Music: Steve Reich — ‘Six Marimbas’
Trump Organization planned to give Putin $50 million penthouse in Trump Tower Moscow
BuzzFeed reports: President Donald Trump’s company planned to give a $50 million penthouse at Trump Tower Moscow to Russian President Vladimir Putin as the company negotiated the luxury real estate development during the 2016 campaign, according to four people, one of them the originator of the plan. Two US law enforcement officials told BuzzFeed News that Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, discussed the idea with a representative of Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary. The Trump Tower Moscow…
How Donald Trump appeals to men secretly insecure about their manhood
Eric Knowles and Sarah DiMuccio write: From boasting about the size of his penis on national television to releasing records of his high testosterone levels, President Trump’s rhetoric and behavior exude machismo. His behavior also seems to have struck a chord with some male voters. See, for example, the “Donald Trump: Finally Someone With Balls” T-shirts common at Trump rallies. But our research suggests that Trump is not necessarily attracting male supporters who are as confidently masculine as the president…
40,000 Syrian refugees remain trapped in U.S.-created no-man’s land
Rozina Ali writes: After months of negotiations, a convoy of sixty-seven aid trucks recently crossed a stretch of desert in southern Syria controlled by the Syrian government and its Iranian allies, before entering territory administered by a small, U.S.-backed rebel group. The trucks carried food, medicine, and winter coats for a fetid refugee camp known as Rukban, home to some forty thousand civilians who have been trapped in a strip of land wedged between Syria and Jordan, and cut off…
Europe’s Jew hatred, and ours
Bari Weiss writes: Paris. Toulouse. Malmo. Copenhagen. Brussels. Berlin. For most people, they are lovely cities where you might happily take a holiday. But for the world’s Jews, they are something else, too. They are place names of hate. Paris for us doesn’t mean just baguettes and Brie but also this year’s murder of a Holocaust survivor in her apartment in the 11th arrondissement and the 2015 siege of a kosher supermarket during which four people were killed. Toulouse is…
Life expectancy declines in the U.S. but is increasing in most other developed nations
The Washington Post reports: Life expectancy in the United States declined again in 2017, the government said Thursday in a bleak series of reports that showed a nation still in the grip of escalating drug and suicide crises. The data continued the longest sustained decline in expected life span at birth in a century, an appalling performance not seen in the United States since 1915 through 1918. That four-year period included World War I and a flu pandemic that killed…
‘First contact’: What a missionary’s death tells us about the perils of colonialism
Ed Simon writes: Last week, Alabama native John Allen Chau bribed fishermen to take him to the protected Andaman archipelago in the Indian Ocean, where he wished to “establish the kingdom of Jesus on the island.” In a particularly American spin on first-contact narratives, Chau brought a football to the Sentinelese, among the last pre-Neolithic tribes on Earth protected from contact. He was ultimately killed by Sentinelese armed with bows and arrows, an end that raises profound questions about “first…
Trump claims climate change isn’t real. My trip to the top of the world proved otherwise
Eric Scigliano writes: Thirteen U.S. government agencies have just issued an alarming new report predicting that global warming, if allowed to continue unabated, will shrink the American economy by 10 percent by 2100, amid environmental impacts that are, if anything, even more dire. The White House tried to bury the report by releasing it on Friday during the holiday weekend, and President Donald Trump announced he didn’t “believe it.” But its conclusions are inescapable. One need only travel to the…
Climate change is making it harder for forests to recover from wildfires
Pacific Standard reports: After consuming more than 153,000 acres, including nearly 14,000 residences, and accounting for 88 fatalities, the Camp Fire has finally been contained. But while communities can now commit fully to recovering from the catastrophic blaze, the landscape itself may have a harder time doing so. Blame climate change. A growing body of research suggests that, thanks to various environmental symptoms of climate change, America’s forests are increasingly at a disadvantage when it comes to recovering from devastating…
How a future Trump Cabinet member gave serial sex abuser, Jeffrey Epstein, the deal of a lifetime
The Miami Herald reports: On a muggy October morning in 2007, Miami’s top federal prosecutor, Alexander Acosta, had a breakfast appointment with a former colleague, Washington, D.C., attorney Jay Lefkowitz. It was an unusual meeting for the then-38-year-old prosecutor, a rising Republican star who had served in several White House posts before being named U.S. attorney in Miami by President George W. Bush. Instead of meeting at the prosecutor’s Miami headquarters, the two men — both with professional roots in…
Senate defies White House on Saudi support in Yemen
Politico reports: The Senate delivered a stunning rebuke to the Trump administration on Wednesday, voting overwhelmingly to advance a measure yanking U.S. support for Saudi-backed forces at war in Yemen. The 63-37 vote, in which 14 Republicans joined every Democrat in voting to move forward on the bipartisan Saudi resolution, came hours after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis failed to sway key undecided senators with an appeal to hold off lest they upset progress of…
Time to regulate social media
In an editorial, The Guardian says: When Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the US Congress this spring he insisted he was not running a media company. But it is getting easier to say why he does. Facebook, the site Mr Zuckerberg founded almost 15 years ago, hosts and produces content. It sells advertising against content. It employs thousands of moderators who help patrol the content it “surfaces”. Two months after he gave his testimony Facebook, without irony, announced plans to launch…
Remembering Raed Fares, who believed that Syria would be saved by its people
Iyad el-Baghdadi writes: On Friday, Raed Fares — a Syrian revolutionary, citizen journalist and civil society leader — was assassinated in northern Syria by masked gunmen suspected of being affiliated with al-Qaeda. He was 46 years old. Hammoud Jneed, Raed’s friend and photographer, was also killed. The news came as a gut punch to me and many activists around the world: Raed was a friend, an inspiration, and a teacher. If I am to speak about what he taught me,…
Should evolution treat our microbes as part of us?
Jonathan Lambert writes: Twilight falls on the Tanzanian plain. As the sky turns a deeper purple, a solitary spotted hyena awakens. She trots along the border of her clan’s territory, marking the boundary with a sour paste from under her tail. She sniffs a passing breeze for hints of itinerant males interested in mating, giving little attention to her stomach’s rumbling over the remnants of the previous night’s hunt or the itch on her flank. The lone hyena chooses what…
Music: Abdullah Ibrahim — ‘Tsakwe / Royal Blue’
The Khashoggi killing had roots in a cutthroat Saudi family feud
David Ignatius writes: Behind the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi lies a power struggle within the Saudi royal family that helped feed the paranoia and recklessness of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Eventually, this rage in the royal court led to the death and dismemberment of a Washington Post journalist. The opening scenes of this family feud took place in January 2015 in a VIP hospital suite in Riyadh, as King Abdullah lay on his deathbed. According to a Saudi…