National Inquiry: The publisher of the National Enquirer admitted to paying the former Playboy model Karen McDougal to kill a story about her account of an affair with Donald Trump, signing a non-prosecution agreement with New York prosecutors. The bones of the story have already been reported on since before the 2016 election, but new this time around is the link to questions of campaign-finance violation.
The president, meanwhile, has been masterfully using “executive time” to deflect media attention. On Friday at 5:18 p.m., he named Director of the Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney as acting White House chief of staff, to replace John Kelly, tweeting that Kelly was a “GREAT PATRIOT and I want to personally thank him for his service!”
Yemen: In a rebuke of the Trump administration’s stance on the ongoing war in Yemen and Saudi Arabia’s involvement there, the U.S. Senate voted to end U.S. support for the war. It’s a historic challenge, given the decades-long robust partnership between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Except that it won’t actually get the U.S. out of the war, after a House maneuver. So what was the Senate hoping to achieve?
One More Thing: Why are chores, even low-lift ones like taking out the recycling, so easy for some people to procrastinate on? According to a psychology professor, these people commonly fall into two types: the task delayers and the chronic procrastinators. Which are you?
Snapshot
H'Hen Nie of Vietnam poses onstage during the 2018 Miss Universe national costume presentation in Thailand, on December 10, 2018. See the rest of some of this week’s most striking photos here. (Lillian Suwanrumpha / AFP / Getty)Your Favorite Books of 2018Last week, we asked you to share with us your favorite book of 2018. Many of you recommended books about history, both recent and ancient, or books on watershed historical moments whose themes continue to have striking relevance today. Check out the impressive selection of books suggested by you and other readers in The Atlantic’s Letters section, here. (If you’re a reader, writer, or simply love books, you might be interested in our weekly Friday Books Briefing newsletter.)
Evening Read“Why has the Republican Party become so thoroughly corrupt?” asks the writer George Packer, who spares the GOP no arrows in his argument about the roots of what he sees as the institution’s “depravity” and “consistent repudiation of norms”:
The corruption of the Republican Party in the Trump era seemed to set in with breathtaking speed. In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter. Its leaders don’t see a dilemma—democratic principles turn out to be disposable tools, sometimes useful, sometimes inconvenient. The higher cause is conservatism, but the highest is power. After Wisconsin Democrats swept statewide offices last month, Robin Vos, speaker of the assembly, explained why Republicans would have to get rid of the old rules: “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”
What Do You Know … About Culture?1. Her ’80s dance-pop peer Madonna was deemed “rock” enough for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008. But this artist wasn’t nominated for inclusion until 2016, and finally got the honor this week.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. Barry Jenkins’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning Moonlight is a fictional adaptation of this 1974 James Baldwin novel.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: Janet JAckson / If Beale Street Could Talk
Poem of the WeekHere is a portion of “A Memory of the Future” by Elizabeth Spires, from our July/August 2011 issue:
I will revel in a world
no longer particular.
A world made vague,
as if by fog. But not fog.
Vaguely aware,
I will wander at will.
I will wade deeper
into wide water.
Looking for our daily mini crossword? Try your hand at it here—the puzzle gets more difficult through the week.
Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com
Did you get this newsletter from a friend? Sign yourself up.
Written by Elaine Godfrey (@elainejgodfrey)
Today in 5 LinesArizona Senator Jon Kyl, who was appointed to replace the late Senator John McCain in September, announced that he will resign from the Senate on December 31. Arizona Governor Doug Ducey is now required to name a Republican replacement for Kyl.
Republican Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin signed legislation stripping powers from the state’s incoming Democratic governor and attorney general.
After losing a year-long court battle, the Department of Education said it would cancel $150 million in student-loan debt for roughly 15,000 students.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team repudiated assertions from Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s former national-security adviser, that he had been tricked into lying to FBI agents. Flynn will be sentenced next week.
The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General said it will investigate the death of a 7-year-old girl from Guatemala, who died of dehydration in the custody of Customs and Border Protection after crossing from Mexico into the U.S. illegally with her father.
Today on The AtlanticHow the National Enquirer Helped Trump: The tabloid secretly agreed to kill a story about Donald Trump’s alleged affair with a Playboy model—but it also published 35 covers with anti–Hillary Clinton stories. (David A. Graham)
What’s Wrong With the GOP?: The Republican Party is a corrupt institution where “the higher cause is conservatism, but the highest is power,” argues George Packer.
Eyes on 2020: A co-chair of the Republican National Committee is leaving to head up Trump’s reelection campaign in Ohio. (Elaina Plott)
Complicit in Mass Starvation: President Trump’s affinity for Saudi Arabia is prolonging the war in Yemen, and House Republicans are also complicit, argues Conor Friedersdorf.
Snapshot
Marvella McDaniel, whose son was murdered, lights a candle during a vigil for gun-violence victims on the sixth anniversary of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, at the Broad Street Ministry in Philadelphia. (Matt Rourke / AP)
What We’re ReadingA New Kind of Koch: Chase Koch, who is poised to take on a leadership role at the Koch network and Koch Industries—currently led by his father, Charles—wants to steer the conservative family business in a different direction. (Maggie Severns, Politico)
The Medicare-for-All Puzzle: More and more Democrats say they support a single-payer health-care system. But its proponents still have to solve one major problem. (Dylan Scott, Vox)
A Retrospective: Sarah Grant and Chuck Rosenberg look back at the 35-page Trump-Russia dossier compiled by the British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and published in its entirety by BuzzFeed News in 2017. It seems to hold up well. (Lawfare)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
“There are several things about Longyearbyen that may seem ‘strange’ to visitors,” warns the Norwegian city’s tourist board. One of the northernmost settlements in the world, Longyearbyen, which is on the island of Svalbard, is home to 2,100 residents from almost 50 countries—most of whom weren’t born there.
“This is not a place people spend their entire lives or where families are continued through generations,” the Longyearbyen website continues. “People have generally come and gone … The history of Svalbard is rich in tragic events, and graves are the most common relics of culture.”
But for more than 70 years, not a single person has been buried in Longyearbyen. That’s due to the region’s year-round sub-zero temperatures: Bodies don’t decompose, but are preserved, as if mummified, in the permafrost. Should anyone die there, the government of Svalbard requires that the body is flown or shipped to mainland Norway to be interred.
“It’s kind of nuts to live there, but that’s part of the appeal,” filmmaker David Freid told The Atlantic. Freid visited the region in 2016 and was so taken by its otherworldliness that he decided to make a short documentary. Nobody Dies in Longyearbyen follows Freid on a journey to investigate the rumor that it’s not only illegal to be buried in Longyearbyen, but also that it’s illegal to die there. He finds that the local lore stems from very real archaeological and epidemiological concerns.
As Freid says at the end of the film: “Perhaps some contagions will arise from the permafrost, like tiny zombies returning from a long nap.”
In The Imperial Presidency, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. warned that the habit of “indiscriminate global intervention, far from strengthening American security, seemed rather to weaken it by involving the United States in remote, costly and mysterious wars, fought in ways that shamed the nation before the world and, even when thus fought, demonstrating only the inability of the most powerful nation on earth to subdue bands of guerrillas in black pajamas. When the grandiose policy did not promote national security and could not succeed in its own terms, would it not be better to pursue policies that did not deform and disable the Constitution?”
These many years later, America is complicit in a mysterious war in Yemen that is waged by Saudi Arabia in ways that shame both of our allied nations. These famine-ravaged youngsters are what that war looks like. As Nicholas Kristof aptly put it, “Your tax dollars help starve children.”
Though the Constitution assigns the war power to Congress, our ongoing role in the conflict is due less to the endorsement of the people or their representatives than to the prerogative of our imperial president. As if to underscore the folly of leaving such decisions to one man, he happens to be a crass buffoon with a broken moral compass, no foreign-policy experience, and a family business that benefits from Saudi-government money even as he sits in the White House.
“I get along great with all of them; they buy apartments from me,” Donald Trump once said of the Saudis during a campaign rally. “They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much!”
On Thursday, Congress took a step toward remedying this discreditable status quo. “The Senate voted … to end American military assistance for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen in the strongest show of bipartisan defiance against President Trump’s defense of the kingdom over the killing of a dissident journalist,” The New York Times reported. “The 56-to-41 vote was a rare move by the Senate to limit presidential war powers and sent a potent message of disapproval for a nearly four-year conflict that has killed thousands of civilians and brought famine to Yemen.”
Few causes “unite Tea Party conservatives, democratic socialist independents, and progressive Democrats in common cause,” Daniel Larison noted in The American Conservative, “but the war on Yemen and our role in enabling it have done exactly that.” Nevertheless, Republican leaders prevented the House from holding a full vote on the same proposition. Indeed, one of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s final acts in Congress will be helping to ensure that the United States remains complicit in mass starvation. The Senate is moving in the right direction.
And still, the House isn’t moving at all.
As the number of scandals surrounding the White House grows, so does, it seems, the president’s free time—and his ability to change the narrative.
It would take an exceptionally bad string of events to crown any one week the most tumultuous of Donald Trump’s presidency, but the past few days have been a strong contender. The Department of Justice implicated Trump in a scheme to pay two of his alleged former mistresses for their silence during the campaign, something he previously claimed to know nothing about. His longtime fixer, Michael Cohen, was sentenced to prison for campaign-finance violations, and revealed that he was readily cooperating with the special counsel in the Russia investigation. Trump boasted on live TV that he had the votes in the House to pass a $5 billion package to fund his border wall, only to learn by week’s end that not enough members had stuck around town to even try. Finally, the public learned that prosecutors are investigating whether Trump’s inaugural committee accepted donations from foreign nations.
All of this, and yet on Wednesday, for example, the day after his spectacle of a meeting with Democratic leaders about a possible government shutdown, Trump reportedly didn’t show up to work until noon. And on Thursday, the president enjoyed nine and a half hours of “executive time”—his blocked-off periods to phone outside advisers, tweet, and watch cable news—according to an official White House schedule shared with me.
He also firmed up his holiday plans, his team placing a travel hold on his schedule between December 21—the deadline to fund much of the government—and January 6, when he will likely be at his Mar-a-Lago resort, according to a source familiar with the matter.
This isn’t to say, though, that the president hasn’t been getting things done this week, according to Rudy Giuliani. “As mayor, some of my busiest days had an open or relatively open calendar,” Trump’s lawyer told me.
Indeed, for any other president confronting Trump’s potential legal and political woes, this spike in unstructured time might seem strange. But for this president, it’s an opportunity to dangle new carrots in front of the public, and to watch reporters flock to them in real time.
This week thus showcased not only how the White House’s problems show no signs of ebbing, but also how, in spite of them all, Trump can still convince people to look elsewhere.
Much of Trump’s executive time, according to sources close to the president, is spent scanning headlines and “obsessing,” in the words of one former senior White House official, over the stock market. Trump views both as key metrics of his presidency, and enjoys his ability to influence them within moments of hitting “Send Tweet” from the residency. Rather than try to put out existing fires, the sources said, Trump prefers to spark new ones that play to his penchant for showmanship and intrigue.
As news outlets dropped one troubling story after another this week, Trump did just that. In one of the more surreal moments of his presidency, he sporadically invited reporters into the Oval Office on Tuesday to look on as he and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi brawled over how to keep the government funded.
At the same event, he indulged reporters’ questions about who he would pick to replace John Kelly as his chief of staff. It was perhaps exactly the question he’d hoped for: Earlier that morning, during a stretch of executive time, he’d tweeted that “over ten are vying for and wanting the White House Chief of Staff position”—sending journalists scrambling to report the most up-to-date list possible.
Trump would adopt an Apprentice-like posture about the position for the rest of the week. In a meeting with Republican governors-elect on Thursday, he told reporters that the search for the next chief of staff was “down to five finalists.” He raved about the candidates, calling them “really good ones” and “terrific people.”
The diversion appeared to work. Twitter was abuzz on Wednesday when The Wall Street Journal scooped that the president had asked Congressman Mark Meadows to stay in the House rather than troop to the West Wing. On Wednesday, a reporter citing “two sources” tweeted that Newt Gingrich topped the list, prompting a flurry of opinion pieces as recently as today about whether Gingrich would be a good pick. (This, despite Gingrich’s apparent disinterest: I texted him Wednesday and asked whether he wanted the job, to which he promptly responded, “No.”)
Thursday evening, HuffPost reported that Jared Kushner was up for the gig. CBS quickly confirmed the report, but less than an hour later, the White House had knocked down the rumor. At the end of the night, Axios broke that Chris Christie had just met with Trump about the job.
All of which is to say that by Thursday night—nearing the end of a week that marked the conviction of one of Trump’s closest associates, an investigation into Trump’s inaugural committee, and uncertainty about a government shutdown—much of Washington was consumed by palace intrigue.
Many of Trump’s allies, though, have started to wonder at what point a few hours’ worth of tweets during executive time won’t be enough to paper over the issues confronting the White House.
Current and former White House officials told me they were worried, for example, about the political fallout that could come if Trump doesn’t make good on his promise to build the wall. Next Friday’s government-funding deadline likely represents Trump’s last chance to get a significant down payment on the wall, given that it will be a nonstarter in a Democratic-led House next year. The current and former officials said that if Trump misses this opportunity, it’s unclear how he will explain it to his base ahead of 2020.
“His Republican base would rather him close the government than cave on the funding,” Gingrich told me. “He has to fight for it.”
“It’s an existential threat to his reelection if he can’t get it done,” a former senior White House official echoed. “A vast swath of the Trump base is going to say, ‘You said the wall was going to be easy and Mexico was going to pay for it, and none of that happened.’ It’s going to be really tough to have a reelection campaign where you try to explain away that fact.”
The former official was quick to note, however, that Trump could very well succeed in convincing his base that there has, in fact, been “tremendous progress” on the wall, as he’s inaccurately claimed this week.
Each source I spoke with for this story said that Trump may always be able to tweet away his political problems. But Mueller’s investigation is another matter entirely.
“I don’t know what happens with the Russia investigation,” the former senior White House official said. “But if it’s bad, all the executive time in the world won’t help him.”
There was shock, then backlash. Last week, officials at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced their plans for the infamous Confederate statue known as Silent Sam, and it hardly satisfied anyone.
On Friday, protesters converged outside of the Center for Leadership Development at Chapel Hill as, inside, the UNC system’s Board of Governors met to deliberate on the university’s plan to erect a $5.3 million building on campus to house the monument. The building would also serve as a university history center. Ahead of the meeting, some board members expressed reservations about the proposal. Was there not a building already on campus that could house Silent Sam without having to spend $5.3 million on a new facility? Others argued that moving the statue to any building, but especially the proposed history center—which has all the hallmarks of a museum—might be illegal due to a state law that says prominently displayed monuments can’t be moved to museums.
In the end, the Board of Governors decided to punt. Harry Smith, the chair of the board, announced that they would be denying the plan presented by UNC Chapel Hill’s chancellor, Carol Folt, last week. For reasons of public safety, Smith said, alongside the sheer cost of the recommendation, the board could not support the plan. The board charged five of its members to meet with Folt to review other options for the statue. The deadline for the new recommendations is March 15, 2019.
The vote by the Board of Governors bookends a chaotic two weeks at the flagship institution. Late last week, more than 80 teaching assistants pledged to withhold final-exam grades for the fall semester unless the proposal was withdrawn, though they would make exceptions for students who needed final grades for graduation, job, or immigration purposes. Administrators forcefully responded. There would be “serious consequences” for such a strike, they said. One member of the Board of Governors—equating the action with “violence”—said that he would push for the expulsion of those who would participate in such a protest.
Then there was the striking incident during a faculty-council meeting where a black student, Angum Check, who had earned a Martin Luther King Jr. scholarship, confronted Folt. “I want to tell you, you are a disgrace,” Check said.
On Thursday, members of perhaps the most lauded organization on the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s campus, the men’s basketball team—including the alumni and NBA stars Vince Carter, Jerry Stackhouse, and Harrison Barnes, alongside several other former black athletes—sent a statement to university officials expressing “deep concern” about the proposal. “We love UNC but now also feel a disconnect from an institution that was unwilling to listen to students and faculty who asked for Silent Sam to be permanently removed from campus,” they wrote in a letter first reported by Spectacular Magazine, and confirmed by The Washington Post. “The recommendation is embarrassing to us who proudly promote UNC.”
[Read: The dramatic fall of Silent Sam, UNC’s Confederate monument]
Ultimately, the decision to punt is not surprising, given the consternation the plan has stirred up over the past several days. So, for now, officials will go back to the drawing board, and both Silent Sam’s supporters and those who would prefer him consigned to history will prepare for another battle in March.
Big waves in Portugal, holiday lights in Europe, New Year’s preparations in Japan, President Donald Trump’s former attorney sentenced to prison, images from the asteroid Bennu, a flight with Virgin Galactic, a Christmas event in a Brazilian prison, a giant middle finger in Vermont, and much more
The opening scene of The Innocent Man, a new Netflix true-crime series hitting streaming shelves just in time for the holidays, features a television, a prominently displayed copy of The Innocent Man by John Grisham, and a quote from Anaïs Nin: “We see things as we are, not as they are.”
That Anaïs Nin? The novelist, diarist, and pioneer of female erotica? It’s hard not to feel as if she’s cited a little arbitrarily here, positioned right next to Grisham, the undisputed king of legal thrillers, at the beginning of a true-crime series that seems tailored by algorithm for fans of existing shows about miscarriages of justice. The implication of Nin’s quote, though, is clear: The Innocent Man wants viewers to think about the unique biases—formed through a knotty tangle of life experiences—that each person inevitably brings to a situation, whether watching a TV show or serving on a jury. It’s a setup for a series that suggests it will think deeply about not just crime and punishment, but also circumstance and history.
Which, in the end, it doesn’t. There are a thousand fascinating component threads making up The Innocent Man, a six-episode series based in part on Grisham’s 2006 nonfiction book about two wrongful murder convictions in Ada, Oklahoma. (Grisham, an executive producer for the show, also appears in interviews.) In 1982, a young woman named Debbie Carter was brutally raped and murdered in her home. Two years later, 24-year-old Denice Haraway disappeared while working a shift at a convenience store. In each case, two men were arrested and convicted for the crime. Two of those men, Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz, have since been exonerated by DNA evidence. The other two, Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot, remain in prison, despite a preponderance of evidence suggesting that they’re innocent.
In making the case for Ward and Fontenot’s wrongful conviction, The Innocent Man seems of a piece with some of Netflix’s previous true-crime hits. Like Making a Murderer, it investigates a series of heinous attempts on the part of police to secure convictions. Like Wormwood, it re-creates snippets of the two murders in moody, shadowy footage, imbuing The Innocent Man with a jarring kind of creepiness. It spends significant time with the families of the dead women, as if to preempt criticism that true-crime series can end up obscuring the female victims in favor of the men behind bars. It’s also structured in that familiarly manipulative way, spending generous amounts of time reiterating already known facts before dropping colossal twists at the end of each episode.
The Innocent Man lays out neat timelines, stacks of evidence, an admirable number of in-person interviews, and a compelling argument that police and prosecutors in Ada unlawfully collaborated in getting four men convicted of murder. What it doesn’t explain is why the show’s events came to pass. The superlative true-crime series of the past few years don’t just re-litigate old cases and (very occasionally) produce definitive answers; they investigate the cultural and societal factors at play. Both Ezra Edelman’s Oscar-winning O.J.: Made in America and Ryan Murphy’s The People v. O. J. Simpson used the same obsessively covered crime to reveal sharp insights about race, celebrity, and tabloid culture. Netflix’s own The Keepers framed itself around a murder, but ended up telling a more thoughtful and valuable story about trauma, recovery, and fighting for justice.
Throughout all six episodes of The Innocent Man, elements studded into the story beg to be examined more closely. Not the nitty-gritty facts of the two crimes, which are exhaustively unpacked, but the circumstances that contributed to them. What is it about Ada, otherwise known as the birthplace of Blake Shelton, that made it host to two such horrific acts of violence against women, and two subsequent botched investigations? What is it that compels people to confess to crimes they haven’t committed? As the series nears its end, it throws out a handful of truly shocking allegations involving both habitual arrangements between corrupt police officers and drug dealers and the ongoing sexual assault of women in the prison system that deserve much closer scrutiny than they end up getting.
With Ada, The Innocent Man’s director, Clay Tweel, has the opportunity to examine a place that popular culture virtually never makes time for. Ada is, Grisham explains in the first episode, the kind of close-knit community with a church on every corner, where “everybody goes to the high-school football game on Friday night.” But it’s also the kind of place where, when a woman is murdered, there are a disproportionate number of plausible suspects with a documented history of violence against women. The culture in Ada seems to merit more analysis than it gets. The Innocent Man briefly details one of the most notorious moments in local history, when a vigilante mob in 1909 lynched four citizens suspected of murder. But it doesn’t reveal how a grisly image of the lynching was for years proudly printed on local postcards with the caption, Ada: A Great Place to Hang Out.
None of this is to say that the story of Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot isn’t worth telling. That they remain in prison still seems indefensible at this point, and The Innocent Man makes clear that as many as 90,000 prisoners in the U.S. could be wrongfully imprisoned. It’s to argue that the most interesting elements in the series are the ones left unexplored. Loose threads abound. And together, they hint at a larger story more compelling and less familiar than the one that’s actually being told.
Subscribe to Radio Atlantic: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Play
This week saw lots of developments in Mueller’s investigation: Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, David Pecker, and Maria Butina—who on Thursday became the first Russian national convicted of seeking to influence the 2016 election. As part of Russia’s years-long effort to cozy up to the American right, Butina gained access to conservative circles through the National Rifle Association. And as the NRA is under scrutiny for ties to Russian operatives, it appears that they illegally coordinated with the Trump campaign.
On this week’s Radio Atlantic, Alex Wagner talks with the Atlantic staff writer Natasha Bertrand to catch up on the week’s news. Then, to make sense of how the gun lobby, Russia, and the Trump campaign connect to one another, she’s joined by Mike Spies, a staff writer for The Trace, who covers the gun lobby.
Listen to learn how the NRA evolved from a small sportsman’s organization to a Washington powerhouse to now, it seems, a potential back channel to the Kremlin.
(Note: This episode was taped before news of investigations into Trump’s inauguration spending.)
VoicesAlex Wagner (@AlexWagner)
Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand)
Mike Spies (@mikespiesnyc)
The feud between Kanye West and Drake, reignited by an Epic of Gilgamesh–length stream of tweets from West on Thursday night that Drake has not yet publicly responded to, involves violence and illness, race and family, music and capitalism. It started, though, with swimming. “Since the pool line he’s been trying to poke at me and fuck with me,” West tweeted, likely referring to these Drake lyrics from 2016: “Now I got a house in L.A., now I got a bigger pool than Ye / And look man, Ye’s pool is nice, mine’s just bigger’s what I’m saying.”
Was that not just a fun boast? What’s Kanye’s problem? That question would take a dissertation to answer. Sure, rap beef is plentiful these days, and West’s status as a public figure worth paying attention to has clearly been on the wane. But this feud is a reminder of his great talent for forcing a conversation. As is way too often the case, a dispute between rich people takes on grander dimensions because of how cannily those people have made their personal life a public concern—one that not only entertains, but that also purports to have social significance.
Drake, arguably the most popular active musician on the planet, arrived in the hip-hop world in 2009 professing a debt to West. On his mixtape So Far Gone, Drake rapped over the beat of “Say You Will” from West’s 808s & Heartbreak, a path-breaking reenvisioning of rap as electronic emo. In a beautiful example of cosmic rhyming, the offense that set off West’s fury this week was Drake requesting that West, almost 10 years after So Far Gone’s debut, sign off on the rights for the sample that Drake had used back then. West took a screenshot of the text message conveying that request and tweeted, “This proves shit faker than wrestling.”
[Read: Pusha T, Drake, and the limits of rap beef]
He seemed to be saying that Drake was a hypocrite for acting as though things were cool between them even though they weren’t. Hostilities erupted between the two camps—West and his allies, Drake and his—earlier this year, when Pusha T rapped on a West-made beat about Drake using ghostwriters for his lyrics: an old accusation airing the traditionalist take that Drake is more of a slick pop idol than a true emcee. Drake replied with an exasperated sigh of a freestyle pointing out that West, Pusha T’s boss, is hip-hop’s ultimate user of other people’s talents. Pusha then escalated things with a cruel song revealing that Drake had secretly fathered a 1-year-old son—information that had been only rumored, and that Drake had been set to address on his then-forthcoming album, Scorpion. (West insists that despite Drake’s suspicions to the contrary, he did not leak this intelligence to Pusha.)
Amid all of this, West had been tweeting and making music that reckoned with his own bipolar diagnosis, espoused admiration for Donald Trump, and—most consistently—preached woo-woo love and positivity. Extending the latter theme, he eventually took to Twitter to make amends with Drake, saying that he shouldn’t have ever participated in music that dissed him. “I will be coming to your show within the next seven days to give love and be inspired by the art you have created,” West posted in September. But that peace has proved fragile, and West says it’s because the Toronto rapper has been engaged in behind-the-scenes intimidation and in-public passive aggression.
Serious charges were leveled in Thursday’s tweets. West suggested that Drake hired the person who threw items at Pusha T during a Toronto concert and claimed that Drake—in the middle of West’s tweetstorm—called him and directly threatened West’s family. West’s wife, Kim Kardashian, backed him up, tweeting, “@drake Never threaten my husband or our family. He paved the way for there to be a Drake.”
Kardashian is, of course, the universe’s ultimate commodifier of private lives, and her reality-TV family is intrinsic to this feud. Drake has allegedly been texting with her mom, Kris Jenner, and one of West’s grievances earlier this year was that Drake let rumors of an affair between Kardashian and him go on for too long. On the No. 1 hit “Sicko Mode,” by Travis Scott (the father of Kardashian’s niece Stormi), Drake glowers about creeping around a neighborhood looking to settle a score, and West’s new tweets seem to confirm the fan theory that Drake had literally been talking about the geography of the Los Angeles suburb where both he and Drake have homes. (My mind was melted at this particular detail.)
So: As feuds go, this is about as “family”—incestuous and cloistered—as one can be. But West has insisted on making it about more than that. Drake’s tough talk and alleged brutality are “why black people never get ahead,” he tweeted, while bringing up XXXTentacion and Tupac, two murdered rappers. Another transgression by Drake: disrespecting people with a mental illness, such as West’s buddy Kid Cudi (whom Drake indeed made fun of for admitting to depression) and West himself (who Drake … sent inappropriate emojis to?). This is a classic West maneuver, politicizing the personal, and while in the past it has been effective at kick-starting important discussions, in this case West has mired his larger points in so much gossip bait that it’s hard to imagine anything productive resulting.
Aside from the notion of a direct threat by phone, little of what West has said of Drake is all that shocking. Drake does make vaguely violent warnings in his songs; he does “sneak diss” habitually; he surely toys with minds and meddles in friendships. If he really were a good guy, he’d knock that all off. But it’s hard to escape the feeling that the real war here is about relevance. West’s statements were couched in reminders of his own influence—“I’m the guy with the pink polo that made a way for him”—even though West has not been landing hits the way he used to, and certainly not in the way Drake has been lately. Picking this fight diverts attention from why West has alienated some of his audience—Trump isn’t involved here, for example—while also building chatter when he has sneakers to sell. Peace may only come when he gets a bigger pool.
What was the best book you read in 2018, and why?
Here’s how they responded.
My favorite book of 2018 was Melmoth by Sarah Perry. On its surface, this book is about the narrator’s encounter with a supernatural specter—an immortal witch known as Melmoth, or the witness, who observes people’s worst deeds and then stalks them with the intention of convincing them to follow her on her doomed and lonely quest to traverse the Earth for eternity. However, the brilliance of this book is that it is actually so much more than a horror story.
The storytelling of the book is so effective in that it expertly builds suspense by alluding to events without actually revealing them until the moment is right. This pulls readers in, as the characters are slowly and exquisitely crafted so that the reader connects with them, feeling what they go through while also marveling at their experiences. Further, the novel deals with intense and heavy themes such as guilt, morality, purpose, forgiveness, and courage. It explores the motives and actions of individuals, all the while delving into their thought processes and feelings during monumental life events. In this way, it is a story about humanity. It asks us to look at others, both likable and wretched, through the lens of their past. It asks us to consider not just who the person is, but how they came out on the other side of traumatic experiences. And, finally, it describes painful moments in history while keeping a personal and heartfelt touch.
On to the craft itself. The prose is sublime. Sarah Perry is obviously a very gifted writer, and this combined with her adept storytelling makes for an enthralling read.
Sarah Perry has created a versatile book that will appeal to horror and thriller fans while also providing a quality and well-developed story that fiction and philosophy fans will appreciate.
Daniel K. Williams
Naperville, Ill.
My book of the year is Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire by Peter H. Wilson. For years I have searched and finally found a good history of the Holy Roman Empire. The heart of Europe was often derided for its failure to unite as France had done. However, in this book one finds the reasons as to why it was a truly united empire in many respects and why it lasted a thousand years. A government structure does not last a thousand years unless it is built on solid institutions that serve the needs of the people. Its appearance seemed “wrong” in so many ways when historians compared it to a unified state such as France or England, but it served the people just as well if not better than those unified states. It is a good example of how disparate territorial units can operate together for the needs of all.
When it actually emerged as a unitary German state with Bismarck as the midwife, within a century it brought untold misery to the German people who had prospered for a thousand years as the people of the Holy Roman Empire.
Gerald Hanisch
Dell Rapids, S.D.
Given the current state of the country, most of my reading this year has been political, including nonfiction on the rise of al-Qaeda and Michiko Kakutani’s incredible meditation on the nature of truth and how it has been perverted in the public discourse. But my favorite book by far was Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Mysterious and meditative, charming and heart-wrenching, this book reminded me of how important it is to empathize with and understand people who are not like me.
Klarissa Fitzpatrick
Paris, France
Educated: A Memoir is the book that has captured my attention most this year, for the eloquent way that Tara Westover illustrated how she finally escaped the trauma of growing up with abusive family members who brainwashed her and retaliated against her for her refusal to obey their commands.
Marilyn Sears Lindsey
Shawnee, Okla.
Regarding my favorite book published in 2018, it would be Dara Horn’s Eternal Life. I love fictional stories that are based around real historical events and take a big-picture look at the whole of human civilization. Ms. Horn’s book did this amazingly well, with a refreshing, feminine point of view.
Karin Hess
Raleigh, N.C.
I’d like to share two books that were favorites of mine in 2018: one by an American writer, George Saunders—Lincoln in the Bardo, and the other by an American-born Canadian, Michael Redhill—Bellevue Square. Like many other people, I enjoy a good story with well-developed characters, but I also love the experience and literary excitement of reading something really different, really creative, and something that jostles my own thought patterns. I want my brain to explode a little when novel environments, situations, or ideas are presented in literature.
That happened with both of the above-mentioned books.
Linden Evans
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels. Much needed in the current climate as a reminder of the essential values that have animated this nation.
Harry W. Gilmer
Madison, Mo.
My favorite book of 2018, hands down, was Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Who could have imagined that such a novel approach to history was out there for the pondering, let alone the writing? Harari’s ideas are so original and powerful that I believe they could serve as a new platform for the kinds of history books to come. To miss this book is a huge oversight for anyone looking to understand history through the most thought-provoking lens possible.
Terry Munson
Pawleys Island, S.C.
My favorite book of the year has been A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.
It is a warm and witty telling of a personal story of one man and his friends and family that also educated me about a time period and place of which I had limited knowledge. It has larger messages that are both timely and timeless.
Theresa Tejas Zingery
Golden Valley, Minn.
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles was published in 2016 but I only read it in 2018. It is the best book I have read in the past five years. Towles writes a novel that is placed in a real setting, pays close attention to real events in the USSR, is filled with distinctive characters, and has a little bit of everything: drama, suspense, tragedy, humor, action, and pathos. It is a long read but I almost hated to see it come to an end.
John Lawson
Silver City, N.M.
My favorite book of 2018 features writing from the 18th century—The Federalist Papers—and that’s largely because in these ignoble times when ignorance rages, it was good to remind myself that we were and are better than what we are putting up with. The Federalist Papers are clear, concise, and to the point, making the best use possible of history and political philosophy. They weren’t starry-eyed, but alert to the dangers that faced the young republic. Everyone should read them.
Theodore D’Afflisio
Palermo, Sicily
My favorite book this year was James Carroll’s The Cloister. Set in New York City in the ’50s, it veers between the legendary love story of Heloise and Abelard and their “cloister” in medieval Europe, and the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s monastery-like center for medieval arts, in New York. A third time period is the years of the Holocaust. All three stories come together in a wonderfully rich, theologically profound, and truly moving novel. As a Pittsburgher who just went through the Tree of Life synagogue massacre, I found the novel spoke to me of the long Christian/Jewish conflict and our struggle 800 years later of still not arriving at complete resolution. It’s well worth one’s time.
Rita M. Yeasted
Pittsburgh, Pa.
Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck was my favorite book of 2018. It is beautifully crafted, bringing to life the immigration crisis by introducing an East German classical-philology professor in current Germany to African migrants. Every sentence is balanced, the rhythm and pacing are perfect, and it’s full of a longing for the senses of home. It is just right for these days when I, and I bet many others, are feeling dislocated in the world as it is.
Robin Aronson
New York, N.Y.
The best book I read was Grant by Ron Chernow. It was very long and read like a novel. Grant was a failure to his father, his wife’s family, and his siblings. Grant was a genius in the army in both tactics and strategy, and that brilliance won the war. His character was sublime; but Andrew Johnson, as president, allowed the Confederacy to win the peace regardless of how hard Grant fought both as a general and as president. His largest weakness was his trust in his family, his friends, and colleagues. Sherman, Sheridan, and Lincoln saw him as he was. And that was an incredible and moral man.
Mitchell Kaplan
Highland Park, Ill.
My favorite book this year was Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult. “If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way,” is one of the many inspiring quotes by Martin Luther King Jr. This quote encouraged me to get involved and try to make a difference in my little world. I have been moved to do small things that might help to make life better for some people.
Janice Shreffler
Westchester, Pa.
Hands down, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou, about the rise and collapse of Theranos in Silicon Valley. I read it in one sitting, finishing at 5:00 a.m. I couldn’t stop, even though I knew the ending: a story of someone pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes right there in plain sight.
The timing of Bad Blood was perfect. A classic “the emperor has no clothes” story with someone finally laying out the truth. People who should have known better stuck with Elizabeth Holmes way too long because they believed her and not the facts. Remind you of anyone?
Jennie Hakes
Aitkin, Minn.
My favorite book this year is still Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations! It provides the perfect set of recommendations to Donald Trump.
Paul Hoff
Akazawa, Japan
I reread To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and thoroughly enjoyed it. Many social issues remain as current today as when the book was written.
Linda C. Wilson
Cheyenne, Wyo.
21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari.
It is among the three most significant books that I have read in the past 10 years. It defines, with elegant reasoning, our path for the future, both human and ecological.
Jack Cain
Winnetka, Ill.
Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh
A Forbidden Rumspringa / A Clean Break / A Way Home by Keira Andrews
The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life by David Quammen
The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah
The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk
Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward
Certain Relevant Passages by Joe Manning
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
There There by Tommy Orange
Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II by Liza Mundy
The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist’s Journey from Helplessness to Optimism by Martin E. P. Seligman
No one today quite understands how they did it, but people in the Stone Age could turn ribbons of birch bark into sticky, black tar. They used this tar to make tools, fixing arrowheads onto arrows and blades onto axes. And they chewed it, as evidenced by teeth marks in some lumps.
These unassuming lumps of chewed birch-bark tar turn out to be an extraordinary source of ancient DNA. This month, two separate research groups posted preprints describing DNA from the tar in Stone Age Scandinavia. The two papers have not yet been peer reviewed, but they are already generating excitement about what they herald.
“It’s really amazing,” says Pontus Skoglund, an ancient-DNA researcher at Francis Crick Institute who was not involved with either study. Ancient DNA from human bones and teeth have recently revolutionized the study of the past, but many cultures over time did not bury their dead and left no remains to analyze. Chewing gum could fill in some of the gaps. It could also reveal a wealth of additional information, such as who helped make the Stone Age tools, what they ate, and what bacteria lived in their teeth.
[Read: Scientists can now pull the DNA of ancient humans out of cave dirt]
The first new paper describes human DNA from three 10,000-year-old pieces of birch-bark tar, all found at a site called Huseby Klev in western Sweden. Having never extracted DNA from tar before, the team tried a protocol originally designed to extract DNA from feces—and it worked. Each piece of tar appears to have been chewed by just one person. In total, the tar pieces captured the DNA of two females and one male.
The site where the lumps were found was littered with the raw material and leftovers from making stone blades. From this, the authors suggest that it was actually a site for making tools, and chewing birch-bark tar was a step in the production process. If so, it would mean both men and women made tools during the Stone Age. And because some of the teeth marks appear to be from baby teeth, it suggests that children had a role, too. All this hints at the social structure of Stone Age society. “The most exciting part is how close we can come to the culture,” says Natalija Kashuba, a researcher at the University of Oslo and first author on the paper.
Ancient DNA can be prone to contamination from modern humans handling the sample. In this case, however, the DNA in the chewing gum appears to be genuinely ancient. “It’s very clear the DNA they get out has ancestry that was only there around 8,000 or 5,000 years ago, and it’s not really there anymore,” Skoglund says. The DNA of the three people looked a lot like the DNA of other hunter-gatherers who lived in northern Europe around that time.
In a second paper, researchers predicted the physical appearance of a 5,700-year-old woman based on chewed birch-bark tar found in Denmark. To modern eyes, she would have looked unusual. She had dark skin, dark hair, and blue eyes, all of which were characteristic of Europe’s hunter-gatherers then. A recent reconstruction of Cheddar Man, a 10,000-year-old hunter-gatherer skeleton found in Britain, also revealed dark skin and blue eyes.
The second team analyzed nonhuman DNA in the chewing gum, too. “You can recover microbial DNA,” says Hannes Schroeder, an ancient-DNA researcher at the University of Copenhagen who led the study. “And this opens up whole other possibilities.” Other groups have studied ancient plaque that built up over years on teeth, but the chewing gum provides an instant snapshot of what was in the mouth. It’s comparable to how scientists study the oral microbiome of people today, and unsurprisingly, the microbial species they found were broadly similar. There were differences in two types of microbes called Veillonellales and Neisseriales, which the team suggests may be due to hunter-gatherers eating fewer carbohydrates before the advent of farming.
[Read: Ancient DNA is rewriting human (and Neanderthal) history]
They also found direct evidence of what the woman ate, in the form of DNA from mallard duck and eel in the chewed tar. This matches up with archaeological evidence at the site, including duck bones and tools for catching eels.
In the Stone Age, the area where this woman was chewing and spitting out birch-bark tar was a lagoon. Today, it’s the site of a massive construction project for a tunnel connecting Denmark and Germany. Theis Jensen, a graduate student in Schroeder’s research group, had helped with pre-construction excavations, and he was the one who convinced colleagues at Museum Lolland-Falster, which is responsible for the excavations, to hand over a piece of birch-bark tar to test. Using the DNA contained within, the team has been able to piece together what one 5,700-year-old woman looked like, what she ate, and even the microbes living in her mouth. “It’s like having the ghost in front of you,” Jensen says.
For all the questions it could answer, birch-bark tar is still at the center of many mysteries. Making it requires a steady application of heat and an oxygen-free environment, and archaeologists aren’t quite sure how people in the Stone Age achieved this without ceramic pots. It’s also unclear exactly why they chewed it: Was it for recreation or health or for making tools or all of the above? Whatever it was, the people who chewed birch-bark tar unwittingly left behind a rich record of the past.
The French protesters known as the “Yellow Vests,” for the safety jackets that have become the emblem of their movement against austerity, income inequality, and the government of President Emmanuel Macron, are hard to describe accurately on a left-right political spectrum.
That has not stopped politicians and activists of all stripes from attempting to claim the movement, but it is worth taking any opportunity to actually listen to the voices of the protesters themselves. So we can be grateful that video journalist Raul Gallego Abellan spent last Saturday in Paris asking a broad spectrum of protesters how they describe the movement themselves, and what they say to observers who want to focus only on the sporadic clashes with the police that broke out along the Champs-Élysées.
What was striking about the protesters Gallego Abellan met and spoke with, he said, was how much more diverse, politically and socially, they were than the largely white, rural members of the movement who took to the streets last month, when the protests were triggered by a planned fuel tax increase and joined by far-right activists.
Last weekend, Gallego Abellan said, more left-wing activists, students, ambulance drivers, truck drivers, and others joined the protest. There were also, for the first time, “people from the poor suburbs called the banlieues,” the filmmaker noted, “urban working-class, middle-class, second- and third-generation immigrants from North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.”
On the streets of Paris on Saturday, the central message was that the poor, the working class, and the middle class were being taxed too much to support policies that rewarded the rich. People said they were tired of the political system that had forced them last year to vote for Macron, a former minister and investment banker, just to keep out the far-right National Front candidate, Marine Le Pen.
Macron “misjudged the nature of his mandate when he won,” the British commentator David Runciman argued this week on his “Talking Politics” podcast. “The key election was the first round, not the second round, of the French presidential system, when he won 24 percent of the vote. That’s his support. Everything else has to be coalition-building, everything has to be compromise, and he has governed as the guy who won 66 percent of the vote in the second round.”
Protesters of all ages and races said that they were tired of being taken for granted. They also refused to let their movement be taken over by more violent elements — vandals known in French as “casseurs,” or “breakers” — but were also aware that until some parts of the wealthy French capital were smashed up in recent weeks, the government had all but ignored their demands.
“The police last weekend tried to seal off the center of Paris, but again did not succeed in stopping the demonstration or the violence or rioters,” Gallego Abellan explained. “Actually, the roadblocks and the attitude of the riot police this time created the violence. The start of the protest was totally peaceful, but the police were trying to intimidate and disperse the people, by passing into the middle of the protest with lines of officers in riot gear.”
There was, he noted, a lot of tear gas fired, as well as rubber bullets and stun grenades, but it was largely ineffective at actually dispersing the crowd of more than 8,000 protesters who persisted in gathering in the center. “Gas, if there is wind, leaves after few minutes,” Gallego Abellan noted, “and people lost their fear and even threw it back at the police constantly. They shot lots of rubber bullets, but when you have so many people, you’ll never have enough rubber bullets for everybody.”
The tear gas and rubber bullets, he said, seemed only to make people more angry and more inclined to clash with the police.
“The majority was peaceful, but there was a big group of people that joined in to make barricades and clash with the police. Then a smaller group started looting and breaking into shops and burning cars,” the filmmaker said. “There were also protesters trying to stop the violence, but the areas of the city where they were burning cars and looting were where rich people live, so lots of people seemed to feel, ‘I’m against this, but people are angry and anyway: Fuck the rich.'”
The post Video: The Faces and Voices of the “Yellow Vests” in France appeared first on The Intercept.
O Brasil mal havia se recuperado da surra que tomou da Alemanha na semifinal da Copa do Mundo de 2014, quando o assunto surgiu dentro de uma reunião tensa no interior de Minas Gerais. No dia 21 de julho, no auditório da prefeitura de Diamantina, prefeitos da região, conselheiros ambientais e pesquisadores discutiam, exaltados, a possibilidade de se liberar mais um empreendimento de mineração na área. Mais especificamente, em Morro do Pilar, pequena cidade de pouco mais de três mil habitantes, onde a mineradora Manabi tentava autorização para começar sua extração de ferro.
“Eu acho que a população tem de ser informada. Não vivam de sonhos e fantasias. Senão vocês vão levar 7 a 1. E o 1 são vocês, o 7 é a Manabi”, disse a antropóloga Andrea Zouri, coordenadora do Grupo de Estudos em Temáticas Ambientais da UFMG. “Quantos médicos tem em Morro do Pilar? Vocês vão receber 6 mil trabalhadores. Seis mil trabalhadores! Como vocês vão tratar de 6 mil?”, ela perguntou.
Ao continuar enumerando os problemas do empreendimento, sua fala foi interrompida pelo menos 12 vezes por Danilo Vieira Júnior, então presidente do conselho, que a alertava que seus cinco minutos já haviam se esgotado. “Quilombo não é um bando, um grupamento de negros, não é assim que se trata quilombo”, ela continuou, ainda interrompida por Vieira: “por favor…”. Ela pediu mais cinco minutos de fala, e o conselho aceitou. Deu tempo de questionar o modelo de desenvolvimento vendido pela mineração aos prefeitos locais e de colocar à disposição a análise de impacto feita por sua equipe.
Pouco depois, a pesquisadora foi novamente confrontada – desta vez, pela então prefeita da cidade, Vilma Diniz, que a desafiou: “a senhora conhece Morro do Pilar?”. Segundo Diniz, a população local apoiava o empreendimento. A prefeita foi cassada dois anos depois por fraude em licitações no município. O impasse continua até hoje: o atual prefeito, Juca, do PDT, tem dito que a retomada da mineração “é a única solução, um mal necessário”.
O conselho ambiental da região decidiu liberar quatro meses depois o empreendimento. Por causa dos inúmeros problemas mal explicados e mal resolvidos, no entanto, o Ibama e o Ministério Público conseguiram frear a extração de ferro na região. Todo esse esforço pode estar prestes a cair: o Brasil está às vésperas da aprovação de uma nova Lei Geral de Licenciamento Ambiental, que afrouxa as regras e impacta justamente empreendimentos com as características do proposto em Morro do Pilar. Se o projeto for aprovado – o que ruralistas com o evidente apoio das mineradoras planejam ainda para 2018 –, a pequena cidade deve viver o seu próprio 7 a 1.
Estrada Real interrompida, nascentes destruídasMorro do Pilar tem pouco mais de 3,5 mil habitantes e fica na parte central da Serra do Espinhaço, a menos de 200 km de Belo Horizonte. As prefeituras da região têm sido muito receptivas com as mineradoras – porque delas vem muito dinheiro. Só em Morro do Pilar, a iniciativa da Manabi – que hoje se chama MLog – renderia à prefeitura pelo menos R$ 50 milhões, uma arrecadação excepcional para uma cidade tão pequena. Até agora, R$ 7 milhões já foram repassados pela empresa ao governo municipal.
Mas a região conhece bem os impactos da mineração. A 40 quilômetros dali fica a extração de ferro Minas-Rio, da transnacional Anglo American, sediada no município de Conceição do Mato Dentro.
Além dos problemas ambientais – como destruição da fauna e flora e poluição –, a mineração forçou comunidades e agricultores a abandonarem suas propriedades, encareceu o preço dos imóveis e trouxe os males do crescimento desordenado para a cidade. “Hoje, o desenvolvimento, o mercado que mais cresceu em Conceição é o tráfico de drogas, e esse desenvolvimento a gente não quer para o nosso município”, alertou o então secretário de Planejamento de Conceição, Ricardo Guerra, durante a reunião que concedeu a licença prévia à MLog.
Cachoeira do Lajeado, no Rio Picão, em Morro do Pilar: no caminho da mineração.
Sergio Mourao/Flickr/Creative Commons
A mineração da Anglo é marcada por uma série de violações, vigilância, assédio e perseguições contra opositores em Conceição do Mato Dentro e região. O Ministério Público mineiro cobra mais de R$ 400 milhões da transnacional pelos danos morais coletivos e sociais causados.
A proposta da MLog segue o mesmo roteiro. A empresa foi, inclusive, fundada por ex-executivos da MMX, empresa de Eike Batista que foi vendida à Anglo American. A MLog planeja usar a bacia do rio Santo Antônio, a mesma usada pela transnacional, para extrair milhões de toneladas de ferro em Morro do Pilar.
“Do nosso ponto de vista, as propostas são basicamente iguais”, relata Sammer Siman, um dos membros da Articulação da Bacia do Rio Santo Antônio. “Em 2014 fizemos visitas a alguns municípios impactados pelo projeto da Anglo, como cidades pelas quais o mineroduto passa e também Conceição do Mato Dentro. A estrutura é a mesma, e os problemas também”, diz.
A proposta passará por cima de 8,5 quilômetros da Estrada Real, a maior rota turística do país. Também afetará a área de proteção ambiental do Rio Picão, causará desmatamento de trechos nativos de Mata Atlântica e a destruição de pelo menos 36 nascentes na zona de impacto da obra. Importantes afluentes da bacia do Santo Antônio, como os rios Cuba, do Peixe, Picão, Preto e os ribeirões das Lajes e Ponte Alta serão poluídos com rejeitos da mineração.
Desde 2012 o Ministério Público do estado cobra explicações da empresa em relação aos verdadeiros danos que a mineração pode causar no município. O grupo MLog foi autorizado a minerar na região pelo governo de Minas Gerais em 2013. A licença ambiental foi concedida em 2014 pelo Conselho Ambiental da região depois dos bate-bocas em uma epopeia de mais de 12h. O Ibama travou parte do empreendimento – o mineroduto e um porto em Linhares (ES) – e o MP mineiro tentou, sem sucesso, revogar a licença prévia.
Nos últimos anos, a queda no preço das commodities e as negativas do Ibama seguraram os ânimos da MLog. Mas a empresa garante: no início de 2019, o licenciamento será retomado. E é aqui que a Lei Geral de Licenciamento Ambiental entra em cena.
O impacto da Lei GeralO PL 3729/04, a Lei Geral do Licenciamento Ambiental, foi apresentado há 14 anos por deputados da bancada do PT. Desde então, foi gradualmente desfigurado pela inclusão de projetos da bancada ruralista – essa mistura resultou em uma colcha de retalhos costurada para abarcar interesses de todos os envolvidos.
Segundo a proposta, órgãos responsáveis poderão acelerar a concessão caso um empreendimento esteja situado em uma mesma área de influência ou em condições similares a outros que já tenham obtido a licença ambiental. Caso, por exemplo, da mineração em Morro do Pilar e Conceição do Mato Dentro.
Além disso, de acordo com a lei, a autorização deixará de ser necessária para iniciativas em unidades de conservação de uso sustentável, tal como a Área de Proteção Ambiental do Rio Picão, em Morro do Pilar.
Neste momento, o projeto está engatilhado na Comissão de Finanças e Tributação da Câmara dos Deputados. Essa comissão tem, entre seus membros, velhos conhecidos das mineradoras. O deputado Leonardo Quintão, do MDB de Minas Gerais, é o mais conhecido. Ele relatou o Marco Regulatório da Mineração, depois de ter recebido generosas contribuições das mineradoras nas eleições de 2014: foram R$ 930 mil em doações de empresas como AngloGold, Cia. Brasileira de Metalurgia e Mineração e Usiminas.
Membros da Frente Parlamentar de Mineração também estão envolvidos. Um deles, o deputado Marcos Montes, do PSD de Minas Gerais, trabalhou bastante para emplacar a Lei Geral. Em 2014, ele recebeu mais de R$ 900 mil em doações de mineradoras como AngloGold e Vale. Em 2016, quando era presidente da Frente Parlamentar da Agropecuária, a FPA, Montes tentou viabilizar um acordo para a votação do projeto.
Segundo o Ministério Público Federal, a Lei Geral oferece brechas específicas para mineradoras. Uma delas é a possibilidade de ‘testes de mineração’ do mesmo porte que os empreendimentos em seu estágio final; em outras palavras, empresas poderão minerar sem licença ambiental.
A proposta também incentiva uma espécie de guerra fiscal por empreendimentos dos mais variados, como usinas hidrelétricas, construção de ferrovias e também mineradoras. Por exemplo: empresas podem estimular um leilão entre estados ou municípios vizinhos no momento da escolha dos pontos pelos quais um mineroduto passará. “O PL poderia gerar uma ‘corrida’ pela flexibilização do licenciamento com a finalidade de atrair investimentos”, diz Maurício Guetta, advogado do Instituto Socioambiental.
Foto: José Emílio Perillo/Folhapress
Outro problema é que o projeto retiraria o poder de veto de entidades como Funai, Fundação Cultural Palmares, IPHAN, Ibama e órgãos gestores de parques nacionais e áreas de proteção permanente. Na prática, a medida enfraquece brutalmente a oposição de ambientalistas, indígenas, quilombolas e outras comunidades a grandes empreendimentos.
Além disso, o projeto poderá permitir empreendimentos em unidades de conservação de proteção integral, como os parques nacionais da Amazônia ou da Chapada dos Veadeiros, além de excluir a compensação por impactos em unidades de uso sustentável. As medidas colocam reservas naturais sob alto risco de poluição e degradação.
Um sonho de consumo para os ruralistasAfrouxar o licenciamento no país se tornou prioridade da Frente Parlamentar da Agropecuária logo após as eleições. Uma das principais razões é que, além de beneficiar o setor de mineração, a Lei Geral também isenta projetos de pecuária extensiva e atividades agrícolas em geral da necessidade de licenciamento.
A atual versão do texto foi relatada por um membro da Frente Parlamentar da Agropecuária, o deputado Mauro Pereira, do MDB. Outros notórios ruralistas, como Alceu Moreira, também do MDB e atual vice-presidente da FPA, e o tucano Nilson Leitão, ex-presidente do bloco, foram alguns dos defensores da Lei Geral em 2018.
Valdir Colatto, do MDB e coordenador da comissão de Meio Ambiente da FPA, chegou ao ponto de sugerir que esse tipo de licenciamento prévio não fosse mais necessário. “Quem for fazer um empreendimento entra com o processo de licenciamento ambiental, e a fiscalização deverá ser feita durante a implantação. Após o término, se estiver tudo conforme as normas exigidas, será aprovado”, disse, em audiência pública realizada pela Comissão de Meio Ambiente da Câmara em 2017.
Parte dos parlamentares da FPA, porém, considera estratégico deixar sua votação para 2019, mas não há consenso sobre o tema. Um dos motivos é a posição da presidente da bancada ruralista, a futura ministra da Agricultura.
A escolhida de Bolsonaro para pasta, a deputada sul-matogrossense Tereza Cristina, do DEM, já avisou que, entre as pautas a serem votadas neste ano, “o licenciamento talvez seja a mais importante”. Cristina disse ainda que sua aprovação “seria uma coisa muito boa para a agropecuária, mas principalmente para outros segmentos da sociedade que têm pautas travadas”.
The post Mineradoras e ruralistas se unem para afrouxar regras de licenciamento ambiental appeared first on The Intercept.
Incoming members of Congress Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib have both come out in favor of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement — the first House members to ever do so.
Critics, however, suggest that BDS is anti-Semitic and undermines a two-state solution in the Middle East. Others say that supporters of BDS aren’t consistent in their criticism of human rights and unfairly focus on the actions of Israel.
In his latest video essay, The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan examines — and debunks — some of the myths and controversies surrounding the BDS movement.
The post The Truth About Israel, Boycotts, and BDS appeared first on The Intercept.
On Monday, the Trump administration hosted an event on behalf of the fossil fuel industry at the United Nations climate talks in Poland, known as COP24. It was almost identical to the one it hosted at last year’s climate talks in Germany: trying to write coal, oil, and gas into the world’s response to climate change, and bemoaning “alarmism” on climate. Both were disrupted by organizers from the United States voicing their opposition, and both received more media coverage than just about anything else happening at either talks, which this year are focused on arriving at a deeply technical rulebook to implement the Paris agreement.
What the flashy White House sideshow obscured, though, is that the U.S. position in Poland, when it comes to the substance of the talks, is indistinguishable on many fronts from the approach taken by the Obama administration. In fact, that agenda is being carried out by many of the very same people, a largely overlapping crew of career technical negotiators keeping a lower profile than Donald Trump team’s at the White House.
That’s not necessarily good news. While the rhetoric coming from the Obama administration was 180 degrees from that of the Trump administration, American negotiators under President Barack Obama were not intent on driving the world toward the most aggressive climate action possible. Quite the opposite.
Since Trump’s election, the narrative surrounding the team of U.S. negotiators at U.N. climate talks has been a largely sympathetic one, of well-meaning career diplomats simply trying to keep their heads down and make the best of it before the administration can officially pull out of the Paris agreement in late 2020.
There’s some truth to that, and the U.S. team is quieter than usual on several issues, according to those who have been in negotiating rooms at COP24. But U.S. negotiators are also hard at work and deep in the weeds of the Paris rulebook-crafting process. “They are actively engaging and they are making sure that the interests of the United States are represented. They are not innocent bystanders. They are active participants,” said Meena Raman, a senior researcher at Third World Network, who has tracked the talks closely for decades.
In something of a good cop-bad cop routine, the public campaign being waged against the Paris agreement by top Trump officials plays into the hands of U.S. negotiators, according to negotiation insiders who declined to be named. The loud condemnation of the agreement gives negotiators political room to demand changes that weaken it.
That the U.S. role behind closed doors is mostly the same as it was before Trump’s inauguration is a big problem for those looking for more ambition to come out of the COP24 rulebook discussions. “By putting roadblocks across all different areas of the rulebook, the U.S. is playing a very dangerous game here in negotiations, at a time when the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] has sent a stark and scary warning that we have only 12 years and we have to raise ambition,” said Harjeet Singh, with nonprofit ActionAid. “I don’t think we are going to get anywhere with that kind of perspective coming from the U.S. What the U.S. is doing or not doing is affecting its own citizens, its neighbors, and people around the world. I think it’s nothing less than a crime against humanity and nature.”
The results of U.S. delegation interventions at COP24 could have far more dire consequences in the long run than anything that was said at Monday’s side event — particularly for the places hit worst by climate change. On Saturday night, for instance, the U.S. joined fellow fossil fuel producers Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Kuwait in blocking the Paris rulebook from formally recognizing the IPCC’s 1.5-degree report — the first to be produced by that body at the request of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change — which found that meeting the goals of the Paris agreement would require far more ambitious action than anything currently on the table. After the U.S. and other developed countries backslid on compromises they had made earlier in the talks on climate financing, the Africa Group of Nations, comprised of all of that continent’s countries, boycotted certain talks this week. U.S. negotiators have also reportedly stymied any efforts from developing G77 countries to introduce equity requirements across countries into the rulebook.
As Raman notes, bad behavior by the U.S. at U.N. climate talks didn’t start with Trump. Documents leaked by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden showed that the State Department enlisted the NSA to surveil private communications between other delegations at the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009. Just before those talks, the U.S. and other developed countries were widely suspected of influencing the Philippines’ decision to pull veteran negotiator Bernarditas de Castro Muller, one of the most notoriously fierce advocates for developing countries, from its team. At climate talks in South Africa in 2011, former American head negotiator Todd Stern famously told the main plenary, “If equity’s in, we’re out.”
What’s happening in Katowice, though, falls outside the narrow partisan framing of climate politics that has taken over after Trump’s election. The negotiators aren’t political appointees or mouthpieces for the administration; delegation head Trigg Talley was also a top negotiator in the Obama administration. Other delegates, and those tracking the process, largely understand that there’s daylight between the team that is in negotiations and the administration’s more bullish message to the UNFCCC, and that negotiators themselves walk a fine line between keeping the White House happy and pursuing long-held U.S. priorities in these talks. As debates about a “Green New Deal” capture headlines at home, the American negotiators serve as a reminder that returning to the Obama-era status quo of climate politics may not get us any closer to averting catastrophe.
In a statement provided by email, a State Department spokesperson only said, “The Administration’s position on the Paris Agreement remains unchanged. The President announced that the United States intends to withdraw from the Paris Agreement absent the identification of terms of participation that are more favorable to the American people. The United States is participating in ongoing negotiations, including those related to the Paris Agreement, at the COP in order to ensure a level playing field that benefits and protects U.S. interests.” Talley declined a request for an interview.
It’s not hard to tell what else his team is after, though. The operating theory among some delegates is that the U.S. is simply operating with the directives they were given in the Obama era, with potential points of departure being the U.S. obstinance around embracing the latest IPCC report. There aren’t higher-level political operatives walking around to negotiating rooms and whipping up support on various issues, as John Kerry’s team did in the lead-up to the Paris climate talks, but the State Department team in Poland certainly isn’t staying quiet to fellow negotiators about what it wants.
So what is that? At a side event on Monday, a former top lawyer on climate for the State Department, Susan Biniaz, outlined what she sees as continued American priorities when it comes to the Paris agreement. “I think some countries left Paris thinking this agreement is great,” she said. “There’s not that much in the way of rules, and we want the rulebook to keep it that way. We probably want a 20-page rulebook that is very light on requirements and not very legally binding. We want to be able to go home and keep Paris as is.” Other parties, though, were far less satisfied with that agreement, she noted, and “want to make up for that deficiency through the rulebook and impose on the rulebook more top-down international guidance.”
At the heart of all of this is a dispute over what the true meaning and spirit of the Paris agreement and even the UNFCCC really are — which various sides are fighting over in deciding what will make it into the rulebook, hopefully produced by the end of this week. “Some countries are bolder about relitigating. Some people claim it’s not relitigating,” Biniaz said. “Relitigating is in the eye of the beholder.”
U.S. negotiators have long sought to move as dramatically as possible away from the regime of climate diplomacy that the Paris agreement was crafted to replace, the Kyoto Protocol of 1992. That agreement was inked by the Clinton White House but ultimately not ratified by Congress. Shortly after that, Canada — another major emitter — left unceremoniously. “Everything that the U.S. succeeded in getting in Paris was a reaction to the reasons the Kyoto Protocol got rejected by the Senate,” Jesse Young, senior climate adviser for Oxfam International and a former member of the State Department’s negotiating team, told me. That includes the development of Nationally Determined Contributions — each country’s voluntary emissions reduction pledge — to get rid of the Kyoto-era distinction between developed and developing countries in favor of a so-called bottom-up approach, where all countries (not just developed nations) are tasked with reining in their emissions — in part as a recognition that India and especially China have emerged as major polluters since the early nineties. That’s likely why George David Banks, the lead negotiator at last year’s climate talks in Bonn, called the Paris agreement a “good Republican agreement. It’s everything the Bush administration wanted.”
Among the biggest red lines for the U.S. is the notion of a “dual rulebook”, which former members of the U.S. negotiating team see as a return to the Kyoto rules and even a rewriting of the Paris Agreement itself. “If December’s talks deliver a dual rulebook, it could stop the U.S. rejoining the deal under a different president,” Biniaz told Climate Home’s Karl Mathiesen. “Neither Stern nor Biniaz denies that making sure this doesn’t happen is guiding their involvement,” Mathiesen added, along with the fact that six current and former non-U.S. diplomats he interviewed also thought that was their goal in attending.
The idea that there are differences between countries on climate, and specifically the notion of “common but differentiated responsibility,” is baked into the UNFCCC itself, in Article 3.1, and can be found throughout the text of the Paris agreement. As such, developing country representatives say the bottom-up approach that the U.S. and other developed countries are pushing for amounts of a rewriting of the text. “What they’re trying to do is to weaken it by saying that we need one set of rules for everybody,” Singh says. “That is inequitable, because not all developing countries have that kind of capacity. What they’re trying to do is complicate the entire narrative and put the blame back on developing countries.” He argues that breaking down the distinction between developed and developing countries — like different levels of responsibility for the crisis, and current vulnerability to it — collapses crucial distinctions between big emitters like China and places like Tuvalu or the Marshall Islands, which are already being hit hard by climate change and have negligible carbon footprints. Still more concerning is the fact that it papers over developed countries’ historical responsibility for climate change — the fact that their thriving, carbon-intensive economies have been built on the backs of over a century of greenhouse gas emissions that are now helping render whole parts of the world uninhabitable.
Perhaps the biggest fault line on this front for U.S. negotiators has been around the related question of climate finance — that is, how much they and other developed countries should have to pay to mitigate, adapt to and rebuild from climate impacts around the world. In an intersessional meeting in the lead-up to COP24, the U.S. joined Japan and Australia to allow loans — contingent upon repayment — to be considered as part of the long agreed-upon goal of mobilizing $100 billion per year in climate financing by 2020, opening the door for that to include packages with potentially onerous repayment terms.
In Paris, Obama had pledged $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund, the agreed-upon body to help coordinate climate financing internationally under the UNFCCC, and governed by a 24-member board comprised of representatives from developed and developing countries. Only $1 billion was actually provided to the fund before Trump cut off America’s contributions entirely. Now, as the $100 billion target grows closer and with even less of a contribution from the U.S., developed countries, including the US, have been pushing back on setting a new target for 2025, despite need far greater than the initial goal.
Climate finance operates along a continuum: The less successful and well-funded mitigation efforts are, the more adaptation funds are needed. The more beleaguered the adaptation, the more funding is needed for loss and damage — effectively, compensation for when the worst happens. Now, without a major course correction on mitigation, the need for adaptation is estimated to reach up to hundreds of trillions of dollars as soon as 2030. Even so, there’s no agreed-upon definition of what climate finance actually means. Unlike the GCF, there’s also no mechanism through which to distribute loss and damage financing. For its part, the U.S. delegation has consistently looked to keep any discussion of loss and damage during climate talks off the table entirely, despite the fact that it’s featured in the Paris Agreement. In advance of COP24, U.S. representatives at the UN Standing Committee on finance refused to ratify a report on climate finance on the grounds that there is no agreed-upon definition of developed and developing countries.
Actions like that are why many have argued it’d be better for the U.S. to stay out of the negotiations entirely as it prepares to leave the Paris agreement. “At least even if you don’t want to be in the Paris agreement, don’t interfere with what’s happening,” Raman said. “They’re negotiating in very bad faith. Those people who argue that we should accommodate the United States — for what? The Paris agreement was an accommodation to the United States. If you want to continue to accommodate the United States it will be at the peril of developing countries.”
The post From Obama to Trump, Climate Negotiations Are Being Run by the Same Crew of American Technocrats appeared first on The Intercept.
No comments:
Post a Comment