Delay, deny and deflect: How Facebook’s leaders dealt with issues such as foreign interference in elections

Delay, deny and deflect: How Facebook’s leaders dealt with issues such as foreign interference in elections

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The New York Times reports: Sheryl Sandberg was seething. Inside Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, top executives gathered in the glass-walled conference room of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. It was September 2017, more than a year after Facebook engineers discovered suspicious Russia-linked activity on its site, an early warning of the Kremlin campaign to disrupt the 2016 American election. Congressional and federal investigators were closing in on evidence that would implicate the company. But it wasn’t the looming disaster at…

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Forget impeachment. Mueller’s real threat to Trump is in 2020

Forget impeachment. Mueller’s real threat to Trump is in 2020

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Jonathan Chait writes: Well-functioning democracies don’t have criminal oligarchies running the country with legal impunity. The kind of deep systemic corruption Trump is implementing, in which establishing a political alliance with a ruling family is a key step in amassing and protecting wealth, depends on selective legal enforcement. More to the point, it requires business partners. Maybe Donald Trump can’t be hauled off to prison, but his partners can. And that prospect can scare off the collaborators Trump needs. Second,…

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Conservative lawyers say Trump has undermined the rule of law

Conservative lawyers say Trump has undermined the rule of law

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The New York Times reports: The annual convention of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, has long been a glittering and bustling affair. In the Trump era, though, the group has become more powerful than ever, supplying intellectual energy and judicial candidates to an assertive administration eager to reshape the legal landscape. But as the group prepares to gather on Thursday for the start of this year’s convention, more than a dozen prominent conservative lawyers have joined together to…

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Inside Trump’s Paris temper, election woes and staff upheaval

Inside Trump’s Paris temper, election woes and staff upheaval

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The Washington Post reports: As he jetted to Paris last Friday, President Trump received a congratulatory phone call aboard Air Force One. British Prime Minister Theresa May was calling to celebrate the Republican Party’s wins in the midterm elections — never mind that Democrats seized control of the House — but her appeal to the American president’s vanity was met with an ornery outburst. Trump berated May for Britain not doing enough, in his assessment, to contain Iran. He questioned…

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How Brexit broke up Britain

How Brexit broke up Britain

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Fintan O’Toole writes: So, at long last, it seems that the negotiations on Brexit between the United Kingdom and the European Union have produced a draft agreement. We do not yet know what it contains but it will be a compromise that falls far short of the high expectations of June 2016 when the British voted to leave. It will tie Britain to the EU’s customs union and single market for an indefinite but probably very long time. Instead of…

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Marie Colvin: Lindsey Hilsum’s revealing biography of courageous war reporter is compelling stuff

Marie Colvin: Lindsey Hilsum’s revealing biography of courageous war reporter is compelling stuff

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Marie Colvin, who died after being targeted in a shell attack in Homs, Syria, in 2012. Wikipedia By Idrees Ahmad, University of Stirling For Marie Colvin, it was Lebanon’s War of the Camps that brought home the power of journalism. In April 1987 Burj al Barajneh, a Palestinian refugee camp, was besieged by Amal, a Shia militia backed by the Syrian regime. Colvin and her photographer Tom Stoddart paid an Amal commander to briefly hold fire while they ran into…

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The myth of the traumatized Neanderthal

The myth of the traumatized Neanderthal

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Ed Yong writes: The very first Neanderthal to be described in the scientific literature, back in 1856, had an old elbow injury—a fracture that had since healed, but had deformed the bone in the process. Such injuries turned out to be incredibly common. Almost every reasonably complete Neanderthal skeleton that was found during the subsequent century had at least one sign of physical trauma. Some researchers attributed these lesions to fights, others to attacks by predators. But whatever the precise…

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Saudi crown prince ‘tried to persuade Netanyahu to go to war in Gaza,’ say sources

Saudi crown prince ‘tried to persuade Netanyahu to go to war in Gaza,’ say sources

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Middle East Eye reports: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman attempted to persuade Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to start a conflict with Hamas in Gaza as part of a plan to divert attention from the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, sources inside Saudi Arabia have told Middle East Eye. A war in Gaza was among a range of measures and scenarios proposed by an emergency task force set up to counter increasingly damaging leaks about Khashoggi’s murder coming from…

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After 17 years, many Afghans blame U.S. for unending war

After 17 years, many Afghans blame U.S. for unending war

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The Associated Press reports: When U.S. forces and their Afghan allies rode into Kabul in November 2001 they were greeted as liberators. But after 17 years of war, the Taliban have retaken half the country, security is worse than it’s ever been, and many Afghans place the blame squarely on the Americans. The United States has lost more than 2,400 soldiers in its longest war, and has spent more than $900 billion on everything from military operations to the construction…

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U.S. joins Russia, North Korea in refusing to sign cybersecurity pact

U.S. joins Russia, North Korea in refusing to sign cybersecurity pact

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Caroline Orr reports: More than 50 countries signed onto a historic cybersecurity pact Monday as part of the Paris Peace Forum, marking an important step forward in the global fight against cyberwarfare and criminal activity on the internet. In addition to the governments that pledged to work together to combat malicious online activities, at least 150 tech companies and 90 charitable organizations and universities also signed onto the agreement. However, there were a few notable absences from the list of…

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‘I see him as a modern day Pablo Escobar’: Inside Bill Browder’s war against Putin

‘I see him as a modern day Pablo Escobar’: Inside Bill Browder’s war against Putin

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Marie Brenner reports: Perhaps all you need to know to understand the essense of Bill Browder is what he carried with him in his briefcase when he lived in Putin’s Russia. “At all times,” he told me not long after we met, “I had $5,000 in cash in case I had to flee for the border and pay off the guards.” Bill Browder’s stories are melodramas. They often begin with a ringing phone—or a knock on a door. In May…

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Time for a Green New Deal?

Time for a Green New Deal?

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Grist reports: Democrats successfully flipped the House last week, and they’ve set their priorities for January: reforming voting, government ethics, and campaign finance laws. Surprise! Climate change isn’t on the list. Not exactly a shocker considering that Democrats don’t even have an economy-wide plan to tackle climate change yet. Guess who does? Young people and newly elected Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A group of 150 youth activists held an hour-long sit-in in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office in D.C….

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The war and the silence

The war and the silence

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At the end of the First World War at 11 AM, on November 11, 1918, the guns fell silent. A piece of film depicting a recording of that moment has been used by Coda to Coda to create an audio interpretation of this event. Their insertion of some birdsong after the gunfire stops appears to have been a bit of poetic license, although this detail has some historical basis. The German novelist Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) fought on the Western Front:…

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How World War I ushered in the century of oil

How World War I ushered in the century of oil

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The Navy converted to oil from coal a few years before the U.S. entered World War I, helping to solidify petroleum’s strategic status. Naval History and Heritage Command By Brian C. Black, Pennsylvania State University On July 7, 1919, a group of U.S. military members dedicated Zero Milestone – the point from which all road distances in the country would be measured – just south of the White House lawn in Washington, D.C. The next morning, they helped to define…

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