Additional interview segments: Whistleblower says Facebook needs to declare “moral bankruptcy” Facebook whistleblower on the company’s algorithm Facebook’s foreign impact Misinformation and hateful content on Facebook
Edward Ongweso Jr writes: On Monday, a global service outage hit Facebook and took down the world’s ubiquitous social network , along with Instagram and WhatsApp. The outage, which affects billions of people, occurred just as Facebook filed a motion to dismiss the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s amended antitrust complaint against the company accusing it of acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp to consolidate anti-competitive market power. The day before the outage, on Sunday, the Facebook whistleblower behind devastating leaks that have…
Donald Ayer writes: The Supreme Court has final authority to make difficult judgment calls articulating the powers of government and the limits and constraints upon them. To merit the public trust, these judgments must not appear simply as assertions of individual value choices by the justices or willy-nilly discard long-established court precedents that profoundly affect people’s lives. Nor should they actively undermine the ability of governments to advance public purposes as established by a fair democratic process. As the court…
Politico reports: A senior State Department official is leaving his role in the Biden administration. And on his way out, he has sent a scathing internal memo criticizing the president’s use of a Trump-era policy to expel migrants from the southern border. In a detailed legal memo dated October 2 and obtained by POLITICO, Harold Koh, a senior adviser and the sole political appointee on the State Department’s legal team, called the use of the public health authority known as…
Rivka Galchen writes: Let’s say that you’ve devoted your entire adult life to developing a carbon-free way to power a household for a year on the fuel of a single glass of water, and that you’ve had moments, even years, when you were pretty sure you would succeed. Let’s say also that you’re not crazy. This is a reasonable description of many of the physicists working in the field of nuclear fusion. In order to reach this goal, they had…
Jude Stewart writes: If all our genius lies in our nostrils, as Nietzsche remarked, the nose is an untrained genius, brilliant but erratic. The human nose can detect a dizzying array of smells, with a theoretical upper limit of one trillion smells—yet many of us are incapable of describing these smells in words more precise than smelly and fragrant. Our auditory and visual receptors offer little mystery—they were mapped and explained by scientists many decades ago—but human olfactory receptors were…
Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project reports: On April 29, 2009, the tenants of a strip of shops and offices on Maddox Street in London’s exclusive Mayfair neighborhood woke up with a new landlord: an 11-year-old boy. This news should have been surprising. Not only was Heydar Aliyev not yet in his teens, but he also happened to be the son of Azerbaijan’s authoritarian president, Ilham Aliyev. And yet, he had managed to become the owner of 33.5 million pounds…
The Guardian reports: In September 2003, a secret transaction took place. The location was Monaco, a tax haven associated with the international rich. Specifically, an exclusive block just beneath its lavish casino. An apartment changed hands. A local notary signed the deal. Purchase price: €3.6m (£3.1m). For this, the buyer got a luxury fourth-floor flat, two parking spaces, a storeroom, and the use of a pool in the Monte Carlo Star complex. From the balcony the new owner could gaze…
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reports: While foreign aid poured in, Jordan’s King Abdullah funnelled $100m through secret companies to buy luxury homes Wealth advisers in Switzerland and the Caribbean sought to protect the identity of a client they referred to as “you know who,” leaked files show. Jordanian protesters took to the streets – again – demanding an end to corruption and poverty in the aid-dependent Middle Eastern monarchy. Masked police broke up the demonstrations and jailed critics…
The Guardian reports: Some of America’s most prominent companies, including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Disney, are backing business groups that are fighting landmark climate legislation, despite their own promises to combat the climate crisis, a new analysis has found. A clutch of corporate lobby groups and organizations have mobilized to oppose the proposed $3.5tn budget bill put forward by Democrats, which contains unprecedented measures to drive down planet-heating gases. The reconciliation bill has been called the “the most significant climate…
The New York Times reports: There was one bed coming available in the intensive care unit in Alaska’s largest hospital. It was the middle of the night, and the hospital, Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage, had been hit with a deluge of coronavirus patients. Doctors now had a choice to make: Several more patients at the hospital, most of them with Covid-19, were in line to take that last I.C.U. spot. But there was also someone from one of…
Harry Enten writes: Democratic hopes for passing big legislation through the Senate rely on Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Both have made things difficult for Senate Democrats because they are moderates who have been hesitant to pass big spending packages. But while Democrats are lucky to have a Democrat of any ideological persuasion representing West Virginia, they may not be getting the best bang for their buck from Sinema. Sinema has, for the last few…
Thomas R Verny writes: I began exploring the concept of cellular memory – the idea that memory can be stored outside the brain, in all the body’s cells – after reading an article on Reuters headlined ‘Tiny Brain No Obstacle to French Civil Servant’ in 2007. It seems that a 44-year-old French man had gone to hospital complaining of a mild weakness in his left leg. Doctors learned that the patient ‘had a shunt inserted into his head to drain…
In an editorial, the New York Times says: However horrifying the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol appeared in the moment, we know now that it was far worse. The country was hours away from a full-blown constitutional crisis — not primarily because of the violence and mayhem inflicted by hundreds of President Donald Trump’s supporters but because of the actions of Mr. Trump himself. In the days before the mob descended on the Capitol, a corollary attack —…