Lev Davidovich

Militants targeted the presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan as journalists gathered to hear a news conference. The attack, at around 6:30 a.m. local time on Tuesday, involved multiple explosions. It was claimed by the Taliban later via text message to reporters. 

Reporter including me are trapped in front of the palace, fight is on going.

— Mirwais Harooni (@MHarooni) June 25, 2013

Smoke rising over central #Kabul pic.twitter.com/yw7zYANcB5

— Nathan Hodge (@nohodge) June 25, 2013

Kabul attack updates: Taliban in text messages to journalists claim the attack saying the target was Palace, MoD & Ariana Hotel (CIA office)

— Esmatullah Kohsar (@EsmatKohsar) June 25, 2013

Here's how the AP described the scene: 

"Reporters gathering for an event early Tuesday with President Hamid Karzai counted at least a half dozen explosions outside the eastern gate of the palace but it was not immediate clear whether it was a suicide bomb attack, hand grenades or both. Small arms fire also could be heard." 

According to Al-Jazeera, President Karzai was likely in his office at the time of the attack. 

The Taliban just opened up an office in Doha, Qatar with the stated purpose of entering into talks with the U.S. and, possibly, Afghanistan. But after the Taliban decked out their new offices with the flag and names they used when they ruled Afghanistan, Karzai understandably responded angrily. The signs have since come down. Since the original announcement of the talks, the Taliban's actions have alternated between negotiation and violence. 

With Google Reader doomsday fast approaching, it's time to face reality and pick an RSS feed replacement. Come July 1 — that's a next Monday! — the beloved Reader will no longer exist, which gives addicts two options: Give up that method of news consumption and face whatever terrible withdrawal symptoms or pick one of the many replacements out there and adapt. Lucky for all you news junkies (ie. bloggers), plenty of other options exist and even more have popped up since the death of GReader was first announced. We know the fear of settling for second-best makes the whole transition a lot more difficult, so we went ahead and did all the research for you. Here are our picks:

For the Masses

Feedly: Feedly attempts to make RSS accessible to all sorts of people. It has a lot of the Google Reader features for the "power masses," but the picture-centric tiled format tones down the information overload that comes with RSS subscription. Like all the Reader replacements below it's incredibly easy to import your subscription lists by exporting it as an OPML file. (It's easier than it sounds.) 

Pros: It can look just like Google Reader but doesn't have to. Some die hards will go for the standard list look, which takes a little tweaking to change from the default:

But, sometimes change is good and the tiled magazine layout, which comes in various formats, presents information in a less overwhelming way:

Also, for those of us who let our Readers go over the years, it has a lovely "organization" tool. It also has the standard social network buttons, for those who want to share what they've read through Twitter or Facebook and it has tagging. 

Cons: If you just want a straight-up Reader replacement it takes a little settings tweaking to get it just right. There is also no search function — but to be fair not a single one of the Reader replacements out there has this. 

For the Power User

Digg Reader: "Our focus is purely on hyper crazy power users," Digg General Manager Jake Levine told The Atlantic Wire. And it shows in the product, which looks like a better designed version of Google Reader for people who loves Reader for its stodgy old self and want nothing more. "This isn't about making RSS more accessible to a new group of people," he added.

Pros: It looks great and matches the Digg homepage. 

It has some nice sharing and saving features, like the Digg and Save for Later buttons, which put your picks in separate folders. But really, the best thing about this is the design. It looks like a cleaned up version of Google Reader with incredibly easy-to-use settings. Up top you can change the view from lists to expanded, for example. Also, Levine promises it works "lightning fast." If you're a power user — like a blogger or something — this was built for you. 

Cons: It's a brand new product, which means bugs. While testing it we hit a few snags. Though, Levine assures the product will be at 100 percent when it launches next Wednesday. If you're looking for any of Old Reader's social features or other bells and whistles you won't find them here.  Levine says they're working on search, but he has no timeline and that it could be a "premium" — ie. cost money — feature.  

For the Mobile News Junkies

FlipBoard: Pretty much all the Reader replacements out there have companion apps. But, if you get all of your news on your phone, you might want to consider FlipBoard as a solution. 

Pros: Because it's from FlipBoard, king of mobile news it looks great and works great. And, if you're already a FlipBoard user it integrates right into the regular news reading app experience, which is awesome. 

Cons: It's mobile only, so if you want to do any Readering while not on your phone you'll have to get another solution anyway. It's a pretty basic version of what Google used to do, so for those looking for any innovation beyond the usual share to social networks features, they won't find it here. 

For the Rich People

NewsBlur: This reader has some die-hard fans including Search Engine Land's Gary Price who switched over way back in 2011, so it's worth considering. 

Pros: It has a great community, as evidenced by Price's evangelism. Also of note is the Intelligence Trainer, which attempts to learn the types of stuff that you might want to read. It also has tagging, which a lot of the newer readers haven't integrated into their services yet. 

Cons: It costs money to add more than 64 feeds. For context, I have over 300 feeds. At $24 a year, Newsblur doesn't ask much to provide a service we should want to pay for. But, still: Why pay when there are other great free versions out there? That said, Premium users get some perks, like the feeds populate ten times more often. For people that don't pay, though, it kind of stinks. The service lags, giving a "fetching stories" progress bar of death and when it does load you can't see the entire folder's contents at one time, which is kind of the point of Reader for some people. 

Finally, it's kind of ugly and cluttered:

For the Die-Hard Google Fan Who Misses Old, Old Reader

The Old Reader: As the name indicates this RSS service was built as an homage to Google, back when Reader had its social settings. 

Pros: The interface looks about as much like Google's as it can without copying it completely. Although Digg has a cleaner look, some die-hard Reader Bros might prefer the look. But, most importantly, this service has all the social features that Google Reader used to have. For example, you can add a note to a post for other people to see when you share a post:

Cons: The service lags a bit, but not as much as Newsblur. It also doesn't care to do anything other than what the Old Reader used to do. If you stuck with Google Reader back when it dropped all its old social settings, you probably aren't missing them that much. "I don't care about that anymore," one Reader power user told me. "The greatest social network ever (orig gReader) is dead and never coming back." 

If none of these sounds great, there are some other options out there like Taptu, another mobile only solution, or AOL Reader, which just launched a Beta option, slowly rolling out to users. The techies who have seen it say it's fast and good looking, but doesn't have search and organizes feeds in a weird way. Or, you could just give it all up for a Google+ account, if you're into that. 

A train of commitments by two administrations has led to the US intervention in Syria, an involvement that started well before the revised intelligence estimate about chemical weapons climbed to “high certainty.” Throughout the peculiar history of preparing the ground in Syria, there are distinct reminders of Iraq. As with Iraq, the US is looking to enter a scene of sectarian hostilities that it hopes to control by the right tactics once regime change has been accomplished. As with Iraq, refusal of inspections by the existing government has been taken to indicate the possession and use of forbidden weapons. As with Iraq, we are being encouraged by Sunni regional partners who are willing to sponsor jihadists from an overwhelming desire to weaken and overthrow the government of Iran.

We're a week away from having the potential album of the summer come out and, apparently, it's not even finished yet. Kanye West's albums still wasn't completed as of last week because he was reworking new songs, ones he sang last night during his Governor's Ball performance. 

The New York Post's Page Six reports Kanye West's new album Yeezus was unfinished as of last week, despite it's looming release next Tuesday, June 18. Yes, West was still working on the album that's supposed to press and ship by next week, and he brought in Def Jam founder and hip-hop legend Rick Rubin to help finalize things after "early releases got mixed reviews." The other problem holding the album back was the new song "Onsite." The song was supposed to sample vocals from Chicago's Holy Name of Mary Church children's choir but record executives couldn't get the sample cleared on time. They rerecorded the choir vocals themselves to avoid dealing with the hassle. 

So that was the last week in Kanye West's life, along with some birthday celebrations with Jay-Z, which all led up to last night's performance at New York City's Governor's Ball festival. Based on reviews of his performance on the Internet and people we spoke with who were there, the performance was so-so. West did touch on his struggle with the album during the performance. "You know with this album, we ain’t drop no single for radio, we ain’t got no big NBA campaign or nothing like that. Shit we ain’t got no cover... we just made some real music," he said during the rant portion of his "Clique" performance. (It's something of a show staple now.) 

He also performed the new version of "Onsite." He had only performed it once before last night, at the Cartoon Network upfronts, when the song was still untitled for the general public. You can compare the two performances if you're so inclined. Last night at Governor's Ball: 

And at Cartoon Network: 

We're now a week away from the album coming out and there's no video, no single and, most importantly, no leaks yet. Maybe he's doing something right leaving everything to the last minute. 

A new report from the International Energy Agency says global temperatures will rise twice as fast as projected if countries don't act to slash their admissions soon. Released this morning, the IEA report shows carbon diaoxide from energy emissions rose 1.4 percent globally last year, a new record, and puts the world on pace for a 5.3 degree Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) rise in global temperatures by 2020 if new steps aren't taken. In 2010, a UN summit agreed the goal would be to limit the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees by 2020. 

"This puts us on a difficult and dangerous trajectory," IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said in her statement. "If we don’t do anything between now and 2020, it will be very difficult because there will be a lot of carbon already in the atmosphere and the energy infrastructure will be locked in."

So, who are the culprits most responsible for the world's bad record so far? China and Japan are two big culprits. They saw 3.8 and 5.8 percent rises in emissions, respectively. Countries in the Middle East were also singled out. Amazingly, the U.S. earned a gold star for their work, per The Washington Post: 

The United States was one of the few relatively bright spots in the report. Switches from coal to shale gas accounted for about half the nation’s 3.8 percent drop in energy-related emissions, which fell for the fourth time in the past five years, dipping to a level last seen in the 1990s. The other factors were a mild winter, declining demand for gasoline and diesel, and the increasing use of renewable energy.

"Born in the caul" is a phrase that's connected with a lot of cross-cultural myths and superstitions — babies born in the caul are supposed to be destined for lives of fame and fortune (or, possibly, misfortune and grisly death, depending on which legends you're listening to). Biologically, though, it refers to a baby that's born with part of the amniotic sac — the bubble of fluid a fetus grows in inside the uterus — still attached. Usually, a piece of the sac is draped over the baby's head or face. These are called caul births, and they're rare. But, about once in every 80,000 births, you'll get something truly extraordinary — "en-caul", a baby born inside a completely intact amniotic sac, fluid and all.

There's a photo of a recent en-caul birth making the rounds online. The photo is being attributed to Greek obstetrician Aris Tsigris. It's fascinating. But it's also pretty graphic, so fair warning on that. (If the sight of newborn infants and blood gives you the vapors, you might also want to avoid most of the links in this post, as well.)

Check that shit out. I mean, seriously. That's awesome.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of information on the details of this particular birth, but, most of the time, when a baby is born this way it's also born premature. Sometimes, really premature. There are case reports in medical literature of babies being born en-caul at 23 weeks, 6 days gestation, which, for context, is a little over half the weeks you'd want a baby to gestate. Fetuses aren't large or well-developed enough to even be able to clearly tell their sex on an ultrasound until about 20 weeks gestation.

The premie connection is probably more than coincidence. For one thing, the smaller the fetus, the more space the sac around it has to ballon outward and come through the birth canal intact. What's more, there's evidence that being born en-caul has a protective effect for premature infants. Nobody is exactly sure why. But it might have something to do with the physical mechanics of birth, which, I'm sure you're aware, can be a little rough on both mother and baby. Premies born en-caul essentially come with their own cushiony air bag, which might protect them from physical injuries that could otherwise be life-threatening.

So, in that sense, babies born en-caul really are lucky. Just not in the way the ancient legends would have you believe. In fact, in 1975, a newborn survived for 25 minutes outside the uterus, but inside the fluid-filled amniotic sac, not breathing air, and turned out completely healthy.

Speaking of legends of the caul, back in 1952 The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine published a manuscript by Thomas Forbes, which collected literary and documentary references to caul-related superstitions dating back to Roman times. I wanted to share one particularly fun story from Forbes' account. This refers to a caul birth, rather than an en-caul birth, so the amniotic sac wasn't totally intact. Instead, just a part of it was draped over the newborn baby's head.

Notes and Queries, that extraordinary repository of antiquarian and other information, offers a quotation from a British newspaper, the Leeds Mercury, for 14 September 1889.

"A laborer's wife bore a son on whose head was a caul. The veil was placed on one side, and no notice was taken of it until some hours after the child's birth. When examined, however, it was found that the words 'British and Foreign Bible Society' were deeply impressed upon the veil. When this discovery was made the greatest excitement prevailed in the neighbourhood, some of the women declaring that nothing short of a miracle had been enacted. The doctor, who inquired into the matter, however, soon explained the affair. The veil, whilst in a pliable condition, had been placed upon a Bible, on the cover of which the words 'British and Foreign Bible Society' were deeply indented. The words were in this way transferred to the veil; but some of the inhabitants still ascribe the affair to supernatural influence..."

READ MORE
• A 2012 case study of another en-caul birth, from the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. This brief write-up has a photo of the baby, neatly packaged in its bubble.
• The Social History of the Caul — Thomas Forbes' 1952 account of the history of caul-related myths and stories.
• Wikipedia on the amniotic sac, in case you need more background about what that is and how it works.

Between 1990 and 2009 there were some sixty-seven prosecutions of heads of state or heads of government for human rights abuses or corruption, or both, a far greater number than ever before. Yet the trial of former dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt, who served as president of Guatemala from the time of his military coup in March 1982 until he was forced out in August 1983, was unique. For the first time, a former head of state was tried for genocide in the courts of his own country. In effect, the prosecution of Ríos Montt also condemned the policies of the Reagan administration, which was a resolute apologist for the Guatemalan dictator.

Our rehearsals of our own good intentions, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, and now in Syria, have swollen to the shape of a rationalized addiction. What then should the US do? Nothing, until we can do something good. But the situation could not be less promising. At present, the main support of Syrian opposition forces comes from Saudis and Qataris. The US has offered help at two removes, but lacks the intelligence to perform much more without strengthening al-Qaeda as we did in Libya. And each day adds a new reminder of the futility of allegedly pragmatic solutions.

Ars Technica's Nate Anderson follows up on his excellent piece on the nuts and bolts of password cracking with a further attempt to decrypt an encrypted password file leaked from LivingSocial, this time with the aid of experts. The password file they were working on was encrypted with the relatively weak (and now deprecated) SHA1 hashing algorithm, and they were only attacking it with a single GPU on a commodity PC, and were able to extract over 90% of the passwords in the file.

The discussion of the guesswork and refinement techniques used in extracting passwords is absolutely fascinating and really is a must-read. However, the whole exercise is still a bit inconclusive -- in the end, we know that a badly encrypted password file is vulnerable to an underpowered password-cracking device. But what we need to know is whether a well-encrypted password file will stand up to a good password-cracking system.

The specific type of hybrid attack that cracked that password is known as a combinator attack. It combines each word in a dictionary with every other word in the dictionary. Because these attacks are capable of generating a huge number of guesses—the square of the number of words in the dict—crackers often work with smaller word lists or simply terminate a run in progress once things start slowing down. Other times, they combine words from one big dictionary with words from a smaller one. Steube was able to crack "momof3g8kids" because he had "momof3g" in his 111 million dict and "8kids" in a smaller dict...

What was remarkable about all three cracking sessions were the types of plains that got revealed. They included passcodes such as "k1araj0hns0n," "Sh1a-labe0uf," "Apr!l221973," "Qbesancon321," "DG091101%," "@Yourmom69," "ilovetofunot," "windermere2313," "tmdmmj17," and "BandGeek2014." Also included in the list: "all of the lights" (yes, spaces are allowed on many sites), "i hate hackers," "allineedislove," "ilovemySister31," "iloveyousomuch," "Philippians4:13," "Philippians4:6-7," and "qeadzcwrsfxv1331." "gonefishing1125" was another password Steube saw appear on his computer screen. Seconds after it was cracked, he noted, "You won't ever find it using brute force."

Anatomy of a hack: How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331”

I had testicular cancer in the spring of 2009. The cancer wasn't really the hard part, it was mostly the depression, combined with all the dumb shit that people had to say about it. I told this story at The Moth on February 13th, 2013 - the theme was "Love Hurts." A version of this was published in a cool book illustrated by Arthur Jones called "The Post-It Note Diaries," but this is pretty different. If you want to see more stories, art, or information about where else I might be performing, check out my blog at andiamnotlying.com.

President Barack Obama’s speech Thursday at the National Defense University may turn out to be the most significant of his tenure. After four years of failing to make much progress toward closing Guantánamo, while increasingly relying on a drone war whose legality has often been questioned, Obama might have chosen to speak more cautiously in his NDU speech. Instead, he went much further, outlining a way out of this “perpetual war,” saying that “our democracy demands it.” Whether he can make good on this promise will very likely define his legacy. If he succeeds in doing so, the Nobel Peace Prize committee will be seen not as naïve, but as remarkably prescient, in its awarding of the Peace Prize to Obama in 2009.

Elijah sez, "Recent news has been all about the commercial use of 3D printing - from food to weaponry. But recently, doctors at the University of Michigan used quick thinking and 3D printing technology to save the life of a 2-month-old child with a rare disease."

The scaffold was made of a bioresorbable material, polycaprolactone, so it would dissolve and be absorbed by the body after about three years. At this point, his airways should be fully developed and no longer need the stent.

The doctors used high-resolution X-ray scans of one of Kaiba's healthy windpipes to design a computer model for the life-saving brace.

Laser-equipped 3-D printers crafted the device in a few hours, and the university obtained emergency clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to implant it on February 9, 2012 at C.S. Mott Children's Hospital in Ann Arbor.

"It was amazing. As soon as the splint was put in, the lungs started going up and down for the first time and we knew he was going to be OK," said Green.

3-D Printing Saves Baby's Life [VIDEO] (Thanks, Elijah Wolfson!)

Daniel Klein of George Mason University has conducted one of the broadest studies with the Google search engine [TC: the paper is here]…On the subject of individualization, he found that the word “preferences” was barely used until about 1930, but usage has surged since. On the general subject of demoralization, he finds a long decline of usage in terms like “faith,” “wisdom,” “ought,” “evil” and “prudence,” and a sharp rise in what you might call social science terms like “subjectivity,” “normative,” “psychology” and “information.”

Klein adds the third element to our story, which he calls “governmentalization.” Words having to do with experts have shown a steady rise. So have phrases like “run the country,” “economic justice,” “nationalism,” “priorities,” “right-wing” and “left-wing.” The implication is that politics and government have become more prevalent.

So the story I’d like to tell is this: Over the past half-century, society has become more individualistic. As it has become more individualistic, it has also become less morally aware, because social and moral fabrics are inextricably linked. The atomization and demoralization of society have led to certain forms of social breakdown, which government has tried to address, sometimes successfully and often impotently.

This story, if true, should cause discomfort on right and left. Conservatives sometimes argue that if we could just reduce government to the size it was back in, say, the 1950s, then America would be vibrant and free again. But the underlying sociology and moral culture is just not there anymore. Government could be smaller when the social fabric was more tightly knit, but small government will have different and more cataclysmic effects today when it is not.

Liberals sometimes argue that our main problems come from the top: a self-dealing elite, the oligarchic bankers. But the evidence suggests that individualism and demoralization are pervasive up and down society, and may be even more pervasive at the bottom. Liberals also sometimes talk as if our problems are fundamentally economic, and can be addressed politically, through redistribution. But maybe the root of the problem is also cultural. The social and moral trends swamp the proposed redistributive remedies.

Here is more, interesting throughout.

Guatemalan dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt, convicted of committing acts of genocide earlier this month, will not be headed to prison. For the time being he'll return to house arrest, after the country's highest court determined that the conclusion of his unprecedented trial be thrown out.

Montt held power in Guatemala between 1982 and 1983, during which time he was accused of ordering troops to massacre indigenous Mayans. On May 20, he was convicted of that crime and sentenced to 80 years in prison, a de facto life sentence for the 86 year-old. Shortly after the trial — a first in Central America — he was transferred to a prison hospital.

Now, he's likely to head home under guard. In essence, the Constitutional Court rewound the trial, which concluded on May 20, back one month. The Times reports on the decision.

The court did not invalidate the entire trial, which began on March 19. Instead, the court ordered that the proceedings be rolled back and reset to April 19, when a complex decision by another judge sent the trial into disarray, causing a brief suspension.

By April 19, the tribunal had heard all of the prosecution’s case and most of the defense’s. That testimony still stands. But the court’s ruling invalidated everything after that date.

To some extent, the turmoil is the Constitutional Court's own fault. On April 18, one of its judges ruled that the entire trial be restarted. The next day, the judges hearing the trial asked the Constitutional Court if it could continue; on April 30, it did.

How the trial proceeds from this point on is still not entirely clear. Nor is it clear what the implication might be for Montt's co-defendant José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez. He was acquitted during the trial, raising the question of whether or not he'd be re-arrested.

BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin, who covered the trial in person, reinforces that the next steps are unclear. She makes clear, too, that the setback is greater than the legal chaos.

It is an unimaginable blow to each of the Ixil Maya victims, and others, who suffered abuses during the US-backed military dictator's 17-month reign.

About 100 Ixil survivors testified during the trial.

“Aquí, no lloró nadie. Aquí, solo queremos ser humanos,” they sang after the verdict. “Here, no one cried. Here, we only want to be human.”

— Xeni Jardin (@xeni) May 21, 2013

Farai Chideya in The Nation on minority representation in the media Farai Chideya takes stock of those trusted to report the news, and wonders why she sees so few minorities in the newsroom: "We are witnessing the resegregation of the American media. The 2012 annual survey of the American Society of News Editors found that while total newsroom employment dropped 2.4 percent in 2011, the loss in minority newsroom positions was 5.7 percent. Between 2007 and 2010, ASNE noted, the minority job losses were even more pronounced." The reason, she says, is monetary: "The issue comes down to money. Mainstream journalism, with its endless unpaid internships, has come far from its working-class newspaper roots. Getting your start in journalism often doesn’t pay. Instead, you have to chip in to join the club. ... News managers can make a short-term case for unpaid intern labor, or layoffs that decimate the recently hired, more diverse segments of their staffs. But a long-term recovery for our hard-hit news industry requires an investment in talent, even if that talent doesn’t come from family money. This reliance on un- or underpaid labor is part of a broader move to a 'privilege economy' instead of a merit economy—where who you know and who pays your bills can be far more important than talent." Ross Perlin, author of Intern Nation, echoed the same sentiment in an interview with NPR: "The internship has become virtually a requirement for getting into the white-collar workforce."

Lindsay L. Rodman in The Wall Street Journal on the data of sexual assault in the military Dealing with the epidemic of sexual assault in the U.S. armed forces will require accurate data of the actual problem, writes Lindsay L. Rodman, who criticizes a recent report which estimated that approximately 26,000 sexual take place in the military each year. ". The truth is that the 26,000 figure is such bad math—derived from an unscientific sample set and extrapolated military-wide—that no conclusions can be drawn from it." She continues: "It is disheartening to me, as a female officer in the Marine Corps and a judge advocate devoted to the professional practice of law in the military, to see Defense Department leaders and members of Congress deal with this emotionally charged issue without the benefit of solid, verifiable data. ... The estimated 26,000 service members who fell victim to unwanted sexual contact in 2012 is higher than the 19,000 estimate based on the 2010 WRGA survey (the survey wasn't conducted in 2011). Does this mean that there was a 34% jump in just two years? The data are too unreliable to tell. ... These numbers vary widely because incidents involving unwanted sexual contact cannot accurately be extrapolated military-wide using this survey." Over at CNN, Maia Goodell adds that the military justice system is unequipped to adequately address sexual assault: "A friend told me that in the 1960s, a teacher told her she needed to sleep with him to pass. She said: "We just called that life." Now, in the civilian world, it's called sexual harassment, and it's illegal.The military hasn't had the benefit of that change. Civilian judges (not Congress, and not the military) made up special military immunities, loosely called the Feres doctrine, to block it. It's time to overrule them." 

Pankaj Mishra at Bloomberg View on wealth and freedom in China What, asks Pankaj Mishra, does the developlment of China say about "the Anglo-American faith in the onward march of liberalism and democracy"? He explains: "It has achieved spectacular growth without embracing electoral democracy. Moreover, the state controls the commanding heights of the globalized economy. This will not change anytime soon. ... Here is the question before us: Is the model sustainable, and what implications would its failure have for China and the larger world? The late modernization of Japan and Germany, though largely successful, did not lead to peace in Europe and Asia. Rather, economic crises and growing social unrest led to greater authoritarianism at home and jingoistic expansionism abroad. ... China may turn out to be another cautionary lesson in the dangers of a country arriving too late in the modern world, with its elites determined to regard liberal democracy as an unaffordable luxury." Meanwhile Louisa Lim at NPR notes how the country's growth has altered its civic character: "Money is the be-all and end-all in modern day China." 

George Packer in The New York Times on the 21st century celebrity Why do we worship celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, and Martha Stewart? "Our age is lousy with celebrities. They can be found in every sector of society, including ones that seem less than glamorous," writes George Packer. "There is a quality of self-invention to their rise: Mark Zuckerberg went from awkward geek to the subject of a Hollywood hit; Shawn Carter turned into Jay-Z; Martha Kostyra became Martha Stewart, and then Martha Stewart Living. The person evolves into a persona, then a brand, then an empire, with the business imperative of grow or die — a process of expansion and commodification that transgresses boundaries by substituting celebrity for institutions. Instead of robust public education, we have Mr. Zuckerberg’s 'rescue' of Newark’s schools. Instead of a vibrant literary culture, we have Oprah’s book club. Instead of investments in public health, we have the Gates Foundation. Celebrities either buy institutions, or 'disrupt' them." Packer remains skeptical that our celebrities, even those who rise above empty face, offer anything like a model for the good life: "We know our stars aren't inviting us to think we can be just like them. Their success is based on leaving the rest of us behind." As a symptom of this arrangement, Packer singled out school reform, whose patron saint, former D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee, was profiled in The New Republic, where Nicholas Lemann hinted at the same dynamic Packer speaks of: "The education-reform movement comports itself in this strident and limited manner is that it depends so heavily on the largesse of people who are used to getting their way and to whom the movement’s core arguments have a powerful face validity."

Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker on the danger of the Keystone XL pipeline Elizabeth Kolbert weighs the advantages of building the transcontinental Keystone XL pipeline, which would shuttle enormous amounts of tar sands oil from Canada to the United States. "The arguments in favor of Keystone run more or less like this: Americans use a lot of oil—more than eighteen million barrels per day. It has to come from somewhere, and Canada is a more reliable trading partner than, say, Iraq," she begins. "If the arguments in favor of Keystone are persuasive, those against it are even stronger. Tar-sands oil ... starts out as semi-solid and has to be either mined or literally melted out of the ground. In either case, the process requires energy, which is provided by burning fossil fuels. The result is that ... significantly more carbon dioxide enters the air than for every barrel of ordinary crude—between twelve and twenty-three per cent more." The pipeline will burden the future, Kolbert argues: "Were we to burn through all known fossil-fuel reserves, the results would be unimaginably bleak: major cities would be flooded out, a large portion of the world’s arable land would be transformed into deserts, and the oceans would be turned into liquid dead zones. If we take the future at all seriously, which is to say as a time period that someone is going to have to live in, then we need to leave a big percentage of the planet’s coal and oil and natural gas in the ground." John Fiege at The Huffington Post explains why the decision will be difficult for President Obama no matter where he decides to throw his support: "With this pipeline, he faces a decision about the economic future of America with outsized symbolic significance: will we go further down the old road of the oil economy ... or will we take a bold turn toward building a new economy based on low-impact, renewable, domestic energy? The president does not want to make this choice, even symbolically. He knows that approving the pipeline would be wrong for the country and for the planet. But doing the right thing would alienate the most powerful industry in the world and disrupt the very fabric of our oil-based economy. So he drags his feet."

So if Kanye West's weird behavior in the Saturday Night Live promos wasn't enough to pique your interest in tonight's season finale, last night he surprised the world be debuting a new song and video with projections on landmarks in 10 different cities around the world. 

From New York to Chicago to L.A., all the way up north to Toronto, and across the seas in Europe and Australia, West released the video for his song "New Slaves" with no advanced word via projections onto the walls of museums and other major buildings late last night. This map from West's website tells you where you needed to live to check it out: 

Here's the video being projected on Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum:

And here's Kanye's face on the wall outside Chicago's Wrigley Field:

And here's Kanye's face outside the 5th Avenue Prada Store in New York City: 

The new beat is sparse and haunting. Kanye seems to be moving in a new political and social direction with this song, judging from the lyrics. (As if that wasn't expected with a title like "New Slaves.") And, yes, the video is roughly four minutes of a close-up shot on Kanye's face. People were scrambling to get to the surprise showings all Friday evening. The song played on a loop for hours to let more people capture videos, vines and instagrams. It might be the most social song debut in the world. Part of that is because of Kanye's face being the only image (because of course it is) but also because these are some of the most political lyrics of Kanye's career. It seems like he has something to get off his chest: 

My mama was raised in an era when/Clean water was only served to the fairer skin
Doing clothes you would have thought I had help/But they wouldn’t be satisfied unless I picked the cotton myself
You see its broke nigga racism/That's that "don't touch anything in the store"
And there’s rich nigga racism/That's that "come in and buy more"
What you want a Bentley, fur coat and diamond chain?/All you blacks want all the same things
Used to only be niggas /Now everybody play me
Spending everything on that Alexander Wang/New Slaves

Meanwhile, Kanye was driving around New York City watching people watch him. Yeezy made surprise appearances at his surprise shows last night. He seemed to be channeling his inner Bill Murray: 

Oh shit. He watched it behind us on his Maybach and just drove off! Wtfffff

— Hyphen (@DJHyphen) May 18, 2013

Man, Yeezy just pulled some punk'd type shit. Watched behind us with his phone up like everyone filming then bounced quick. Keyser Soze.

— Hyphen (@DJHyphen) May 18, 2013

Few people can get away with this kind of thing. Debuting a song with no warning as part of a street art stunt is the ballsiest thing an artist can possibly do. If it was anyone other than Kanye the response would be, "who cares?" But Ye's crafted himself into a position where he can pull something like this off: 

Kanye rolling up to the Prada store in a Maybach to watch people watch his face on a building is the most Kanye thing there is.

— Luis Paez-Pumar (@paezpumarL) May 18, 2013

Kanye has people listening to a song for 5 hours straight and staring at a screen. On a wall or at home. Fucking genius

— Nation (@NahRight) (@definitely_nah) May 18, 2013

truly he is Citizen Kanye

— Molly Lambert (@mollylambert) May 18, 2013

So Kanye just cranked up the anticipation level for his Saturday Night Live appearance. As our Esther Zuckerman explained yesterday, Kanye's history of putting on memorable performances in Studio 8H is extensive. His 2010 appearance produced two of the most enduring performances of "Runaway" and "Power," off his fantastic My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy album, from that album's promotional tour. You should make sure you tune in tonight. It's going to be interesting, to say the least. 

The familiar stark divide between people of religion and without religion is too crude. Many millions of people who count themselves atheists have convictions and experiences very like and just as profound as those that believers count as religious. They say that though they do not believe in a “personal” god, they nevertheless believe in a “force” in the universe “greater than we are.” They feel an inescapable responsibility to live their lives well, with due respect for the lives of others; they take pride in a life they think well lived and suffer sometimes inconsolable regret at a life they think, in retrospect, wasted.

“Everybody has got plenty of advice,” sighed President Obama at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. “Maureen Dowd said I could solve all my problems if I were just more like Michael Douglas in ‘The American President.’ And I know Michael is here tonight. Michael, what’s your secret, man? Could it be that you were an actor in an Aaron Sorkin liberal fantasy? Might that have something to do with it?”

That’s it. That’s the joke. Or, perhaps more to the point, that isn’t the joke. There’s no punchline. It’s more of a straightforward rebuttal to a recent Maureen Dowd column.

(Pete Marovich/EPA/Pool)

Obama’s speech at the White House correspondents’ dinner was well received, and for good reason — it was very funny. But there were a lot of moments when Obama seemed to be subverting the rules of the evening in order to get away with telling harsh truths that he could later claim were just jokes.

“Some folks still don’t think I spend enough time with Congress,” the president said. “‘Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?’ they ask. Really? Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?”

Everyone laughed. But do you detect an actual joke there? And lest you think I’m cutting the punchline, here’s Obama’s next sentence: “I’m sorry. I get frustrated sometimes.”

Juliet Eilperin and Zach Goldfarb have a nice piece delivering the context for that frustration:

At this point in his presidency, Obama has pretty much tried it all. He has met privately with Republican leaders in the House, collaborated with bipartisan groups of senators and taken his case to the people, hoping that the power of public opinion could win over his opponents in Congress. This year, for the most part, none of those approaches have worked.

What’s left, they write, is Obama’s “charm.” And I think if you read their piece closely — or just think about Washington for more than a minute — you won’t come away particularly optimistic over the chances for “charm” to work, either.

There should be nothing controversial about this next sentence: If Republicans don’t want to work with President Obama, there’s nothing he can do to make them work with him. Speeches don’t work. Backroom negotiations don’t do it. And of course “charm” is insufficient.

And yet, that sentence is deeply controversial. Most political commentary expressly denies it. If written down, the implicit assumption that dominates this town is, in fact, closer to the opposite: If Republicans aren’t working with President Obama, it’s because he’s doing something to drive them away, or because he’s not doing something to pull them closer in.

But politicians understand their incentives. Republican legislators have to win primaries among electorates that deeply dislike President Obama. In that world, working with the White House very likely means losing your job. It also means making Obama more popular, which means making it less likely that you and your party will get back into the majority in the next election. And on the other side of this equation is — what? Bourbon with Obama? A speech Obama gave to 2,000 people in your state?

The White House can employ better or worse strategies, of course. But it’s deeply insulting to the grown men and women who populate the U.S. Congress to posit that the only reason they’re acting as they are is that the president doesn’t lavish them with sufficient attention, or campaign in their districts, or twist arms like Lyndon Johnson. Give Congress a bit more credit than that. Like the president at the White House correspondents’ dinner, they take this stuff seriously.

Until now, President Obama has put the blame for failing to deal with Guantánamo on Congress. Without question, Congress has made his job more difficult by obstructing detainee transfers with onerous “certification” requirements. But there are steps the president could nonetheless take. For example, the current law permits the executive branch to waive some of the requirements when the transfer “is in the national security interests of the United States.” Moreover, eighty-six detainees have been “cleared for release” but remain in detention. Fifty-six of them are Yemeni citizens, and it was President Obama, not Congress, who placed their release on hold.

Detainees at Camp X-Ray sit in a holding area with Naval Base Guantanamo Bay military police during intake on Jan. 11, 2002. Camp X-Ray is now an abandoned area. US DoD photo.

Jason Leopold at Truthout reports that an attorney who represented detainees at Guantanamo Bay, where a mass hunger strike is ongoing, was found dead last week in what sources said was a suicide:

Andy P. Hart, 38, a federal public defender in Toledo, Ohio, apparently died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Hart left behind a suicide note and a thumb drive, believed to contain his case files. It is unknown where Hart died, what the suicide note said or whether an autopsy was performed.

At a White House press conference Tuesday, President Obama said he would again press Congress to allow the Guantanamo Bay detention center to be closed, and that the 100 detainees currently on hunger strike there have shown that "this is a lingering problem that is not going to get better — it's going to get worse, it's going to fester." Obama's failure to get Gitmo closed is his most famous broken campaign promise from 2008, and even promised parole-style hearings have been delayed more than a year. "For a lot of Americans the notion is out-of-sight-out-of-mind, and it's easy to demagogue the issue — that's what happened the first time this came up. I'm going to go back at it, because I think it's important," Obama said. "All of us should reflect on why, exactly, are we doing this." Yes, all of us. Because what has kept Gitmo open is a chain of elected and appointed officials making sure there's no way they can be blamed if the detainees there commit a crime in the future.

"I don't want these individuals to die," Obama said, insisting the Pentagon was handling the hunger strike "as best as they can." The American Medical Association doesn't think so. The Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg reports that the AMA has written a letter to the Pentagon saying "force feeding of detainees violates core ethical values of the medical profession." If detainees won't eat, they're fed through a tube in their noses, usually by enlisted sailors with medical training and now by medics who recently arrive in Cuba. By Monday, the prison had a 1-to-1 prisoner-to-medical-worker ratio. Five detainees have been hospitalized, and 21 are being nose-tubed.

If Obama hates Guantanamo so much, why didn't he close it? It's a complicated chain in which everyone is avoiding responsibility for hypothetical crimes committed by yet-to-be-released detainees:

Obama wanted to try some detainees in the U.S., but Congress said no. In the 2011 and 2012 defense spending bills, Congress prevented taxpayer money from paying for detainees to have trials in the U.S., as well as using an Illinois prison to hold detainees who can't be tried. 

Obama wanted to transfer some detainees, but Congress said no, unless there's a court order or a national security waiver. In 2009, a Guantanamo Review Task Force found that about 80 of the then-171 detainees could be released to another country, the Herald's Rosenberg explains. But Congress passed legislation making it very difficult to transfer detainees — there must be a federal court order, or the Secretary of Defense must issue a national security waiver. (At right, three former Gitmo detainees making a new life in Palau.)

Court orders aren't happening. The U.S. Court of Appeals has overruled lower court decisions allowing detainees to be released. The Daily Beast's Clive Stafford-Smith explained last year:

A new study out of Seton Hall University School of Law finds that the federal district courts in Washington, D.C., granted 56 percent of the habeas petitions filed by detainees after the Supreme Court permitted the petitions in 2008. But since July 2010, the courts have rejected all but one.

And the Pentagon isn't issuing waivers. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel would, on a case-by-case basis, basically have to promise the detainees would never do anything bad again. The law requires the country detainees are returned to must have "agreed to take effective steps to ensure that the transferred person does not pose a future threat to the United States, its citizens or its allies." As The Boston Globe points out points out, this "sweeping language has had a chilling effect." That being said, the Obama administration has not used this power.

And Obama has made it impossible to return detainees to the place many are from: Yemen. At The Daily Beast, Baher Azmy, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, writes that "the most direct limitation on his ability to successfully close the prison is self-inflicted: a ban on all transfers to Yemen, which roughly 90 of the men at Guantánamo call home." This happened after the underwear bomber's attempted attack in 2009. A few years ago, the U.S. couldn't send detainees there because the Yemeni government was demanding a ton of money to take the detainees of American hands. But the current Yemeni government has asked the detainees be returned. Yemen is, after all, a partner in the war on terror, letting us drone their terrorists.

(Inset photos by the Associated Press. Click here for more on Obama's press conference.)

Old Mankato, MN Public Library, aka Deep Valley Library.

“She thought of the library, so shining white and new; the rows and rows of unread books; the bliss of unhurried sojourns there and of going out to a restaurant, alone, to eat.”
—Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown

Photo: Jaime Reyes, Guatemala. A bus carrying demonstrators from the Ixil area to a pro-Rios Montt march in Guatemala City. The sign reads, “Hairy Hippies and Foreigners, stop making money off the lie of genocide in Nebaj.”

Update, 447pm Guatemala local time: The Constitutional Court has resolved to effectively annul the trial, but it is not yet clear how far back the process has been turned. Prosecution team and victims' rights groups vow to move forward. CALDH: "This is a setback for justice, for the victims, but this is not a defeat."

I've been traveling in Guatemala for the past few weeks, reporting on the genocide trial of former Guatemalan General and genocide and de factor dictator Rios Montt, and his then-head of intelligence Jose Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez. Montt's 1982-1983 regime was supported by the United States; during this era many thousands of non-combatant civilians were killed.

On Friday, a legal power struggle between two judges, initiated by the defense, effectively put the trial on hold. Today, the nation's highest court, the Corte Constitutional, continues to deliberate behind closed doors about whether or not the tribunal may continue. And as the judges review numerous legal appeals, supporters of the Ixil Maya victims (and of the trial itself) and supporters of Rios Montt and the Army (who want the trial to be thrown out) face off in increasingly charged public protests.

As I publish this post, a large assembly of former civil patrollers ("patrulleros," mostly indigenous people who were conscripted by the Army to fight in the counterinsurgency), Army veterans and their families and allies, and Ixil persons transported in from Nebaj, have descended upon Guatemala City in a caravan of buses with provocative banners.

Ricardo Mendez-Ruiz of Guatemalan Foundation Against Terrorism (Fundación Contra El Terrorismo), with Ixil people transported to Guatemala City from Nebaj for a demonstration supporting Rios Montt, and condemning the genocide trial. Photo: skylight.is.

One sign on one of the pro-Montt buses carrying in protesters from the Ixil area reads, “Hairy Hippies and Foreigners, stop making money off the lie of genocide in Nebaj” (the Ixil area at the center of this tribunal is generally defined as a zone around three villages: Nebaj, Chajul, and Cotzal). Another banner reads, “Don’t shame the Ixiles with this genocide stuff, because it’s a lie.”

The march appears to have been organized by Fundación Contra El Terrorismo. Inviting Facebook fans to join the march, the group warns: “Remember, a genocide conviction won’t just be against Montt and Sanchez, it will be against you and me, and the entire state of Guatemala. And it will affect you financially—you have to pay victims compensation, which will mostly line pockets of middlemen.”

Get off of Facebook and on to the streets, the group asked its followers. “And don’t complain if your laziness allows communists to decide the future for you."

Fundación Contra El Terrorismo is the same group that recently published a 20-page insert in the Sunday paper which blamed a Marxist conspiracy enabled by the Catholic Church for the "lie" of genocide on trial in the Guatemalan courts. You can read it here.

Ricardo Mendez-Ruiz, the Foundation's director and the son of Rios Montt’s former Minister of Interior, wrote an op-ed in today's El Periodico titled "Mickey Mouse Pressure."

In his op-ed, Mendez personally condemns Nobel Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz, and US Ambassador to Guatemala Arnold Chacon, linking them indirectly the to “Marxist-Leninist ideology” that was purportedly at the heart of the internal armed conflict, and threatens still to destroy the country. More directly, the implication is that the US Ambassador, and the country he represents, are manipulating or applying pressure to the justice system to enable the genocide trial. In other words, "Mickey Mouse Pressure."

The US Embassy and a coalition of international aid groups which were recently condemned in media attacks took the unprecedented step of publishing this statement on Friday. The statement emphasizes their respect for Guatemala's sovereignty, and is a move of support toward a fair and functional justice system. These accusations [against us] don't help to confront the real problems Guatemala faces, their message concludes.

The Fundación Contra El Terrorismo's Mendez has been speaking out frequently in domestic media of late. The group's argument is that foreigners and domestic communists funded by foreigners are inciting a revengeful attack on the Guatemalan Army and the state itself through the genocide trial; there was no genocide, they say, and to ask the question is to attack Guatemala and the soldiers who sacrificed their lives fighting the threat of the Soviet- and Cuba-backed international communist conspiracy.

Ricardo Mendez-Ruiz of Guatemalan Foundation Against Terrorism (Fundación Contra El Terrorismo), leading a public protest in Guatemala City for the Montt genocide trial to be terminated. Photo: skylight.is.

In the Ixil area today, Mayan community organization Comité de Unidad Campesina condemns the pro-Montt demonstration as, more or less, the result of unfair manipulation and bribery of war victims who are living in poverty. Indigenous leader Miguel Rivera of Nebaj will speak shortly.

And in related news: the National Lawyers Guild of the United States (NLG) wrote to the Constitutional Court of Guatemala to communicate their concern "for the twist that the trial for crimes against humanity have taken." US Ambassador Chacon was cc'd. A copy of their letter is here.

And at Al Jazeera's website, “The long arc of justice in Guatemala” is a comprehensive opinion piece written by NLG delegation member Lauren Carasik.

At riosmontt-trial.org, two thorough and informative posts to read today: one, an overview of the legal challenges and debates at issue. And in this post, news that the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, Mr. Adama Dieng, has urged judicial authorities involved in the Guatemala genocide trial "to conclude the case and bring accountability for the atrocity crimes committed during the internal armed conflict in Guatemala."

Archive: Boing Boing coverage of the Rios Montt genocide trial in Guatemala.

Photo: Fernanda Toledo, Guatemala. A bus carrying demonstrators from the Ixil area to a pro-Rios Montt march in Guatemala City. The sign reads, “Don't shame the Ixiles with this genocide stuff, because it's a lie.”

According to pro-tribunal activists, some Ixiles who were bussed in from Nebaj today came because they were promised a free gift of fertilizer for their crops; when they arrived, they were told they were obligated to participate in the pro-Montt, anti-tribunal demonstration to receive the gift. Above, one Ixil person carries a sign saying, "I'd rather not receive fertilizer to deny genocide." (Pic: HijosGuatemala via NISGUA)