, these ruins have remained in remarkably good condition for more than 1,000 years, their stone structures largely withstanding the passing of empires and battering by the wind and rain. And many Syrians, with noplace else to go, have taken refuge in them.

President of Chad Is Killed as Soldiers Clash With Rebels (NYT) Gunshots rang out in the capital of Chad Monday night into early Tuesday morning as supporters of the president, Idriss Déby, fired in the air celebrating the announcement that after three decades of iron-fisted rule, he had just won a sixth term. Meanwhile, Mr. Déby was dying on a battlefield north of the capital, Ndjamena, of wounds sustained while fighting rebels trying to overthrow his government, his military generals said. His death was announced on Tuesday. The death of Mr. Déby, who brooked no dissent and was feared by his own people, could spark a battle for succession and leave a gaping hole in a country heavily relied upon by the West in its wars against Islamist extremists in West and Central Africa. Chad is a desert nation three times the size of California, surrounded on all sides by countries facing serious instability, like Libya, to the north, and Nigeria to the south. Its military forces have been key to both the war in the Sahel, a vast stretch of territory to the south of the Sahara, and the fight against Boko Haram and its splinter groups in the Lake Chad region.

Home accidents (WSJ) The scars of 2020 are in some cases quite literal: A study published in Injury Epidemiology found that 26 percent of about 2,000 respondents surveyed between March and June 2020 reported a household injury, up from a 2017 version of the same survey where 14 percent reported one in the preceding three months. New hobbies, home improvement projects, at-home exercise routines, all the random things people did to divert their attention in the inaugural months of the pandemic in some cases came back to bite them. I, for one, learned a valuable lesson about the melting point of solder vs. the melting point of thumbs over the summer that I would not care to repeat.

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Thursday, June 10, 2021

Spacecraft buzzes Jupiter’s mega moon (AP) NASA’s Juno spacecraft has provided the first close-ups of Jupiter’s largest moon in two decades. Juno zoomed past icy Ganymede on Monday, passing within 645 miles (1,038 kilometers). The last time a spacecraft came that close was in 2000 when NASA’s Galileo spacecraft swept past our solar system’s biggest moon. Ganymede is one of 79 known moons around Jupiter, a gas giant, and is bigger than the planet Mercury.

Global sting began by creating message service for crooks (AP) When the FBI dismantled an encrypted messaging service based in Canada in 2018, agents noticed users moving to other networks. Instead of following their tracks to rivals, investigators decided on a new tactic: creating their own service. ANOM, a secure-messaging service built by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, launched in October 2019 and solidified its following after authorities took down another rival. Popularity spread by word of mouth. When ANOM was taken down Monday, authorities had collected more than 27 million messages from about 12,000 devices in 45 languages—a vast body of evidence that fueled a global sting operation. Authorities on Tuesday revealed the operation known as Trojan Shield and announced that it had dealt an “unprecedented blow” to organized crime around the world. Unbeknown to criminals, authorities were copied on every message sent on the FBI devices, much like blind recipients of an email.

Hot Today (CBS News) More than 24 million people, from the Northern Plains and New England to parts of Texas, are under a heat advisory, with at least six states setting record highs on Monday. Boston is under a heat emergency as temperatures rose above 90 degrees Tuesday for the fourth consecutive day. At least 15 public schools in Minneapolis, Minnesota, announced they’re moving to remote learning from Tuesday through Thursday, as the extreme heat is expected to continue all week. Severe drought conditions across the West helped fuel two wildfires in Arizona, burning more than 60,000 acres and forcing hundreds to evacuate homes outside of Phoenix.

New Yorkers Are Watched by More Than 15,000 Surveillance Cameras (Reason) Even as debates continue about pervasive government monitoring of our lives, surveillance technology is becoming more sophisticated and pervasive. New York City residents in just three boroughs live and work under the watchful gaze of over 15,000 cameras. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has the ability to run the images they capture through software that matches faces to identities—though not always reliably. The result is not just a loss of privacy for those under constant scrutiny, but also the potential for confrontations with law enforcement. “The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has the ability to track people in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx by running images from 15,280 surveillance cameras into invasive and discriminatory facial recognition software,” according to Amnesty International. “Thousands of volunteers from around the world participated in the investigation, tagging 15,280 surveillance cameras at intersections across Manhattan (3,590), Brooklyn (8,220) and the Bronx (3,470).” The volunteers continue to count cameras in Queens and Staten Island to get a fuller picture of the extent of surveillance in the city.

Cicadas were flying; for hours, Biden's press plane was not (AP) The cicadas were flying. The reporters hoping to join the president in Europe were not. Reporters traveling to the United Kingdom for President Joe Biden’s first overseas trip were delayed seven hours after their chartered plane was overrun by cicadas. The Washington, D.C., area is among the many parts of the country that have been swarmed by Brood X cicadas, a large emergence of the loud 17-year insects that take to dive-bombing onto moving vehicles and unsuspecting passersby. There are trillions of them in the Washington, Maryland and Virginia region, said University of Maryland entomologist Paula Shrewsbury. Even Biden wasn’t spared. The president brushed a cicada from the back of his neck as he chatted with his Air Force greeter after arriving at Joint Base Andrews for Wednesday’s flight. This is not the first time the cicadas have caused havoc for a presidential event or been political fodder. In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt, known for a booming voice, was nearly drowned out in an address at Arlington National Cemetery. Eighty-five years later—five cicada cycles—President Ronald Reagan in a radio address talked about how Washington was overrun and compared the harmless flying insects to big spenders. “I think most everyone would agree, things will be much more pleasant when the cicadas go back underground,” Reagan said.

U.S. forming expert groups on safely lifting global travel restrictions (Reuters) The Biden administration is forming expert working groups with Canada, Mexico, the European Union and the United Kingdom to determine how best to safely restart travel after 15 months of pandemic restrictions, a White House official said on Tuesday. Another U.S. official said the administration will not move quickly to lift orders that bar people from much of the world from entering the United States because of the time it will take for the groups to do their work. The White House informed airlines and others in the travel industry about the groups, the official said. The CDC said on Tuesday it was easing travel recommendations on 110 countries and territories, including Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Africa and Iran, but has declined to lift any COVID-19 travel restrictions.

Authorities in Nicaragua arrest two more presidential challengers (BBC) Opposition figures Felix Maradiaga and Juan Sebastián Chamorro have been arrested and were held under a controversial new security law passed by president Daniel Ortega’s government. The 75-year-old Ortega is seeking a fourth consecutive term in November’s election.

Brexit bureaucracy creates British nightmare for Dutch boat captain (Reuters) When Dutch boat captain and engineer Ernst-Jan de Groot applied to continue working in Britain after Brexit, he became ensnared in a bureaucratic nightmare because of an online glitch and says he is now likely to lose his job. De Groot, 54, has worked happily in Britain on and off for the past six years. He sails long, narrow barges from the Netherlands to England to be used as floating homes. He also spends a few months a year building boats at a shipyard near London and captains a tall ship around the west coast of Scotland in the summer. A fluent English speaker, de Groot says he followed the post-Brexit rules by applying for a frontier worker permit to allow him to work in Britain while not being resident. The online application was straightforward until he was asked to provide a photo. The next page of his application, which was reviewed by Reuters, said: “you do not need to provide new photos”, and there was no option to upload one. A few weeks later, his application was rejected—for not having a photo. So began a labyrinthine nightmare of telephone calls, emails and bureaucratic disarray. De Groot estimates he has spent over 100 hours contacting government officials who he said were either unable to help or gave conflicting information. He tried to start a new application to bypass the glitch but each time he entered his passport number it linked to his first application and he remained trapped in the photo-upload loop. “I am trapped in a bureaucratic maze that would even astonish Kafka, and there is no exit,” de Groot said. “I have tried everything I can think of to communicate the simple fact that their website is not functioning as it should.”

Two arrested after slap of French President Macron (AFP) A man grabbed President Emmanuel Macron by the forearm and slapped him across the face yesterday during a meet-and-greet with a crowd in southern France. Reports say the first arrest is the bearded man who levied the slap, the second is the person who filmed it.

Ten NGO workers killed in attack in Afghanistan (Radio Free Afghanistan) The Kabul government has blamed the Taliban for an attack that killed ten NGO workers and wounded 16 others, though the militant group denies responsibility. The workers were part of a British-American mine clearance organization, the HALO trust.

Auckland has become the world’s most liveable city (The Economist) New Zealand has done a remarkable job of controlling covid-19. It has reported just 26 deaths from the disease, roughly one out of every 200,000 people. On many days this year, it has not recorded a single new case. One of those days was March 19th—a time when many countries were still enforcing strict lockdowns, but Auckland was already permitting concerts. As 12,000 fans of Crowded House, an Australian rock band, squeezed into Spark Arena that night, they had good reason to think they were living in the best city in the world. A new survey of “liveability” in 140 cities by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a sister company of The Economist, gives mathematical weight to such a claim. For the first time, Auckland leads the EIU’s ranking, thanks largely to the city’s early containment of the pandemic and to its subsequent ability to lift restrictions on mobility. It came 12th in 2019, the most recent year in which the EIU published its list. Close on Auckland’s heels is Wellington, New Zealand’s capital, which moved up from 25th in 2019 to fourth this year. Other island nations with strong border controls also fared well: two Japanese cities and four from Australia appear in the top ten. In the vast majority of cities, however, living conditions have plummeted compared with pre-pandemic levels.

In Lebanon, a search for medicine and a stranger’s help (AP) To all the struggles of life in Lebanon—the pandemic, the power outages, the inflation, the punishing financial and political crises—add one more: shortages of crucial medications. But as residents struggle to find the medicines they need, some are finding that their fellow Lebanese are doing what they can to help. Christiane Massoud, a 41-year-old nurse, scoured pharmacies for an elusive drug to manage her Crohn’s disease, had friends around the country search on her behalf and asked her doctor if there was a substitute. She also appealed to strangers online for pointers to track it down. Nada Waked responded to one of those online pleas: She had a small amount that her mom no longer needed. Massoud offered to pay; Waked and her mom declined the money. Instead, Waked asked for a prayer. “It showed that we are a people who stand by one another and feel for one another,” Massooud said. “There are still people who help each other out.” As the country’s crises deepened, pharmacist Chadi Geha said he noticed more were eager to help strangers. Some of his customers started refusing to take back change, asking him instead to use the cash to pay for the medications of others in need.

Mali’s second military coup (Le Monde) Nine months after the military installed a new interim leader, a young colonel has again taken over the country in what appears to be a pure power play. Malians and international allies alike are worried about what happens next. Malians appear tired of seeing their political life marked by ineffective policies sanctioned by successive coups d’état, the fifth since the country’s independence in 1960.

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Headlines

Coronavirus will undermine trust in government, research finds (Washington Post) Two new working papers present complementary data showing that the coronavirus pandemic will leave a deep psychological scar on the nation for years to come. One finds that people who endure a pandemic in young adulthood tend to be more distrustful of government institutions for the rest of their lives, an outcome that makes it more difficult for governments to effectively respond to future pandemics. The findings are substantial: “An individual with the highest exposure to an epidemic (relative to zero exposure) is 7.2 percentage points less likely to have confidence in the honesty of elections; 5.1 percentage points less likely to have confidence in the national government; and 6.2 percentage points less likely to approve the performance of the political leader,” the authors wrote. The general population averages for those values hover around 50 percent, so that represents more than a 10 percent reduction in trust. “Citizens expect democratic governments to be responsive to their health concerns,” study co-author Orkun Saka wrote in an email, “and where the public-sector response is not sufficient to head off the epidemic, they revise their views in unfavorable ways.” The authors contend such an erosion of trust can become self-reinforcing. “One can envisage a scenario where low levels of trust allow an epidemic to spread,” the study noted in its conclusion, “and where the spread of the epidemic reduces trust in government still further, hindering the ability of the authorities to contain future epidemics and address other social problems.”

Houston mayor warns hospital system close to "overwhelmed" amid COVID spike (CBS News) Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner warned Sunday that his city's hospital system is close to becoming 'overwhelmed' with patients amid a spike in confirmed coronavirus cases. 'If we don't get our hands around this virus quickly, in about two weeks our hospital system could be in serious, serious trouble,' Turner said on 'Face the Nation.'

With Department Stores Disappearing, Malls Could Be Next (NYT) The directory map for the Northfield Square Mall in Bourbonnais, Ill., has three glaring spaces where large department stores once stood. Soon there will be a fourth vacancy, now that J.C. Penney is liquidating stores after filing for bankruptcy. With so much empty space and brick-and-mortar retail in the midst of seismic changes even before the pandemic hit, the mall’s owners have been talking with local officials about identifying a “higher and better use for the site,” though they have declined to elaborate on what that could be. The standard American mall was built around department stores. But the pandemic has been devastating for the retail industry and many of those stores are disappearing at a rapid clip. Some chains are unable to pay rent and prominent department store chains including Neiman Marcus, as well as J.C. Penney, have filed for bankruptcy protection. As they close stores, it could cause other tenants to abandon malls at the same time as large specialty chains like Victoria’s Secret are shrinking. Malls were already facing pressure from online shopping, but analysts now say that hundreds are at risk of closing in the next five years.

Pope praises UN efforts for worldwide cease-fire (AP) Pope Francis is praising U.N. Security Council efforts for worldwide cease-fires to help tackle the coronavirus pandemic. In remarks Sunday to the public in St. Peter’s Square, Francis hailed the Security Council’s “request for a global and immediate cease-fire, which would permit the peace and security indispensable for supplying so urgently needed humanitarian assistance.” The pontiff called for the prompt implementation “for the good of the so many persons who are suffering.” He also expressed hope that the Security Council resolution be a “courageous first step for the future of peace.”

Coronavirus: Mexico's death toll passes 30,000 (BBC) Mexico has recorded more than 30,000 deaths from its coronavirus outbreak, as the disease continues to ravage one of Latin America's worst-hit countries. The health ministry said deaths rose by 523 on Saturday, pushing the total to 30,366.

Argentina’s child poverty rate soars amid pandemic (Reuters) Antonio Chenarce, a 49-year-old baker and father of three in Buenos Aires, has struggled to make ends meet since losing his job due to the coronavirus lockdown imposed in the Argentine capital since mid-March. The health crisis has hammered Argentina’s economy, which is now expected to shrink around 12% this year, driving millions into poverty and leaving almost six out of every 10 children and adolescents below the poverty line, United Nations data show. “If I don’t work, it’s all screwed up. Food is expensive. Hunger doesn’t wait for you,” Chenarce, who lives with his wife and children in a poor neighborhood of the capital, said in an interview. Roberto Valent, U.N. coordinator in Argentina, said the pandemic was leading to a spike in poverty and predicted that 58.6% of children and adolescents would be in poverty by year’s end. That is up from 53% in late 2019.

France-Turkey spat over Libya arms exposes NATO’s limits (AP) The festering dispute between France and Turkey over a naval standoff in the Mediterranean Sea has shone a glaring searchlight on NATO’s struggle to keep order among its ranks and exposed weaknesses in a military alliance that can only take action by consensus. According to French accounts of the June 10 incident in the Mediterranean, the French frigate Courbet was illuminated by the targeting radar of a Turkish warship that was escorting a Tanzanian-flagged cargo ship when the French vessel approached. France said it was acting on intelligence from NATO that the civilian ship could be involved in trafficking arms to Libya. The Courbet was part of the alliance’s operation Sea Guardian, which helps provide maritime security in the Mediterranean. In a power-point presentation to French senators on Wednesday, which angered the French officials, Turkey’s ambassador to Paris, Ismail Hakki Musa, denied that the Courbet had been “lit up” by targeting radar and accused the French navy of harassing the Turkish convoy. The French defense ministry rushed to release its version of events and underline that it would not take part in the operation until the allies had recommitted to the arms embargo on Libya, among other demands. On Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron had accused Turkey of flouting its commitments by ramping up its military presence in Libya and bringing in jihadi fighters from Syria. Despite concerns about its direction and close ties with Russia—NATO’s historic rival—Turkey can’t be ejected from the military organization. Legally, there is no mechanism, and decisions require the unanimous agreement of all 30 member nations. In any case, NATO insists that Turkey is too strategically important to lose.

Japan floods leave up to 34 dead, many at nursing homes (AP) Deep floodwaters and the risk of more mudslides that left at least 34 people confirmed or presumed dead hampered search and rescue operations Sunday in southern Japan, including at elderly home facilities where more than a dozen died and scores were still stranded. Helicopters and boats rescued more people from their homes in the Kumamoto region. More than 40,000 defense troops, the coast guard and fire brigades were taking part in the operation. Large areas along the Kuma River were swallowed by floodwaters, with many houses, buildings and vehicles submerged almost up to their roofs. Mudslides smashed into houses, sending people atop rooftops waving at rescuers.

Israel says 'not necessarily' behind all Iran nuclear site incidents (Reuters) Israel’s defence minister said on Sunday it is not “necessarily” behind every mysterious incident in Iran, after a fire at the Natanz nuclear site prompted some Iranian officials to say it was the result of cyber sabotage. Israel, widely believed to be the region’s only nuclear power, has pledged never to allow Iran to obtain atomic weapons, saying Tehran advocates its destruction. Iran denies ever seeking nuclear arms and says its atomic programme is peaceful. The underground Natanz site, where a one-storey building was partly burned on Thursday, is the centrepiece of Iran’s uranium enrichment programme and monitored by inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog. In 2010, the Stuxnet computer virus, widely believed to have been developed by the United States and Israel, was discovered after it was used to attack Natanz. Last month, Israeli security cabinet minister Zeev Elkin said Iran had attempted to mount a cyber attack on Israel’s water system in April.

Israeli leader’s son takes center stage in corruption sagas (Washington Post) As scandal-plagued Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands trial for corruption, his 28-year-old son has emerged as a driving force in a counterattack against critics and the state institutions prosecuting the longtime Israeli leader. A favorite of the prime minister’s nationalistic base and far right leaders around the world, Yair Netanyahu has become a fixture in the news, clashing with journalists on social media, threatening lawsuits against his father’s adversaries and posting online content deemed so offensive that Facebook briefly suspended his account. In the past month alone, he has called to banish minorities from Tel Aviv, tweeted a discredited conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya and intimated that a critical Israeli broadcast journalist slept her way up to her coveted job. But his toughest broadsides have been directed at the Israeli media, judiciary and law enforcement for conducting what he has called a leftist, ideological crusade to topple his father. He’s called for the attorney general to be investigated for his “crimes,” compared the police chief to fictional mob boss Tony Soprano and described investigators as the Stasi, Gestapo and “the political police of the Israeli junta.”

Africa’s locust outbreak is far from over (AP) The crunch of young locusts comes with nearly every step. The worst outbreak of the voracious insects in Kenya in 70 years is far from over, and their newest generation is now finding its wings for proper flight. For months, a large part of East Africa has been caught in a cycle with no end in sight as millions of locusts became billions, nibbling away the leaves of both crops and the brush that sustains the livestock so important to many families. The young yellow locusts cover the ground and tree trunks like a twitching carpet, sometimes drifting over the dust like giant grains of sand. In the past week and a half the locusts have transformed from hoppers to more mature flying swarms that in the next couple of weeks will take to long-distance flight, creating the vast swarms that can largely blot out the horizon. A single swarm can be the size of a large city.

Death toll in Ethiopian protests after killing of singer jumps to 156 (Reuters) The number of people killed in protests in Ethiopia following the slaying of a popular singer has jumped to 156 from the initial tally of 80, a senior regional security official told Reuters on Sunday. The protests were sparked by the assassination of musician Haacaaluu Hundeessaa on Monday night and spread from Addis Ababa to the surrounding Oromia region.

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