23 December 19
Jeffrey Toobin | A Senator Who Will Be Sorely Missed at Trump's Impeachment Trial
Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker
Toobin writes: "As the nation contemplates the first impeachment trial of a President in a generation, my own thoughts turn to covering the last one, in 1999, and to someone whom I trailed during those tumultuous days: Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York."
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Former Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. (photo: Mohammed Al-Shaikh/Getty)
Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker
Toobin writes: "As the nation contemplates the first impeachment trial of a President in a generation, my own thoughts turn to covering the last one, in 1999, and to someone whom I trailed during those tumultuous days: Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York."
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Former Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. (photo: Mohammed Al-Shaikh/Getty)
Saudi Arabia Sentences Five to Death, Three to Jail Over Khashoggi Murder
Marwa Rashad, Reuters
Rashad writes: "Saudi Arabia on Monday sentenced five people to death and three more to jail terms totaling 24 years over the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last year."
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Starbucks is a favorite topic of hoaxes and conspiracy theories by right wingers. (photo: Sarah Rogers/Daily Beast/Getty Images)
Marwa Rashad, Reuters
Rashad writes: "Saudi Arabia on Monday sentenced five people to death and three more to jail terms totaling 24 years over the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last year."
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Starbucks is a favorite topic of hoaxes and conspiracy theories by right wingers. (photo: Sarah Rogers/Daily Beast/Getty Images)
Why Does Starbucks Melt Conservative Brains?
Kelly Weill, The Daily Beast
Weill writes: "Right-wingers keep falling for hoaxes and believing the worst about the ubiquitous coffee purveyor."
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Harvey Weinstein had seemed likely to settle a class-action lawsuit by alleged victims without an admission of guilt and paid for by his former company. (photo: Mark Lennihan/AP)
Kelly Weill, The Daily Beast
Weill writes: "Right-wingers keep falling for hoaxes and believing the worst about the ubiquitous coffee purveyor."
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Harvey Weinstein had seemed likely to settle a class-action lawsuit by alleged victims without an admission of guilt and paid for by his former company. (photo: Mark Lennihan/AP)
Edward Helmore, Guardian UK
Helmore writes: "Harvey Weinstein's civil liabilities just got more complicated."
arvey Weinstein’s civil liabilities just got more complicated.
As he and his bankrupt film studio thought they were closing in on a bargain $47m class-action settlement with more than 30 actors and former employees over claims of sexual misconduct, three women have established separate legal actions against the disgraced movie producer.
All three women, Kaja Sokola, Wedil David and Jane Doe – a pseudonym for the same woman who will testify against Weinstein when he is tried next month on charges of rape, predatory sexual assault and criminal sexual act – claim, like many before them, that Weinstein assaulted them.
They maintain that the settlement lets Weinstein off too lightly and are determined to prevent that.
“My clients believe the current settlement is inadequate in terms of the amounts of money for the victims, and doesn’t provide for any understanding of how many will participate or how much each individual will receive,” Doug Wigdor, attorney for the trio, told the Guardian.
Sokola is claiming under New York’s Child Victims Act, as she was 16 at the time of the alleged assaults. In court documents filed on Thursday, Sokola, now 33, told how she was introduced to Weinstein in 2002 at an event associated with her model agency a month after arriving from Poland aged 16.
Weinstein told her he had made the careers of Penelope Cruz and Gwyneth Paltrow and that if she wanted to be an actress, she would have to be comfortable “losing her inhibitions and getting naked”.
According to the complaint, the producer then asked her to lunch in the interest of helping her pursue an acting career. She agreed but alleges his driver brought them to Weinstein’s apartment instead. There, she claims “he terrified and sexually abused her”. Afterwards he insisted “what had just happened was normal”.
When Sokola initially came forward with her claim as a Jane Doe in 2018, Weinstein’s lawyer dismissed them.
“Like so many other women in this case who have already been exposed as liars, this latest completely uncorroborated allegation that is almost 20 years old will also be shown to be patently false,” said Weinstein’s then counsel, Benjamin Brafman.
But Sokola, David and Doe’s accounts are strikingly similar. David claims Weinstein raped her in 2016 and masturbated in front of her both that year and a year earlier, including once during a meeting about a prospective acting job at the Montage hotel in Beverly Hills.
Doe claims that Weinstein sexually assaulted her under the premise of discussing acting opportunities in 2002.
Weinstein has consistently denied all claims of non-consensual sex, and pleaded not guilty to criminal charges against him.
So far more than 80 women have accused him of sexual assault or harassment, including Rosanna Arquette, Ashley Judd, Rose McGowan, Gwyneth Paltrow and Mira Sorvino.
But the latest court filing on behalf of Sokola, whose allegations (under a Jane Doe) first appeared in the 2018 class-action lawsuit that accused Weinstein and the board of his former film company of a pattern of sexual misconduct, point to a split in approaches.
Under the current settlement deal being offered, Weinstein is not required to put up any of his own money or offer an admission of guilt. Additionally, company executives would be shielded from further claims and just $6.2m of the $47m would go to 18 of the alleged victims, with no one individual receiving over $500,000.
But newly enacted child victims legislation, which extends the age at which a victim can bring a claim for past crimes to 55, has reinvigorated efforts to hold Weinstein to account – as well as The Weinstein Company and its executives and Miramax’s parent firm, Disney – on the grounds that all of them had acted to protect the movie producer despite knowledge of his conduct.
The complaint goes on to claim that “numerous employees and executives of Miramax and Disney were aware of Harvey Weinstein’s pattern of misconduct, but the companies that employed him utterly failed to supervise him, and they continued to empower him with their prestige and resources and allowed him to find more victims, including Kaja Sokola.”
Disney did not reply to a request for comment at time of publication.
Unlike many claims against Weinstein and his employers in the class-action suit, Sokola and Davis’s claims fall within the civil statute of limitations. Doe, a 16-year-old at the time of the alleged assault in 2002, is able to claim against Miramax’s then owner, Disney.
The company, says Wigdor, “bears responsibility legally for the negligence that ultimately permitted Harvey Weinstein to sexually assault our client”.
In breaking away from the proposed class-action settlement, Sokola, Davis and Doe’s attorneys described it as “offensive and one-sided” and called on other victims and the New York attorney general to abandon the settlement and join their effort.
“Where companies had actual knowledge of the sexual predator’s acts, then took steps to hide those acts from the larger public and enabled that person to continue by keeping them employed or building penalties for future transgressions into Harvey Weinstein’s contract, that sets reasonable grounds to hold those companies responsible,” Wigdor said.
And that, Wigdor said, should also be seen in the context of a post-#MeToo environment in which employers and board members can be held accountable for the actions of a sexual predator or for permitting a sexually predatory environment to develop.
“One of the ways of trying to minimize or curtail these power-dynamic situations is for companies to take greater control of, and responsibility for, the acts of its executives. That’s really what we are trying to do in addition to holding Harvey Weinstein accountable.”
In her new book The Government-Citizen Disconnect, Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler investigates this paradox. (image: Javier Zarracina/Vox/Miller Center/Getty Images)
Sean Illin, Vox
Illin writes: "Everyone benefits from welfare. Here's why most people don't know that."
EXCERPT:
overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
President Ronald Reagan uttered those words in his 1981 inaugural address to the country. He was referring specifically to the government’s role in helping bring the US out of an economic crisis. But since then, it’s become a kind of blanket truism in Republican circles. The government is a perennial boogeyman, and the main policy objective on the right has been to reduce the role of government in public life.
But there’s a problem: Many who accept this dogma are the very people who need the government the most. Research shows, for instance, that Republican states are disproportionately dependent on federal aid. Yet many Republican voters appear blissfully unaware of this contradiction.
In her new book The Government-Citizen Disconnect, Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler investigates this paradox. She looks at historical government data as well as surveys of Americans’ experiences with 21 federal social policies, including food stamps, Social Security, Medicaid, and the home mortgage interest deduction.
And what she found was fascinating: It turns out that people’s attitudes toward welfare are a strong predictor of how they’ll vote. But even more interesting, the types of federal benefits people get — and whether they’re “visible” like food stamps and Medicaid or “invisible” like tax breaks — influence how they perceive their own personal dependency on social welfare programs.
Google. (photo: Lionel Bonaventure/Getty)
France: Antitrust Bureau Fines Google $167 Million for Abuses
teleSUR
Excerpt: "The U.S. tech giant has been abusing its dominant position in the online advertising market."
teleSUR
Excerpt: "The U.S. tech giant has been abusing its dominant position in the online advertising market."
"Google has abused its dominant position in the search advertising market by adopting opaque and difficult to understand operating rules for its advertising platform Google Ads and by applying them unfairly and randomly," the regulator said.
The French bureau of competition is an independent antitrust institution that monitors anticompetitive practices, provides expertise on market functioning and reviews merger transactions.
Currently, 90 percent of virtual searches made by French Internauts are done through Google, which also controls over 80 percent of the Internet advertising market.
As a consequence of this, the antitrust authority considers that the company "is obliged to define the operating rules of its advertiser platform in an objective, transparent and non-discriminatory manner."
The U.S.-based company's rules, however, "are not based on any precise and stable definition, which leaves Google free to interpret them according to situations."
#GAFA : c’est au tour du Japon de sévir contre les géants du web et plus particulièrement Google et Facebook. Mardi 17 décembre, une nouvelle loi a été annoncée pour lutter contre l’abus de position dominante de ces derniers ow.ly/MQCd1024uko
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"Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (GAFA): It is Japan's turn to take strong action against the web giants, especially Google and Facebook. A new law to fight their abuse of dominant position is expected on Tuesday, Dec. 17."
Google has also modified its interpretation of its own rules, which generates "legal and economic insecurity" to advertisers, to whom the company does not inform them about changes in regulations.
The French authorities also consider that Google discriminately applies its own rules because it suspends the ads of some companies and allows similar ads from others.
All these practices led anti-trust regulators to conclude that Google’s search engine has prevented advertising from advertisers with innovative strategies and has devised “a deliberate and global strategy aimed at disrupting competition.”
Indonesia is the latest country to get tougher on domestic taxation of global digital companies. Under new rules, these co’s must hv a representative office in the country. Meanwhile, Trump is set to retaliate at France for latter’s ‘Les Gafa’ digital tax asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Indone…
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Google is set to appeal against the regulator's decision and has had previous run-ins with French authorities.
In September, Google agreed to pay US$1 billion to settle disputes with French tax authorities, which began four years ago.
In January, France's National Data Protection Commission (CNIL) fined Google US$55 million for breaching the European Union's online privacy rules.
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The Burgess Shale fossils, including this well-preserved trilobite, are the result of an ancient underwater landslide that entombed tens of thousands of animals more than half a billion years ago. (photo: Sarah Kaplan/The Washington Post)
These Fossils Remind Us How Fleeting Life Can Be - and What Peril We're In
Sarah Kaplan, The Washington Post
Kaplan writes: "A massive Canadian fossil trove reminds us how fleeting life on Earth can be - and how much peril we're in."
Sarah Kaplan, The Washington Post
Kaplan writes: "A massive Canadian fossil trove reminds us how fleeting life on Earth can be - and how much peril we're in."
EXCERPTS:
But then I think of the invasive bark beetles, spurred by a warming climate, that are eating away at this forest. I think of retreating glaciers and vanishing species and all the consequences of unchecked carbon consumption that are still to come.
I think of the United Nations scientists who declared last year that we had just over a decade to get climate change under control, and the officials meeting in Madrid this month who have fallen far short of the commitments needed to make that happen.
Life on Earth has been evolving for nearly 4 billion years. Yet only now, as the geological clock strikes midnight, is there a creature capable of looking back at that history and appreciating it. Only now, as our own actions imperil this extraordinary and singular planet, do humans have a chance to comprehend all that is about to be lost.
What a profound responsibility that is. What a beautiful gift.
Researchers debate what caused the single-celled microbes of the Proterozoic (or “simple life”) eon to evolve into the complex organisms seen in the Burgess Shale. Perhaps it was climate change — Earth was slowly recovering from an intense ice age — or the greater availability of oxygen in the atmosphere. Others have suggested that some key biological innovation, like the development of vision or the rise of predators, set off an evolutionary arms race that resulted in ever-more-complex creatures.
Weirdness seems to be the defining characteristic of Burgess Shale organisms. Hynes shows us illustrations of Opabinia, an oddball with five eyes and a vacuum cleaner nozzle for a nose, and the monstrous Hallucigenia, which boasted eight pairs of legs and an equal number of conical spines. The ancestor of all modern vertebrates, including fish, birds and humans, was Pikaia, a wriggling eel-like organism no longer than your big toe. My favorites are the trilobites, distant relatives of today’s horseshoe crabs, with jointed legs and shells of overlapping plates that almost look like ribs. They thrived for 300 million years, through the drifting of continents and the rise and fall of sea levels, the flourishing of coal age plants, the invention of the backbone.
In the end, the thing that got them was climate change; trilobites died out during the end-Permian mass extinction, when gigantic volcanic eruptions raised temperatures, acidified the oceans and killed off some 90 percent of life on Earth.
By comparison, our species seems like little more than a hiccup in the steady march of geologic time. Homo sapiens has existed for just 0.06 percent of the time trilobites survived. Given the environmental crisis we’ve created, it’s unclear how much longer we’ll be around.
Back in Washington, I head over to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, home to tens of thousands of Burgess Shale specimens. Hans Sues, the museum’s chair of paleobiology, guides me down dimly lit hallways to the Cambrian collections, where he pulls out drawer after drawer of fossils. He handles each one like it’s a relic.
The events of 500 million years ago are just the beginning of the Burgess Shale’s story, he explains. What happened after scientists uncovered them is perhaps even more profound.
It was a secretary of the Smithsonian, Charles Doolittle Walcott, who first excavated the fossil site in 1909. The extraordinary find was announced without fanfare; “A most interesting discovery of unique Cambrian fossil,” was all Walcott wrote in an initial scientific report.
Walcott spent 15 field seasons at the shale, but he was so busy digging up fossils he didn’t have much time to decipher them. It wasn’t until decades later that scientists began to realize how unusual and diverse the Burgess Shale specimens truly were. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould found the fossils so strange, he believed that many of them couldn’t belong to any known animal group. In his 1989 book, “Wonderful Life,” he speculated that Cambrian animals were part of an exceptionally experimental period in Earth’s history. Far from being “primitive,” these creatures and their ecosystem were as complex as anything we see today. If we were to rewind the geologic clock, Gould argued, perhaps evolution would take an entirely different course. In place of humans, the world could be dominated by Hallucigenia’s many-legged descendants.
More recent research has shown that Gould’s theories weren’t quite correct, Sues says; most of the Burgess Shale specimens do fit into existing categories on an evolutionary tree. But the idea still stands that evolution is unpredictable and undirected, that humanity is a fluke outcome rather than the inevitable result of millennia of increasing complexity. “There were all these other worlds out there,” Sues says. Someday, “ours is going to be just another one of them.”
Still, a few traits have staying power. The most common type of Cambrian creatures were arthropods, or joint-legged invertebrates. This same group, which includes insects, spiders and crustaceans, still accounts for more than 80 percent of all known animal species. There are probably millions more arthropods that remain undiscovered and unnamed.
In other words, Sues says, if the world of the Burgess Shale seems utterly alien, it’s only because we haven’t been paying enough attention to our own world.
The price of our ignorance about life’s current diversity will be a duller, poorer future, because our inattention has led us to undermine the conditions that make Earth’s extraordinary variety possible. Recent studies have found that arthropod populations, survivors of so many millions of years of tumult, are in “hyperalarming” decline in the human era. Flying insects have vanished from German nature preserves. Huge numbers of bugs have disappeared from a pristine forest in Puerto Rico. A catastrophic combination of habitat loss and climate change is transforming ecosystems faster than scientists can study them.
“We’re losing things we don’t even know about,” Sues says. “If we don’t understand this world, if we don’t appreciate how this world came into being, how can we be capable stewards of it?”
Since the moment the Burgess Shale organisms began crawling out of the mud, living things on this planet have never been stagnant. They’ve been bombarded by asteroids, numbed by ice, eclipsed by competitors, even suffocated by the products of their own metabolisms. Yet, no matter how terrible the transformation, life has always emerged — altered, yet undeterred.
The world we love, the very fact of our existence, is contingent upon that process. Change is why we are here. And change will happen again.
But at this moment, Earth’s climate is changing at a pace unmatched in the planet’s 4.6 billion-year history. The systems on which species depend are vanishing. Living things as large and charismatic as whales, as delicate as orchids, as anonymous as tiny gray lichen growing on some remote Arctic tree, are dying out at a rate approaching the scale of the biggest extinctions.
The planet is hurtling toward “the point of no return,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said last weekend at the opening of the COP 25 climate change summit. It is the last such meeting before the Paris climate agreement goes into effect, but global leaders still have not agreed on a mechanism for achieving the emissions reductions needed. The biggest source of cumulative greenhouse gases in history — the United States — refuses to cooperate on climate change mitigation at all. Meanwhile, unprecedented wildfires have burned millions of acres in Australia, Venice is underwater, hundreds of Bahamians are still missing after Hurricane Dorian devastated the island nation in August. Like the creatures of the Cambrian, humans are entering a world utterly unlike the one in which we evolved. Our species may not die out, but life as we know it cannot go on.
While the trilobites had no hand in their fate, we brought this revolution on ourselves. And we can still shape its course. We already know what must be done to avert the worst effects of warming: Starting next year, global greenhouse gas emissions must fall by 7.6 percent annually, reaching zero by the middle of the century. And although the scale of such action would be unprecedented, we already know how to achieve it: Put a price on carbon, replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources, restore nature landscapes that act as carbon sinks, equip ordinary people with the tools to adapt to a transformed world. No new technologies need to be invented to meet the terms of the Paris climate agreement. All we are waiting for is the will to change.
Humans are the first species with not just the power to alter the planet on a geologic scale but also the capacity to predict the consequences. We understand the connection between our actions and each of Earth’s possible futures.
What a profound responsibility that is. What a beautiful gift.
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