Police removed protestors demonstrating against a North Dakota pipeline, the Oregon militiamen were acquitted, groping allegations of Clarence Thomas, and more from across the United States and around the world.
—Police officers wearing riot gear have started removing hundreds of people protesting a controversial crude oil pipeline at its construction site in North Dakota on Thursday. More here
—Ammon Bundy and six other co-defendants were found not guilty Thursday of federal conspiracy and weapons charges stemming from their armed takeover of a federally owned wildlife sanctuary in Oregon earlier this year. More here
—An Alaska lawyer has accused Justice Clarence Thomas of groping her at a dinner party in 1999. More here
—We’re live-blogging the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4).
President Obama commuted the sentences of 98 federal prisoners on Thursday, his latest small step in a broader effort to reduce excessive sentences in the criminal-justice system.
Forty-two of the 98 inmates who received clemency today had been serving life sentences. All had been convicted for nonviolent drug offenses. Obama’s latest round of pardons comes as the White House tries to clear a lengthy backlog before his term ends in January. The Washington Posthas more:
The administration's highly-touted clemency initiative had been tangled up by bureaucratic delays after it got underway. Though the pace of commutations he has granted has worried activists — and, as of earlier this month, there were more than 11,000 petitions pending, according to the Justice Department — there has been a flurry of activity on this front recently.
In August, Obama commuted the sentences of 214 inmates, setting a single-day record for his administration, and the 111 commutations he handed down a few weeks later also helped set a single-month record. Earlier this month, Obama granted clemency to an additional 102 inmates.
Today’s move brings Obama’s total number of commutations to 872, including 688 acts of clemency in 2016 alone. According to the White House, Obama has now commuted more sentences than every post-World War II president combined. (That number excludes mass pardons, like the one granted to Vietnam War draft-dodgers by President Jimmy Carter.)
Six years after a secret recording allegedly led a Rutgers University student to commit suicide, the man who recorded the video has pled guilty to attempted invasion of privacy.
Using a hidden webcam, Dharun Ravi recorded his roommate, Tyler Clementi, kissing another man and shared it with others. Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge three days after he found about about the recording. The case sparked a national discussion about cyberbullying and discrimination against the LGBT community.
The plea deal comes after a New Jersey appeals court last month threw out Ravi's 2012 conviction on 15 counts, including invasion of privacy and bias intimidation. The appellate court decision came after the state Supreme Court last year ruled that the laws under which Ravi was convicted were unconstitutional and that the ruling could be applied retroactively.
In the third-degree felony plea deal, Ravi was sentenced to the 20 days he already served. He’s previously paid a $10,000 fine. Clementi’s parents, who started a foundation in honor of their son, said after the plea deal, “We have learned that witnesses or bystanders need to become upstanders for those in our society like Tyler, who cannot stand up for themselves.”
Ammon Bundy and six other co-defendants were found not guilty Thursday of federal conspiracy and weapons charges stemming from their armed takeover of a federally owned wildlife sanctuary in Oregon earlier this year.
For 41 days in January and February, members of a militia occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, demanding the federal government give up control of 188,000 acres of public lands. The men made a national call for arms and aid as they controlled the facility near Burns, Oregon, even as police blocked off roads that led to the refuge.
The Oregoniancalled the acquittal a “stunning verdict, undoubtedly a significant blow to federal prosecutors.”
The New York Timesexplains how the men were able to avoid conviction:
Their lawyers argued that prosecutors did not prove that the group had engaged in an illegal conspiracy that kept federal workers—employees of the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management—from doing their jobs.
The episode launched a national debate about who can control public lands, even getting initial support from Republicans like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. The Bundy family previously led another standoff with federal authorities in 2014 in Nevada over similar issues.
Police officers wearing riot gear have started removing hundreds of people protesting a controversial crude oil pipeline at its construction site in North Dakota on Thursday.
An estimated 200 protesters built an encampment of hundreds of tents directly in the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline, a $3.8 billion, 1,1172-mile pipeline near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, Reuters reports. Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier said the roadblocks constructed by the protesters “forced law enforcement to respond.” The sheriff’s department also claimed the protesters had set fire to a bridge.
As my colleague Robinson Meyer previously reported, the pipeline has drawn criticism from members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and environmental activists, who say the project’s construction threatens to destroy sacred tribal sites and contaminate the Missouri River, the Sioux’s sole water source.
Demonstrations against the pipeline have been held for several months, resulting in the arrests of more than 100 people. The protests have drawn nationwide attention, including from civil-rights activists, celebrities, and presidential candidates.
Colombia has suspended peace talks with its second-largest Marxist rebel group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), because the government says the rebels have not released their last remaining hostage.
Peace talks were set to begin Thursday in Ecuador at 6 p.m. local time, but the Colombian government canceled them at the last minute, demanding the release of former congressman Odin Sanchez. Colombia’s chief negotiator with ELN, Juan Camilo Restrepo, said Monday negotiations will be stalled until Sanchez is let go.
But there seems to be some confusion over whether Sanchez has been released or not. The ELN took Sanchez in April. He had offered himself in exchange for his brother, a former governor whom rebels kidnapped three years ago, and who had become ill while captive. The guerrilla group initially asked for a hefty ransom in exchange for Sanchez’s release, but the government insisted rebels set him free as a gesture of good faith before the peace talks. After the government insisted on his release, news organizations reported rumors that ELN had prepared to release Sanchez in the Darien Jungle, and some reports said the ELN already had. But on Wednesday, the Red Cross, which had been appointed to handle the recovery, said it had not been officially alerted of his release, and so had not activated its recovery protocols.
The breakdown in talks is yet another another bump in the negotiations to disarm a decades-old rebel group in Colombia. The ELN and Colombia’s largest, most well-known guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), both emerged around the same time in the 1960s to fight for land reform. About 250,000 people have been killed in the fighting between government forces and the rebels since they took up arms. And though their numbers have drastically declined, FARC still has about 8,000 soldiers; the ELN has about 2,000. Last month, Colombia successfully negotiated a peace deal with FARC, but earlier this month Colombian voters rejected it.
Lawyer Accuses Justice Clarence Thomas of Groping Her in 1999
An Alaska lawyer has accused Justice Clarence Thomas of groping her at a dinner party in 1999.
In interviews with the National Law Journalpublished Thursday, Moira Smith, who is now the general counsel for Enstar Natural Gas Company, said she met the justice while she was a Truman Foundation scholar living in Washington, D.C. During that time, the foundation asked Thomas to present an award it had recently created.
The night before the ceremony, Thomas dined with Smith and other Truman scholars and fellows at the home of Louis Blair, the foundation’s executive secretary. According to Smith, she was helping set up before the dinner when the alleged incident occurred.
Alone with Thomas, “I was setting the place to his right when he reached out, sort of cupped his hand around my butt and pulled me pretty close to him,” Smith said in an interview. “He said, ‘Where are you sitting?’ and gave me a squeeze. I said, ‘I’m sitting down at the garden table.’ He said, ‘I think you should sit next to me,’ giving me squeezes. I said, ‘Well, Mr. Blair is pretty particular about his seating chart.’ I tried to use the seating chart as a pretext for refusing. He one more time squeezed my butt and he said, ‘Are you sure?’ I said yes, and that was the end of it.”
Smith said the other guests then assembled for the dinner and she went to the garden table to take her seat. Buckley said she did not recall seeing anything unusual that evening. Smith recalled being “shell-shocked, but also I was there for work. I had a job to do, to be genial as sort of a stand-in hostess.”
The Journal spoke with four other people, including Smith’s roommates at the time, who recalled her sharing her story around the time it allegedly occurred. Blair and two other dinner attendees told the Journal they didn’t know about the incident until now.
Thomas, who joined the Court 25 years ago this week, emphatically denied Smith’s allegations. “This claim is preposterous and it never happened,” he said to the Journal in a statement.
The justice last faced sexual-misconduct allegations in 1991 during one of the most contentious confirmation battles in Supreme Court history. Anita Hill, the law professor, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Thomas had verbally sexually harassed her while she worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Thomas vehemently denied the allegations and described the hearings as a “high-tech lynching.” The Senate confirmed him in a 52-to-48 vote.
Smith first went public with her allegations in a Facebook post on October 7, shortly after the Washington Post published video clips from 2005 in which Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, brags about sexually assaulting women. In the post, Smith also noted two other times she had been assaulted by different men.
“I do not take the decision to share these incredibly personal and painful moments lightly,” she wrote. “I also do not share this because of the election, or even really because of Donald Trump. I share this because if this can happen to me—a privileged white woman—three times in ten years, how bad must it be for those who are not as privileged?”
Internal Feud at Tata Sons, the Indian Conglomerate, Spills Out Into the Open
Tata Sons, one of India’s most venerable companies, is in the midst of a very public corporate feud.
At issue is the ousting this week of Cyrus Mistry, the company’s chairman, by the board. He was replaced on an interim basis by his predecessor, Ratan Tata, who ran the company from 1991 to 2012. The news was unexpected and has dominated the headlines of Indian media. Part of the reason for this is not only the company’s size ($103.5 billion in revenues), but the Tata family’s outsized influence on the Indian consciousness for nearly 150 years. The Tata name dominates salt, steel mills, cars, and luxury hotels, and its global acquisitions in the late 1990s and early aughts—Tetley Tea, Jaguar Land Rover, Corus Steel—were a matter of pride for many Indians.
Although Mistry was the company’s first chairman in nearly eight decades to come from outside the Tata family, he was by no means an outsider. His family, a major Tata shareholder since the 1930s, owns about 18 percent of the company; his sister is married to Ratan Tata’s half-brother, Noel; and he was Ratan Tata’s handpicked successor to become chairman.
But Mistry did not take his firing well and his letter to the Tata Sons board, of which he remains a member, was leaked to the media. In it he claimed he was a “lame duck” figure, said the group faced about $18 billion in write-downs, and raised enough questions about the financial health of the Tata Group’s various holdings that it got India’s financial regulators interested. On Thursday, Tata Sons, the holding company that owns the Tata Group, responded, calling the leak “unseemly and undignified,” and Mistry’s claims “unsubstantiated and malicious.”
“It has taken everyone by surprise,” J. N. Gupta, a former executive at India's markets regulator and now managing director at Stakeholders Empowerment Services, told the BBC. “Nobody would have thought such things could happen at Tata.”
A Judge Awards a Historic Settlement in the Philadelphia Amtrak Crash
A Pennsylvania judge has approved a historic—possibly the largest ever—settlement for victims of the 2015 Amtrak passenger train crash just outside Philadelphia that killed eight people and injured about 200 others.
U.S. District Court Judge Legrome Davis for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania awarded plaintiffs a $265-million settlement. It’s believed to be the largest ever, because last year Congress raised the settlement cap on a single rail accident from $200 million to $295 million. Lawyers arrived at this lower price because they believed it would be the maximum allowed once future inflation is accounted for because the settlement will likely drag out for years in litigation.
The Amtrak train crashed May 12, 2015, as it passed through Philadelphia. More than 240 passengers rode the train that day, and it crashed after it entered a curve at 106 miles per hour, more than double the recommended speed. The National Transportation Safety Board released a report in May that found the driver, Brandon Bostian, became distracted while listening to radio chatter of another train struck by a rock. Bostian then lost track of his own train’s location and speed. As my colleague David Graham has written, such a tragedy might have been avoided if that portion of the track were outfitted with positive train control, a technology that automatically regulates the speed of trains.
Amtrak has declined to comment on the settlement’s amount.
U.S. Charges Dozens for Multimillion-Dollar Call-Center Scam
The U.S. Department of Justice charged Thursday more than 60 people and entities in India and the U.S. for allegedly taking part in a multimillion dollar international scheme extorting tens of thousands of people of more than $300 million.
The defendants, including 24 people in the U.S. and 32 people and five call centers in India, were charged with conspiracy to commit identity theft, false impersonation of an officer of the United States, wire fraud, and money laundering. One of the defendants was also charged with passport fraud.
Here’s how the Justice Department says the scam works: Potential victims received calls from an operator located in call centers in Ahmedabad, India. These operators, impersonating officials from the Internal Revenue Service or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, would threaten potential victims with “arrest, imprisonment, fines or deportation” if they did not pay an immediate fine, often for a fictitious tax violation. Once the victim pays the fine, the U.S.-based collaborators would launder the funds through prepaid debit cards or wire transfers using stolen or fake identities.The defendants also allegedly offered victims short-term loans or grants, asking them for good-faith deposits in order to receive the funds.
In one case, the Justice Department says, a victim from Hayward, California, lost $136,000 after receiving multiple calls over a 20-day period from purported IRS agents demanding payment for alleged tax violations.
“Today’s actions will not only bring a sense of justice to the victims in this case, but this significant investigation will also help increase awareness of this type of fraud,” Peter Edge of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations said Thursday in a statement.
He added: “To potential victims, our message today is simple: U.S. government agencies do not make these types of calls, and if you receive one, contact law enforcement to report the suspected scam before you make a payment.”
SeaWorld Makes a Wetsuit for a Featherless Penguin
An Adelie penguin at SeaWorld has been outfitted with a custom-made wetsuit after she lost some of her feathers.
The wardrobe department at the Orlando theme park sewed the suit for Wonder Twin, who became unable to regulate her body temperature after experiencing some feather loss. Adelie penguins, which are only found in Antartica, can experience this condition in the wild, where it could prove harmful.
Wonder Twin now swims, eats, and sleeps in the suit, which keeps her warm:
Wonder Twin is part of Seaworld Orlando’s colony of Adelie penguins, which you can follow in this live webcam from inside their enclosure (it’s OK, research has shown that watching videos of cute animals at work may actually boost your productivity).
Users on social media are swooning over the suit, which is good news for SeaWorld. The company has been trying to repair its public image since the controversial 2013 documentary Blackfish claimed that the park’s orcas suffered in captivity. SeaWorld announced last November it would stop its orca performance shows, and said in March it would end orca-breeding programs.
Twitter to Cut 9 Percent of Its Global Workforce, Kill Vine
Updated at 12:38 p.m. ET
Twitter announced that it is killing off Vine, its video app.
“Today, we are sharing the news that in the coming months we’ll be discontinuing the mobile app,” Twitter and Vine said in statement.
Twitter, which bought Vine in late 2012, launched it in 2013. The app played six-second video on a loop, but never quite developed a broad following.
Our original post:
Twitter said Thursday it will cut 9 percent of its 3,860-strong global workforce in a bid to becoming profitable in 2017.
Additionally, Twitter, in its third-quarter results, announced better-than-expected earnings. It earned 13 cents per share on revenue of $616 million, up 8 percent year over year. Analysts surveyed by Thompson Reuters expected Twitter to post earnings of 9 cents per share on $606 million in revenue.
The company also said the number of active monthly users was up 3 percent to 317 million. There was also a 7 percent increase, the company said, in its number of daily active users. Advertising revenue was $545 million, up 6 percent year-over-year. Of this, 90 percent was mobile-advertising revenue, the company said.
Twitter was reportedly courted by several major companies, including Salesforce and Google, but no formal offer was made to buy the social-media giant.
News of the job cuts and the better-than-expected results pushed Twitter’s stock up more than 3 percent in pre-market trading.
Humans on Track to Kill Off One-Third of World's Wildlife by 2020
If you care about wild animals or wild habitats, prepare to be depressed. A new report on the status of wildlife populations—the most comprehensive to date—by the Zoological Society of London and the World Wildlife Foundation found a 58 percent decrease in Earth’s animal population from 1970 to 2012—and humans are to blame.
Researchers analyzed 14,000 populations of 3,700 vertebrate species that are regularly used to measure conservation efforts. They found huge population drops across animals in all different types of environments. They also predicted the planet will have lost more than one-third of its animal life by 2020.
Animal populations in river and lake environments were the most affected; they fell by 81 percent since 1970. Major factors included excessive water use, pollution, and dams. Globally, the largest cause of wildlife depletion is owed to habitat loss from farming and logging by humans. But hunting is also to blame. Humans are currently eating more than 300 mammal species into extinction, according to an earlier report.
Humans now dominate nearly all landmass, with just 15 percent reserved for protection. The new report suggested that wildlife loss will cause increase human conflict due to “the risk of water and food insecurity and competition over natural resources.”
There is a bit of good news. Some species have seen their numbers rebound after human intervention. The report cited tigers as an example, as well as pandas, which were recently removed from the endangered-species list.
Indian officials said 35-year-old Mahmood Akhtar, a staffer in the Pakistani High Commission’s visa section, was arrested outside the gates of the Delhi zoo Wednesday after being caught exchanging sensitive documents for cash with two Indian men, who were also arrested, Pakistani newspaper Dawn reports. Akhtar was later released and told he had 48 hours to leave the country.
New Delhi accused Akhtar of misusing his consular status to gather intelligence. Pakistani officials rejected the accusation, and condemned “the detention and mishandling of Pakistan High Commission Staff,” a move they said violates the 1961 Vienna Convention, which guarantees their agents diplomatic immunity from the criminal jurisdiction of the state where they are serving.
Using diplomatic missions as a cover for espionage, however, isn’t unheard of in India and Pakistan. As A. S. Dulat, the former special director of India’s Intelligence Bureau, toldThe New York Times Thursday: “It’s been like that between India and Pakistan of late, everything is getting hyped.”
He added: “Let me put it this way: If it was a Chinese or Russian or American, they would not bother too much.”
Hype or not, this incident is the latest salvo in the deterioration of relations between the two neighbors. Last month, India blamed a deadly attack on an army base in Indian-administered Kashmir on Pakistan, though Islamabad denied the claim. Shortly thereafter, India said it launched a series of “surgical strikes” on Pakistani-administered Kashmir in retaliation, but Islamabad denied that, too.
U.S. Calls Off the Search for a Lost Chinese Sailor Out to Break a World Record
The U.S. has called off its search to find a Chinese sailor trying to break the world record for crossing the Pacific Ocean alone on a boat.
Guo Chuan’s team noticed his ship had slowed and tried to contact him Tuesday, but were unable reach him by satellite phone or through the internet. Three years ago, Guo became the first Chinese sailor to circumnavigate the globe on a non-stop solo sail. On October 18, Guo left San Francisco, with hopes to reach Shanghai in 20 days—a speed that would break the current record by a day. The ship was a 97-foot red-colored trimaran with text on the sails that read: “Peace and Sport.”
The U.S. Coast Guard dispatched a helicopter and airplane to find Guo, whose boat had slowed around the Hawaiian islands. On Thursday rescuers found Guo’s boat drifting hundreds of miles away from the U.S. island chain. They found his lifejacket on the ship, but Guo was not aboard. Searchers also found a broken sail, something that could have led to Guo slipping off if he had tried to repair it. Guo had previously told a reporter with Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, his greatest fear was the thought of falling off the boat and into the ocean.
Brigham Young University, the Mormon-owned school in Utah, will no longer investigate students who report themselves as victims of sexual assault for simultaneously violating the school's strict honor code that prohibits activities like drinking alcohol and premarital sex. The school will accept 23 changes recommended by an internal advisory council, an inquiry that began after several sexual-assault victims said the school opened an honor-code investigation against them after they reported abuse.
Some of the victims toldThe Salt Lake Tribune the changes satisfied them. The biggest difference comes in the form of amnesty for students who report sexual abuse. The school’s sexual-assault investigation office—the Title IX office—will also no longer share victims’ names with the honor-code department, and the two will no longer share physical space. BYU said it will hire a victim’s advocate, publicize resources for victims, and report to the Mormon church how local clergy leaders respond to reports of abuse. This was one aspect of the policy changes still being criticized, because critics said the recommendations did not go far enough to monitor how Mormon clergy, especially bishops in the church, would handle reports of sexual abuse because those leaders communicate frequently with the school.
Awareness of BYU’s policies began in April, when Madi Barney, a former student, told people at a campus rape conference she’d been sexually assaulted and investigated by the school. Her story generated protests and a petition online to change the policy. She also filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education, which opened an investigation on the school in August. BYU is the third school in Utah to be investigated for similar claims. Sexual assault on campus has gained nationwide attention—with nearly 200 colleges under investigation.
The U.K.’s Office of National Statistics said Thursday the country’s economy grew 0.5 percent in the three months after the Brexit vote to leave the European Union. The number, though preliminary, is better than the 0.3 percent growth forecast by economists.
Growth was driven solely by the services sector, which grew 0.8 percent. All other sectors of the U.K. economy shrank in the July-September period. Growth in the previous quarter was 0.7 percent.
“The economy has continued to expand at a rate broadly similar to that seen since 2015 and there is little evidence of a pronounced effect in the immediate aftermath of the vote,” the agency said.
The data are expected to lower expectations that the Bank of England, the country’s central bank, will cut interest rates next week.
At issue is the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). Twenty-seven of the EU’s member states wanted the deal with Canada to go ahead, citing potential trade benefits. But Belgian law mandates that any such agreement must have a buy-in from all of the country’s regions. Earlier this week, the deal looked dead when Charles Michel, the Belgian prime minister, said Wallonia, the Brussels city government, and the French community had rejected CETA.
Wallonia, the French-speaking region of 3.6 million people, expressed fears CETA would degrade consumer, labor, and environmental protections, while granting excessive power to multinational corporations.
Details of the deal Michel secured with the French-speaking region haven’t yet been made public, and they will have to be approved by other EU members for CETA to go into effect. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had been due in Brussels Thursday to sign CETA, but canceled the trip after it appeared there would be no agreement. There’s no word yet on when—or whether—he’ll reschedule.
A good pretext for war is not enough to make a war just.
“This is our 9/11,” an Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson said a few days after the rape, torture, kidnapping, and mass murder of Israelis on October 7. Or it was worse than 9/11. “Twenty 9/11s,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a few weeks later, once the scale of the devastation was evident. As for the current military campaign in Gaza? Earlier this month, Netanyahu told new IDF cadets, “We are preventing the next 9/11.”
I’m a New Yorker. For me, 9/11 was the unbearable loss of thousands of lives. But I’m also a veteran of America’s War on Terror, so for me, 9/11 was also the pretext for disastrous, poorly conceived wars that spread death and destruction, destabilized the Middle East, created new enemies, and empowered Iran.
I didn’t know that college would be a factory of unreason.
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O
ne of the section leaders for my computer-science class, Hamza El Boudali, believes that President Joe Biden should be killed. “I’m not calling for a civilian to do it, but I think a military should,” the 23-year-old Stanford University student told a small group of protesters last month. “I’d be happy if Biden was dead.” He thinks that Stanford is complicit in what he calls the genocide of Palestinians, and that Biden is not only complicit but responsible for it. “I’m not calling for a vigilante to do it,” he later clarified, “but I’m saying he is guilty of mass murder and should be treated in the same way that a terrorist with darker skin would be (and we all know terrorists with dark skin are typically bombed and drone striked by American planes).” El Boudali has also said that he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government (though he clarified later that he “doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”). When you ask him what his cause is, he answers: “Peace.”
Thanks to AI, people may no longer feel the need to learn a second language.
A few days ago, I watched a video of myself talking in perfect Chinese. I’ve been studying the language on and off for only a few years, and I’m far from fluent. But there I was, pronouncing each character flawlessly in the correct tone, just as a native speaker would. Gone were my grammar mistakes and awkward pauses, replaced by a smooth and slightly alien-sounding voice. “My favorite food is sushi,” I said—wo zui xihuan de shiwu shi shousi—with no hint of excitement or joy.
I’d created the video using software from a Los Angeles–based artificial-intelligence start-up called HeyGen. It allows users to generate deepfake videos of real people “saying” almost anything based on a single picture of their face and a script, which is paired with a synthetic voice and can be translated into more than 40 languages. By merely uploading a selfie taken on my iPhone, I was able to glimpse a level of Mandarin fluency that may elude me for the rest of my life.
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After the stock-market frenzy that ensued when Trump Media & Technology Group started trading on Tuesday (under the ticker symbol DJT), one thing is almost certainly true: Donald Trump is now the chairman of the most overvalued company on Nasdaq.
Trump Media had a grand total of $3.4 million in revenue in the first nine months of 2023, against more than $10 million in operating losses. Its only product is Truth Social, Trump’s right-wing Twitter clone, which has a tiny user base, few advertisers, and no real prospect of challenging the dominant players in the social-media space. And yet, as of market close on Tuesday, Trump Media was valued at almost $8 billion, making it worth more on paper than TheNew York Times.
They’re our most benign yet unexpectedly intimate secrets.
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In 2011, demographic researchers across America realized something surprising: Census forms had a lot of spots left blank. When one person fills it out for the whole household, they might skip certain sections—especially the middle-name column. Sixty percent of people left out the middle names of their extended family members, and nearly 80 percent omitted those of roommates they weren’t related to. Respondents weren’t trying to keep secrets. Much of the time, they just didn’t know the middle names of the people they lived with.
Middle names occupy a strange space in American society. We use them most in bureaucratic contexts. They show up on driver’s licenses and passports, but they aren’t required when booking plane tickets. You probably don’t include yours in your signature, and you probably don’t put it in your social-media profiles. For many of us, the name feels like a secret. Only about 22 percent of Americans think they know the middle names of at least half of their friends or acquaintances, according to a poll conducted for The Atlantic by The Harris Poll. Yet you still might be offended if a spouse or a close friend forgets yours. Knowing this seemingly benign piece of information has become emblematic of your connection. “She don’t even know your middle name,” Cardi B laments about an ex-partner’s new fling in her song “Be Careful.” But the intimacy you miss out on when you don’t know someone’s middle name can be more than symbolic. The names can be Trojan horses of meaning about ourselves or our ancestors, couriers of overlooked parts of our identity.
When our daughter died suddenly, she left us with grief, memories—and Ringo.
I was at the kitchen counter making coffee when my daughter Miranda’s dog approached. Ringo stands about 10 inches high at the shoulder, but he carries himself with supreme confidence. He fixed his lustrous black eyes on mine. Staring straight at me, he lifted his leg and urinated on the oven door.
After the mess was cleaned up, I complained to Miranda, “I don’t think Ringo likes me.”
Miranda replied, “Ringo loves you. He just doesn’t respect you.”
Theoretically, Ringo is a Cavalier King Charles spaniel. You may have seen depictions of the breed peeking at you from portraits of monarchs and aristocrats. But the spaniels in the paintings are almost always the cinnamon-and-white variety known as a Blenheim spaniel. My wife, Danielle, has a Blenheim. The Blenheim Cavalier is a true lapdog: easygoing, obedient, insinuating. Ringo is very different. He is exactly the color of a cup of espresso, mostly black-haired with a little brownish tinge at his extremities. He’s commonly mistaken for a miniature Rottweiler. That confusion is less absurd than it sounds. If an unwelcome stranger steps in his way, 18-pound Ringo will stiffen and growl, murder in his eyes.
People are discovering the truth about their biological parents with DNA—and learning that incest is far more common than many think.
When Steve Edsel was a boy, his adoptive parents kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings in their bedroom closet. He would ask for it sometimes, poring over the headlines about his birth. Headlines like this: “Mother Deserts Son, Flees From Hospital,” Winston-Salem Journal, December 30, 1973.
The mother in question was 14 years old, “5 feet 6 with reddish brown hair,” and she had come to the hospital early one morning with her own parents. They gave names that all turned out to be fake. And by 8 o’clock that evening, just hours after she gave birth, they were gone. In a black-and-white drawing of the mother, based on nurses’ recollections, she has round glasses and sideswept bangs. Her mouth is grimly set.
Sometimes, going viral isn’t as great as it seems.
Lucchese is not the world’s cutest dog. Picked up as a stray somewhere in Texas, he is scruffy and, as one person aptly observed online, looks a little like Steve Buscemi. (It’s the eyes.)
Isabel Klee, a professional influencer in New York City, had agreed to keep Lucchese, or Luc, until he found a forever home. Fosters such as Klee help move dogs out of loud and stressful shelters so they can relax and socialize before moving into a forever home. (The foster can then take on a new dog, and the process restarts.) Klee began posting about Luc on TikTok, as many dog fosters do. “I fell in love with him, and the internet fell in love with him,” she told me over the phone earlier this month. “Every single video I posted of him went viral.” In one such video, which has attained nearly 4 million views since it was published in October, Klee’s boyfriend strokes Luc, who is curled up into his chest like a human infant. The caption reads, “When your foster dog feels safe with you 🥲🫶.”
Breadfruit is a staple in tropical places—and climate change is pushing its range north.
Someplace in the lush backroads of San Sebastián, in western Puerto Rico, my friend Carina pulled the car over. At a crest in the road stood a breadfruit tree, full of basketball-size, lime-green fruits, knobbled and prehistoric, like a dinosaur egg covered in ostrich leather. One had recently fallen. I jumped out to scoop it up, thinking about the breadfruit tostones we would make that afternoon. We’d fry chunks of the white, spongy flesh, then smash them with the back of a cast-iron pan, then fry them again. In a wooden pilón, Carina would pound garlic and oil with oregano brujo, a pungent weedy plant in the mint family, and spoon the sauce over the frittered discs. For me, little in this world is above a breadfruit tostón, crisp and flaky on the outside, creamy on the inside. My mouth is watering writing this paragraph.
New obesity drugs are remarkable. But few people realize how useful the old ones can be.
“In my lifetime, I never dreamed that we would be talking about medicines that are providing hope for people like me,” Oprah Winfrey says at the top of her recent prime-time special on obesity. The program, called Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution, is very clear on which medicines she means. At one point, Oprah stares into the camera and carefully pronounces their brand names for the audience: “Ozempic and Wegovy,” she says. “Mounjaro and Zepbound.” The class of drugs to which these four belong, called GLP-1 receptor agonists, is the reason for the special.
For a brief and telling moment, though, Oprah’s story of the revolution falters. It happens midway through the program, when she’s just brought on two obesity doctors, W. Scott Butsch and Amanda Velazquez, to talk about the GLP-1 wonder drugs. “Were you all surprised in your practices when people started losing weight?” she asks. Butsch gets a little tongue-tied: “Yeah, I mean, I think we have—we’ve already been using other medications for the last 10, 20 years,” he says. “But these were just a little bit more effective.”