Attention to the Unseen

The Washington Post reports: For the second time in six months, Microsoft has identified a Russian government-affiliated operation targeting prominent think tanks that have been critical of Russia, the company said in a blog post Tuesday evening. The “spear-phishing” attacks — in which hackers send out phony emails intended to trick people into visiting websites that look authentic but in fact enable them to infiltrate their victims’ corporate computer systems — were tied to the APT28 hacking group, a unit…

Read More Read More

Rafael Behr writes: When does a church become so broad that its congregants no longer profess the same faith? For Labour, that challenge goes beyond the present rows over Brexit and antisemitism. It drills into deep ideological faultlines. Corbyn’s party has no leftmost boundary. There is no form of radical socialism that it deems taboo. It welcomes people who wave hammer and sickle flags, whether they are unaware of atrocities committed under that banner or simply relaxed about them. It…

Read More Read More

The Daily Beast reports: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has tapped Faiz Shakir to serve as his campaign manager for his second run at the White House, The Daily Beast has learned. In hiring Shakir, Sanders brings into the fold one of the Democratic Party’s better-traveled operatives—an official with limited campaign experience but with ties to the party’s think tank infrastructure, its Hill operations, and the larger progressive universe. Shakir joins the Sanders operation from the American Civil Liberties Union where…

Read More Read More

Roberto Saviano writes: The migrant caravan that left Honduras and headed north toward the US last October is the largest flight from drug trafficking in history. Though the phenomenon of Central American caravans isn’t new, never before have thousands of people decided to flee from criminal organizations in such numbers. It is, in a sense, the biggest anti-mafia march the world has ever seen. The migrants departed from San Pedro Sula, the second-largest city in Honduras and its economic center,…

Read More Read More

By Emily Yates-Doerr, Sapiens, October 25, 2018 On May 23, a bystander filmed 20-year-old Claudia Patricia Gómez González after a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot her in the head. The young woman had recently crossed into Texas from Mexico, and she was unarmed. In an article published soon after her death, her mother, who still lives in Guatemala, described her as “naughty and cuddly and playful,” adding that “she loved to draw and sing.” Gómez González grew up in the…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: European leaders have long been alarmed that President Trump’s words and Twitter messages could undo a trans-Atlantic alliance that had grown stronger over seven decades. They had clung to the hope that those ties would bear up under the strain. But in the last few days of a prestigious annual security conference in Munich, the rift between Europe and the Trump administration became open, angry and concrete, diplomats and analysts say. A senior German official,…

Read More Read More

Anne Applebaum writes: Because I write books about Soviet history, and because I often speak about them to U.S. or European audiences, I am frequently forced to confront the problem of Western indifference. Why, I am asked over and over, did British diplomats who knew about the man-made Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933 do nothing to stop it? The Catholic Church at that time was also aware that millions of Soviet citizens were dying because Joseph Stalin’s state had confiscated their…

Read More Read More

Gary Younge writes: [W]hen Theresa May asks for more time to negotiate with the European Union over Brexit, we would be wise to be sceptical. Not because Britain doesn’t need more time. It does. Hopelessly out of its depth, the country is neither ready to make a deal nor to crash out without one. As more than 40 former ambassadors argued in a joint statement this week: “We should not leave the EU when we have no clarity about our…

Read More Read More