EveryMintNews: November 2018

Friday, 30 November 2018

VA officials contest report that underpaid vets would not be reimbursed

Officials from the Department of Veteran Affairs sought to correct conflicting reports Thursday that they would not reimburse underpaid vets from an August backlog.

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Trump repeats false claim about steel plants while downplaying GM plant closings

Trump claimed, without evidence, that steel plants are opening nationwide.

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DOJ distributes another $695 million to Bernie Madoff fraud victims

This brings the total returned to almost $2 billion.

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Trump cancels meeting with Putin over Ukraine dispute

He said he was doing so because Russia had not returned Ukranian sailors.

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Man accused of killing his brother's family, torching mansion, over financial dispute

Paul Caneiro, the brother of a man found slain alongside his wife and children in a torched home last week, has been charged with murder, according to court records.

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6 bodies, including 4 children, recovered from scene of Indiana house fire

A 25-year-old mother and her three young children were among the victims, authorities said.

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Columbia University professor's office vandalized with swastikas, anti-Semitic words

A teacher college who teaches and researches the Holocaust at Columbia University is vandalized with anti- Semitic graffiti.

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Mall shooting suspect apprehended days after police shoot, kill wrong man: Officials

Erron Brown, 20, was taken into custody in Fairburn, Georgia, authorities said.

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Sinclair distances itself from commentary after protest

The Sinclair Broadcast Group is distancing itself from a segment by its chief political analyst, who defended President Trump's efforts to halt migration at the U.S. border with Mexico

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WATCH: Serial killer says he's killed around 90 people

The FBI is asking the public for help and information on Samuel Little, who is already in jail for murder but now says he's killed around 90 people since the 1970s.

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WATCH: Vehicles float away amid flooding in Turkish resort town

Vehicles were swept away by fast-moving flash floodwaters in the Turkish resort town of Bodrum on the Aegean Sea.

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WATCH: Near catastrophe at Purdue Bell Tower

A repair crew narrowly avoids catastrophic disaster while working on the Purdue University Bell Tower, when a clock face dropped, bouncing from the cherry picker, into the tower's wall.

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WATCH: Dog greets soldier with unbelievable reaction

A soldier reunited with her beloved dog after being deployed in Africa.

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WATCH: Town forcing man to pay $2,000 a night for Christmas lights

Thomas Apruzzi, of Old Bridge Township, N.J., is refusing to pay thousands of dollars a night for police security at his massive Christmas light display after complaints from neighbors.

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WATCH: Water pipe bursts in Algeria, flooding homes

A water pipe in Algeria burst on Tuesday, creating a huge fountain in the town of Djebahia.

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WATCH: Pelican rescued after getting hooked by fishing lure

A pelican suffering from a fishing lure caught in its wing is flying the friendly skies again thanks to some help from these kindly visitors to Hatteras Island, North Carolina.

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WATCH: Massive cow too big for slaughterhouse

Knickers is believed to be the tallest bovine in Australia.

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James Comey attacks GOP and Trump in challenge to House subpoena

Lawyers for former FBI Director James Comey have filed suit in federal court, challenging a congressional subpoena that demands he testify behind closed doors.

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Former CBS CEO Les Moonves may lose his $120 million payout after bombshell report

Moonves is the subject of two internal investigations at CBS.

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Premier League: 10 things to look out for this weekend

Liverpool’s problems could worsen in the derby, Ranieri returns to the Bridge and Newcastle fans plan a walk-in protest

Maybe the table never lies but it sure can mislead. Perhaps Liverpool are the second-best team in the Premier League at the moment but that does not mean they are very good. So far in the league they have been unbeaten and unconvincing. The main problem is their midfield, which lacks ingenuity and suffers from waning dynamism. Jürgen Klopp has not overhauled it swiftly enough, though at least he has started Xherdan Shaqiri in the last two leagues games to bring more inventiveness. But he deployed Jordan Henderson, James Milner and Gigi Wijnaldum for Wednesday’s lame Champions League defeat in Paris. Henderson is suspended for Sunday’s Merseyside derby so there’s no need for him to be dropped. But there’s a good case for sidelining Wijnaldum and even Milner to go with a midfield trio of Shaqiri, Naby Keïta and Fabinho. That would partly be an expression of faith in the ability of the last two to produce their best form, which has so far eluded them in the early, stop-start days of their careers at Liverpool. Everton, meanwhile, are looking increasingly formidable. If Idrissa Gueye and André Gomes run midfield, as they may well do, then Everton could win at Anfield for the first time this century. PD

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PFA received complaint claiming Gordon Taylor referred to black footballers as ‘coloured’

• PFA chief denies he said it or would use such language
• Outdated language claim brings leadership back into spotlight
• No suggestion union leader is racist

Gordon Taylor’s leadership of the Professional Footballers’ Association is back in the spotlight after it emerged a complaint was made that he referred to black players as “coloured” at an event arranged to promote diversity and racial equality.

Taylor has told the PFA he cannot recall using the alleged term when giving a talk almost a year ago. A spokesperson for the players’ union said: “Gordon firmly believes he didn’t say it and it is not language he would ever use. He has led in this area for 40 years and understands fully the sensitivities.”

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Postponed Copa Libertadores final to be played at Bernabéu in Madrid

• Second leg now on 9 December after attack on Boca Juniors bus
• River Plate given $400,000 fine and two-match stadium ban

Conmebol has confirmed that the postponed second leg of the Copa Libertadores final between River Plate and Boca Juniors will be played at the Bernabéu stadium, more than 6,000 miles away from the original venue, on 9 December. Fans of both sides will be given an equal allocation of tickets.

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Callum Hudson-Odoi scores first Chelsea goal in thrashing of 10-man PAOK

This was a mismatch from the start, one of those Europa League group games where Chelsea might have lapsed into a stroll and prevailed with just as much to spare, but it still had its moment to savour. The clock had ticked on to the hour-mark with PAOK heaving to repel another of the hosts’ attacks when Gary Cahill and Cesc Fàbregas retrieved possession, with the latter slipping Callum Hudson-Odoi free into space down the left.

The teenager scuttled forward, Léo Matos backing off further with the forward’s every delicate touch, before effortlessly stroking away an early shot with the inside of his right foot. Both defender and goalkeeper had clearly anticipated the effort being angled towards the far post, only for the ball to fizz inside the near post as a startled Alexandros Paschalakis dived forlornly to his right.

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Aaron Ramsey scores in stroll against Vorskla as Arsenal win group

Arsenal secured top spot in their Europa League group as a much-changed side coasted to victory against Vorskla Poltava, whose manager then hit out at the decision to move the game to Kiev.

The Group E fixture was moved 185 miles east of Poltava to the capital’s Olympic Stadium with parts of Ukraine under martial law as political tensions with Russia continue to rise.

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Rangers hang on against Villarreal after red card for Daniel Candeias

Analysis of this game must always come with context of Rangers playing the second half with 10 men. Villarreal will be upset at departing with just a point, thereby not seizing on the opportunity given to them by Daniel Candeias’s dismissal. Their territorial dominance ultimately amounted to very little so Steven Gerrard retains a live hope of taking Rangers to the Europa League’s knockout phase in this, his first season as a manager. What Rangers lacked in quality, they made up for with belligerence.

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Scott Sinclair strikes to put Celtic on course for Europa League progress

Celtic’s quest to reach the knockout stages is in their own hands following a 1-0 win over Rosenborg in Trondheim. Scott Sinclair headed the only goal three minutes before the interval for the club’s first ever away victory in the group stages of the competition.

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Manchester United activate one-year extension on David de Gea’s contract

• Spain goalkeeper now contracted until 2020
• Alexis Sánchez ruled out with hamstring injury

David de Gea may well stay at Manchester United for at least another 18 months after the club activated an option to extend his present contract by a year.

The goalkeeper’s current deal was due to end next summer though it is understood De Gea and his representatives are now working on the basis that the player who joined from Atlético Madrid in 2011 will stay until 2020. Had the extension clause in his contract not been triggered, De Gea would have been free to talk to other clubs in the January transfer window and possibly sign a pre-contract agreement.

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Lucas Moura relishes chance to shine at Spurs after being displaced at PSG

Brazilian is keen to make his point on Sunday against Arsenal and Unai Emery, the manager who froze him out at PSG

Lucas Moura has described it as the worst seven months of his life and even now the speed of his descent from hero to zero under Unai Emery at Paris Saint-Germain feels mystifying.

The Tottenham winger was an established PSG player when Emery came to the club for the 2016-17 season and he would make 53 appearances in all competitions for him, getting 19 goals – a career high and second only to Edinson Cavani in the club’s scoring charts.

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Sol Campbell: ‘Macclesfield fans will probably think: what’s going on here?’

The former Arsenal and England defender is unveiled at the League Two club’s Moss Rose ground and is delighted to have the opportunity to manage

Sol Campbell arrived a few minutes late for the debut press conference of his belated managerial career having overrun with his first full training session at Macclesfield Town earlier in the day. He apologised to those assembled in the McIlroy Lounge at Moss Rose, looked and sounded remarkably at ease in his new, humble surroundings and preferred to thank the club that has given him the opportunity rather than dwell on the many who did not. But there were hints of dismay at what has been an exhausting path from celebrated player to manager of the Football League’s bottom club.

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Stonewall head to Wembley and break vital new ground

The trailblazing LGBT team play on Friday in the first regular season, non-league game at the national stadium

The Wembley lights will be on for a special fixture this Friday night. Stonewall FC are playing Wilberforce Wanderers to honour the trailblazing work of Britain’s first LGBT football team. If that were not occasion enough there will also be three points at stake in the Middlesex County Football League Division One Central & East.

“We’re going to meet at the station and have the whole squad walking down Wembley Way together,” says Stonewall’s manager, Eric Najib Armanazi. “Everyone will be dressed in their club tracksuits and they’ll have 10 minutes to walk on the pitch and take a selfie. But once they are in the dressing room, they have to realise we have a match to win.”

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Liverpool need a midfield rethink to help end their continental drift | Barney Ronay

Jürgen Klopp’s moans in Paris should not distract him from the fact that his side needs a reboot

At the end of Liverpool’s defeat in Paris on Wednesday night Jürgen Klopp and Thomas Tuchel offered up a weirdly self-referential round of press conferences deep in the bowels of the damp concrete hulk that is the Parc des Princes.

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Mourinho has a point about young players – but he should trust them more | Eni Aluko

Youngsters today are not as ready for first-team action as they used to be. However José Mourinho should treat those who do break through, such as Marcus Rashford, with more respect

There’s been a lot of debate this week about the difference between young players today compared to 10 years ago after José Mourinho referred to them as “spoiled kids”. It’s interesting because I do think things have changed significantly in terms of their level of readiness.

Young players have always found it hard to break into the first team but those who did in the past such as Frank Lampard, Rio Ferdinand and Michael Owen were much more ready to make that step than those who are coming through now. You don’t see many 18-year-olds doing the same these days – Marcus Rashford was probably the last one to do so at a big Premier League club.

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James Milner says Liverpool not thinking about crashing out of Europe

• ‘We’re just focused on getting through the group’
• Virgil van Dijk criticises gamesmanship of PSG players

Liverpool will not deserve a place in the knockout stage of the Champions League should they fail to defeat Napoli in the crucial Group C decider at Anfield, James Milner has said.

Liverpool must beat the Italian side 1-0 or by two goals on 11 December having missed an opportunity to qualify at Paris Saint-Germain on Wednesday. The 2-1 defeat at Parc des Princes leaves Liverpool at risk of slipping into the Europa League – or even finishing bottom of Group C – seven months after reaching the Champions League final.

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Liverpool, Neymar, Mr Blobby and faking death – Football Weekly Extra

Max Rushden, Barry Glendenning, Andy Brassell and Reshmin Chowdhury discuss the Premier League teams in Europe, diving galore, David de Gea, Mr Blobby as physio and faking a death to dodge a fixture

Join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter and email.

We look back at the last few days of football, starting with Liverpool’s Champions League defeat at PSG, which leaves them in danger of crashing out of the competition they made it to the final of just six months ago. We ask what more Marco Verratti could have done to get himself sent off and whether it’s time to judge Neymar on his own merits, rather than the circus surrounding him.

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Footballers in Cyprus forced to retire with heart issues after injections

Players’ union Fifpro calls for immediate inquiry
Mystery substances said to have been given by club doctors

Fifpro has called for an urgent inquiry into medical treatment given to players at several top-tier clubs in Cyprus.

The demand from the world footballers’ union follows reports in the Cypriot media that at least four clubs have been giving injections of unidentified substances to players, three of whom have been forced to retire with serious heart problems.

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Pochettino says Spurs can beat Barcelona and make knockout round

• Champions League win over Inter gives Tottenham belief
• ‘We dominated Inter and had the best chances,’ says Pochettino

Tottenham can still qualify for the Champions League knockout rounds according to Mauricio Pochettino, who believes his side’s 1-0 victory over Internazionale has changed the dynamic of their group ahead of the crucial final round of fixtures.

Christian Eriksen’s 80th-minute winner means that Spurs travel to Barcelona on 11 December knowing that a win will be enough to see them through to the round of 16, whatever Inter manage against PSV Eindhoven.

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Champions League roundup: Messi’s spectacular goal helps Barça through

• Barcelona beat PSV to confirm place in knockout stage
• Napoli keep pressure on Liverpool with win over Red Star

Barcelona ensured their place in the knockout stages with a 2-1 win over PSV in Eindhoven. Lionel Messi’s fired in a spectacular solo goal to put the visitors ahead shortly before Gerard Piqué doubled their lead with a tap-in. Luuk de Jong struck a late consolation.

Marek Hamsik’s early strike set Napoli on their way to a victory over Red Star Belgrade that kept the Italians top of Group C. Dries Mertens added a goal either side of half-time in a 3-1 win, Mohamed Ben Nabouhane scoring for the visitors.

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‘PSG made us look like butchers’ – Klopp sees red over Neymar antics

• Liverpool manager unhappy with Brazilian and teammates
• ‘We look like butchers after the yellow cards we had’

Jürgen Klopp accused Paris Saint-Germain – and Neymar in particular – of making Liverpool “look like butchers” as his team suffered a third consecutive away defeat for the first time in the Champions League group stage.

The Liverpool manager admitted the French champions merited victory for a dominant start that brought goals for Juan Bernat and Neymar before James Milner scored a penalty in first-half stoppage time.

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Neymar, the great individualist of the age, gives less to provide more for PSG | Barney Ronay

The Brazilian scored PSG’s winner in perhaps his most effective high-profile performance since leaving Barcelona

With Neymar the questions have always been along the same kind of lines. How far? How good? To what height can the broad wings of his own attacking talent carry him? At a slightly wild Parc des Princes, Liverpool lost an exciting, slightly fractious Champions League game 2-1, menaced throughout by a star striker intent on posing two very different sets of questions.

For the opening 40 minutes, Liverpool felt the force of what was surely Neymar’s most effective high-profile performance since his Barcelona days. This was followed by the beta version: a second half of circus play and indulgence on the ball, with Neymar tumbling to the turf like a tiny little Victorian fairy sprite lashed with a blow from the under-gardener’s rake; and beyond that the full range of attacking ego-ball.

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Dele Alli the intense, flexible emblem of Tottenham’s mental strength

Spurs’ special brand of nerveless resolve was on glorious display in the win over Internazionale – Alli represents its zenith

When we talk about nerves, we often ascribe them the qualities of metal. They’re made of steel, obviously, and when things are not going so well they start to jangle, like a set of keys or a piece of taut piano wire. But what if real emotional resilience was less like metal and more like, say, pastry? What if the key to surviving pressure was actually to stay malleable, supple, even a bit soft?

Spurs were within 10 minutes of flunking out of Europe here and might well do so for real when they head to Camp Nou in two weeks’ time. But thanks to Christian Eriksen’s beautiful goal – delivered by Moussa Sissoko, finessed by Dele Alli and slammed home by the Dane – Spurs are still alive in the Champions League. And in winning this game they showed nerves of pastry throughout.

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The surprising struggles of Europe's top goalkeepers

David de Gea, Thibaut Courtois, Marc-André ter Stegen and Manuel Neuer have all been unusually inconsistent this season

By Martin Laurence for WhoScored

The weekend threw up another series of shock results around Europe. Real Madrid suffered a humiliating defeat, losing 3-0 at Eibar; Bayern Munich could only manage a 3-3 draw against Fortuna Dusseldorf, the bottom team in the Bundesliga; and Manchester United were also held at home against Crystal Palace. José Mourinho’s team are now a point closer to Fulham at bottom of the table than Manchester City at the top.

The one upside for United was that David de Gea kept his first clean sheet in nine league matches. He pulled off a brilliant save against Young Boys as United progressed to the last-16 of the Champions League but it has been a tough season for the Spaniard in the league – and he is not the only big-name keeper who is struggling.

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Mark Hughes’ official complaints reveal hypocrisy of a serial whinger | Barry Glendenning

Manager’s VAR anguish would be permissible if it did not entirely oppose his previous grumble over Southampton’s treatment

Almost 20 years into his career as a manager, we finally appear to have reached peak Mark Hughes. Following Southampton’s Carabao Cup defeat on penalties at Leicester, he used his post-match interview to complain about a refereeing decision that had not gone his team’s way. In itself, that was not unusual – rarely a weekend goes by in which Hughes does not publicly lay blame for their many shortcomings at the door of officialdom. Long before Donald Trump developed a reputation for tediously ranting and raving about the perceived injustices repeatedly inflicted upon him by the Fake News Media, Hughes had earned one for railing similarly against referees.

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The forgotten story of … 'evil' Football League test matches

At the end of the 19th century, the battle for First Division places involved unwisely scheduled post-season test matches

As the 1897-98 season roared towards its final furlong, the battle to avoid relegation from the First Division was white hot. Seven of the 16 teams were in danger of being forced to endure the post-season test matches that pitted the top two of the Second Division with the bottom two of the First to decide the final make-up of the following year’s top flight. “However the final positions may be allocated there will be a finer set of test games this April than ever before,” trilled Sporting Life in February. It is fair to say they got that one wrong.

By the time the season ended the league’s own president was declaring the tests “a distinct failure” and proclaiming that “the sooner we get rid of them the better”, while plans were made to gift the two losing sides promotion as a final apology for inventing the cursed system in the first place.

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'A message for my lovers': Mourinho hits back at critics – video

Manchester United manager José Mourinho was in a combative mood after his team’s narrow Champions League win over Young Boys. Despite qualifying for the knockout rounds with a game to spare, United’s performance was far from convincing, with Marouane Fellaini’s injury-time goal the difference. But Mourinho defended his record in Europe, saying: ‘I play Champions League 14 years, and I qualify 14 times. The two years I wasn’t in the Champions League, I won the Europa League twice.’

He also stood by his decision to drop star players Alexis Sánchez, Paul Pogba and Romelu Lukaku from the starting lineup, claiming those who had played ‘gave everything’

José Mourinho ‘relieved and frustrated’ after narrow Manchester United win

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'A sad day for Argentinian soccer': Boca Juniors reflect on Copa Libertadores bus attack – video

The Copa Libertadores final was postponed for a second time on Sunday following an attack by River fans on Boca Juniors’ team bus which left several players in need of medical treatment.

Boca president Daniel Angelici said it was a ‘sad day for Argentinian soccer’, while head coach Guillermo Barros Schelotto said the final could not go ahead because the attack had left his team at a ‘sporting disadvantage’.

The first leg, held at Boca’s stadium La Bombonera, ended in a 2-2 draw.

Copa Libertadores: second leg of final called off again hours before kick-off

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Donald Trump Gave Russia Leverage Over His Presidency

Shortly after President Donald Trump was inaugurated, he gave a combative press conference at which he was asked by a reporter, “I was just hoping that we could get a yes-or-no answer on these questions involving Russia. Can you say if you are aware that anyone who advised your campaign had contacts with Russia during the course of the election?”

In reply, he lied to the American public. “Russia is a ruse. I have nothing to do with Russia. Haven’t made a phone call to Russia in years. Don’t speak to people from Russia,” he said. “...I have nothing to do with Russia. To the best of my knowledge no person that I deal with does.”

That he lied has long been clear—all sorts of people with whom he dealt had extensive, well-documented dealings with Russia and Russians. But additional evidence that he lied was revealed Thursday during an appearance in federal court by his former attorney Michael Cohen, who admitted that he negotiated on Trump’s behalf to build a skyscraper in Moscow; that his efforts lasted until at least June 2016; that he briefed Trump and members of Trump’s family about the matter; and that he later lied to Congress, to avoid contradicting Trump’s political message.

Consider the implications. At the very beginning of Trump’s presidency, as soon as he lied in that press conference, Vladimir Putin and Russian intelligence possessed the ability to unmask Trump as a liar to the American public, revealing damaging information to Congress and the public about which they had previously been ignorant. BuzzFeed’s account of the negotiations involving a potential Trump Tower in Moscow hints at the wealth of documentary evidence that the Russians would possess to back up their claims.

As it would turn out, that was merely the beginning of their leverage. In September 2017, Donald Trump, Jr., gave sworn Senate testimony that may be contradicted by Thursday’s revelations, raising the prospect that the Russians have been in possession of evidence suggesting the president’s son may have committed a felony. And once Cohen lied to Congress about the matter, the Russians were in a position to expose the unlawful behavior of Trump’s personal attorney.

Those particular bits of Russian leverage over Trump are gone now that Robert Mueller’s investigation has revealed the truth to Congress and the public. But there is so much that we still don’t know about the Trump Tower deal, the president’s role in negotiating it, and the reasons his inner circle took extraordinary legal risks to hide the truth about it.

“The Kremlin knows the answer to these questions,” says Susan Hennessey, a former National Security Agency lawyer, on a Lawfare podcast. “And unless the answers here are the most innocent possible explanations … if it's anything other than that, the United States is in an incredibly dangerous position, because the United States is in a position where the American president is aware that a hostile foreign adversary potentially has devastating—politically devastating and potentially legally and criminally devastating, if not for him than for members of his family or organization—that a hostile foreign adversary has that information on him, and those really are the kinds of conditions where your worst nightmare is about blackmail and influence.”

Perhaps the public will ultimately learn why Trump and some of his closest associates lied about business opportunities that they were pursing in Moscow during the 2016 election. But the mere fact that they did lie, for whatever reason, gave a powerful geopolitical adversary at least some leverage over an American president and his son. And Trump knew about the leverage as soon as he lied to the public about Russia, and again when he watched his son and his then attorney lie to Congress, raising the stakes to a matter of clear criminality. Elected officials have resigned in disgrace for less serious transgressions.

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The Atlantic Daily: To What End?

The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: A Bridge Too Farr

NASA Administrator on Elon Musk: ‘That Was Not Appropriate Behavior’

If Elon Musk wants to launch American astronauts to space, he can’t smoke weed and drink whiskey on a podcast again.

That’s a message from Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, to the founder of SpaceX, which, along with Boeing, is developing transportation systems that would allow the United States to fly NASA astronauts from American soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.

“I will tell you that was not helpful, and that did not inspire confidence, and the leaders of these organizations need to take that as an example of what to do when you lead an organization that’s going to launch American astronauts,” Bridenstine said Thursday at a meeting of reporters at NASA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The warning comes about a week after The Washington Post broke the news that NASA would conduct reviews of workplace culture at both SpaceX and Boeing, reportedly in response to Musk’s actions on The Joe Rogan Experience in September. At the time, NASA declined to offer a specific reason for the reviews but offered a hint in its official statement: “[The agency] will be conducting a cultural assessment study in coordination with our commercial partners to ensure the companies are meeting NASA’s requirements for workplace safety, including the adherence to a drug-free environment.”

[Read: Reefer madness at NASA]

Bridenstine said Thursday that he personally ordered the reviews.

He said his decision was influenced in part by several tragedies in NASA’s history. Those tragedies include the Apollo 1 fire in 1967, when three astronauts were killed during a ground test, and the two Space Shuttle disasters (Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003), which together killed 14 people. Bridenstine said he spent some time between his nomination for the job of NASA chief and his confirmation—a months-long, contentious process that left an unprecedented gap between NASA administrators—reading the investigation reports for these incidents.

“Every single one of those accidents had a number of complications. Of course, the technological piece was a big piece of it. [But] the other question that always comes up was, what was the culture of NASA?” he said. “What was the culture of our contractors, and were there people that were raising a red flag that we didn’t listen to, and ultimately did that culture contribute to the failure and, in those cases, to disaster?”

I asked Bridenstine whether he considered Musk’s actions on the Rogan show to be one such red flag.

“I think those were not helpful,” he said.

Bridenstine said he has spoken with Musk recently. “We’ve had a number of conversations,” he said. “I will tell you, he is as committed to safety as anybody, and he understands that that was not appropriate behavior, and you won’t be seeing that again.”

But, Bridenstine said, he had wanted to conduct a review of workplace culture at SpaceX and Boeing even before Musk took a puff of marijuana, which is legal in California, where the podcast was filmed, but considered a controlled substance, like heroin and cocaine, by the federal government. He described the assessments as a “necessary and appropriate step when you’re launching humans on rockets.”

“Rather than waiting until—we don’t believe there’s going to be an incident, but if there is an incident—rather than waiting until there’s an incident, we do a cultural assessment of our contractors [now],” Bridenstine said. “We want to get ahead of it. We want to see, right now, today, are they experiencing pressure from schedule, are they experiencing pressure from cost, and are those concerns challenging their thought process in a way that could be dangerous?”

A spokesperson for SpaceX declined to comment on Bridenstine’s remarks.

After news of the safety reviews broke, both SpaceX and Boeing offered statements touting workplace programs that promote drug-free environments. NASA hasn’t provided details about the reviews, but the Post described them as a “months-long assessment that would involve hundreds of interviews designed to assess the culture of the workplaces.”

NASA gave the two companies a combined $6.8 billion in 2014 to develop launch systems that could transport the agency’s astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The passengers for the first test launches were selected in August. NASA announced last week that the first test, an uncrewed demonstration by SpaceX, is tentatively scheduled for January 7, but Bridenstine said on Thursday that the date is unlikely to stick and may slide into the spring. Crewed test flights are expected next summer, but that timeline is also likely to change.

NASA’s contracts with SpaceX and Boeing require both contractors to “maintain a program for achieving a drug-and alcohol-free workforce” and conduct “preemployment, reasonable suspicion, random, post-accident, and periodic recurring testing of contractor employees in sensitive positions for use, in violation of applicable law or federal regulation, of alcohol or a controlled substance.”

[Read: The problem with Popular Mechanics’ love letter to Elon Musk]

In the last decade, NASA has worked increasingly with commercial companies on various projects. The partnerships have created an unusual situation for the agency. Longtime NASA contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman have been following the rules, including those about drug use, for decades. For NASA, managing a start-up with a young workforce and a famous CEO is a very new experience. The agency may need to rethink how it handles these newcomers, of which there will be many; on Thursday, NASA announced it would work with nine U.S. companies to bring robotic missions to the moon. The majority were formed in the last 10 years.

As I’ve written before, Bridenstine’s disapproval of Musk’s podcast appearance is understandable. NASA, just like any federal agency, is endlessly concerned with its public image, and the optics of one of their contractors smoking and drinking in front of millions of viewers, months before he is entrusted with the lives of Americans, are not great. Whether that behavior calls for an extensive review of employees at SpaceX, who certainly answer to Musk but may not support his choices, is open for debate.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2AxESt9

Michael Cohen Takes Mueller Inside the Trump Organization

In a Manhattan federal court on Thursday, President Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the timing of his negotiations to build a Trump Tower Moscow in 2016, and about how often he discussed the deal with Trump during the campaign. The guilty plea is the first Mueller has secured that is related directly to Trump’s business dealings—and may be just the tip of the iceberg in the ongoing investigation of business deals involving the Trump Organization and Russian financiers, inside and outside the Kremlin.

With Trump now at war with someone who for years was his most loyal lieutenant and fixer, Cohen’s court appearance underscored the peril he presents for the president, who is unsettled by dramatic Democratic gains in the midterms and facing the prospect of unending offshoot probes by newly emboldened Democratic committee chairmen.

The plea includes evidence, for the first time, that could show how Trump was compromised by Russia while Russian President Vladimir Putin was waging a direct attack on the 2016 election. The formal agreement also incentivizes Cohen, the former executive vice president of the Trump Organization and Trump’s right-hand man for more than a decade, to tell Mueller everything he knows—and sets Cohen up as a more credible witness should Mueller ask him to testify in the future. Significantly, the guilty plea was finalized after Trump submitted his written answers to Mueller, who reportedly asked Trump specifically about the Moscow deal. (Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said on Thursday that Trump’s written answers matched the story that Cohen had told Mueller.)

Cohen, moreover, has indicated that he has no loyalty to the president and does not want or expect a presidential pardon. He has also not been sharing information with the president’s legal team throughout the course of his cooperation with Mueller, as Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort has been. Whereas Manafort has kept one foot in the door of Trumpworld, Cohen severed his ties to the president months ago. “The real wild card for Trump is Cohen,” said a veteran Washington lawyer who requested anonymity because he represents a client involved in the Russia probe. “It’s obvious that Cohen knows more about Trump’s business activities over the last decade than just about anyone.”

Cohen admitted on Thursday that he lied to Congress about how often he and Trump had spoken about the Trump Tower deal in 2016, and acknowledged that he had tried to organize a trip for Trump to Russia in 2016 to scope out the potential project after Trump clinched the Republican nomination. He lied both to minimize Trump’s link to the Moscow project and to limit “the ongoing Russia investigations,” according to Mueller’s team. The criminal information filed by Mueller’s office on Thursday makes clear that Cohen contacted the Kremlin “asking for assistance in connection with the Moscow Project” in January 2016.

Dan Goldman, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, where he focused on organized crime, said he believes that the plea agreement is “a prelude to forthcoming indictments and other investigative steps. Before using information from a cooperating witness, prosecutors generally like to ‘lock in’ the witness through a guilty plea,” Goldman said. “So I would expect more to come arising out of, at least in part, Michael Cohen’s cooperation.”

It isn’t just Trump who may be in legal danger now that Cohen is cooperating—it’s also his family members, who Cohen admitted to briefing on the Trump Tower Moscow deal in 2016. According to the criminal information, filed by Mueller on Thursday, Cohen discussed the Moscow deal with Trump’s family members “within” the Trump Organization. Donald Trump Jr., an executive vice president of the Trump Organization, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last year that he was only “peripherally aware” of the Moscow deal in 2016. It is not clear what he told the House Intelligence Committee, which has not yet released the transcripts of the closed-door interview. But Representative Adam Schiff, the committee’s incoming chairman, said in a statement that the Cohen plea “highlights concern over another issue—that we believe other witnesses were also untruthful before our committee.”

While the extent of Cohen’s communications about the project with Trump’s family members is not laid out in the court filings, he has undoubtedly described those interactions to Mueller. “This sends a message that if you have lied to Congress, or plan to do so in the future, the special counsel will charge you for those lies,” Goldman said. “And the case is not simply a he-said, he-said: Mueller brings documentary proof to every one of his charges and allegations.” Indeed, the criminal information that Mueller filed against Cohen included emails that directly contradicted Cohen’s written statement to Congress. Goldman added that if he were Donald Trump Jr., “I would be more worried today than I was yesterday.”

Cohen’s guilty plea is the first Mueller has secured related directly to Trump’s business dealings, potentially crossing the “red line” Trump set last year related to his sprawling organization. Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, who replaced Jeff Sessions earlier this month, has also said that Trump’s businesses should be off limits to Mueller.

But Cohen has been cooperating with Mueller’s team since August, when he first proffered information, and has already sat for more than 70 hours of interviews since September. That could prove to be incredibly damaging for Trump—who insisted both during and after the election that he had no business ties to Russia—and it could contextualize Trump’s consistent and inexplicable praise for Putin along the campaign trail. “This shows motive: Trump’s desire to pursue a major deal in Russia,” Jens David Ohlin, the Vice Dean of Cornell Law School, told me. “It finally gives Mueller some direct evidence that Trump's associates continued to pursue business opportunities in Russia during the campaign, which would explain why Trump was, and continues to be, so deferential to Russia in general and Putin in particular. The motive was financial.”

Cohen also appears to be in a position to corroborate a key portion of the Steele dossier—a collection of reports written by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele outlining Trump’s alleged ties to Russia. Trump has called the dossier a collection of lies that was financed by Democrats.

Steele’s sources in Russia claimed that “the Kremlin’s cultivation operation” of the candidate had included offers of “various lucrative real estate development deals in Russia.” While Trump had a “minimal investment profile in Russia,” the dossier continued, it was “not for want of trying. Trump’s previous efforts had included exploring the real estate sector in St. Petersburg as well as Moscow.”

A top priority for some Democrats on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees has been to determine whether the Russians ever sought financial leverage over Trump and his associates, or whether they hold any such leverage today. Schiff, speaking to reporters, said the criminal information filed Thursday raised the issue of “whether the Russians possess financial leverage over the president of the united states.”

“We need to look into the credible allegations that the Russians may have been laundering money through the Trump Organization,” Schiff said. “That has been a constant concern of ours, but an issue the Republicans were unwilling to look into. That is something we expect to pursue.”

Cohen’s guilty plea could shed light on the Trump family’s longtime bank of choice: Deutsche Bank, which was the only bank willing to loan to Trump after he lost others money in a series of bankruptcies. The bank was fined in 2017 as part of a Russian money-laundering scheme that involved its Moscow, New York, and London branches, and its headquarters were raided on Thursday morning by police and tax investigators as part of an ongoing money-laundering investigation. The bank refused last year to hand over documents requested by five Democratic lawmakers related to its relationship with Trump, citing the confidentiality of nonpublic customer information, and the GOP refused to subpoena the records.

Trump said on Thursday that he was still free to pursue business deals while he was running for president. “There was a good chance that I wouldn't have won, in which case I would have gotten back into the business, and why should I lose lots of opportunities?” he told reporters. But he never disclosed the deal publicly, and Cohen’s guilty plea clearly shows how he lied in the written statement to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to conceal the Trump Organization’s ongoing involvement in the Moscow project from January through June 2016, with the campaign under way.

The project wasn’t revealed until August 2017, when The New York Times obtained emails between Cohen and the Russian American businessman Felix Sater, who appears to be “individual 2” in the court documents filed on Thursday. Sater, who began advising the Trump Organization in the early 2000s and scoped out deals for the Trump Organization in Russia between 2005-2006, boasted of his ties to Putin in emails to Cohen in November 2015 and told Cohen that he could get “all of Putins team to buy in” on the Moscow deal. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote. “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected.”

Sater forwarded a letter of intent to Cohen outlining the terms of a licensing agreement to purchase property to build a “Trump World Tower Moscow,” and Trump eventually signed it. Cohen was also in touch with an assistant to Putin’s right-hand man, Dmitry Peskov, according to the court filings, and was apparently invited to be Peskov’s guest at the St. Petersburg Forum in June 2016. Cohen told Sater he would attend, but backed out at the last minute—just days after senior members of the Trump campaign met with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower on the promise of obtaining dirt on Hillary Clinton. Peskov himself, meanwhile, also appears to have been caught in a lie: while he acknowledged on Thursday that his office called Cohen in 2016 to discuss the Trump Tower Moscow project, he claimed last year that the Kremlin had never replied to Cohen’s overtures because “we do not react to such business topics.”

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2DSraUZ

Three Remarkable Things About Michael Cohen's Plea

Michael Cohen’s decision to plead guilty to lying to Congress on Thursday was remarkable for three reasons.

The first was that Cohen walked into a Manhattan federal courtroom unannounced. He did it by surprise. We live in a political environment characterized by constant leaks, each choreographed more carefully than a public announcement. The drama of learning what’s going to happen at an event, rather than before the event, has mostly disappeared. But Cohen’s plea, a momentous development in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, happened with no warning. That reflects admirable discipline in Mueller’s office.

The second remarkable thing was that the plea happened at all. Cohen already pleaded guilty in August to eight federal felonies, including tax fraud, bank fraud, and campaign-finance violations. That plea already ended his career and exposed him to at least several years in federal prison. By contrast, Cohen’s new plea is to a lone count of lying to Congress in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001 —a weapon Mueller has wielded ruthlessly against President Donald Trump’s followers, including Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Rick Gates, and Paul Manafort. The conviction won’t increase Cohen’s sentence, and the additional felony count won’t have any perceptible impact on his life. If anything, by adding a cooperation term to his plea agreement, this new plea gives him an opportunity to reduce his sentence.

[Read: What Michael Cohen’s guilty plea means for Trump]

Normally, federal prosecutors don’t waste time with this sort of rubble-bouncing. So why would Mueller spend the time and resources on it? Because it tells a story about Trump and his campaign. Because it lays a marker.

It’s not clear whether the Constitution allows Mueller to indict a sitting president. But Department of Justice policy forbids it, and Mueller is a rule-follower. If Mueller thinks that the president has committed a federal crime, his remedy is to recommend impeachment in a report to the attorney general. The attorney general, in turn, is supposed to tell Congress the outcome of the special counsel’s investigation and decide whether the report should be made public. Did you catch the problem? The acting attorney general is Matthew Whitaker, Trump’s creature and a vigorous critic of Mueller’s investigation. Mueller has every reason to expect that Whitaker will suppress the report and limit what he shows to Congress.

A formal report is not, however, Mueller’s only way to tell Congress—and the nation—about his conclusions. The journalist Marcy Wheeler has written extensively about her theory that Mueller will “make his report” through court filings against Trump confederates like Manafort and Cohen. On Monday, Mueller accused Manafort of lying to investigators, breaching his cooperation agreement, and committing further federal crimes; he promised he’d bring the receipts when he filed briefs urging a long sentence. Those sentencing briefs will let Mueller tell the story of how Manafort lied about the Trump campaign—and, by extension, lay out the evidence of what the Trump campaign did.

[Peter Beinart: We’re all Michael Cohen]

Cohen’s case lets Mueller do the same thing—tell a story, make a report. The information—the charging document to which Cohen pleaded, waiving his right to indictment by grand jury—asserts that the Trump Organization planned a hotel in Russia, communicated with Russian officials about it, and even contemplated sending Trump himself for a visit to Russia well into 2016, contrary to Cohen’s congressional testimony that the plan was abandoned in January 2016. The significance is not just that Cohen lied to Congress. The significance is what he lied about: the fact that Team Trump continued to pursue Russian opportunities well into the campaign. Not only that, but the Information also asserts that Cohen kept Trump (whose identity is not at all concealed as “Individual 1”) and others within the campaign informed about his progress in Russia.

The third remarkable thing about Cohen’s plea was its substance. The president of the United States’ personal lawyer admitted to lying to Congress about the president’s business activities with a hostile foreign power, in order to support the president’s story. In any rational era, that would be earthshaking. Now it’s barely a blip. Over the past two years, we’ve become accustomed to headlines like “President’s Campaign Manager Convicted of Fraud” and “President’s Personal Lawyer Paid for Adult Actress’s Silence.” We’re numb to it all. But these are the sorts of developments that would, under normal circumstances, end a presidency.

They still might. Cohen admitted that he lied to Congress to support President Trump’s version of events. He notably did not claim that he did so at Trump’s request, or that Trump knew he would do it. But if Cohen’s telling the truth this time, then this conclusion, at least, is inescapable: The president, who has followed this drama obsessively, knew that his personal lawyer was lying to Congress about his business activities, and stood by while it happened.

[Read: Michael Cohen’s astonishing claim about the Trump Tower meeting]

And that’s not all. Cohen’s plea is only one shoe dropping in a boot warehouse. Who else lied to Congress about the pursuit of a hotel deal in Russia? Donald Trump Jr.? Did the president himself lie about it in his recent written answers to Mueller’s questions? (His lawyers claim that his answers matched Cohen’s.) Even if the pursuit of the hotel deal wasn’t criminal (and there’s no evidence that it was), everyone in Trump’s orbit who made statements about it—whether under oath or in interviews with the FBI—is in jeopardy today.

They’re not just in danger from Mueller, either. In just weeks, a Democratic majority will take over the House of Representatives. Control of committees will shift, and subpoenas will fly like arrows at Agincourt. Each hearing will present new terrible choices: Take the Fifth, tell uncomfortable truths, or lie and court perjury charges? Each subpoena is a new chance for frightened Trump associates to make new bad decisions like the ones that have felled Cohen and Manafort and Gates and Flynn and Papadopoulos.

I wouldn’t expect President Trump’s agitated tweets to stop anytime soon.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2QmxXx5

‘Sometimes, Life Forces You to Do Things’

Maxime Lacoste-Lebuis and Maude Plante-Husaruk, both filmmakers, were researching their upcoming trip to Central Asia when they first heard a man named Raïmberdi talk about plants. “We stumbled upon a French TV program about [Tajikistan] where Raïmberdi had briefly appeared, and we immediately thought he was a very interesting man and that there was definitely more to his story,” Lacoste-Lebuis told The Atlantic.

Months later, the pair arrived in Tajikistan through the deserted region of the Pamir Mountains. “We started inquiring about the old Kyrgyz man who had built his own hydroelectric power station,” Lacoste-Lebuis said. They didn’t know his name, or even whether he was still living. But they got lucky: A German researcher happened to be traveling through the remote area at the same time. He pointed the filmmakers in the right direction.

Lacoste-Lebuis and Plante-Husaruk’s short documentary, The Botanist, is an elegant, meditative portrait of Raïmberdi, his culture, and his life’s work. Raïmberdi descends from a tribe that lived a nomadic lifestyle in a particularly hostile environment. “Therefore, they were completely dependent on the fauna, flora, and climate of the region,” Plante-Husaruk said.

“Old Kyrgyz people knew how to use plants to make herbal remedies for pains and aches,” Raïmberdi says in the film. “I discovered everything about roots, stems, leaves, flowers, etc., and how to use them … Each plant accumulates organic substances its own way.”

Living in the Soviet Union, Raïmberdi and his people received regular shipments of goods from Russia. But when the Communist bloc collapsed, Tajikistan plunged into a devastating five-year civil war. Raïmberdi’s region suffered a prolonged famine. With no other recourse, Raïmberdi leaned into his passion for botany. He performed comprehensive geographical fieldwork, collecting thousands of plant samples in handmade herbariums. He taught himself to identify more than 300 types of plants. With this knowledge, he provided sustenance as well as medicinal support to his community. ]

Today, nearly three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, Raïmberdi’s region still lacks essential supplies such as gasoline, kerosene, matches, and flour. But the enterprising Raïmberdi has made do. In addition to his hydroelectric station, which he made out of an electromagnetic generator he salvaged from the dump, he created a machine to make fire, and other innovative technologies that his family and community rely on to survive.

“It is very surprising to meet someone who has so much ingenuity and understanding of how things work in such a simple, remote, and deserted place that seems resourceless and completely cut out from the world,” Plante-Husaruk said. “Raïmberdi has a wisdom that seems to go beyond the boundaries of his own education, age, and culture. He is one of a kind, and that’s what inspired us to make the film in the first place.”

Plante-Husaruk and Lacoste-Lebuis believe that there is much to be gleaned from Raïmberdi’s story. “I think we can learn from his curiosity,” Plante-Husaruk said. “We can learn how to open our eyes and heart to our environment—to develop humility and to stop thinking that we are above nature. This message is even more relevant now with the extreme climate changes we are to face in the next century.”

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2E1peug

Trump Suddenly Takes a Stand Against Russia

This morning it was “probably” on. Now it appears it’s off: President Trump said Thursday he was canceling his bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the seizure by Russia of three Ukrainian naval vessels off the coast of Crimea.

“Based on the fact that the ships and sailors have not been returned to Ukraine from Russia, I have decided it would be best for all parties concerned to cancel my previously scheduled meeting in Argentina with President Vladimir Putin,” Trump said on Twitter. “I look forward to a meaningful Summit again as soon as this situation is resolved!”

[Read: Ukraine is ground zero for the crisis between Russia and the West]

The president’s remarks are a striking reversal from his position earlier this week when he appeared to blame both Ukraine and Russia for the clash, saying: “We do not like what’s happening either way.” But the comments are also a walk back from those he made earlier on Thursday when he said he “probably will be meeting with President Putin,” because “I think it’s a very good time to have a meeting.” Trump also added: “I’m getting a full report on the plane as to what happened” between Russia and Ukraine in the Sea of Azov. Whatever Trump’s advisers told him, he decided to cancel the meeting.

On past occasions, this sort of advice has mattered little. Trump met with Putin in Helsinki, Finland, in July, just days after the U.S. Justice Department indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers for their alleged hacking of the emails and computers of senior Democratic Party officials in an attempt to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. Trump said at the time: “Getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing.” At a news conference following the meeting, Trump rejected the overwhelming consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, saying the Russian leader had “said it is not Russia.”

Those remarks echo Trump’s long-standing reluctance to blame Russia for its actions. Earlier this year, before he headed to the contentious G7 summit in Canada, Trump called for Russia to be readmitted to that club, from which it was expelled in 2014 following its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea. When asked if he would recognize Russia’s occupation of Crimea, Trump replied: “We’re going to have to see.” He reportedly told the other members of the G7 that Crimea was Russian because its population spoke Russian—a view he expressed as far back as 2016. Trump then appeared to blame President Barack Obama for Russia’s actions, saying, “He was the one that let Crimea get away,” and adding that Russia has “spent a lot of money on rebuilding it.”

[Read: Trump has trapped himself into cracking down on Russia]

It’s probably little coincidence that the president’s reversal Thursday came shortly after Michael Cohen, his former lawyer, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress, telling a federal court he traveled to Russia to discuss the construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow during the 2016 presidential campaign. Cohen’s plea is part of a deal with Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating Russian interference in the election and possible collusion between Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian government. Trump has insisted that there was no collusion with Russia over his election, and has labeled Mueller’s investigation a “witch hunt.”

Had Trump met with Putin at the G20, questions about Cohen, Cohen’s meetings with Russian officials, and Moscow’s interference in the presidential election would have almost certainly dogged the American president. But canceling the meeting is no guarantee that questions about Cohen’s claims and what Trump knew about his lawyer’s actions won’t continue to dog the president.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2SmajOA

Jeff Tweedy Says It’s Okay to Be Okay

The famously inscrutable Jeff Tweedy has at last clarified his opinion on American interventionism. Kinda, maybe. “All my life I’ve played a part in the bombs above the ones you love,” the Wilco front man sings over hesitant guitar twang in the opening moments of his first album of solo originals, Warm. “I’m taking a moment to apologize. I should have done more to stop the war.”

In the next verse he sings of having left “behind a trail of songs from the darkest gloom to the brightest sun,” but “it’s hard to say” that what he’s “been through should matter to you.” Then, an anecdote: A drunk man once took him by the hand and told him that “suffering is the same for everyone.” Tweedy reflects, with his voice cracking, that “he was right, but I was wrong to agree.”

As a listener, I felt I understood the meaning immediately. Tweedy is waking up to the puny scale of his problems. He sings sad songs about emotions, while his country manufactures payloads that kill children in Yemen. The drunk man turns Tweedy’s empathy back on him, offering absolution for those sad songs—absolution that Tweedy may be entitled to, but that will not bring any justice to the world.

Tweedy, however, puts the song in another context in his bracing new memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), released just a few weeks before Warm. To recover from opioid addiction in the mid-2000s, he checked into “a very hard-core city hospital in an underserved neighborhood,” and came to feel guilty about the scope of his troubles in comparison to the other people there:

I’d sit in group sessions and listen to other patients talk about their lives, and what they’d endured was beyond anything I could imagine … One guy told us about seeing his father murder his mother when he was nine and that he had his first taste of alcohol that night because his father forced him to drink whiskey, thinking it would make him forget what he’d seen. Hearing a story like that made me ashamed of how little I had had to survive and how much pain I’d derived from so much less actual trauma. What was I gonna say when the group got to me? “Um … I cry a lot. I get scared sometimes. I have headaches, and it makes it hard to make music.” That was the worst of it. I was out of my league.

But when he related this guilt to another patient, that patient was offended:

“Listen to me, motherfucker, listen.” Getting right up in my face. “Mine ain’t about yours. And yours ain’t about mine. We all suffer the same. You don’t get to decide what hurts you. You just hurt. Let me say my shit, and you say your shit, and I’ll be there for you. Okay?”

In this telling, the man offering absolution isn’t drunk, but rather in recovery. There are no bombs. But the underlying story is the same. Tweedy worries his damage is unearned given the wider world’s problems. Yet still, it’s there, and it must be dealt with either way.

More than three decades into his career as a rock-folk subversive in Wilco and Uncle Tupelo, Tweedy has emerged as a philosopher on the topic of suffering. His crisis with migraines and painkiller addiction, which crested between the 2002 release of Wilco’s genre-melting masterpiece Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and 2004’s A Ghost Is Born, was integral to his public narrative. But in the years since, he’s spoken out against the archetype with which he got tagged: the tortured artist. His memoir is now, on some level, a 304-page takedown of that cultural myth.

In his brother Steve’s bedroom, the wall was scrawled with an apocryphal Hemingway quote: “No writer ever becomes great until they’ve been greatly hurt.” The sentiment has long creeped Tweedy out, filling him with fear for whatever terrible thing he’d have to endure to succeed as an artist. He even suspects it “damaged” Steve, an author of unfinished books who Tweedy says refuses help to stop drinking. “Everyone suffers by degrees and I believe everyone has the capacity to create,” Tweedy writes. “But I think you’re one of the lucky ones if you’ve found an outlet for your discomfort or a way to cope through art.”

Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) unflinchingly describes Tweedy’s lowest point, during the making of A Ghost Is Born. Holed up in hotel rooms, he’d down pills and then fearfully Google about signs of overdose. He was sure he’d die soon. That’s why the album’s lyrics have a zoology motif: He was playing with a Noah’s Ark analogy, and “all of the songs were animals representing the different aspects of my personality worth saving.” The idea was that after his death, the lyrics would comfort his kids with the thought of their dad living on.

It’s a gutting revelation that lays bare how tangibly suffering can take a toll on art. Tweedy was debilitatingly high or in pain so often that compromises had to be made to accommodate him. “We restructured the song to be as minimal as possible with the fewest amount of chord changes,” he writes of the track “Spiders (Kidsmoke).” “This allowed me to just recite the lyrics and punctuate them with guitar skronks and scribbles to get through the song without having to concentrate past my headache too much.”

On Warm, a casually moving collection of what feel like Wilco demos that are nicely complemented and deepened by the memoir, Tweedy directly addresses fans who’ve taken the wrong lesson from his addiction stories. “Now people say, ‘What drugs did you take, and why don’t you start taking them again?’” he sings in gentle, measured tones. “But they’re not my friends.”

There’s a Tweedy solo album and book out now because Wilco has taken a break to allow the drummer, Glenn Kotche, to accompany his wife as she partakes in a Fulbright fellowship in Helsinki. That decidedly adult situation fits with the larger themes of domesticity and maturity emphasized by Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back). Tweedy’s musical career has become a family affair, with his sons, Spencer and Sammy, supposedly playing an integral role in his recording process now. The former lays down preliminary drum tracks and the latter often offers backup vocals. Both of them contributed to Sukierae, a 2014 album released under the band name “Tweedy,” as did Jeff’s wife, Susan, who was battling cancer that year.

The Fulbright-related hiatus is also a lot less dramatic than the complications that have previously faced Tweedy’s bands over the years. Jay Farrar, Tweedy’s childhood friend, quit at the height of their band Uncle Tupelo’s success after Tweedy got too friendly (platonically, Tweedy says) with Farrar’s girlfriend. In 2001, Tweedy abruptly asked Wilco’s manager to fire Ken Coomer, the drummer, simply because Tweedy had met a better percussionist in Kotche. His squabbles with the guitarist and studio experimentalist Jay Bennett were captured in Sam Jones’s 2002 documentary, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, but Tweedy’s memoir foregrounds Bennett’s drug use when explaining his firing. The musician died of an overdose a few years later.

Tweedy dishes on these tales—expressing compassion for the men he’s fallen out with, taking some measure of the blame, but also strenuously arguing his side of the story—in much the same folksy, straightforward, shockingly funny manner that the rest of Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) is written in. Dad jokes are aplenty, as are self-deprecating and sarcastic asides, even in the darkest passages. Regarding his early days of pill abuse: “I’d taken plenty of non-narcotic pain medication in my life, but mostly in suppository form due to my inability to keep solids down during a migraine. What’s that? You didn’t need to know that? My bad.”

For fans who know Tweedy largely through his abstruse poetry about murder, bloody needles, and “tongue-tied lightning,” the breezy tone will come as a shock, which is probably the point. The memoir opens with him explaining that the cover for Wilco’s 2015 freebie album, Star Wars—a cat wearing “an expression that’s more like ‘I am Coconut. I am your new god,’” Tweedy writes—was not that deep. In fact, that album and its 2016 follow-up, Schmilco, were meant to help deflate the pretentious image that had accreted around the band.

Tweedy’s 2018 output, the book and solo album, seems to have a similar corrective mission, arguing that optimism and recovery can make for art as powerful as art created from pain. To be all right—in spite of past sins, in spite of the romanticization of misery, and in spite of humankind’s tragedies—is good. Or at least it’s worth working for. “I know it’s a lie when you say it’s okay,” goes a line on the standout country-pop track “I Know What It’s Like,” and the cozy way Tweedy delivers it makes it clear he’s talking about a white lie, a healthy lie.

All of this is not to say that Warm is as jarringly perky as the memoir (though there is one facetious hurrah for the apocalypse, “Let’s Go Rain”). As always, Tweedy subtly complicates familiar folk and rock sounds—cowpunk goes ambient, noise clouds the prairie—while drawling about impossible images. But the book explains that the album was intended to be his most direct work, and indeed even the abstractions here hit the ear pretty cleanly. “I break bricks with my heart,” he sings, seeming to describe his songwriting approach. “Only a fool would call it art.”

Most poignant is the way each song works its way toward resolution, even as fear and death tremble in the margins. Warm’s title comes from a wonderful lyric on the album: “I don’t believe in heaven  / I keep some heat inside /  Like a red brick in the summer / Warm when the sun has died.” On another song, one in which Tweedy dismisses those who want him to get on painkillers again, he succinctly states his philosophy of late. “Having been is no way to be alive,” he sings, moving from weary-sounding to hopeful. “And I’m alive.”

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2KLwLy8

Companionable Capybaras

Native to most of South America, the capybara is the largest rodent on Earth. Capybaras can grow to be two feet tall (61 cm) and weigh as much as 175 pounds (79 kg). They are social animals by nature, and they have gained a level of fame worldwide for their seeming ability to make individuals from other species feel at ease in their presence. Collected here: images of capybaras young and old, in the wilds of South America, in safari parks in Europe, hot springs in Japan, and elsewhere, often pictured with a companion or two.

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2.4-Million-Year-Old Stone Tools Turn Up in an Unexpected Place

There’s a Spider That Makes Milk

From the start, Zhanqi Chen realized that something was odd about the spiders.

He had first spotted the species, known as Toxeus magnus, in a park in Singapore, and whenever he’d peer into their silken nests, he’d usually find a centimeter-long adult female surrounded by several smaller youngsters. That was weird. Most spiders are solitary, and even cannibalistic toward their own kind. There are a few kinds of sociable spiders that live in colonies, but Toxeus magnus shouldn’t have been one of them. It’s a jumping spider, a group generally known for being loners. And yet, there it was, apparently living in family groups, where the mothers cared for their young—another rarity among spiders.

The mystery deepened when Chen collected several of the spiders and reared them in his lab at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden. He noticed that after hatching, the spiderlings would stay in their home nests for at least three weeks. During that time, they never left, and their mothers never ventured out to bring back food. And yet, the spiderlings would quadruple in size. What were they eating?

Chen discovered the answer when he noticed a spiderling that seemed to have fixed itself to its mother’s underside. It wasn’t just hanging out around her. It looked like it was, for lack of a better word, suckling. Chen took one of the females, looked at it under a microscope, and squeezed its abdomen. A white droplet oozed out, and soon yellowed in the air.

It looked like milk. And for all intents and purposes, it was.

When a brood of spiderlings first hatch, their mother starts secreting the liquid from her epigastric furrow, a fold on her underside that she also uses to lay eggs. For the first week, she dabs the droplets onto the walls of her nest, and the youngsters scurry over to suck these up. After that, they drink from the furrow directly. During their crucial early period, the spiderlings rely on the milk as their only source of sustenance. It doesn’t have a lot of fat or sugar, but it’s loaded with proteins—four times as much as the equivalent amount of cow milk. When Chen stopped the spiderlings from drinking this fluid, by blocking their mother’s epigastric furrow with a dab of correction fluid, all of them died within 10 days. (The correction fluid itself didn’t affect them.)

Whether the liquid truly counts as milk depends on how you define the term. Traditionally, milk is defined as a nutritious liquid secreted by the mammary gland, and mammary glands are found only in mammals such as ourselves. But if you stretch the description to include any parental secretion that nourishes and provides for the young, then milklike stuff starts cropping up in many unexpected corners of the animal kingdom.

The tsetse fly is an insect that does a good impression of a mammal: It gives birth to live young, which it feeds within the womb with a milklike fluid. The parasitic bat flies do something similar. One species of Pacific cockroach also gives birth to live young, which it nourishes with a yellow milk, full of glittering protein crystals. Pseudo-scorpion mothers carry their hatchlings in a sac attached to their belly, and feed them with a nutritious liquid secreted from their ovaries. And pigeons (fathers included) feed their relatively helpless chicks by coughing up a chunky, fatty liquid that they secrete from their throats.

Compared with these creatures, the jumping spiders are arguably closest to mammalian lactation, in that they produce milk from a specialized organ, from which the youngsters drink over a very long time. “It would be really interesting to dissect the spiders [to see if there] was some kind of identifiable gland or something like that,” says Laura Hernandez of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who studies lactation. And Katie Hinde, another lactation expert at Arizona State University, wants to know if the spider’s liquid contains other components that are found in mammal milk, including hormones, immune chemicals, and bacteria.

[Read: Breastfeeding at any cost?]

But in the meantime, “we can call it spider milk,” Hinde says. “I’m not hung up on it coming from a mammary gland. I’m interested in how it supports development.”

Twenty days after hatching, the spiderlings make their first forays out of the nest, and start hunting for small flies. But they still return to their mother to drink her milk, until finally weaning at 40 days of age. Even then, most of them stay in the nest for many weeks more, while the mother continues to care for them. She’ll throw out their molted exoskeletons, repair the nest, and evict parasites such as mites. Even when Chen dammed up the milk-producing furrow, he found that older spiderlings still benefit from their mother’s fastidiousness, and are less likely to survive in her absence.

“She feeds them well past the period when they can forage on their own, and the nursing enhances their survival,” says Linda Rayor, an entomologist at Cornell University. “That is really quite interesting, and I don’t know of any comparable data for other spiders. [It’s also] exciting that the spiders stay together long past the period where 99.9 percent of spiders have dispersed independently.”

If this unusual setup exists in other spiders, Chen hasn’t found it yet. Even close relatives of Toxeus magnus don’t produce milk, or show such prolonged parental care. So why did these traits evolve in this one species?

“We have no idea!” Chen says. He guesses that they arose because these spiders have to cope with a difficult environment, in which food is hard to get and predators are rife. The spiderlings are barely a millimeter long, even smaller than the fruit flies that they initially hunt. “Fruit flies are also good fliers, and I don’t think it’s easy for new spiderlings to catch them,” Chen says. Far better, then, for the mothers to give them a head start in life with a steady food source. Additionally, the females, for whatever reason, might find it hard to breed. If they don’t get a lot of chances at raising a new generation, it would pay to invest more heavily in the current one.

[Read: The queen bee’s guide to parenting]

“These rare variants across the animal kingdom give us really exciting insights into the evolution of parental care,” Hinde says. All mammals make milk, so to understand why we evolved to do so, scientists have to look back in time, using genes or fossils. But species such as Toxeus magnus—an oddball milk producer within an entire family of nonlactators—make it easier to “look at what evolutionary pressures led to this huge scale-up of parental investment,” she says.

As Chen and his colleagues write, “We anticipate that [our] discoveries will encourage a reevaluation of the evolution of lactation.”

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The Strange Phenomenon of L.O.L. Surprise Dolls

Kids like weird things: Yellow sponge-boys, talking doe-eyed ponies, ruddy-cheeked rodents that say only “pika pika,” and, especially in the past few years, unboxing videos.

Kids’ unboxing videos are YouTube series in which children, or in some cases just disembodied hands, take toys out of their packaging and play with them as uplifting music plays in the background. One particularly popular video shows a small boy unwrapping and then assembling a child-size electric car, using plastic tools that would surely fall apart in less practiced hands. He then drives the car down the sidewalk through an eerily empty neighborhood to a playground that is also completely empty, where he plays by himself, presumably because all the other neighborhood children are busy watching YouTube. The video has 267 million views.

[Read: Raised by YouTube]

Toy makers, who are experts at capitalizing on children’s weird interests, have now figured out how to make a toy that replicates what kids like about unboxing videos. Enter the L.O.L. Surprise! doll, a sphere the size of a bocce ball that consists of seven layers of packaging. Kids peel away the layers of crinkly plastic, which contain stickers and messages and tiny accessories that are surely crunched under many a parental foot, and find a small, nearly naked plastic doll with giant Bette Davis eyes who measures just a few inches tall.

More than 800 million L.O.L. Surprise! toys have been sold since their debut in late 2016, and they were one of the top products sold on Cyber Monday this year, according to Adobe Digital Insights. This year, even more toy makers have caught on to the trend. Parents can now buy eggs, pods of foam, cake pops, burritos, and balls of many shapes and sizes containing mystery animals and figurines. (“Unrolling is the new unboxing,” said Ashley Mady, the head of brand development at the company that launched the burritos, called Cutetitos, in October.) Some balls contain “boy-themed” surprises, which include insects, octopuses, skateboards, ninjas, and a packet of a powdery substance, as well as my personal favorite, Poopeez, which are rolls of toilet paper that hold mystery capsules with names including Lil’ Squirt, Skid Mark, and Toot Fairy. (“These new blind capsules are creating a stink all over Kerplopolis faster than a fart disappears in the wind,” according to marketing material on Amazon.)

L.O.L. Surprise! dolls were created by MGA Entertainment, the company behind the over-sexualized plastic Bratz Dolls that were a hit in the early 2000s. Isaac Larian, the CEO, told me in an email that L.O.L. dolls were essentially reverse engineered: The company wanted to cash in on the unboxing and collectibles trends, and so it came up with L.O.L. dolls. MGA Entertainment was told, at first, that kids needed to see a product before they would ask for it, Larian said. But L.O.L. dolls proved analysts wrong—kids can apparently want things without even knowing what they are. MGA Entertainment has since branched out into L.O.L. Surprise! pets, L.O.L. Surprise! houses, and larger L.O.L. Surprise! capsules, which contain dozens of dolls and accessories and retail for about 80 bucks.

At first glance, unboxing videos are an especially bizarre phenomenon to model a toy on. Kids are essentially watching other, luckier kids get lots of expensive toys, playing without having to bother with school, or nap time, or that perennial enemy, broccoli. Some unboxing stars have become millionaires—one 6-year-old named Ryan made $11 million last year, and all he really does is open toys, search for toys in his swimming pool, shop for toys at Walmart, meet life-size and slightly creepy versions of his favorite toys, and get along well with his parents. His YouTube channel has 17 million subscribers, and a video of him collecting giant eggs from his personal bouncy castle and then opening them to reveal toys inside has a mind-boggling 1.6 billion views.

There are biological reasons young children like watching unboxing videos, and it’s the same reason they’re drawn to surprise toys. Kids don’t really get good at understanding and anticipating the future until they’re about 4 or 5, Rachel Barr, the director of the Early Learning Project at Georgetown University, told me. At that age, they start looking forward to things that will happen down the road, and so they like watching videos that have an anticipation aspect to them. But kids of that age don’t particularly like being frightened, so they like videos in which they know that nothing bad is going to happen. Unboxing videos and surprise toys allow kids to enjoy the anticipation without being too afraid, Barr said, because they know roughly what will be in the package, just not the exact details.

[Read: Why kids want things]

Kids will watch unboxing videos over and over—or open surprise toys over and over—because they pick up new details every time, Barr said, figuring out how unwrapping works. Some of the most popular unboxing videos on YouTube are of surprise toys, including a 12-minute video with 321 million views in which a boy tears open a giant golden egg to find a load of Spider-Man-themed candy and toys, including a few smaller eggs that he also unwraps. The video, which is loaded with commercials, ends with him screaming in excitement as his final egg includes a little Spider-Man.

Unboxing videos have their benefits: They allow kids to connect with other people, experience toys that their parents might not be able to afford, and hang out, in a way, with other kids, even if they live in an area without a lot of children or where it’s too dangerous to go outside, according to David Craig, a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Parents might not mind videos in which children watch other kids play with toys, he says, if it keeps them out of trouble.

Mary Lynn Hashim was confused when her 6-year-old started asking for L.O.L. Surprise! dolls last year, ahead of her December birthday. She ended up having to wait in line outside a Toys “R” Us in New York before it opened one morning to buy the toy, because it was sold out everywhere she’d looked and the store told her it was getting a new shipment. Hashim was standing next to her daughter, who is now nearly 8, as she talked to me, and asked her what was so cool about the surprise dolls. “You might get an ultra-rare,” her daughter said, referring to one of the less common dolls contained in the spheres. “Or the baby sister. It would be cool if I got the baby one.”

This desire for rare toys and dolls is what drives the collectibles industry, which itself is helping increase toy sales. According to the NPD Group, the global collectibles market grew by 14 percent in 2017, to $3.9 billion, led by L.O.L. Surprise! toys. That’s a victory for toy makers at a time when shops such as Toys “R” Us are closing their doors. But to some advocates, the fever over surprise toys shows how successful MGA Entertainment has been at marketing. They’ve convinced kids that toys are about collecting, not about play, Susan Linn, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School and the author of Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood, told me. “The problem with these dolls is the whole point of them is the acquisition,” she said. “It’s the notion that the things we buy will make us happy.”

[Read: The demise of Toys ‘R’ Us is a warning]

When kids watched programming primarily on television, it was easier for them to know what was a TV show and what was a commercial. Now that they watch more content on YouTube, they might have more difficulty telling the difference. Unboxing videos are both a TV show and a commercial; they feature kids playing, but also kids shilling new toys that have sometimes been sent to them by the toy maker. Brands create whole TV series of kids playing with toys—the L.O.L. Surprise! channel has 758,000 subscribers and features two chipper girls who wear a lot of glitter and makeup and seem to have an endless capacity for excitement over small plastic dolls. In one video, the girls talk about how great it is to get a doll you already have, because then you have twins, or “BFFs,” or even a whole dance crew. Other consumers have made and uploaded their own L.O.L. Surprise! videos, which themselves have millions of views; some feature kids who are so young they can barely talk.

Jen DelVecchio’s kids, ages 10 and 4, don’t watch TV anymore. Instead, they watch videos on an iPad. But they keep coming back to unboxing videos and commercials on YouTube, which make them go crazy over L.O.L. Surprise! toys. She buys them for special occasions, she said, but then finds that the kids abandon them after opening them. “I think with my kids, the excitement is more unwrapping it than it is actually playing with it,” she said.

For Linn, this habit—of getting something and then immediately casting it aside for something new—is what is driving the popularity of surprise toys. Kids and adults alike have short attention spans, and are hungering for adrenaline hits to get them through the day. Kids receive those adrenaline hits by getting and opening new toys, and then casting them aside. “We are in basically an ADD culture, where we are all encouraged to move very quickly from one thing to another thing,” Linn told me.

[Read: Why rich kids are so good at the marshmallow test]

Of course, not every kid who wants a surprise toy has watched an unboxing video. As often happens with kids’ obsessions, the weird thing one kid wants has become the weird thing every kid wants. Suzanne Barnecut’s 6-year-old daughter isn’t allowed to watch YouTube. But she still started asking Barnecut for L.O.L. Surprise! toys a few months ago, stopping by the toy aisle at Target to point them out. Barnecut bought a few of the toys for her daughter for Christmas, though she’s a bit worried about what will be inside, since there is no way for a parent to know ahead of time. “She definitely has not seen the videos, but all her friends have them, so they’re cool,” Barnecut said.

Surprises aren’t exactly new in the toy industry: Kids have long searched for prizes in the bottom of their Sugar Smacks or Cracker Jack boxes, and surprise toys aren’t all that different from the hundreds of toys that have cycled through kids’ playrooms and closets over the years. Kids desperately want some weird thing, nag their parents about it for days, and then get it, play with it, and cast it aside. But with surprise toys, they’re not nagging their parents about an actual toy that they want. They want the pleasure of consuming, to be let into the adult world of buying things, opening them, and then casting them aside.

Hashim, the mom who scoured the New York suburbs looking for an L.O.L. Surprise! doll, told me her daughter lost interest soon after opening it. She and her friends are now into a new toy, she told me. It’s a furry bracelet with an animal’s face on it that giggles and talks, and it’s featured in many an unboxing video on YouTube.

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