Ex-Trump attorney Michael Cohen pleads guilty to lying to Congress in Russia probe
11/29/18 6:34 AM
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Shortly after President Donald Trump was inaugurated, he gave a combative press conference at which he was asked by a reporter, “I was just hoping that we could get a yes-or-no answer on these questions involving Russia. Can you say if you are aware that anyone who advised your campaign had contacts with Russia during the course of the election?”
In reply, he lied to the American public. “Russia is a ruse. I have nothing to do with Russia. Haven’t made a phone call to Russia in years. Don’t speak to people from Russia,” he said. “...I have nothing to do with Russia. To the best of my knowledge no person that I deal with does.”
That he lied has long been clear—all sorts of people with whom he dealt had extensive, well-documented dealings with Russia and Russians. But additional evidence that he lied was revealed Thursday during an appearance in federal court by his former attorney Michael Cohen, who admitted that he negotiated on Trump’s behalf to build a skyscraper in Moscow; that his efforts lasted until at least June 2016; that he briefed Trump and members of Trump’s family about the matter; and that he later lied to Congress, to avoid contradicting Trump’s political message.
Consider the implications. At the very beginning of Trump’s presidency, as soon as he lied in that press conference, Vladimir Putin and Russian intelligence possessed the ability to unmask Trump as a liar to the American public, revealing damaging information to Congress and the public about which they had previously been ignorant. BuzzFeed’s account of the negotiations involving a potential Trump Tower in Moscow hints at the wealth of documentary evidence that the Russians would possess to back up their claims.
As it would turn out, that was merely the beginning of their leverage. In September 2017, Donald Trump, Jr., gave sworn Senate testimony that may be contradicted by Thursday’s revelations, raising the prospect that the Russians have been in possession of evidence suggesting the president’s son may have committed a felony. And once Cohen lied to Congress about the matter, the Russians were in a position to expose the unlawful behavior of Trump’s personal attorney.
Those particular bits of Russian leverage over Trump are gone now that Robert Mueller’s investigation has revealed the truth to Congress and the public. But there is so much that we still don’t know about the Trump Tower deal, the president’s role in negotiating it, and the reasons his inner circle took extraordinary legal risks to hide the truth about it.
“The Kremlin knows the answer to these questions,” says Susan Hennessey, a former National Security Agency lawyer, on a Lawfare podcast. “And unless the answers here are the most innocent possible explanations … if it's anything other than that, the United States is in an incredibly dangerous position, because the United States is in a position where the American president is aware that a hostile foreign adversary potentially has devastating—politically devastating and potentially legally and criminally devastating, if not for him than for members of his family or organization—that a hostile foreign adversary has that information on him, and those really are the kinds of conditions where your worst nightmare is about blackmail and influence.”
Perhaps the public will ultimately learn why Trump and some of his closest associates lied about business opportunities that they were pursing in Moscow during the 2016 election. But the mere fact that they did lie, for whatever reason, gave a powerful geopolitical adversary at least some leverage over an American president and his son. And Trump knew about the leverage as soon as he lied to the public about Russia, and again when he watched his son and his then attorney lie to Congress, raising the stakes to a matter of clear criminality. Elected officials have resigned in disgrace for less serious transgressions.
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2zGVBef
If Elon Musk wants to launch American astronauts to space, he can’t smoke weed and drink whiskey on a podcast again.
That’s a message from Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, to the founder of SpaceX, which, along with Boeing, is developing transportation systems that would allow the United States to fly NASA astronauts from American soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.
“I will tell you that was not helpful, and that did not inspire confidence, and the leaders of these organizations need to take that as an example of what to do when you lead an organization that’s going to launch American astronauts,” Bridenstine said Thursday at a meeting of reporters at NASA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The warning comes about a week after The Washington Post broke the news that NASA would conduct reviews of workplace culture at both SpaceX and Boeing, reportedly in response to Musk’s actions on The Joe Rogan Experience in September. At the time, NASA declined to offer a specific reason for the reviews but offered a hint in its official statement: “[The agency] will be conducting a cultural assessment study in coordination with our commercial partners to ensure the companies are meeting NASA’s requirements for workplace safety, including the adherence to a drug-free environment.”
[Read: Reefer madness at NASA]
Bridenstine said Thursday that he personally ordered the reviews.
He said his decision was influenced in part by several tragedies in NASA’s history. Those tragedies include the Apollo 1 fire in 1967, when three astronauts were killed during a ground test, and the two Space Shuttle disasters (Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003), which together killed 14 people. Bridenstine said he spent some time between his nomination for the job of NASA chief and his confirmation—a months-long, contentious process that left an unprecedented gap between NASA administrators—reading the investigation reports for these incidents.
“Every single one of those accidents had a number of complications. Of course, the technological piece was a big piece of it. [But] the other question that always comes up was, what was the culture of NASA?” he said. “What was the culture of our contractors, and were there people that were raising a red flag that we didn’t listen to, and ultimately did that culture contribute to the failure and, in those cases, to disaster?”
I asked Bridenstine whether he considered Musk’s actions on the Rogan show to be one such red flag.
“I think those were not helpful,” he said.
Bridenstine said he has spoken with Musk recently. “We’ve had a number of conversations,” he said. “I will tell you, he is as committed to safety as anybody, and he understands that that was not appropriate behavior, and you won’t be seeing that again.”
But, Bridenstine said, he had wanted to conduct a review of workplace culture at SpaceX and Boeing even before Musk took a puff of marijuana, which is legal in California, where the podcast was filmed, but considered a controlled substance, like heroin and cocaine, by the federal government. He described the assessments as a “necessary and appropriate step when you’re launching humans on rockets.”
“Rather than waiting until—we don’t believe there’s going to be an incident, but if there is an incident—rather than waiting until there’s an incident, we do a cultural assessment of our contractors [now],” Bridenstine said. “We want to get ahead of it. We want to see, right now, today, are they experiencing pressure from schedule, are they experiencing pressure from cost, and are those concerns challenging their thought process in a way that could be dangerous?”
A spokesperson for SpaceX declined to comment on Bridenstine’s remarks.
After news of the safety reviews broke, both SpaceX and Boeing offered statements touting workplace programs that promote drug-free environments. NASA hasn’t provided details about the reviews, but the Post described them as a “months-long assessment that would involve hundreds of interviews designed to assess the culture of the workplaces.”
NASA gave the two companies a combined $6.8 billion in 2014 to develop launch systems that could transport the agency’s astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The passengers for the first test launches were selected in August. NASA announced last week that the first test, an uncrewed demonstration by SpaceX, is tentatively scheduled for January 7, but Bridenstine said on Thursday that the date is unlikely to stick and may slide into the spring. Crewed test flights are expected next summer, but that timeline is also likely to change.
NASA’s contracts with SpaceX and Boeing require both contractors to “maintain a program for achieving a drug-and alcohol-free workforce” and conduct “preemployment, reasonable suspicion, random, post-accident, and periodic recurring testing of contractor employees in sensitive positions for use, in violation of applicable law or federal regulation, of alcohol or a controlled substance.”
[Read: The problem with Popular Mechanics’ love letter to Elon Musk]
In the last decade, NASA has worked increasingly with commercial companies on various projects. The partnerships have created an unusual situation for the agency. Longtime NASA contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman have been following the rules, including those about drug use, for decades. For NASA, managing a start-up with a young workforce and a famous CEO is a very new experience. The agency may need to rethink how it handles these newcomers, of which there will be many; on Thursday, NASA announced it would work with nine U.S. companies to bring robotic missions to the moon. The majority were formed in the last 10 years.
As I’ve written before, Bridenstine’s disapproval of Musk’s podcast appearance is understandable. NASA, just like any federal agency, is endlessly concerned with its public image, and the optics of one of their contractors smoking and drinking in front of millions of viewers, months before he is entrusted with the lives of Americans, are not great. Whether that behavior calls for an extensive review of employees at SpaceX, who certainly answer to Musk but may not support his choices, is open for debate.
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2AxESt9
In a Manhattan federal court on Thursday, President Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the timing of his negotiations to build a Trump Tower Moscow in 2016, and about how often he discussed the deal with Trump during the campaign. The guilty plea is the first Mueller has secured that is related directly to Trump’s business dealings—and may be just the tip of the iceberg in the ongoing investigation of business deals involving the Trump Organization and Russian financiers, inside and outside the Kremlin.
With Trump now at war with someone who for years was his most loyal lieutenant and fixer, Cohen’s court appearance underscored the peril he presents for the president, who is unsettled by dramatic Democratic gains in the midterms and facing the prospect of unending offshoot probes by newly emboldened Democratic committee chairmen.
The plea includes evidence, for the first time, that could show how Trump was compromised by Russia while Russian President Vladimir Putin was waging a direct attack on the 2016 election. The formal agreement also incentivizes Cohen, the former executive vice president of the Trump Organization and Trump’s right-hand man for more than a decade, to tell Mueller everything he knows—and sets Cohen up as a more credible witness should Mueller ask him to testify in the future. Significantly, the guilty plea was finalized after Trump submitted his written answers to Mueller, who reportedly asked Trump specifically about the Moscow deal. (Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said on Thursday that Trump’s written answers matched the story that Cohen had told Mueller.)
Cohen, moreover, has indicated that he has no loyalty to the president and does not want or expect a presidential pardon. He has also not been sharing information with the president’s legal team throughout the course of his cooperation with Mueller, as Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort has been. Whereas Manafort has kept one foot in the door of Trumpworld, Cohen severed his ties to the president months ago. “The real wild card for Trump is Cohen,” said a veteran Washington lawyer who requested anonymity because he represents a client involved in the Russia probe. “It’s obvious that Cohen knows more about Trump’s business activities over the last decade than just about anyone.”
Cohen admitted on Thursday that he lied to Congress about how often he and Trump had spoken about the Trump Tower deal in 2016, and acknowledged that he had tried to organize a trip for Trump to Russia in 2016 to scope out the potential project after Trump clinched the Republican nomination. He lied both to minimize Trump’s link to the Moscow project and to limit “the ongoing Russia investigations,” according to Mueller’s team. The criminal information filed by Mueller’s office on Thursday makes clear that Cohen contacted the Kremlin “asking for assistance in connection with the Moscow Project” in January 2016.
Dan Goldman, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, where he focused on organized crime, said he believes that the plea agreement is “a prelude to forthcoming indictments and other investigative steps. Before using information from a cooperating witness, prosecutors generally like to ‘lock in’ the witness through a guilty plea,” Goldman said. “So I would expect more to come arising out of, at least in part, Michael Cohen’s cooperation.”
It isn’t just Trump who may be in legal danger now that Cohen is cooperating—it’s also his family members, who Cohen admitted to briefing on the Trump Tower Moscow deal in 2016. According to the criminal information, filed by Mueller on Thursday, Cohen discussed the Moscow deal with Trump’s family members “within” the Trump Organization. Donald Trump Jr., an executive vice president of the Trump Organization, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last year that he was only “peripherally aware” of the Moscow deal in 2016. It is not clear what he told the House Intelligence Committee, which has not yet released the transcripts of the closed-door interview. But Representative Adam Schiff, the committee’s incoming chairman, said in a statement that the Cohen plea “highlights concern over another issue—that we believe other witnesses were also untruthful before our committee.”
While the extent of Cohen’s communications about the project with Trump’s family members is not laid out in the court filings, he has undoubtedly described those interactions to Mueller. “This sends a message that if you have lied to Congress, or plan to do so in the future, the special counsel will charge you for those lies,” Goldman said. “And the case is not simply a he-said, he-said: Mueller brings documentary proof to every one of his charges and allegations.” Indeed, the criminal information that Mueller filed against Cohen included emails that directly contradicted Cohen’s written statement to Congress. Goldman added that if he were Donald Trump Jr., “I would be more worried today than I was yesterday.”
Cohen’s guilty plea is the first Mueller has secured related directly to Trump’s business dealings, potentially crossing the “red line” Trump set last year related to his sprawling organization. Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, who replaced Jeff Sessions earlier this month, has also said that Trump’s businesses should be off limits to Mueller.
But Cohen has been cooperating with Mueller’s team since August, when he first proffered information, and has already sat for more than 70 hours of interviews since September. That could prove to be incredibly damaging for Trump—who insisted both during and after the election that he had no business ties to Russia—and it could contextualize Trump’s consistent and inexplicable praise for Putin along the campaign trail. “This shows motive: Trump’s desire to pursue a major deal in Russia,” Jens David Ohlin, the Vice Dean of Cornell Law School, told me. “It finally gives Mueller some direct evidence that Trump's associates continued to pursue business opportunities in Russia during the campaign, which would explain why Trump was, and continues to be, so deferential to Russia in general and Putin in particular. The motive was financial.”
Cohen also appears to be in a position to corroborate a key portion of the Steele dossier—a collection of reports written by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele outlining Trump’s alleged ties to Russia. Trump has called the dossier a collection of lies that was financed by Democrats.
Steele’s sources in Russia claimed that “the Kremlin’s cultivation operation” of the candidate had included offers of “various lucrative real estate development deals in Russia.” While Trump had a “minimal investment profile in Russia,” the dossier continued, it was “not for want of trying. Trump’s previous efforts had included exploring the real estate sector in St. Petersburg as well as Moscow.”
A top priority for some Democrats on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees has been to determine whether the Russians ever sought financial leverage over Trump and his associates, or whether they hold any such leverage today. Schiff, speaking to reporters, said the criminal information filed Thursday raised the issue of “whether the Russians possess financial leverage over the president of the united states.”
“We need to look into the credible allegations that the Russians may have been laundering money through the Trump Organization,” Schiff said. “That has been a constant concern of ours, but an issue the Republicans were unwilling to look into. That is something we expect to pursue.”
Cohen’s guilty plea could shed light on the Trump family’s longtime bank of choice: Deutsche Bank, which was the only bank willing to loan to Trump after he lost others money in a series of bankruptcies. The bank was fined in 2017 as part of a Russian money-laundering scheme that involved its Moscow, New York, and London branches, and its headquarters were raided on Thursday morning by police and tax investigators as part of an ongoing money-laundering investigation. The bank refused last year to hand over documents requested by five Democratic lawmakers related to its relationship with Trump, citing the confidentiality of nonpublic customer information, and the GOP refused to subpoena the records.
Trump said on Thursday that he was still free to pursue business deals while he was running for president. “There was a good chance that I wouldn't have won, in which case I would have gotten back into the business, and why should I lose lots of opportunities?” he told reporters. But he never disclosed the deal publicly, and Cohen’s guilty plea clearly shows how he lied in the written statement to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to conceal the Trump Organization’s ongoing involvement in the Moscow project from January through June 2016, with the campaign under way.
The project wasn’t revealed until August 2017, when The New York Times obtained emails between Cohen and the Russian American businessman Felix Sater, who appears to be “individual 2” in the court documents filed on Thursday. Sater, who began advising the Trump Organization in the early 2000s and scoped out deals for the Trump Organization in Russia between 2005-2006, boasted of his ties to Putin in emails to Cohen in November 2015 and told Cohen that he could get “all of Putins team to buy in” on the Moscow deal. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote. “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected.”
Sater forwarded a letter of intent to Cohen outlining the terms of a licensing agreement to purchase property to build a “Trump World Tower Moscow,” and Trump eventually signed it. Cohen was also in touch with an assistant to Putin’s right-hand man, Dmitry Peskov, according to the court filings, and was apparently invited to be Peskov’s guest at the St. Petersburg Forum in June 2016. Cohen told Sater he would attend, but backed out at the last minute—just days after senior members of the Trump campaign met with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower on the promise of obtaining dirt on Hillary Clinton. Peskov himself, meanwhile, also appears to have been caught in a lie: while he acknowledged on Thursday that his office called Cohen in 2016 to discuss the Trump Tower Moscow project, he claimed last year that the Kremlin had never replied to Cohen’s overtures because “we do not react to such business topics.”
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2DSraUZ
Michael Cohen’s decision to plead guilty to lying to Congress on Thursday was remarkable for three reasons.
The first was that Cohen walked into a Manhattan federal courtroom unannounced. He did it by surprise. We live in a political environment characterized by constant leaks, each choreographed more carefully than a public announcement. The drama of learning what’s going to happen at an event, rather than before the event, has mostly disappeared. But Cohen’s plea, a momentous development in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, happened with no warning. That reflects admirable discipline in Mueller’s office.
The second remarkable thing was that the plea happened at all. Cohen already pleaded guilty in August to eight federal felonies, including tax fraud, bank fraud, and campaign-finance violations. That plea already ended his career and exposed him to at least several years in federal prison. By contrast, Cohen’s new plea is to a lone count of lying to Congress in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001 —a weapon Mueller has wielded ruthlessly against President Donald Trump’s followers, including Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Rick Gates, and Paul Manafort. The conviction won’t increase Cohen’s sentence, and the additional felony count won’t have any perceptible impact on his life. If anything, by adding a cooperation term to his plea agreement, this new plea gives him an opportunity to reduce his sentence.
[Read: What Michael Cohen’s guilty plea means for Trump]
Normally, federal prosecutors don’t waste time with this sort of rubble-bouncing. So why would Mueller spend the time and resources on it? Because it tells a story about Trump and his campaign. Because it lays a marker.
It’s not clear whether the Constitution allows Mueller to indict a sitting president. But Department of Justice policy forbids it, and Mueller is a rule-follower. If Mueller thinks that the president has committed a federal crime, his remedy is to recommend impeachment in a report to the attorney general. The attorney general, in turn, is supposed to tell Congress the outcome of the special counsel’s investigation and decide whether the report should be made public. Did you catch the problem? The acting attorney general is Matthew Whitaker, Trump’s creature and a vigorous critic of Mueller’s investigation. Mueller has every reason to expect that Whitaker will suppress the report and limit what he shows to Congress.
A formal report is not, however, Mueller’s only way to tell Congress—and the nation—about his conclusions. The journalist Marcy Wheeler has written extensively about her theory that Mueller will “make his report” through court filings against Trump confederates like Manafort and Cohen. On Monday, Mueller accused Manafort of lying to investigators, breaching his cooperation agreement, and committing further federal crimes; he promised he’d bring the receipts when he filed briefs urging a long sentence. Those sentencing briefs will let Mueller tell the story of how Manafort lied about the Trump campaign—and, by extension, lay out the evidence of what the Trump campaign did.
[Peter Beinart: We’re all Michael Cohen]
Cohen’s case lets Mueller do the same thing—tell a story, make a report. The information—the charging document to which Cohen pleaded, waiving his right to indictment by grand jury—asserts that the Trump Organization planned a hotel in Russia, communicated with Russian officials about it, and even contemplated sending Trump himself for a visit to Russia well into 2016, contrary to Cohen’s congressional testimony that the plan was abandoned in January 2016. The significance is not just that Cohen lied to Congress. The significance is what he lied about: the fact that Team Trump continued to pursue Russian opportunities well into the campaign. Not only that, but the Information also asserts that Cohen kept Trump (whose identity is not at all concealed as “Individual 1”) and others within the campaign informed about his progress in Russia.
The third remarkable thing about Cohen’s plea was its substance. The president of the United States’ personal lawyer admitted to lying to Congress about the president’s business activities with a hostile foreign power, in order to support the president’s story. In any rational era, that would be earthshaking. Now it’s barely a blip. Over the past two years, we’ve become accustomed to headlines like “President’s Campaign Manager Convicted of Fraud” and “President’s Personal Lawyer Paid for Adult Actress’s Silence.” We’re numb to it all. But these are the sorts of developments that would, under normal circumstances, end a presidency.
They still might. Cohen admitted that he lied to Congress to support President Trump’s version of events. He notably did not claim that he did so at Trump’s request, or that Trump knew he would do it. But if Cohen’s telling the truth this time, then this conclusion, at least, is inescapable: The president, who has followed this drama obsessively, knew that his personal lawyer was lying to Congress about his business activities, and stood by while it happened.
[Read: Michael Cohen’s astonishing claim about the Trump Tower meeting]
And that’s not all. Cohen’s plea is only one shoe dropping in a boot warehouse. Who else lied to Congress about the pursuit of a hotel deal in Russia? Donald Trump Jr.? Did the president himself lie about it in his recent written answers to Mueller’s questions? (His lawyers claim that his answers matched Cohen’s.) Even if the pursuit of the hotel deal wasn’t criminal (and there’s no evidence that it was), everyone in Trump’s orbit who made statements about it—whether under oath or in interviews with the FBI—is in jeopardy today.
They’re not just in danger from Mueller, either. In just weeks, a Democratic majority will take over the House of Representatives. Control of committees will shift, and subpoenas will fly like arrows at Agincourt. Each hearing will present new terrible choices: Take the Fifth, tell uncomfortable truths, or lie and court perjury charges? Each subpoena is a new chance for frightened Trump associates to make new bad decisions like the ones that have felled Cohen and Manafort and Gates and Flynn and Papadopoulos.
I wouldn’t expect President Trump’s agitated tweets to stop anytime soon.
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2QmxXx5
Maxime Lacoste-Lebuis and Maude Plante-Husaruk, both filmmakers, were researching their upcoming trip to Central Asia when they first heard a man named Raïmberdi talk about plants. “We stumbled upon a French TV program about [Tajikistan] where Raïmberdi had briefly appeared, and we immediately thought he was a very interesting man and that there was definitely more to his story,” Lacoste-Lebuis told The Atlantic.
Months later, the pair arrived in Tajikistan through the deserted region of the Pamir Mountains. “We started inquiring about the old Kyrgyz man who had built his own hydroelectric power station,” Lacoste-Lebuis said. They didn’t know his name, or even whether he was still living. But they got lucky: A German researcher happened to be traveling through the remote area at the same time. He pointed the filmmakers in the right direction.
Lacoste-Lebuis and Plante-Husaruk’s short documentary, The Botanist, is an elegant, meditative portrait of Raïmberdi, his culture, and his life’s work. Raïmberdi descends from a tribe that lived a nomadic lifestyle in a particularly hostile environment. “Therefore, they were completely dependent on the fauna, flora, and climate of the region,” Plante-Husaruk said.
“Old Kyrgyz people knew how to use plants to make herbal remedies for pains and aches,” Raïmberdi says in the film. “I discovered everything about roots, stems, leaves, flowers, etc., and how to use them … Each plant accumulates organic substances its own way.”
Living in the Soviet Union, Raïmberdi and his people received regular shipments of goods from Russia. But when the Communist bloc collapsed, Tajikistan plunged into a devastating five-year civil war. Raïmberdi’s region suffered a prolonged famine. With no other recourse, Raïmberdi leaned into his passion for botany. He performed comprehensive geographical fieldwork, collecting thousands of plant samples in handmade herbariums. He taught himself to identify more than 300 types of plants. With this knowledge, he provided sustenance as well as medicinal support to his community. ]
Today, nearly three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, Raïmberdi’s region still lacks essential supplies such as gasoline, kerosene, matches, and flour. But the enterprising Raïmberdi has made do. In addition to his hydroelectric station, which he made out of an electromagnetic generator he salvaged from the dump, he created a machine to make fire, and other innovative technologies that his family and community rely on to survive.
“It is very surprising to meet someone who has so much ingenuity and understanding of how things work in such a simple, remote, and deserted place that seems resourceless and completely cut out from the world,” Plante-Husaruk said. “Raïmberdi has a wisdom that seems to go beyond the boundaries of his own education, age, and culture. He is one of a kind, and that’s what inspired us to make the film in the first place.”
Plante-Husaruk and Lacoste-Lebuis believe that there is much to be gleaned from Raïmberdi’s story. “I think we can learn from his curiosity,” Plante-Husaruk said. “We can learn how to open our eyes and heart to our environment—to develop humility and to stop thinking that we are above nature. This message is even more relevant now with the extreme climate changes we are to face in the next century.”
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2E1peug
This morning it was “probably” on. Now it appears it’s off: President Trump said Thursday he was canceling his bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the seizure by Russia of three Ukrainian naval vessels off the coast of Crimea.
“Based on the fact that the ships and sailors have not been returned to Ukraine from Russia, I have decided it would be best for all parties concerned to cancel my previously scheduled meeting in Argentina with President Vladimir Putin,” Trump said on Twitter. “I look forward to a meaningful Summit again as soon as this situation is resolved!”
[Read: Ukraine is ground zero for the crisis between Russia and the West]
The president’s remarks are a striking reversal from his position earlier this week when he appeared to blame both Ukraine and Russia for the clash, saying: “We do not like what’s happening either way.” But the comments are also a walk back from those he made earlier on Thursday when he said he “probably will be meeting with President Putin,” because “I think it’s a very good time to have a meeting.” Trump also added: “I’m getting a full report on the plane as to what happened” between Russia and Ukraine in the Sea of Azov. Whatever Trump’s advisers told him, he decided to cancel the meeting.
On past occasions, this sort of advice has mattered little. Trump met with Putin in Helsinki, Finland, in July, just days after the U.S. Justice Department indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers for their alleged hacking of the emails and computers of senior Democratic Party officials in an attempt to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. Trump said at the time: “Getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing.” At a news conference following the meeting, Trump rejected the overwhelming consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, saying the Russian leader had “said it is not Russia.”
Those remarks echo Trump’s long-standing reluctance to blame Russia for its actions. Earlier this year, before he headed to the contentious G7 summit in Canada, Trump called for Russia to be readmitted to that club, from which it was expelled in 2014 following its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea. When asked if he would recognize Russia’s occupation of Crimea, Trump replied: “We’re going to have to see.” He reportedly told the other members of the G7 that Crimea was Russian because its population spoke Russian—a view he expressed as far back as 2016. Trump then appeared to blame President Barack Obama for Russia’s actions, saying, “He was the one that let Crimea get away,” and adding that Russia has “spent a lot of money on rebuilding it.”
[Read: Trump has trapped himself into cracking down on Russia]
It’s probably little coincidence that the president’s reversal Thursday came shortly after Michael Cohen, his former lawyer, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress, telling a federal court he traveled to Russia to discuss the construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow during the 2016 presidential campaign. Cohen’s plea is part of a deal with Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating Russian interference in the election and possible collusion between Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian government. Trump has insisted that there was no collusion with Russia over his election, and has labeled Mueller’s investigation a “witch hunt.”
Had Trump met with Putin at the G20, questions about Cohen, Cohen’s meetings with Russian officials, and Moscow’s interference in the presidential election would have almost certainly dogged the American president. But canceling the meeting is no guarantee that questions about Cohen’s claims and what Trump knew about his lawyer’s actions won’t continue to dog the president.
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2SmajOA
The famously inscrutable Jeff Tweedy has at last clarified his opinion on American interventionism. Kinda, maybe. “All my life I’ve played a part in the bombs above the ones you love,” the Wilco front man sings over hesitant guitar twang in the opening moments of his first album of solo originals, Warm. “I’m taking a moment to apologize. I should have done more to stop the war.”
In the next verse he sings of having left “behind a trail of songs from the darkest gloom to the brightest sun,” but “it’s hard to say” that what he’s “been through should matter to you.” Then, an anecdote: A drunk man once took him by the hand and told him that “suffering is the same for everyone.” Tweedy reflects, with his voice cracking, that “he was right, but I was wrong to agree.”
As a listener, I felt I understood the meaning immediately. Tweedy is waking up to the puny scale of his problems. He sings sad songs about emotions, while his country manufactures payloads that kill children in Yemen. The drunk man turns Tweedy’s empathy back on him, offering absolution for those sad songs—absolution that Tweedy may be entitled to, but that will not bring any justice to the world.
Tweedy, however, puts the song in another context in his bracing new memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), released just a few weeks before Warm. To recover from opioid addiction in the mid-2000s, he checked into “a very hard-core city hospital in an underserved neighborhood,” and came to feel guilty about the scope of his troubles in comparison to the other people there:
I’d sit in group sessions and listen to other patients talk about their lives, and what they’d endured was beyond anything I could imagine … One guy told us about seeing his father murder his mother when he was nine and that he had his first taste of alcohol that night because his father forced him to drink whiskey, thinking it would make him forget what he’d seen. Hearing a story like that made me ashamed of how little I had had to survive and how much pain I’d derived from so much less actual trauma. What was I gonna say when the group got to me? “Um … I cry a lot. I get scared sometimes. I have headaches, and it makes it hard to make music.” That was the worst of it. I was out of my league.
But when he related this guilt to another patient, that patient was offended:
“Listen to me, motherfucker, listen.” Getting right up in my face. “Mine ain’t about yours. And yours ain’t about mine. We all suffer the same. You don’t get to decide what hurts you. You just hurt. Let me say my shit, and you say your shit, and I’ll be there for you. Okay?”
In this telling, the man offering absolution isn’t drunk, but rather in recovery. There are no bombs. But the underlying story is the same. Tweedy worries his damage is unearned given the wider world’s problems. Yet still, it’s there, and it must be dealt with either way.
More than three decades into his career as a rock-folk subversive in Wilco and Uncle Tupelo, Tweedy has emerged as a philosopher on the topic of suffering. His crisis with migraines and painkiller addiction, which crested between the 2002 release of Wilco’s genre-melting masterpiece Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and 2004’s A Ghost Is Born, was integral to his public narrative. But in the years since, he’s spoken out against the archetype with which he got tagged: the tortured artist. His memoir is now, on some level, a 304-page takedown of that cultural myth.
In his brother Steve’s bedroom, the wall was scrawled with an apocryphal Hemingway quote: “No writer ever becomes great until they’ve been greatly hurt.” The sentiment has long creeped Tweedy out, filling him with fear for whatever terrible thing he’d have to endure to succeed as an artist. He even suspects it “damaged” Steve, an author of unfinished books who Tweedy says refuses help to stop drinking. “Everyone suffers by degrees and I believe everyone has the capacity to create,” Tweedy writes. “But I think you’re one of the lucky ones if you’ve found an outlet for your discomfort or a way to cope through art.”
Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) unflinchingly describes Tweedy’s lowest point, during the making of A Ghost Is Born. Holed up in hotel rooms, he’d down pills and then fearfully Google about signs of overdose. He was sure he’d die soon. That’s why the album’s lyrics have a zoology motif: He was playing with a Noah’s Ark analogy, and “all of the songs were animals representing the different aspects of my personality worth saving.” The idea was that after his death, the lyrics would comfort his kids with the thought of their dad living on.
It’s a gutting revelation that lays bare how tangibly suffering can take a toll on art. Tweedy was debilitatingly high or in pain so often that compromises had to be made to accommodate him. “We restructured the song to be as minimal as possible with the fewest amount of chord changes,” he writes of the track “Spiders (Kidsmoke).” “This allowed me to just recite the lyrics and punctuate them with guitar skronks and scribbles to get through the song without having to concentrate past my headache too much.”
On Warm, a casually moving collection of what feel like Wilco demos that are nicely complemented and deepened by the memoir, Tweedy directly addresses fans who’ve taken the wrong lesson from his addiction stories. “Now people say, ‘What drugs did you take, and why don’t you start taking them again?’” he sings in gentle, measured tones. “But they’re not my friends.”
There’s a Tweedy solo album and book out now because Wilco has taken a break to allow the drummer, Glenn Kotche, to accompany his wife as she partakes in a Fulbright fellowship in Helsinki. That decidedly adult situation fits with the larger themes of domesticity and maturity emphasized by Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back). Tweedy’s musical career has become a family affair, with his sons, Spencer and Sammy, supposedly playing an integral role in his recording process now. The former lays down preliminary drum tracks and the latter often offers backup vocals. Both of them contributed to Sukierae, a 2014 album released under the band name “Tweedy,” as did Jeff’s wife, Susan, who was battling cancer that year.
The Fulbright-related hiatus is also a lot less dramatic than the complications that have previously faced Tweedy’s bands over the years. Jay Farrar, Tweedy’s childhood friend, quit at the height of their band Uncle Tupelo’s success after Tweedy got too friendly (platonically, Tweedy says) with Farrar’s girlfriend. In 2001, Tweedy abruptly asked Wilco’s manager to fire Ken Coomer, the drummer, simply because Tweedy had met a better percussionist in Kotche. His squabbles with the guitarist and studio experimentalist Jay Bennett were captured in Sam Jones’s 2002 documentary, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, but Tweedy’s memoir foregrounds Bennett’s drug use when explaining his firing. The musician died of an overdose a few years later.
Tweedy dishes on these tales—expressing compassion for the men he’s fallen out with, taking some measure of the blame, but also strenuously arguing his side of the story—in much the same folksy, straightforward, shockingly funny manner that the rest of Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) is written in. Dad jokes are aplenty, as are self-deprecating and sarcastic asides, even in the darkest passages. Regarding his early days of pill abuse: “I’d taken plenty of non-narcotic pain medication in my life, but mostly in suppository form due to my inability to keep solids down during a migraine. What’s that? You didn’t need to know that? My bad.”
For fans who know Tweedy largely through his abstruse poetry about murder, bloody needles, and “tongue-tied lightning,” the breezy tone will come as a shock, which is probably the point. The memoir opens with him explaining that the cover for Wilco’s 2015 freebie album, Star Wars—a cat wearing “an expression that’s more like ‘I am Coconut. I am your new god,’” Tweedy writes—was not that deep. In fact, that album and its 2016 follow-up, Schmilco, were meant to help deflate the pretentious image that had accreted around the band.
Tweedy’s 2018 output, the book and solo album, seems to have a similar corrective mission, arguing that optimism and recovery can make for art as powerful as art created from pain. To be all right—in spite of past sins, in spite of the romanticization of misery, and in spite of humankind’s tragedies—is good. Or at least it’s worth working for. “I know it’s a lie when you say it’s okay,” goes a line on the standout country-pop track “I Know What It’s Like,” and the cozy way Tweedy delivers it makes it clear he’s talking about a white lie, a healthy lie.
All of this is not to say that Warm is as jarringly perky as the memoir (though there is one facetious hurrah for the apocalypse, “Let’s Go Rain”). As always, Tweedy subtly complicates familiar folk and rock sounds—cowpunk goes ambient, noise clouds the prairie—while drawling about impossible images. But the book explains that the album was intended to be his most direct work, and indeed even the abstractions here hit the ear pretty cleanly. “I break bricks with my heart,” he sings, seeming to describe his songwriting approach. “Only a fool would call it art.”
Most poignant is the way each song works its way toward resolution, even as fear and death tremble in the margins. Warm’s title comes from a wonderful lyric on the album: “I don’t believe in heaven / I keep some heat inside / Like a red brick in the summer / Warm when the sun has died.” On another song, one in which Tweedy dismisses those who want him to get on painkillers again, he succinctly states his philosophy of late. “Having been is no way to be alive,” he sings, moving from weary-sounding to hopeful. “And I’m alive.”
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2KLwLy8
Native to most of South America, the capybara is the largest rodent on Earth. Capybaras can grow to be two feet tall (61 cm) and weigh as much as 175 pounds (79 kg). They are social animals by nature, and they have gained a level of fame worldwide for their seeming ability to make individuals from other species feel at ease in their presence. Collected here: images of capybaras young and old, in the wilds of South America, in safari parks in Europe, hot springs in Japan, and elsewhere, often pictured with a companion or two.
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2DS1pUT
From the start, Zhanqi Chen realized that something was odd about the spiders.
He had first spotted the species, known as Toxeus magnus, in a park in Singapore, and whenever he’d peer into their silken nests, he’d usually find a centimeter-long adult female surrounded by several smaller youngsters. That was weird. Most spiders are solitary, and even cannibalistic toward their own kind. There are a few kinds of sociable spiders that live in colonies, but Toxeus magnus shouldn’t have been one of them. It’s a jumping spider, a group generally known for being loners. And yet, there it was, apparently living in family groups, where the mothers cared for their young—another rarity among spiders.
The mystery deepened when Chen collected several of the spiders and reared them in his lab at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden. He noticed that after hatching, the spiderlings would stay in their home nests for at least three weeks. During that time, they never left, and their mothers never ventured out to bring back food. And yet, the spiderlings would quadruple in size. What were they eating?
Chen discovered the answer when he noticed a spiderling that seemed to have fixed itself to its mother’s underside. It wasn’t just hanging out around her. It looked like it was, for lack of a better word, suckling. Chen took one of the females, looked at it under a microscope, and squeezed its abdomen. A white droplet oozed out, and soon yellowed in the air.
It looked like milk. And for all intents and purposes, it was.
When a brood of spiderlings first hatch, their mother starts secreting the liquid from her epigastric furrow, a fold on her underside that she also uses to lay eggs. For the first week, she dabs the droplets onto the walls of her nest, and the youngsters scurry over to suck these up. After that, they drink from the furrow directly. During their crucial early period, the spiderlings rely on the milk as their only source of sustenance. It doesn’t have a lot of fat or sugar, but it’s loaded with proteins—four times as much as the equivalent amount of cow milk. When Chen stopped the spiderlings from drinking this fluid, by blocking their mother’s epigastric furrow with a dab of correction fluid, all of them died within 10 days. (The correction fluid itself didn’t affect them.)
Whether the liquid truly counts as milk depends on how you define the term. Traditionally, milk is defined as a nutritious liquid secreted by the mammary gland, and mammary glands are found only in mammals such as ourselves. But if you stretch the description to include any parental secretion that nourishes and provides for the young, then milklike stuff starts cropping up in many unexpected corners of the animal kingdom.
The tsetse fly is an insect that does a good impression of a mammal: It gives birth to live young, which it feeds within the womb with a milklike fluid. The parasitic bat flies do something similar. One species of Pacific cockroach also gives birth to live young, which it nourishes with a yellow milk, full of glittering protein crystals. Pseudo-scorpion mothers carry their hatchlings in a sac attached to their belly, and feed them with a nutritious liquid secreted from their ovaries. And pigeons (fathers included) feed their relatively helpless chicks by coughing up a chunky, fatty liquid that they secrete from their throats.
Compared with these creatures, the jumping spiders are arguably closest to mammalian lactation, in that they produce milk from a specialized organ, from which the youngsters drink over a very long time. “It would be really interesting to dissect the spiders [to see if there] was some kind of identifiable gland or something like that,” says Laura Hernandez of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who studies lactation. And Katie Hinde, another lactation expert at Arizona State University, wants to know if the spider’s liquid contains other components that are found in mammal milk, including hormones, immune chemicals, and bacteria.
[Read: Breastfeeding at any cost?]
But in the meantime, “we can call it spider milk,” Hinde says. “I’m not hung up on it coming from a mammary gland. I’m interested in how it supports development.”
Twenty days after hatching, the spiderlings make their first forays out of the nest, and start hunting for small flies. But they still return to their mother to drink her milk, until finally weaning at 40 days of age. Even then, most of them stay in the nest for many weeks more, while the mother continues to care for them. She’ll throw out their molted exoskeletons, repair the nest, and evict parasites such as mites. Even when Chen dammed up the milk-producing furrow, he found that older spiderlings still benefit from their mother’s fastidiousness, and are less likely to survive in her absence.
“She feeds them well past the period when they can forage on their own, and the nursing enhances their survival,” says Linda Rayor, an entomologist at Cornell University. “That is really quite interesting, and I don’t know of any comparable data for other spiders. [It’s also] exciting that the spiders stay together long past the period where 99.9 percent of spiders have dispersed independently.”
If this unusual setup exists in other spiders, Chen hasn’t found it yet. Even close relatives of Toxeus magnus don’t produce milk, or show such prolonged parental care. So why did these traits evolve in this one species?
“We have no idea!” Chen says. He guesses that they arose because these spiders have to cope with a difficult environment, in which food is hard to get and predators are rife. The spiderlings are barely a millimeter long, even smaller than the fruit flies that they initially hunt. “Fruit flies are also good fliers, and I don’t think it’s easy for new spiderlings to catch them,” Chen says. Far better, then, for the mothers to give them a head start in life with a steady food source. Additionally, the females, for whatever reason, might find it hard to breed. If they don’t get a lot of chances at raising a new generation, it would pay to invest more heavily in the current one.
[Read: The queen bee’s guide to parenting]
“These rare variants across the animal kingdom give us really exciting insights into the evolution of parental care,” Hinde says. All mammals make milk, so to understand why we evolved to do so, scientists have to look back in time, using genes or fossils. But species such as Toxeus magnus—an oddball milk producer within an entire family of nonlactators—make it easier to “look at what evolutionary pressures led to this huge scale-up of parental investment,” she says.
As Chen and his colleagues write, “We anticipate that [our] discoveries will encourage a reevaluation of the evolution of lactation.”
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2BGK27S
Kids like weird things: Yellow sponge-boys, talking doe-eyed ponies, ruddy-cheeked rodents that say only “pika pika,” and, especially in the past few years, unboxing videos.
Kids’ unboxing videos are YouTube series in which children, or in some cases just disembodied hands, take toys out of their packaging and play with them as uplifting music plays in the background. One particularly popular video shows a small boy unwrapping and then assembling a child-size electric car, using plastic tools that would surely fall apart in less practiced hands. He then drives the car down the sidewalk through an eerily empty neighborhood to a playground that is also completely empty, where he plays by himself, presumably because all the other neighborhood children are busy watching YouTube. The video has 267 million views.
Toy makers, who are experts at capitalizing on children’s weird interests, have now figured out how to make a toy that replicates what kids like about unboxing videos. Enter the L.O.L. Surprise! doll, a sphere the size of a bocce ball that consists of seven layers of packaging. Kids peel away the layers of crinkly plastic, which contain stickers and messages and tiny accessories that are surely crunched under many a parental foot, and find a small, nearly naked plastic doll with giant Bette Davis eyes who measures just a few inches tall.
More than 800 million L.O.L. Surprise! toys have been sold since their debut in late 2016, and they were one of the top products sold on Cyber Monday this year, according to Adobe Digital Insights. This year, even more toy makers have caught on to the trend. Parents can now buy eggs, pods of foam, cake pops, burritos, and balls of many shapes and sizes containing mystery animals and figurines. (“Unrolling is the new unboxing,” said Ashley Mady, the head of brand development at the company that launched the burritos, called Cutetitos, in October.) Some balls contain “boy-themed” surprises, which include insects, octopuses, skateboards, ninjas, and a packet of a powdery substance, as well as my personal favorite, Poopeez, which are rolls of toilet paper that hold mystery capsules with names including Lil’ Squirt, Skid Mark, and Toot Fairy. (“These new blind capsules are creating a stink all over Kerplopolis faster than a fart disappears in the wind,” according to marketing material on Amazon.)
L.O.L. Surprise! dolls were created by MGA Entertainment, the company behind the over-sexualized plastic Bratz Dolls that were a hit in the early 2000s. Isaac Larian, the CEO, told me in an email that L.O.L. dolls were essentially reverse engineered: The company wanted to cash in on the unboxing and collectibles trends, and so it came up with L.O.L. dolls. MGA Entertainment was told, at first, that kids needed to see a product before they would ask for it, Larian said. But L.O.L. dolls proved analysts wrong—kids can apparently want things without even knowing what they are. MGA Entertainment has since branched out into L.O.L. Surprise! pets, L.O.L. Surprise! houses, and larger L.O.L. Surprise! capsules, which contain dozens of dolls and accessories and retail for about 80 bucks.
At first glance, unboxing videos are an especially bizarre phenomenon to model a toy on. Kids are essentially watching other, luckier kids get lots of expensive toys, playing without having to bother with school, or nap time, or that perennial enemy, broccoli. Some unboxing stars have become millionaires—one 6-year-old named Ryan made $11 million last year, and all he really does is open toys, search for toys in his swimming pool, shop for toys at Walmart, meet life-size and slightly creepy versions of his favorite toys, and get along well with his parents. His YouTube channel has 17 million subscribers, and a video of him collecting giant eggs from his personal bouncy castle and then opening them to reveal toys inside has a mind-boggling 1.6 billion views.
There are biological reasons young children like watching unboxing videos, and it’s the same reason they’re drawn to surprise toys. Kids don’t really get good at understanding and anticipating the future until they’re about 4 or 5, Rachel Barr, the director of the Early Learning Project at Georgetown University, told me. At that age, they start looking forward to things that will happen down the road, and so they like watching videos that have an anticipation aspect to them. But kids of that age don’t particularly like being frightened, so they like videos in which they know that nothing bad is going to happen. Unboxing videos and surprise toys allow kids to enjoy the anticipation without being too afraid, Barr said, because they know roughly what will be in the package, just not the exact details.
Kids will watch unboxing videos over and over—or open surprise toys over and over—because they pick up new details every time, Barr said, figuring out how unwrapping works. Some of the most popular unboxing videos on YouTube are of surprise toys, including a 12-minute video with 321 million views in which a boy tears open a giant golden egg to find a load of Spider-Man-themed candy and toys, including a few smaller eggs that he also unwraps. The video, which is loaded with commercials, ends with him screaming in excitement as his final egg includes a little Spider-Man.
Unboxing videos have their benefits: They allow kids to connect with other people, experience toys that their parents might not be able to afford, and hang out, in a way, with other kids, even if they live in an area without a lot of children or where it’s too dangerous to go outside, according to David Craig, a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Parents might not mind videos in which children watch other kids play with toys, he says, if it keeps them out of trouble.
Mary Lynn Hashim was confused when her 6-year-old started asking for L.O.L. Surprise! dolls last year, ahead of her December birthday. She ended up having to wait in line outside a Toys “R” Us in New York before it opened one morning to buy the toy, because it was sold out everywhere she’d looked and the store told her it was getting a new shipment. Hashim was standing next to her daughter, who is now nearly 8, as she talked to me, and asked her what was so cool about the surprise dolls. “You might get an ultra-rare,” her daughter said, referring to one of the less common dolls contained in the spheres. “Or the baby sister. It would be cool if I got the baby one.”
This desire for rare toys and dolls is what drives the collectibles industry, which itself is helping increase toy sales. According to the NPD Group, the global collectibles market grew by 14 percent in 2017, to $3.9 billion, led by L.O.L. Surprise! toys. That’s a victory for toy makers at a time when shops such as Toys “R” Us are closing their doors. But to some advocates, the fever over surprise toys shows how successful MGA Entertainment has been at marketing. They’ve convinced kids that toys are about collecting, not about play, Susan Linn, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School and the author of Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood, told me. “The problem with these dolls is the whole point of them is the acquisition,” she said. “It’s the notion that the things we buy will make us happy.”
[Read: The demise of Toys ‘R’ Us is a warning]
When kids watched programming primarily on television, it was easier for them to know what was a TV show and what was a commercial. Now that they watch more content on YouTube, they might have more difficulty telling the difference. Unboxing videos are both a TV show and a commercial; they feature kids playing, but also kids shilling new toys that have sometimes been sent to them by the toy maker. Brands create whole TV series of kids playing with toys—the L.O.L. Surprise! channel has 758,000 subscribers and features two chipper girls who wear a lot of glitter and makeup and seem to have an endless capacity for excitement over small plastic dolls. In one video, the girls talk about how great it is to get a doll you already have, because then you have twins, or “BFFs,” or even a whole dance crew. Other consumers have made and uploaded their own L.O.L. Surprise! videos, which themselves have millions of views; some feature kids who are so young they can barely talk.
Jen DelVecchio’s kids, ages 10 and 4, don’t watch TV anymore. Instead, they watch videos on an iPad. But they keep coming back to unboxing videos and commercials on YouTube, which make them go crazy over L.O.L. Surprise! toys. She buys them for special occasions, she said, but then finds that the kids abandon them after opening them. “I think with my kids, the excitement is more unwrapping it than it is actually playing with it,” she said.
For Linn, this habit—of getting something and then immediately casting it aside for something new—is what is driving the popularity of surprise toys. Kids and adults alike have short attention spans, and are hungering for adrenaline hits to get them through the day. Kids receive those adrenaline hits by getting and opening new toys, and then casting them aside. “We are in basically an ADD culture, where we are all encouraged to move very quickly from one thing to another thing,” Linn told me.
[Read: Why rich kids are so good at the marshmallow test]
Of course, not every kid who wants a surprise toy has watched an unboxing video. As often happens with kids’ obsessions, the weird thing one kid wants has become the weird thing every kid wants. Suzanne Barnecut’s 6-year-old daughter isn’t allowed to watch YouTube. But she still started asking Barnecut for L.O.L. Surprise! toys a few months ago, stopping by the toy aisle at Target to point them out. Barnecut bought a few of the toys for her daughter for Christmas, though she’s a bit worried about what will be inside, since there is no way for a parent to know ahead of time. “She definitely has not seen the videos, but all her friends have them, so they’re cool,” Barnecut said.
Surprises aren’t exactly new in the toy industry: Kids have long searched for prizes in the bottom of their Sugar Smacks or Cracker Jack boxes, and surprise toys aren’t all that different from the hundreds of toys that have cycled through kids’ playrooms and closets over the years. Kids desperately want some weird thing, nag their parents about it for days, and then get it, play with it, and cast it aside. But with surprise toys, they’re not nagging their parents about an actual toy that they want. They want the pleasure of consuming, to be let into the adult world of buying things, opening them, and then casting them aside.
Hashim, the mom who scoured the New York suburbs looking for an L.O.L. Surprise! doll, told me her daughter lost interest soon after opening it. She and her friends are now into a new toy, she told me. It’s a furry bracelet with an animal’s face on it that giggles and talks, and it’s featured in many an unboxing video on YouTube.
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2E50Isu
There’s an especially gruesome clue in a notorious international murder case. The killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the widespread suspicion that the Saudi crown prince himself directed it, have roiled U.S.-Saudi relations and politics in the United States, where the Senate is challenging the Trump administration to take stronger measures against the Saudis. And the hit was, reportedly, all caught on tape.
By President Donald Trump’s account, the tape records a “very violent, very vicious, and very terrible” incident—and it’s one the president told Fox News he hasn’t heard and doesn’t want to hear. His national-security adviser, John Bolton, echoed that this week, prompting bafflement at a press briefing where journalists pressed him on why he wouldn’t want to hear the raw intelligence about one of the major national-security issues confronting the United States.
But why should he? It’s not necessarily typical for the president or the national-security adviser to consume that much raw intelligence. In fact, one of the major controversies of the Iraq War era was precisely that high officials were seeking raw intelligence to form their own conclusions about the connection between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaeda.
[Read: The Saudi crown prince gets a pass on Khashoggi at the G20].
That effort showed that raw doesn’t always mean right. In one famous instance, officials in the Pentagon seized on a report of a supposed meeting in Prague between the 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and a high-level Iraqi official in the apparent belief that the CIA had missed something important; the CIA had actually doubted the report’s veracity at the time, and later investigations found that the meeting had never happened.
Bolton asked what he would get from hearing the tape, which he said was in Arabic, a language he doesn’t speak. Setting aside the fact that the U.S. national-security adviser has access to translators, his comment underscores an important point about what the intelligence community does: It takes raw pieces of information such as the Khashoggi tape and interprets them for policy makers, through context and analysis.
“Raw intelligence in the hands of policy makers is always a risky proposition,” said Amy Zegart, an intelligence expert and a contributing editor at The Atlantic, via email. “Raw intel typically does not include assessments about the credibility of a source. It does not include context like what happened just before the recording started? Was the person whose comms were intercepted being coerced? Were there more forces at play? Was the recording genuine? What exactly was said? What accents and words were involved, and what do they tell us about who was in the room, where they came from, and what their relationships with each other are?”
This was why the hunt within the George W. Bush–era Defense Department for raw intelligence that could bolster the case for war in Iraq was so controversial—because some reports, absent good analysis about their credibility, ended up painting a misleading picture. Which is not to say that analysis can’t also mislead, as evidenced by the CIA’s assessment of Iraq’s efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction.
But if the Bush administration was looking for intelligence to indict a dictator, the Trump administration seems to be avoiding it to protect one.
It’s this, more than anything else, that makes both Trump’s and Bolton’s apparent disinterest in the tape telling, if not important from an investigative perspective. After all, the key question now is not whether Khashoggi was murdered—Saudi officials have confirmed this. It’s whether and how the crown prince was involved, and it’s unclear whether the tape contains any information that answers that question.
“There is a repeated tendency, on different episodes, to latch on to … one piece of juicy reporting, whether it’s a tape or something or intercept, often that goes beyond what its significance is likely to be in answering the main questions that need to be answered,” said Paul Pillar, who served in the CIA until 2005. “I think this might be another instance of that.”
[Graeme Wood: The brutal truth behind Trump’s love affair with Saudi Arabia]
Yet there’s the appearance of the refusal to listen, which, amid all the other public reporting about details such as a team of assassins and a bone saw and a still-missing body, seems to suggest a lack of curiosity about what actually happened. “If John Bolton was genuinely interested in finding out what happened in that consulate, then I think he ought to listen to it,” Pillar said.
In both the Iraq War case and the Khashoggi case, the intelligence can inform policy but doesn’t dictate it. Bush-administration officials began planning to invade Iraq within months of the attacks of September 11, 2001, which had nothing to do with Saddam. Formal intelligence assessments also helped the administration bolster the case for war, and also proved seriously flawed. The “raw” account of the Prague meeting was not the decisive turning point in the march to war; it was a reflection of preexisting policy preferences. “The president and the vice president didn’t need convincing” to go to war in Iraq, said Mark Lowenthal, an assistant director of central intelligence from 2002 to 2005.
Similarly, Trump, Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis have all made clear the administration’s policy preference: that they have no intention of formally blaming Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the killing, and that the CIA’s reported analysis is just that—an analysis.
“We have no smoking gun that the crown prince was involved,” Mattis told reporters on Wednesday. “Not the intelligence community or anyone else.” If it’s somewhere on the tape, Trump and Bolton won’t hear it.
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2KIT47f
Updated at 2:05 p.m. ET on November 29, 2018
The president of the United States is threatening to close the border with Mexico to prevent the entry of Central Americans seeking asylum. He is also threatening to shut down the government if Congress doesn’t finance his border wall. All this in the same week that he intends to sign a new, revised North American Free Trade Agreement, rebranded as the USMCA.
It’s a confusing juxtaposition for Mexicans tired of President Donald Trump’s bombastic rhetoric as well as for ardent Trump supporters and Fox News viewers who must wonder why the U.S. would ever enter into a free-trade agreement with that country.
The situation may yet become more confusing, and surreal, after Andrés Manuel López Obrador is sworn in as the new president of Mexico on Saturday. Although it’s not popular to point this out south of the border, AMLO, as he’s known, shares a few traits with Trump, including disdain for deeper economic integration with the outside world. That’s why it’s rather convenient for him that outgoing President Enrique Peña Nieto will sign the deal with Washington and Ottawa in the final hours of his administration (although AMLO’s representatives grudgingly approved it).*
[Read: Trump’s new deal with Mexico could make asylum next to impossible.]
Trump and AMLO will make an odd economic marriage, given both men’s insistence on putting their country first (for a change, they’d add). Like Trump, AMLO is a nationalist populist, though of a more proletarian variety. Like Trump, AMLO claims that his supporters have been handed the short end of the stick by his nation’s more globalized elites (and, says AMLO, by certain “power mafias” ruling over the country from swampy Mexico City). Like Trump, AMLO has little patience for established norms or checks and balances, considering them pretexts for the establishment’s subjugation of the voters he has now come to vindicate.
AMLO has been a busy president-elect, in ways alarming to financial markets. He held a consulta popular referendum of no legal standing, and mostly among his supporters, to ratify his decision to scratch Mexico’s $13 billion new international airport. AMLO’s process—disregard for existing contracts (construction was well under way)—and warnings to get used to hearing from the people more often have led to a slide in the Mexican stock market and the value of the peso.
AMLO’s second consulta popular appeared to prove the people’s desire for his cherished high-speed train from Mexico City to his home state of Tabasco, the so-called Tren Maya, and for a basket of goodies such as universal free Wi-Fi and health care, with no consideration of cost or means. The president-elect now says he wants to amend Mexico’s constitution to allow for more frequent, formal referenda. He also plans to create an office of “super delegate” in each state to act as his emissary, overseeing and coordinating all federal programs. Governors see this as an incursion into their sovereign affairs, a violation of Mexico’s federalism, but AMLO and his National Regeneration Movement, Morena, control a majority in both houses of Congress and in many state legislatures, so there are few impediments to what he’s calling Mexico’s “fourth transformation.” (The previous three refer to watershed moments in Mexican history, including its achievement of independence.)
It should be quite a spectacle, this AMLO presidency, if a rather scary one for anyone who is paid in pesos or holds investments in Mexico.
[Reihan Salam: Trump and Mexico need each other.]
Just how the AMLO and Trump shows will play off each other is an open question. Mexico’s outgoing administration was full of steady technocrats determined to duck each of Trump’s provocations to minimize damage to the relationship. Indeed, President Peña Nieto took this strategy to the inexplicable extreme recently, awarding Jared Kushner Mexico’s highest honor given to a foreigner, the Order of the Aztec Eagle, much to the dismay and disgust of Mexicans of all political persuasions.
During AMLO’s long transition since his July triumph at the polls, the two men have struck a cordial note in their exchanges, contrary to expectations. But things could now turn sour very quickly. Both AMLO and Trump may conspire unwittingly to a surge of migrants leaving Mexico for work in the United States if they persist with policies that dissuade job creation in Mexico. Even before taking office, AMLO has scared off investors with his disregard for the rule of law and property rights. Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly used his bully pulpit to browbeat U.S. corporations that invest in Mexico, most recently attacking GM’s decision to close plants in the U.S. (plants that produced unpopular sedans that aren’t selling) while keeping other plants open in Mexico.
And of course there’s the so-called border crisis. The Pew Research Center reported this week that the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. peaked in 2007, at 12.2 million, and is now down to 10.7 million. Far fewer Mexicans, moreover, are crossing the border illegally than in the past, a result of the Great Recession in the U.S., tougher security measures that predate Trump, and the graying of Mexico’s population. But these facts and figures mean little in the face of that infamous caravan of Hondurans now stuck in Tijuana.
It would be relatively easy (in terms of substance) for Presidents Trump and AMLO to find a joint approach to processing and settling Central American economic migrants in addition to bona fide refugees. But Trump seems far more eager to exaggerate the migration problem for political gain, and AMLO, a fellow grandstander, seems unlikely to turn the other cheek.
* Due to an editing error, this article originally misstated the name of Mexico’s outgoing president.
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2E4nuRa
Andy Serkis is, by acclimation, the greatest motion-capture actor ever. That might sound like a backhanded compliment, but in this CGI-dappled, fantasy-dominated century of cinema, it’s an estimable title. As Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, Serkis found new and innovative ways to emote through layers of technology and make otherworldly characters feel tangible. So it makes some sort of sense that he’d be tasked with bringing a story like Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book to life. As the director of Mowgli, debuting on Netflix December 7 after a limited theatrical run, Serkis has to draw out compelling performances from a tiger, a panther, and a pack of wolves—all of them computer-generated.
Mowgli, which is being promoted with the unnecessary subtitle Legend of the Jungle, has had a strange route to the screen. Filmed in 2015, it languished in post-production for nearly three years; last July, Netflix acquired the distribution rights from Warner Bros. That means the movie won’t play on big screens outside of a very limited release, which is unfortunate for a work made on such an epic scale. Still, it’s easy to see why Mowgli was shuffled over to streaming: For all the time Serkis has had to tinker with it, the film feels painfully incomplete, from its frequently told story to its weak visuals.
Serkis—who has also played motion-capture luminaries such as Star Wars’ Snoke, Planet of the Apes’ Caesar, and Tintin’s Captain Haddock—seems to have directed all his attention to Mowgli’s animal creations. The script, from the debut writer Callie Kloves, is a grittier, more violent take on Kipling’s Mowgli tales (drawing from The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book), but the narrative remains familiar. Mowgli (Rohan Chand) is a human child raised in the jungle by kindly wolves who is contending with the encroachment of man and other predators.
Unlike Disney’s two takes on The Jungle Book—the 1967 animated version and the (broadly similar) 2016 “live-action” remake—Serkis’s film makes some effort to grapple with the colonial malevolence of Kipling’s tales. The character of John Lockwood (Kipling’s father, and the illustrator of many of his books) is played by Matthew Rhys as a merciless big-game hunter, toting a shotgun and looking for additions to his trophy wall. But most of the movie is spent in the jungle, where Mowgli is taught by Baloo the bear (voiced and performed by Serkis) how to be a member of the wolf tribe and avoid the evil Shere Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch), a tiger who wants Mowgli dead.
I wasn’t too enamored of Jon Favreau’s 2016 The Jungle Book, which translated Disney’s charming cartoon animals into photo-realistic creatures who still hummed songs and cracked silly jokes. But the CGI on display there was far more advanced than what Serkis is working with. The animals in Mowgli look ill-formed and unconvincing, and the environments around them appear dull and colorless. For all the years put into post-production work, Mowgli looks surprisingly terrible; the visuals are so PlayStation-esque, I half expected Crash Bandicoot to swing in on a vine midway through.
[Read: ‘The Jungle Book’ points toward a CGI future]
The motion-capture performances are similarly one-note, all of them indebted to Serkis’s legendary scene-chewing as Gollum. While Serkis played that character, a warped and demonic little imp, as big as possible, he has also given incredibly subtle motion-capture performances, particularly as the strong and silent ape leader Caesar. Almost all the major stars recruited for Mowgli offer no such nuance. As Shere Khan, Cumberbatch is in classic villain mode, much as he was when he played the dragon Smaug in the Hobbit movies. Cate Blanchett is on autopilot as the hypnotic python Kaa (who functions as the narrator), and Serkis himself affects an oddly hokey Cockney accent as Baloo.
Without Disney’s loose structure of songs and misadventures, Mowgli is formless, going through the motions of a hero’s journey as the boy trains, fights, and overcomes his enemies. Serkis includes more bloody violence to emphasize the brutality of life in the jungle, but The Jungle Book is, at its core, a whimsical story with talking animals. Scene after scene of wolves convening to discuss tribal bylaws and bare their teeth at one another is not so much intriguingly realistic as it is plainly dull.
Netflix’s film slate in 2018 has been a peculiar mix of revived genres (romantic comedies in particular), worthy pieces of art cinema (such as Roma), and projects such as Mowgli or The Cloverfield Paradox, which are odd castoffs from other studios. The whole project has an element of curiosity to it, a grimmer version of a shiny Disney blockbuster, but the execution is so lacking that Mowgli can’t rise beyond the level of being an interesting footnote. Serkis himself remains an elite motion-capture thespian, but that skill isn’t enough to support such a tired retread.
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2FMGZiL
