Apple has just announced the new sixth-generation iPad Pro. The company's latest flagship tablet is powered by the M2 chip that first debuted in the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro earlier this year. From a report: It'll be available in the same two screen sizes as before: you can choose between 12.9-inch and 11-inch sizes. Preorders open today and it'll be in stores on October 26th starting at $799 for the 11-inch and $1,099 for the 12.9-inch model. As with the 2021 refresh, the 12.9-inch iPad Pro features Mini LED display technology for improved black levels, better contrast, and more impactful HDR performance, while the smaller model sticks with a more basic screen. Both support Apple's ProMotion feature for refresh rates up to 120Hz. The new iPad Pro has a new "hover" feature that detects the Apple Pencil when positioned slightly above the screen. Apple says this lets users "see a preview of their mark before they make it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At the beginning of August, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida did one of his publicity stunt press conferences where he appealed to the basest fears of the conservative world. No, this wasn’t the time he went after LGBTQ+ children or teachers. No, this wasn’t the millions of dollars in taxpayer money he used to separate immigrant families in order to score political points with xenophobes. This was the time he announced that he was going to create a Gestapo-like outfit of election fraud law enforcement officials. Like everything DeSantis has done, it costs the taxpayers a lot of money in order to punish a few (almost always entirely innocent) people.

Subsequently, DeSantis announced with confetti that his crack squad of election-fraud-stateers had arrested “20” Florida residents for illegally voting in the 2020 election. It turns out that the number was 19, and it also turns out that most of the people in that number were Black (at least 13 of the people taken into custody), 12 were registered Democrats, and virtually every single person arrested by the DeSantis goon squad were told in one form or another that they could vote by various Florida officials. The move works on two levels: 1) DeSantis gets to make a big splash with the national Republican base by championing the conspiracy theory bullshit that fires up their old racism, and 2) DeSantis creates fear of voting among communities unlikely to vote for a dirtbag Republican in Florida. The cost? Some citizens’ freedoms and lives.

Now video of a few of the arrests through police officer body camera footage has been obtained by the Tampa Bay Times. It shows Florida citizens absolutely baffled and demoralized while apologetic police officers arrest them on these politically motivated hack charges.

RELATED STORY: 'It’s really unconscionable': The more we learn about DeSantis’ election victims, the worse it looks

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The United Kingdom is forcing Meta to sell off Giphy. Who’s next?

If Big Tech didn’t know it already, it does now: It’s time to take global antitrust regulators as seriously as it does those in the United States. Maybe even more so.

Meta has been forced to sell off Giphy, the GIF database and search engine it acquired back in 2020 for about $315 million. And it’s being forced to do so by regulators in the United Kingdom, not the United States, even though both Meta and Giphy are based in the US.

But the rest of Big Tech shouldn’t be sitting around grinning and eating popcorn like Michael Jackson in a movie theater. They should be reading the decision on their computer screens and looking concerned, like Titus in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Because even though this particular decision affects only Meta, it may be an indication of how other Big Tech acquisitions will fare under the scrutiny of countries whose antitrust rules don’t favor businesses as much as America’s do.

This marks the first time a global regulator has unwound a Big Tech acquisition, and it’s an almost sure sign that it won’t be the last.

The decision isn’t a huge surprise, as the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which regulates competition in the UK, ruled last November that Meta would have to sell Giphy, saying that it would hurt competition both in social media and display advertising markets. For display advertising, the CMA said, Meta’s purchase removed a potential competitor, as Giphy had a growing advertising business that Meta shut down when it bought the company. For social media companies, the reasoning was that Meta could deny its competitors access to one of the most popular GIF search and databases out there, or that it could require them to give Meta user data in order to use Giphy’s GIFs on their own platforms.

Meta appealed that ruling, but on Tuesday, the CMA ruled again that the acquisition had to be undone. This time, Meta decided to take its ball and go home, like George Michael Bluth doing the sad walk home on Arrested Development. Though the decision comes from a UK regulator, Meta will sell off Giphy’s global operations.

“We are disappointed by the CMA’s decision but accept today’s ruling as the final word on the matter. We will work closely with the CMA on divesting Giphy,” the company said in a statement.

Having to get rid of Giphy may not be the worst thing to happen to Meta at this point. Things have changed since 2020. Like most companies, Meta is looking for ways to reduce spending, including shutting down projects that aren’t doing well. And GIFs are apparently on their way out, with some seeing them as an outdated format used by outdated people. (That said, the GIF was pronounced “dead” a while ago — this Atlantic article is from 2012 — but it’s still alive in many corners of the internet.) While Meta doesn’t like to be told what to do and it fought the UK for years in an attempt to keep Giphy, Meta might not be too devastated by losing in this particular case. GIFs don’t really have much of a place in the metaverse, anyway.

But it’s still a turnaround for Meta, which previously didn’t really seem to take the CMA very seriously. It was fined several times for violating the CMA’s initial enforcement order and failing to give the authority the required updates. The CMA said it was the first time it had to fine a company for deliberately refusing to provide necessary information.

Other Big Tech companies should try to learn from Meta’s loss because global regulators probably won’t stop there.

The UK is one of several countries that has the desire and ability to curb Silicon Valley’s dominance. Whereas the United States has been slow to pass antitrust laws and its regulators are limited in what they can do to enforce the antitrust laws they have, the European Union and the UK have taken the lead. The EU’s big effort to regulate Big Tech, the Digital Markets Act, starts to go into effect in November. Its Digital Services Act goes into effect in 2024. The UK created its own dedicated unit for digital markets under the CMA two years ago, which it said would “oversee a new regulatory regime for the most powerful digital firms.” Elsewhere in the world, Australia passed a law forcing Meta and Google to pay publishers for content their platforms host — and both companies are paying. Apple has given ground on its App Store rules to some countries that passed laws requiring it to allow for things like third-party payment services.

If in 2024 you see a USB-C charging port on your iPhone where a proprietary Lightning port used to be, well, that’s probably the result of the EU’s decision to require devices to use one common charging port.

And when it comes to Big Tech acquisitions, some of them may well suffer the same fate as Meta and Giphy. Microsoft’s massive Activision acquisition is currently being investigated by the CMA, for example. Failure is not guaranteed: The CMA has approved other recent Big Tech acquisitions, like Meta’s purchase of Kustomer, and the EU’s competition authority signed off on Amazon’s purchase of MGM.

While attempts in the US to pass Big Tech-focused antitrust legislation have largely stalled and aren’t expected to pass this session, its enforcement agencies are making an effort to go after Big Tech acquisitions it believes violate antitrust laws. The Federal Trade Commission is seeking to force Meta to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp in one lawsuit and trying to block its acquisition of a virtual reality app developer in another.

In the aftermath of announcing its decision to unwind the Giphy deal, Meta has made sure to note that it won’t stop acquiring companies. “We will continue to evaluate opportunities — including through acquisition — to bring innovation and choice to more people in the UK and around the world,” the company said in a statement.

We’ll see if Meta still has the same appetite for gobbling up smaller competitors — and, if so, how hard the people in the UK and around the world are going to push back.

Special Counsel John Durham's probe into the origins of the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation suffered another high-profile blow Tuesday, but his disciples see a silver lining in the veteran prosecutor's checkered courtroom record.

After about nine hours of deliberations, a federal jury acquitted Russian policy researcher Igor Danchenko on Tuesday on four felony false-statement charges brought as part of Durham's probe of misinformation that triggered the FBI probe of former President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign.

Simply put, federal prosecutors are not used to losing. So, Durham's defeat at the Danchenko trial — which came less than five months after a similar acquittal in another case brought by the special prosecutor — represents an unmistakable defeat.

However, Durham and his aides used the forum of the recent trials to air evidence of what they suggested was a failure by FBI personnel to pursue leads as they probed the sourcing of the Steele dossier, a compendium of allegations former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele assembled about links between Trump and Russia. Danchenko was Steele's key source when compiling the dossier.

Durham's open criticism of the FBI produced an unusual spectacle at the trial, as he and his team attacked the competence of FBI agents and analysts who were the prosecution's key witnesses. The back-and-forth led to disclosures about senior investigators' refusal to pursue inquiries that more junior FBI personnel thought were warranted, as well as ongoing efforts to discipline FBI personnel over issues related to the Trump-Russia investigation.

Defenders of the FBI's Trump-Russia probe have said Durham's criticisms have focused on a relatively small part of the broad investigation, although Durham could offer more disclosures in a forthcoming report. However, his back-to-back courtroom defeats suggest he and his aides misjudged those cases and committed some of the same investigative gaffes they've decried in the original probe.

Danchenko managed to defeat the charges against him even though he declined to take the stand in his own defense and called no witnesses during the trial. His attorneys suggested to the jury that he was the victim of a politically inspired prosecution by Durham, who was tapped in 2019 by then-Attorney General William Barr to look into how the Trump-Russia probe began and played out.

The jury of seven men and five women deliberated for about nine hours over two days before returning their verdicts.

Danchenko initially showed little emotion as the successive "not guilty" verdicts were read aloud by a court clerk shortly after 4 p.m. Tuesday. At least one member of the jury looked directly at him as the verdicts came down.

Danchenko glanced briefly at his wife, who began crying as the verdicts were delivered and was handed a box of tissues by a bailiff via one onlooker in the audience. Later, Danchenko teared up himself and embraced his attorneys.

Durham did not address reporters at the courthouse, but issued a written statement saying: "While we are disappointed in the outcome, we respect the jury’s decision and thank them for their service. I also want to recognize and thank the investigators and the prosecution team for their dedicated efforts in seeking truth and justice in this case."

The four charges the jury considered all involve Danchenko’s statements about his dealings with Sergei Millian, who served in 2016 as head of the Russian American Chamber of Commerce.

Danchenko told the FBI that he received a call in July 2016 from an unidentified man who shared derogatory information about Trump. The Russian researcher said he believed the man was Millian and that the pair agreed to meet up in New York, but the man never showed.

Durham’s team said Danchenko never had contact with Millian and invented the entire story to cover for having told Steele that Millian was the source of a lurid story about Trump’s alleged actions at a Moscow hotel.

“There was no call with Millian and there was no call with any individual,” prosecutor Michael Keilty said in a closing statement for the Durham team. “It’s a not-to-be believed story.”

But the prosecutors found themselves in the difficult situation of having to prove a negative — that Millian never talked to Danchenko — and having to do so beyond a reasonable doubt.

Durham’s team suggested that the absence of Millian’s known phone numbers from call logs for Danchenko’s phone proved the two men never spoke, but the defense noted that people often speak via a variety of phone apps, such as WhatsApp and Signal.

They also noted that travel records showed Millian, who did not testify, arriving in New York from Asia on the night before the day Danchenko said he was supposed to meet the anonymous caller in New York.

Before the jury verdicts Tuesday, the criminal case against Danchenko had already proved to be difficult for Durham and his team. At the conclusion of the prosecution’s evidence on Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Anthony Trenga granted a defense motion to throw out one of the five false-statement charges the former think tank employee faced.

Durham had charged Danchenko with lying to the FBI when he said he never “talked” to public relations executive Charles Dolan about the compendium Trump’s political opponents paid Steele to compile about Trump’s ties to Russia. Many of the stories in the so-called Steele Dossier appear to be apocryphal and FBI personnel who testified at the trial said they were unable to corroborate any of it.

While there was proof at the trial that Danchenko emailed with Dolan about the dossier, there was no evidence the two men ever spoke. Durham’s team alleged the jury could find the emails amounted to talking, but Trenga- — an appointee of President George W. Bush — said it appeared Danchenko’s denial was literally true so the count had to be thrown out.

The prosecution of Danchenko on false-statement charges is the third criminal case brought by Durham’s team.

The first, against FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, netted a guilty plea from the lawyer for forging details in an email related to a surveillance application during the early stages of the Trump-Russia probe. Clinesmith, who said he altered the message to save himself time, got no jail time.

Jurors in Washington made short work of Durham’s second outing, a single-count false-statement charge against cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussmann for allegedly lying about his client when relaying to the FBI suspicions about computer links between Trump and Russia.

A prosecutor argued to jurors that the evidence of Sussmann’s guilt was “overwhelming,” but after a two-week trial, the jury took just six hours to acquit the Washington lawyer.

Shortly after the verdicts were received, Trenga called Danchenko to the lectern, saying “Your bond has been discharged and you’re free to go.” After that, the Russian national also began crying and embraced both of his defense attorneys, Stuart Sears and Danny Onorato.

In the wake of the verdicts, Onorato and Sears shook hands with Durham and his prosecutors, Keilty and Brittain Shaw.

“We’ve known all along that Mr. Danchenko was innocent. We’re happy now that the American public knows that as well,” Sears said outside the courthouse, flanked by his client. “We thank these jurors for their hard work and deliberation for reaching the right result.”

The defense lawyers declined to answer questions from reporters, while Durham never came to the cameras stationed in front of the courthouse and commented only in his written statement.

How do we know that Ron DeSantis’ cruel political stunt treating children and adults as human props was shady to the nth degree? Well, text messages reported by the Miami Herald reveal that the notorious recruiter who aided the Florida governor’s scheme left money at dead drops for the unwitting recruiters she used to help lure as many vulnerable people as possible. 

Emmanuel, himself a Venezuelan migrant, was brought in by the now-identified Puerla Huerta. She paid him $700 cash to help recruit other migrants, leaving his final payment in an envelope behind the dumpster of a San Antonio BBQ joint. You know, just some normal state business. 

”While the media has focused on Huerta, a Miami Herald investigation found DeSantis’ San Antonio operation was far bigger and better organized than previously known, with more than half a dozen recruiters and support staff on the ground, and some operational logistics handled from Florida,” the report said. The stunt was financed through interest earnings associated with federal pandemic funding, a move now under probe by the Treasury Department watchdog.

RELATED STORY: Public records lawsuit asks court to force DeSantis to hand over documents related to migrant stunt

Named among these figures is DeSantis’ chief of staff, James Uthmeier, who oversaw scheming in San Antonio. ”Florida’s public safety czar, Larry Keefe, served as point person for the program in Texas, documents show.” The Miami Herald report said that the latter actually, once upon a time, represented Vertol Systems Company Inc., the contractor and GOP megadonor that got paid big bucks to shuttle human beings for DeSantis. 

From Texas, Keefe messaged Uthmeier that “conditions” were “quite favorable,” Miami Herald said. It’s unclear if this was in the literal sense, as in Oh, its a nice sunny day today, or instead, Our scheming is going according to plan, evil laugh. “Very good,” Uthmeier replied, according to Miami Herald. “You have my full support. Call anytime.”

Both Uthmeier and Vertol Systems Company Inc. are specifically named in a recent lawsuit launched by the Florida Center for Government Accountability watchdog that’s asking a court to force DeSantis to release public records related to the stunt. Text messages were “obtained by the Herald and other organizations through public records requests,” though it's unclear if Florida Center for Government Accountability was among them.

What does continue to be clear is that Emmanuel and dozens of others were lied to, misled, and outright tricked by the orchestrators of this political scheme. Emmanuel even said he had Huerta’s name saved in his phone as “Perla Hermosa,” or, “beautiful Perla.” The migrant “said he believed he was part of a benevolent mission run by a kind and compassionate woman,” one who was offering desperate people all sorts of lifelines, the report said. “Huerta told him she was a military veteran. He trusted her.”

“I don’t know who is good, and who is bad,” Emmanuel now says, according to the report. “It’s like something is eating me from the inside.”

The mysterious “Perla” was later revealed to be former combat medic and counterintelligence agent Perla Huerta. She recently left the military after two decades under circumstances not publicly known. Like so many scammers throughout history, she’s seemingly vanished without a trace, deleting social media profiles and even putting up her Tampa house for sale, the report said. We also see that at least one top official within DeSantis’ office was very much involved in carrying out this scheme. Meanwhile, the governor’s office has actively stalled on releasing public records into the scheme. If it feels shady, it probably is shady, folks.

Is there some hope of justice for the victims of this scam? We desperately hope. Last week a Texas sheriff signed off on certain documentation that could ultimately help victims gain permanent relief here. A U-visa is available to victims of crime who are helpful to law enforcement in their investigations. But because of an annual cap and massive backlog, relief could be many years away. Emmanuel himself has been cooperating with Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar’s probe, though its unclear if he’s seeking a humanitarian visa.

”Legitimate operations don't hide bags of money behind BBQ restaurants,” tweeted Florida House Democrats. “This is an embarrassment for Florida.”

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Texas sheriff's sign-off means DeSantis' migrant victims may get chance to stay here permanently

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If the GOP regains the House, four of the leading Republicans contenders for the House Budget Committee chair have all vowed to demand cuts to Social Security and Medicare in return for their cooperation in raising the debt ceiling next year. To be clear, that’s Republicans saying they will crash the U.S. economy to force President Joe Biden to give into their demands.

Now would-be House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has confirmed that yes, that’s exactly what Republicans intend to do. That continues to generate yawns from the super savvy reporters in D.C. and New York, who largely ignored the first reports of this threat. Now they’re continuing to try to downplay it. But it’s as real and as dangerous as can be.

“You can’t just continue down the path to keep spending and adding to the debt,” McCarthy said in an interview with Punchbowl News, reported in The Washington Post. “And if people want to make a debt ceiling [for a longer period of time], just like anything else, there comes a point in time where, okay, we’ll provide you more money, but you got to change your current behavior.”

As if Republicans had no agency in federal spending, as if they had no part in, for example, the ballooning defense budgets year after year. “We’re not just going to keep lifting your credit card limit, right,” he added. “And we should seriously sit together and [figure out] where can we eliminate some waste? Where can we make the economy grow stronger?” Again, as if the budget of the United States of America was like a household budget and Democrats were profligate teenagers with credit cards.

“Waste,” in Republican terms, is people getting the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid they pay for with their taxes. McCarthy tried to play coy in the interview, saying he wouldn’t “predetermine” that they’re talking about Social Security and Medicare because, while he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer he’s not as dull as, say, Ron Johnson.

The cat’s already out of the bag on that, however. Any of the four people McCarthy will put in charge of the Budget Committee will threaten those programs, giving Biden a choice: Cave to their demands to destroy the U.S. economy, or they’ll destroy the global economy. Those are the choices, particularly since Republicans would also extend the Trump tax cuts. They’d enforce recession-inducing austerity on everyone but the super-rich.

Beyond the fact that they’ve already committed to the idea that they’ll threaten to blow up the global economy over these critical social insurance programs, of course they will! Social Security and Medicare have been on the Republicans chopping block since the programs were passed. Republicans hate them. Republicans hate that people love them so much they put Democrats in power for decades. They didn’t break through until they figured out how to get billions of dark money dollars into our political system to give them wins, and now they’re going to pay those big funders back by stealing the money in those programs.

All of the very serious people in D.C. and New York don’t think there’s any way the Republicans would actually force the U.S. into default. Just like they assured us all the people saying abortion rights were in jeopardy were crying wolf, because no way would the Supreme Court do that after decades of precedent. Just like they said warning Donald Trump wasn’t going to accept the results of the election and would do anything to stay in office was being alarmist.

Way back when, before the pre-MAGA nihilists of the Tea Party took over the Republican Party, government shutdowns were nearly unthinkable. The debt ceiling was sacrosanct and no one would actually consider breaching it. Sure, they’d use the regular vote to suspend or lift it as an opportunity to raise hell about the debt and deficits, but no elected official would have used it as a bargaining chip. Any lawmaker who did would have been called out in the media as a total crank and would have been isolated by their leadership and colleagues.  

All of which is to say normal business as usual is barely a speck in the review mirror, and as usual the very serious people in D.C. and New York refuse to acknowledge that. We—the people who aren’t shielding vital information from the public because that has to go in the books we’re negotiating six-plus deals on—don’t have the luxury of ignoring Republicans when they tell us what they’re going to do.

So we have to be the ones to make sure that McCarthy and his MAGA crew don’t get their dirty claws on Social Security, Medicare, and all the vital programs that are keeping Americans hanging on.

We can win in this battleground, hold our House majority, and keep Republicans from destroying everything. Please give $1 now to each of these 12 races where Democrats are fighting to flip GOP seats in the House this year!

On Daily Kos’ The Brief we talk about the work being done to keep Nevada’s Senate Democratic. We are joined by UNITE HERE director Mario Yedidia. UNITE HERE represents more than 250,000 workers throughout the U.S. and Canada who work in the hospitality, gaming, food service, manufacturing, textile, laundry, and airport industries. Yedidia tells us about what workers in Nevada are thinking about and voting about this coming November.

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Republicans at it again, publicly plotting how they’ll end Social Security and Medicare

TikTok has a lot to answer for. In Britain, regulators want to fine the social media app for violating the privacy of minors. In California, the app faces a freshly bundled 80-pack of lawsuits charging it and other social media apps with hooking kids on the site. The Biden White House is pressuring the Chinese-owned app to improve data security, and some policy lords want at least part of it sold to an American or its American data stored domestically. When not denouncing TikTok for ruining the mental health of its young users, killing them, shortening our attention spans, serving oodles of political misinformation or contributing to political polarization, writers and lawsuits fault it for encouraging every self-destructive behavior from cutting to anorexia.

These criticisms land particularly hard on TikTok because it has recently conquered the internet. TikTok now gets more visits than Google. Its average American viewer logs on for 80 minutes a day. And two-thirds of our teens use it. Once considered a delightful boon that entertained and diverted, the time-wasting app has recently followed the path of other new media sensations to become regarded as a bane. A cultural sensation of the 2020s, TikTok has also become the internet’s whipping boy, shamed by governments and advocates more often these days than even Facebook.

Let’s stipulate from the get-go that TikTok deserves most of the bricks thrown at it. But in inventorying TikTok’s many downsides, let’s not forget to place the app in a historical context that might deflect some of the collective fury aimed at it. Setting aside for a moment the fact that Chinese proprietors control the personal data tossed off by the app, TikTok has much to commend it, and we shouldn’t be shy about saying so.

New forms of media and communication have attracted suspicion and hostility ever since Plato denounced writing as something corrosive to memory. When the telegraph arrived in 1858, the New York Times denounced it as “superficial, sudden, unsifted, too fast for the truth,” and others declared it was a new way “to cheat, steal, lie, and deceive,” as historian Tom Standage put it. The telephone earned similar opprobrium for breaching class and family order. It allowed anybody to enter your home. It turned the socially minded into shut-ins. It reduced parents’ gatekeeper power over their children. In 1894, a Philadelphia newspaper editor warned readers that disease could be spread over a telephone line. Similar scaremongering attended the arrival of radio and television, which allegedly polluted morals and vegetized viewers. More of the same has been directed at computer games, the internet and smartphones, and will be used against VR if ever widely adopted. In the 1890s, some critics even diagnosed societal dangers in electrification.

The basest criticism of TikTok’s algorithm-powered river of short videos is that it’s a worthless time-sink, a sordid place for teenagers to swipe mindlessly though a never-ending deck of videos until their fingers blister. But is this uniquely bad? Wasting time on a silly diversion commands a solid pedigree. It’s called leisure time. Do not millions of grown-up house-spouses and retirees chain-watch soaps or cable news all afternoon without having to eat a griefburger over it? How many Americans tank up on football all weekend and then return on Monday and Thursday nights for refills?

Yes, today’s average adolescent might be squandering an hour-and-a-half on TikTok daily, but haven’t earlier generations spent equal amounts of watching mindless television? Didn’t ’60s kids dial their transistor radio tuners from station to station in search of the perfect beat the way today’s TikTok users swipe though the app looking for stimulation? Weren’t there ’90s scares about “internet addiction”? Previous generations wasted hours each day talking to their boyfriends and girlfriends on the phone. Others played Dungeons and Dragons or Pokémon, read piles of comic books, played computer games endlessly or hung out at the games arcade.

Every generation has found kicks in forms of media that required little effort on their part but frightened their parents. Conceding again that devoting an evening with TikTok isn’t as socially redeeming as volunteering at the soup kitchen or studying for an algebra final, we can’t allow the psychobabblists to tell us that TikTok is polluting the minds of a generation without filing a countercomplaint. There’s plenty of good to say about TikTok!

TikTok’s highest value might be the way it gives the young a zone of separation from the adult internet (Twitter, Facebook). (Yes, adults use TikTok, too, but most of the fretting over the app is about what it does to kids.) Beaten down by helicopter parents, young people need media real estate they can call their own. For many users, TikTok provides a sense of community, a common base of reference. Like the long telephone calls of old, along with chatrooms and smartphone DMs, TikTok provides a media space in which adolescents can carry on without adult interruption. It’s a place to go to discover new music, follow fashion, explore hairstyles and track trends. In other words, a sourcebook on how to be a teen.

Nobody would ever call TikTok’s news coverage comprehensive, but you can find timely and witty coverage there of current events at the Washington Post account, the BBC’s, and various commentary outposts. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, TikTok allows users to express their personalities and creativity in videos, and some young creators are even earning megabucks for their efforts. Can their videos be banal and silly? Sure. But more banal than a round of golf or more pointless than gardening? Particularly for LGBTQ kids, minorities or subcultures, it serves as a place to meet others of your kind and not feel so alone. TikTok must be a lifeline for a gay kid who lives in the sticks. In this case, at least, we should be grateful for the power of the algorithm.

Of course, TikTok can be anxiety-inducing, a tool of conformity and bullying, and a place to encourage teens to attempt dangerous “challenges.” But inducers of anxiety, conformity, bullying and risk-taking abound in society. In this regard, the perils of TikTok are more like normal life than they are an outlier.

Sometimes the best way to judge a person or institution is to ask who opposes them. In the case of TikTok, always remember that President Donald Trump sought to ban it and the Russian government recently fined it for refusing to delete content that crossed laws against posting “LGBT propaganda.” With enemies like that, how bad can TikTok be?

******

No, I don’t have a TikTok account. Send your favorite TikTok to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My RSS feed bullies my Twitter feed on TikTok.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: In a major blow to America's seafood industry, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has, for the first time in state history, canceled the winter snow crab season in the Bering Sea due to their falling numbers. While restaurant menus will suffer, scientists worry what the sudden population plunge means for the health of the Arctic ecosystem. An estimated one billion crabs have mysteriously disappeared in two years, state officials said. It marks a 90% drop in their population. Ben Daly, a researcher with ADF&G, is investigating where the crabs have gone. He monitors the health of the state's fisheries, which produce 60% of the nation's seafood. "Disease is one possibility," Daly told CBS News. He also points to climate change. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Alaska is the fastest warming state in the country, and is losing billions of tons of ice each year -- critical for crabs that need cold water to survive. "Environmental conditions are changing rapidly," Daly said. "We've seen warm conditions in the Bering Sea the last couple of years, and we're seeing a response in a cold adapted species, so it's pretty obvious this is connected. It is a canary in a coal mine for other species that need cold water." "Did they run up north to get that colder water?" asked Gabriel Prout, owner of a Kodiak Island fishing business heavily reliant on the snow crab population. "Did they completely cross the border? Did they walk off the continental shelf on the edge there, over the Bering Sea?" Prout said there needs to be a relief program for fisherman, "similar to programs for farmers who experience crop failure, or communities affected by hurricanes or flooding," notes the report.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why Lake's seduction of voters is alarming for the future of democracy.

Last week we discovered, thanks to a niche media outlet, that Republicans are right now plotting about how they’ll destroy the economy as well as Social Security and Medicare if they take Congress. Last Tuesday, Bloomberg Government reported on Republican plans to use an must-pass increase debt ceiling next fall to make massive cuts to social insurance programs, like Social Security and Medicare, and force right-wing policies like spending caps and work requirements on safety net programs.

Not increasing the debt ceiling would mean the U.S. would default on its debts, which would be economically catastrophic, and not just domestically. Even flirting with a default is economically damaging—we know that now because Republicans did it in 2011 and 2013, increasing borrowing costs by $1.3 billion and as much as $70 million in those years, respectively.

But like every disaster Republicans court, the traditional media is treating this as though it were business as usual. They don’t point out every time it happens that Republicans are filibustering every important piece of legislation, and that this is abnormal and destroying the institution of the Senate. They treat Republicans’ annual threat of a government shutdown—which sometimes happens more than once a year—as just another thing Congress does.

RELATED STORY:  Republicans at it again, publicly plotting how they’ll end Social Security and Medicare

And, as Media Matters records this time around, the traditional media is not even reporting that Republicans right now are talking about what they’ll do to the country and to Social Security and Medicare if they win Congress. In an election that’s supposed to be all about the economy—Republicans say so!—this should be as high a priority for headlines as gas prices anywhere.

MSNBC had one segment in the past week on this; Chris Hayes interviewing Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). It’s an excellent interview. “The Republicans are loud and clear about this,” Warren told Hayes. “There are already Republicans saying that if they can get control of the House or the Senate then they’re going to hold hostage things like Social Security and Medicare.”

And, that was it: “the story hasn’t been referenced elsewhere this week on MSNBC, or on CNN, or on Fox News,” Media Matters reports. They know because they record it all. “The nationally broadcast morning and evening news shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC haven’t discussed it. It hasn’t been mentioned in the pages of major newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today.”

“Republicans Gain Edge as Voters Worry About Economy, Times/Siena Poll Finds,” a headline on the NYT website Monday shouts. A quick search for “Republicans, debt ceiling” for the past week turns up nothing. The same at the Post, although they do have a story about Republicans’ economic goals for their potential majority: extending the Trump tax cuts to the rich, and it contains one sentence about their plans for the debt ceiling and Social Security.

Republicans just can’t shut up about how they intend to end the Social Security and Medicare. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida wants them to sunset every five years. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin thinks they need to be voted on and authorized every single year. There are some very concrete threats.

So is saying out loud, right now, that the debt ceiling is going to be a hostage if they make it. It’s on par with this spring’s leak of the Supreme Court’s abortion decision in terms of norms being broken and potential impending disaster. It should be front and center every time anyone in the traditional media talks about how the economy is driving this election.

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The British prime minister also insists she will "definitely" lead her party into the next general election.

Almost nowhere else in the world do judges have to run for their offices, and there's a good reason why.

Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, facing a tough challenge from independent Evan McMullin, got himself a great headline in The Salt Lake Tribune: “Mike Lee has earned a reputation as principled conservative.” So why is he being widely mocked for the piece attached to the glowing headline? It comes down to the byline.

Here’s the opening paragraph: “Mike Lee serves as a United States senator representing the state of Utah. Since taking office, Senator Lee has earned a reputation as a principled conservative. He believes elected officials are responsible for keeping the federal government within its constitutionally limited role.” 

While that paragraph might read like a child’s book report, the byline is … Mike Lee. Or, it was. After a lot of jokes about Lee writing about himself in the third person, and questions about why the newspaper had run something by Lee reading as if it was an outside assessment of him, the Tribune simply removed the byline. Real transparency there.

RELATED STORY: Things aren't going so hot for Mike Lee and his reelection dreams

It appears that Lee and McMullin had each been given the chance to make the case for themselves in an op-ed. McMullin did it in the format of the typical politician’s op-ed, writing in the first person and focusing on why he was running and how his experience was relevant to the job.

Lee submitted a stilted biographical sketch of himself in the third person. If knowing what year someone got their undergraduate and law degrees from Brigham Young University is important to Utah voters (which, maybe?), then Lee made the case for himself. He also made sure they know that he “serves on various committees important to Utah.”

It’s basically a version of the biography on his Senate website, only less well written. And also, it’s an op-ed written in the third person! The weirdness was duly noted:

Again, the response from the Tribune was to remove the byline. It would be interesting to learn exactly how all this went down, but as of now, the newspaper does not appear to be planning to inform readers about it.

As some of those tweets point out, Lee’s most recent foray into the headlines was when he used a Tucker Carlson appearance to publicly beg Sen. Mitt Romney to endorse him, despite Romney having made clear he would not be endorsing in the race. Lee is definitely nervous about this race, and if the main way he’s getting his name out there involves looking like a buffoon (and not in an intentional, Trumpian kind of way), it’s probably not helpful.

Lee and McMullin will debate on Monday night.

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Jerry Falwell Jr.’s fall from grace was, like everything else over the last five or so years, predictably trite. The son of Jerry Falwell Sr., Junior stepped into his father’s camel-sized shoes and used his father’s political connections to promote the very lucrative (and tax exempt) morality of evangelical Christianity. At the peak of his powers, with Donald Trump by his side, Falwell Jr. and his wife came under scrutiny for what sounded a lot like what evangelicals and other conservative Christians would call an immoral lifestyle. The evangelical school his father began, Liberty University, called it his “loose lifestyle” in its 2021 lawsuit against the former leader. A “pool boy” with whom the Falwells maintained both a business relationship and an intimate relationship came under investigation.

People’s intimate lives are none of my beeswax when they don’t effect millions of people. If you make untold millions of dollars and use your political power to take away the rights of hundreds of millions of Americans based on a “moral” stance that you yourself cannot be bothered to even attempt to live up to, then your intimate relationships become everybody’s business.

You have only had to watch one soap opera in your life to know at least some of what happened next. In 2006, film director and Florida native Billy Corben hit the scene with a wildly entertaining documentary about the cocaine trade in the late 1970s and 1980s that burst out in Miami. Called Cocaine Cowboys, Corben’s fast-paced, uptempo soundtrack style of documentary filmmaking became a hit. Since that time he has done a lot of documentary films including the 30 for 30 series The U film about Miami University’s storied college football program. His newest documentary will be coming to streaming service Hulu on Nov. 1, and the trailer looks great.

Called God Forbid, it chronicles the rise and fall of the Falwells and promises to expose the “evangelical” family’s very un-evangelical lifestyles. (Or maybe I have it wrong and it is an “ultra-evangelical” lifestyle?)

RELATED STORY: Falwell's business partner says he had affair with Trump-supporting evangelical leader and his wife

One of the clear indicators that the story will be an interesting if not entertaining one is that the third person in the Falwell’s polyamorous relationship, Giancarlo Granda, is a featured talking head in the doc. A classic summation of what the documentary promises comes early on as Granda says, “If I would have known that accepting this woman's invitation to go back to her hotel room would have led to a scandal involving the president of the largest Christian university in the world and the president of the United States, I would have walked away and just enjoyed my private life.” And that’s the tamest part of the trailer. 

The trailer strongly implies that former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen may have found out about the Falwell’s lifestyle and possibly used that information to make the unappealing Donald Trump more appealing to Jerry Falwell Jr.

Enjoy. Seriously. Enjoy it.

RELATED STORIES:

Liberty University sues Jerry Falwell Jr. for millions, says he lied about his ‘loose lifestyle’

Here are the times in the last 20 months the 'moral majority' was unfazed by Republican immorality

A day after mocking self-distancing, Trump-supporting 'evangelical' leader closes Liberty University

On this week's episode of The Downballot we get medieval on the traditional media for its appalling display of ableism in the wake of John Fetterman's recent NBC interview; recap the absolutely wild goings-on in Los Angeles, where City Council President Nury Martinez just resigned after a racist tirade was caught on tape; dive into the unexpectedly close race for governor in Oklahoma; and highlight a brand-new database from Daily Kos Elections showing how media markets and congressional districts overlap.

In any given year where Republicans control either the House, the Senate, or both, Democratic presidents are treated to the same bizarre, exasperating ritual. If Democrats don’t agree to massive cuts in Medicare, Social Security, or other social programs, Republicans threaten to allow the U.S. to default on its credit by refusing to allow the debt ceiling to be raised. This action would unquestionably precipitate a catastrophic, global economic disaster, sending this nation and most of the developed (and undeveloped) world into a second and probably permanent Great Depression.

Far more consequential than a “government shutdown,” this threat to arbitrarily default on the nation’s existing debts has been wielded cynically and repeatedly since Republicans discovered its utility at energizing and inflaming their ignorant voter base against Democratic policies that benefit people they consider “undeserving,” (i.e., Black people and other racial minorities). The reality that it would inflict economic calamity to every person in this country, more or less across the board, is immaterial to them. 

Time and time again this tactic proved to be mere posturing: At the 11th hour, some agreement is suddenly reached, or resolution is suddenly passed, which keeps the U.S. government credit-worthy and assures other nations that yes, we will pay our already-incurred bills. As Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell himself acknowledged, the country’s debt ceiling is a hostage that is worth ransoming, but probably not killing outright. After all, Republicans ultimately have to put food on their families’ tables, too, and most of them prefer living in houses rather than on the streets. But now there’s a big, big problem.

As political scientist and emeritus Norman Ornstein explains in an article written for The Atlantic, the current inhabitants of the Republican House of Representatives are more fanatic, ignorant, and blindly malevolent than even their Tea Party forebearers who pulled this nonsense on President Barack Obama (before they finally backed down) a decade ago. That was an act of intentional sabotage that—even when mitigated at the last minute by the Obama administration reaching a deal with then-House Speaker John Boehner—still resulted in the U.S. credit rating downgraded globally, costing the U.S. taxpayers billions in added borrowing costs and a dramatic plunge in the stock market.

Unfortunately for the country, should this new and clueless breed of Republicans take control over the House in 2022, there is no leader among them respected enough to thwart their worst impulses, no matter how self-destructive. Assuming an unctuous political invertebrate like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy advances to the speakership, he will have next to no control over the actions of his caucus, and no capacity or authority to negotiate a resolution to such a crisis.

As Ornstein writes:

If there is one timeworn cliché about elections, it is that the next one is the most significant in our lifetime. There is reason to believe it is true this time. Although the outcomes remain uncertain, one thing is clear: If Republicans win control of the House of Representatives, the country will face a series of fundamental challenges much greater than we have had in any modern period of divided government, including a direct and palpable threat of default and government shutdown. The Republican majority will be more radical, reckless, and willing to employ nuclear options to achieve its goals than any of its predecessors have been, and its leadership, starting with McCarthy, will be either compliant or too weak to head off catastrophe.

This would effectively leave the fate of American people at the mercy of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and others of the House’s bomb-throwing caucus, all of whom (as Ornstein notes) would be perfectly willing to march off the ledge and plunge the nation into a fiscal catastrophe, if only to solicit the ersatz applause of their thousands of Russian Twitter-bot followers. These people have already amply demonstrated they live in a hermetically sealed bubble of partisan rancor and fantasy that brooks no dissent, far less any inclination to fiscal reason. Through their warped, Trump-distorted goggles they would simply view this as an opportunity to permanently damage the Biden administration and earn the adulation of their equally nihilistic constituents.

As Tom Nichols, also writing for The Atlantic, aptly described the Republican MAGA base:

These citizens do not want a discussion or a compromise. They don’t even want to “win,” in any traditional political sense of that word. They want to vent anger over their lives—their personal problems, their haunted sense of inferiority, and their fears about social status—on other Americans, as vehemently as possible, even to the point of violence. [...]

The MAGA movement isn’t interested in politics, or policies, or compromises. It is interested in destruction and seeing others made as miserable as its followers are.

Fortunately, there is a way of dispensing with this farce and neutering the MAGA base’s ability to inflict their ignorance and nihilism on the rest of us, one not involving dubious gimmicks such as the minting of a trillion-dollar coin to cover our nation’s debts, or risking a constitutional crisis by President Joe Biden invoking the 14th Amendment to unilaterally suspend the debt ceiling. As Ornstein explains:

If the Republicans prevail in November, the lame-duck session becomes an opportunity to take this threat off the table once and for all. The way to do so is by making permanent, perhaps via reconciliation, the ironically named “McConnell Rule.” The rule was raised by the Senate Republican leader a decade ago to allow the president to raise the debt ceiling. It allows Congress to pass a joint resolution blocking the action, but contains a provision where the president is able to veto that resolution—meaning, in this instance, that a president would need only one-third of support plus one of the two houses of Congress to avoid default.

Since such a provision is quite literally tied to the budget it should pass muster with the parliamentarian for reconciliation in the lame-duck Congress, even in the event Republicans take control of the House. All Democrats—even ones like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—would vote for it because their donors know what havoc a default would wreak on their own prospects, even if the MAGA base does not (Manchin has already expressed his support for such a procedure). House Republicans would scream and howl (and fundraise of course) about “tyranny and “executive overreach,” but they’re going to do that anyway.

As Ornstein observes, the stakes are just too high now to ignore the issue or hope it will somehow “work out:”

We have moved into a new and frightening era in American politics and governance, one when radicals intent on a revolution and craving major disruption will be not just a vocal minority but potentially dominating a governing body. We cannot risk the full consequences of that brutal reality.

No one can foresee the November election results. But the consequences of a Republican takeover of the House—if it happens—will be stark and visible soon enough to all Americans. In fact, Republicans have already made their intentions quite clear:

Democrats have no reason to accede to this kind of sabotage. It’s time to put a stop to it, once and for all.

Donate now to protect the Democratic majority in the House!

Drew DeVault, prolific FOSS blogger and hacker behind SourceHut, Sway, wlroots, and many other projects, writes in a blog post: I have relied on ffmpeg for many tasks and for many years. It has always been there to handle any little multimedia-related task I might put it to for personal use -- re-encoding audio files so they fit on my phone, taking clips from videos to share, muxing fonts into mkv files, capturing video from my webcam, live streaming hacking sessions on my own platform, or anything else I can imagine. It formed the foundation of MediaCrush back in the day, where we used it to optimize multimedia files for efficient viewing on the web, back when that was more difficult than "just transcode it to a webm." ffmpeg is notable for being one of the first large-scale FOSS projects to completely eradicate proprietary software in its niche. Virtually all multimedia-related companies rely on ffmpeg to do their heavy lifting. It took a complex problem and solved it, with free software. The book is now closed on multimedia: ffmpeg is the solution to almost all of your problems. And if it's not, you're more likely to patch ffmpeg than to develop something new. The code is accessible and the community are experts in your problem domain. ffmpeg is one of the foremost pillars of achievement in free software. It has touched the lives of every reader, whether they know it or not. If you've ever watched TV, or gone to a movie, or watched videos online, or listened to a podcast, odds are that ffmpeg was involved in making it possible. It is one of the most well-executed and important software projects of all time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

‘It feels like the end. I think she’ll be gone next week,’ says veteran Tory MP.

Why Trump will face serious danger if he ever agrees to testify.

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Three theories for a mysterious string of deaths in Putin’s Russia.

It’s a rough year to be a high-profile Russian: After nearly eight months of war in Ukraine, the Russian military is reeling and on its back foot; sanctions continue to squeeze the country’s economy and elite — and at least 15 Russian businessmen and executives have died in apparent accidents or by suicide, including a number of Putin allies.

The victims range from an executive with Gazprom, a major state-owned oil company, to the managing director of a state-run development corporation. The causes of death range from unremarkable — a stroke, for example — to lurid, such as death by toad poison in a shaman’s basement.

Combined, the sheer number of deaths, as well as the prominence of the dead and a long history of suspicious demises in Putin’s Russia, have raised questions about whether something other than ordinary bad luck is at fault.

According to Stanislav Markus, an associate professor at the University of South Carolina business school and author of Property, Predation, and Protection: Piranha Capitalism in Russia and Ukraine, it’s a near certainty. “We can almost certainly rule out the official explanation of the deaths as suicides or poor health,” Markus told me via email. He’s not alone; theories vary — and generally don’t feature some grand conspiracy by the Kremlin — but a number of Russia experts see “more than just randomness” in the deaths, as Syracuse University professor Brian Taylor, who specializes in Russian politics and is the author of The Code of Putinism, put it to me in an interview.

The string of mysterious fatalities began with the death of Gazprom Invest transport director Leonid Shulman in late January; a suicide note was reportedly found near his body, and the death was investigated as such.

Another Gazprom executive, Alexander Tyulakov, died in February, also by suicide, as did Ukraine-born billionaire Mikhail Watford, who was found dead in his house in the United Kingdom.

Vasily Melnikov, the founder of the medical supplies company MedStom, was found dead in March, in a possible murder-suicide along with his wife and his two children. Another alleged murder-suicide, that of former Gazprombank executive Vladislav Avayev and his wife and teenage daughter, followed in April, just one day before former oil and gas executive Sergei Protosenya was also found dead along with his family in a third possible murder-suicide incident.

Avayev and his family were shot to death, according to news reports, while Protosenya was found hanged and his wife and daughter fatally stabbed.

Other subsequent deaths, including multiple deadly falls — down stairs, from a window, from a moving boat — have also prompted speculation, though there is no overt evidence of foul play.

Most recently, Pavel Pchelnikov, a manager with the Russian Railways subsidiary Digital Logistics, died by suicide late last month; shortly before that, on September 21, a former Russian aviation expert, Anatoly Gerashchenko, fell to his death “from a great height” and down multiple flights of stairs, according to a report in the Daily Beast citing Russian media.

Of the dead, a number have links to Gazprom and Novatek, Russia’s two largest natural gas companies; two others were affiliated with Lukoil, also a major energy company in Russia.

There are reasons to doubt the official stories

In several cases, the family and friends of the dead have already raised questions about their deaths, or rejected official conclusions of suicide.

In a statement after Protosenya’s death, for example, Novatek, his former employer, said that speculations about his death “bear no relation to reality,” an apparent reference to early reports in Spanish media describing it as a murder-suicide. Protosenya’s son, Fedor, also told the Daily Mail that his father “could never do anything to harm them [his family]. I don’t know what happened that night but I know that my dad did not hurt them.”

Igor Volobuev, also a former Gazprombank executive, told CNN he does not believe Avayev’s death was truly a murder-suicide.

“He was in charge of very large amounts of money. So, did he kill himself? I don’t think so. I think he knew something and that he posed some sort of risk,” Volobuev said.

There’s something to these suspicions — political assassinations, after all, aren’t exactly unusual in Russia. Assassination by purported suicide is virtually a category to itself: As Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, remarked on Twitter in September, “for those keeping track at home, 12 ‘threw himself from window/shot himself 7 times in the head’ russian oligarch deaths this year so far” (a number that has since increased).

As recently as two years ago, Alex Ward highlighted a similar trend in a different sector of Russian society in a story for Vox: coronavirus doctors dying after falling from high windows early in the pandemic. Those deaths were equally unexplained, but as Ward wrote at the time, murder “may not be completely out of the question.”

That ambiguity is a common theme around deaths in Russia; though there is rarely clear-cut evidence, questions surrounding the deaths of Putin critics stretch back nearly two decades.

Three experts I spoke with told me that was equally the case here — though they stressed the degree of uncertainty surrounding the deaths.

“The number of [deaths] seems higher than random chance would suggest, but that doesn’t mean that it’s all part of the same story,” Taylor said. “Some of them really could be suicides or accidents. Some of them could be murders.”

So what really happened?

The short answer is we don’t know — the deaths are strange on their own and outright suspicious as a cluster, but the throughline, if there is one, remains a mystery. That being said, there are a few possible explanations.

Suicide and accident — really

According to the experts I spoke with, the sheer volume of accidental deaths and suicides so far is enough to mean that this is unlikely to be the true explanation in every case. It’s not impossible, however; sometimes a suicide is just a suicide and an accident is just an accident, no matter how odd.

There are certainly factors that point in that direction, even beyond official findings in the deaths. Specifically, as Ward pointed out in May 2020, Russia has the third-highest suicide rate in the world, according to the World Health Organization. The data is now several years old — the last full set is from 2016 — but that year, about 122 people died by suicide each day in Russia, equal to more than 44,500 deaths a year.

Additionally, according to Peter Rutland, a Russia expert and professor of government at Wesleyan University, Russia’s system, and perhaps especially its business community, is under substantial pressure due to the war.

“These are incredibly stressful times, right?” Rutland said. “Businesspeople have seen their chances to visit Europe frozen, their assets frozen, their yachts seized, the value of the shares in their companies.”

Those factors, Rutland told me, could conceivably provoke a spate of suicides.

“If businesspeople had loans that were collateralized with those assets, or which required some kind of business income, which has just disappeared because of the sanctions, you can only imagine that that would drive people to suicide,” he said.

Of course, that doesn’t account perfectly for the murder-suicides, or the number of fatal accidents. But it’s not impossible that at least some of the deaths are no more than what they seem on the surface.

The long arm of the Kremlin

One of the most dramatic and often-speculated-about explanations is that the deaths are really killings — carried out at the order of the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

As Bill Browder, a onetime investor in Russia turned Kremlin critic, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) this month, “when people of all the same industry die that way, it looks to me like what I would call an epidemic of murder.”

According to ABC’s Samantha Hawley and Flint Duxfield, Browder “told the ABC News Daily podcast he had little doubt the deaths of the Russian oligarchs — predominantly from the oil and gas sector — have come at the orders of the Kremlin.”

Under Browder’s theory, as he explained it to ABC, the pressure of sanctions has created a financial crunch for Putin, and the deaths of businessmen are a particularly brutal way to revive streams of funding for the conflict — particularly from Russia’s oil and gas industry.

“I would suspect that this guy said ‘no’ and then the best way of getting that flow of cash is to kill him and then ask his replacement the same question,” Browder told ABC.

It’s a tempting answer, particularly given Putin’s long history of assassinating or attempting to assassinate dissidents, such as Alexei Navalny, who was poisoned with the Russian nerve agent Novichok in 2020 and has since been imprisoned in Russia. It’s also something Browder is familiar with — his lawyer, Sergei Magintsky, died in a Russian prison in 2009 after uncovering apparent large-scale fraud by the Russian government.

However, Taylor told me, it’s not the most likely explanation in this case.

“It’s a big leap from saying yes, there’s been a campaign of repression against internal opposition going back for a long time, and evidence of some high-profile people being targeted by the state, to saying everyone who’s killed mysteriously was killed either because of their business dealings with Putin or their criticism of the state,” Taylor said.

Fiona Hill, a former Russia specialist on the National Security Council staff, agrees. “Not every unexplained death in Russia is the KGB or the GRU bumping someone off,” she told Politico Magazine in August regarding the apparent suicide of Dan Rapoport, a Washington, DC-based Kremlin critic who previously did business in Russia.

Internal business pressures turned deadly

That leaves a third theory, one that both Taylor and Rutland indicate is far more likely than either a Kremlin-directed campaign of assassinations or a spate of genuine accidents and suicides.

Specifically, the recent run of deaths among Russia’s business elite could well be disguised killings — but the killings may be a product of Russia’s tangled political and economic structures, which are newly under pressure from Russia’s war in Ukraine, more than of any specific, overarching agenda.

According to Taylor, the deaths could have more to do with “shady business, attempt to cover tracks, attempt to wipe out a competitor, trying to maybe get rid of someone who’s inconvenient at a time when there’s a lot of pressure on state-affiliated companies, especially in the oil and gas sector, but also in the defense sector.”

Markus agrees, noting in an email that “there are competing influential clans” within the Russian state “that span state institutions and private or state-owned firms.”

“So far these clans have been loyal to Putin, but this loyalty has not reduced their predatory appetites,” Markus told me. “From the clans’ viewpoint, the current situation has led to (1) lower cash flows available for diversion or theft; and (2) less certainty in Putin’s future as the ultimate leader of Russian kleptocracy. Hence, clans may be settling their scores and competing more viciously — which could involve murders in question — without this being a centralized Kremlin effort.”

That explanation also makes more sense than the Kremlin-directed conspiracy theory, given the cross section of Russia’s business class that’s turned up dead. Though there are some common linkages — ties to energy companies, for example — some experts, such as Mark Galeotti, the author of the upcoming book Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine, have pointed out that coverage of the deaths can paint with an overly broad brush.

“When did the death of the former rector of a technical university become the (implied: mysterious) end of a ‘Putin ally’? (Everyone dying in [Russia] now is elevated to oligarch or ally),” Galeotti tweeted after the death of Geraschenko in September.

Significantly, both Taylor and Rutland emphasize that there’s still a great deal of uncertainty around the deaths. However, under the third and, according to them, more likely theory, continued pressure on Russia’s economy could well accelerate the trend.

Violence as a way of doing business has been “deeply normalized going back to the 1990s,” Rutland said. “And so as the regime enters what could be its death throes, or certainly it’s under huge pressure, you can imagine that there’s gonna be this — well, it’s not yet a bloodbath, but you can imagine that the faction fighting will get even more desperate.”

There are no satisfying answers to be had, at least for now. Recent history supports the idea that such deaths are something Putin would be fully capable of, but he lacks a clear motive that connects them all; as some close Russia watchers have observed, Russia’s cutthroat business culture is at least equally likely to be culpable as a repressive Kremlin. In both cases, there’s a distinct dearth of evidence — but the speculation only underscores the overlapping brutality of Russian business and Putin’s regime.

President Biden’s surprise marijuana reform announcement last week has mostly gotten attention for pardoning thousands convicted of simple possession of marijuana, a move that many observers have called a small step towards criminal justice reform. But it’s the mostly overlooked second part of Biden’s announcement — a directive to reevaluate pot’s federal status as a Schedule I drug — that has the potential to change the future of American cannabis policy.

Schedule I is the federal government’s most tightly controlled drug classification, reserved for extremely dangerous substances with high potential for abuse and no medical use. That doesn’t describe pot, Biden declared last week, and he is now asking his own administration to start the process of making the drug’s legal classification match its reality.

The reevaluation is more than just an empty gesture. Experts like John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said there’s a very good chance of Biden’s directive leading to actual reform — not decades from now, but by the end of his current term in office. “This is not just a blue-ribbon commission putting together a report,” Hudak said. “This is a formal legal process that is required in order for the executive branch to consider a change in scheduling.” 

In other words, Biden just triggered a process that could end federal pot prohibition as we know it. 

Marijuana landed in Schedule I in 1970, when Congress first passed the Controlled Substances Act, a law that dictates federal drug policy and created five “schedules” under which substances could be classified. Pot’s placement was meant to be only a temporary designation, while officials waited for scientists to finish research on the plant and its effects. But in 1972, after then-Attorney General John Mitchell overruled the scientific commission’s recommendation to decriminalize, marijuana became a permanent Schedule I drug. The decision would later become infamous when interviews with aides to former President Richard Nixon and recordings from Nixon’s White House tapes showed that the administration was using that classification as a way to criminalize, in the words of former Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, the “antiwar left and Black people.”

Despite the sordid history of pot’s scheduling, cannabis has been paralyzed in Schedule I status for more than 50 years because of a legal dilemma created by the law itself. Before pot can be downgraded to a lower schedule, there needs to be scientific evidence that cannabis can be used safely and has at least some medical uses. But the Schedule I status itself severely limits any research into the drug: Subsequent reviews have inevitably failed to find enough evidence to reschedule the drug.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/races-bringing-democrats-odds-holding-senate-fivethirtyeight-91476350

Pot’s Schedule I status remains the most powerful force in American cannabis policy, even as millions of Americans gain access to medical marijuana through state markets. Schedule I is why federal agents can arrest people for smoking a single joint. It’s why scientists can’t easily study the drug. It’s why most banks won’t lend money to marijuana startups and why pot companies pay some of the highest federal tax rates in the country.

Moving a drug to a different schedule is a lengthy bureaucratic process — previous reviews of pot’s CSA classification took between six and 22 years to complete, Hudak said. But he and other experts think that this reclassification could happen much faster. That’s because Biden is approaching this declassification in a unique — and powerful — way. 

That starts with how the president announced his plans. Biden publicly told his appointees that he wants this done “expeditiously,” pressuring his officials to act before his term ends in 2024. “The president is messaging to those appointees — and the appointees will totally understand it — that this is something he wants done [quickly],” Hudak said. In contrast, former President Barack Obama refused to take this administrative action, telling reporters that a schedule change had to come from Congress. Biden not only directed his agencies to conduct this review, but announced it by saying that Schedule I “makes no sense” for pot.

The process will begin with the Food and Drug Administration conducting a scientific evaluation of cannabis. This study will look at eight different aspects of the drug, including the substance’s pharmacological effects, public health risks and potential for abuse. The FDA will send this information to the secretary of Health and Human Services, who will then make a recommendation to the Drug Enforcement Administration. The HHS secretary can recommend that pot remain a Schedule I drug, be moved to a lower, less restrictive schedule or be removed entirely.

Both Attorney General Merrick Garland and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra are already taking up the charge. Becerra tweeted hours after Biden’s announcement (at 4:20 p.m., in perhaps a nod to stoner culture) that he was “looking forward” to working with Garland to review how marijuana is scheduled under federal law. And the Department of Justice announced the same day that it is “expeditiously” reviewing pardons and working with HHS to review pot’s scheduling decision.

This forceful move by Biden has made legal experts like Daniel Shortt, a cannabis attorney based in Seattle, optimistic about the chances marijauna could be removed from Schedule I. 

“This is the most consequential piece of federal cannabis policy since 1937, when federal pot prohibition began,” Shortt said. “However long this process takes, it’s going to end with a significantly different approach to federal prohibition.”

But there are many ways Biden’s scheduling directive could fail. Chief among them is the evaluation of marijuana’s medical effectiveness. This isn’t the first time the federal government has reviewed pot’s Schedule I status. The DOJ and HHS have studied the issue multiple times and each review has concluded the same way: with the FDA declaring that pot is dangerous and has no accepted medical use, and the DOJ refusing to remove cannabis from Schedule I.

As recently as 2016, the FDA ruled that marijuana had not demonstrated medical value — but there have been major medical cannabis developments in the last six years. Nearly half of oncologists reported recommending medical cannabis to their cancer patients, according to a survey conducted in 2016 and 2017. And the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the country’s leading academic body for scientific research, concluded in 2017 that there is substantial evidence that cannabis is an effective treatment for chronic pain in adults. 

Even the FDA has updated its opinion on the medical use of cannabinoids. In 2018, the agency approved Epidiolex, a pharmaceutical cannabinoid derived from cannabis plants, to treat rare forms of epilepsy. Epidiolex showed benefits in randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials, effectively proving through the gold standard of medical research that pot can have medical value. 

The approval of Epidiolex could be the most important development in changing the FDA’s opinion about pot by demonstrating that cannabis has “medical value and accepted medical use,” Hudak said. But Matt Zorn, an attorney who has handled multiple cases against DEA’s scheduling decisions, said it wasn’t clear if Epidiolex would be a slam dunk for rescheduling cannabis. The agency could decide that a pharmaceutical derived from cannabis is categorically different from cannabis itself.

But there is power in the president clearly and decisively asking for change. Politics inevitably creeps into the FDA’s scientific review and scheduling recommendation, Hudak said. And this is the first time the president himself, rather than an outside group, has requested a reevaluation of pot. This will likely push the agencies to make a different decision simply “because their boss told them to,” Shortt said. 

And not only is the president on record supporting pot — both of Biden’s appointees have a history of defending cannabis. In his 2021 confirmation hearings, Garland, who will eventually make the ultimate scheduling decision as the head of the DOJ, criticized enforcing federal marijuana law as an ineffective use of federal resources and racially discriminatory in its effect.

Becerra is an even bigger advocate for cannabis reform. As a member of Congress, Becerra repeatedly voted to block the DOJ from interfering with medical marijuana programs and to allow cannabis businesses to access banking. As California’s attorney general, Becerra helped administer the state’s medical marijuana program and he attacked pot’s Schedule I status, telling the Los Angeles Times in 2017 that “The federal government has to catch up and get into the 21st century.” It’s hard to see how Becerra could possibly recommend that pot remain a Schedule I substance, Hudak said, given everything Becerra has fought for over the last decade. 

In theory, a drug’s scheduling should be guided by scientists making decisions based on the best available data. But politics has always affected federal drug policy, whether it’s Nixon outlawing pot in the 1970s or Congress creating the discriminatory disparity between crack and cocaine penalties. But this time, with Biden’s announcement, the politics are in pot’s favor.

British prime minister will give a press conference Friday afternoon.

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The company formerly known as Facebook earlier this week announced -- and demonstrated -- that avatars on its metaverse will soon have legs. Here's an update on that: While the updates bringing full-body avatars aren't expected until 2023, Zuckerberg was clearly seen jumping around in the video, giving everyone an early look at the tech. Or was he? Anyone who has ever been around any piece of marketing ever made should know by now that not everything is as it seems when a company is trying to sell you something. And in this case, the video Meta showed off was made with some help. As UploadVR's Ian Hamilton has since reported, Meta has issued a follow-up statement, which says, "To enable this preview of what's to come, the segment featured animations created from motion capture."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Geoffrey Fowler, writing for The Washington Post: You may not realize all the ways Amazon is watching you. No other Big Tech company reaches deeper into domestic life. Two-thirds of Americans who shop on Amazon own at least one of its smart gadgets, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. Amazon now makes (or has acquired) more than two dozen types of domestic devices and services, from the garage to the bathroom. All devices generate data. But from years of reviewing technology, I've learned Amazon collects more data than almost any other company. Amazon says all that personal information helps power an "ambient intelligence" to make your home smart. It's the Jetsons dream. But it's also a surveillance nightmare. Many of Amazon's products contribute to its detailed profile of you, helping it know you better than you know yourself. Amazon says it doesn't "sell" our data, but there aren't many U.S. laws to restrict how it uses the information. Data that seems useless today could look different tomorrow after it gets reanalyzed, stolen or handed to a government.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to reporting from HuffPost, during a campaign event in Forsyth, Georgia, in late September, Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker proclaimed that his mother told him his grandmother was “full-blood Cherokee,” adding, “So, I’m Native American.”

To make matters even worse, the Trump-backed Heisman Trophy winner went on to call himself a “super mutt” and added, “I don’t know what I am, but this was so funny. This was so funny. I said, ‘Mom, why you never said anything to us?’ She said, ‘Back in my days, a lot of the Native Americans were treated worse than Blacks.’”

At another rally, he told the crowd he was “proud to be Black’ but he ‘may not be Black” because he said he had just learned his “mother is part Native American.”

RELATED STORY: Where were Herschel Walker’s Christian values when it came to suing a WWII vet?

HuffPost reports that Walker claimed to have Native ancestry at a slew of campaign events in the past few months but has never provided any evidence. He’s told crowds that his mom is 40% Native American after learning that his grandmother was supposedly 100% Cherokee.

So, the HuffPost did its own investigating and spoke with Walker’s mother, Christine Walker, as well as a spokesperson from the Cherokee Nation.

“There is no one listed in Cherokee Nation’s Registration database with that name and birthdate,” the tribe’s spokesperson said.

When the outlet asked Walker’s mother about the claims, she said simply that she’d heard about her father’s mother (Walker’s great-grandmother) being “kin” to Cherokee. “Back when I was a little child running around, she was kin to the Cherokee,” she told HuffPost.

When HuffPost asked what being “kin” meant to her, she said she believed her grandmother to have had some relationship with Cherokee but wasn’t sure what that was.

She added, “See, my grandmother, she passed when I was quite young. I don’t know too much about how she was connected.” 

“Tribes have all kinds of … ways to determine whether somebody meets particular criteria to be a citizen of a particular government,” according to Dr. J. Cedric Woods, director of the Institute for New England Native American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “You have some tribes who use blood quantum. You have some tribes that are still strictly matrilineal or patrilineal. You have some tribes who accept descendancy from either line. How much of that blood quantum is required is all across the map,” Woods said in an interview with Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.

So, why is Walker trying to claim lineage to the Indigenous community? It appears to be another way he can veer away from the complex and painful issue that many white Americans (especially in Georgia) refuse to face—an issue Walker does not want to discuss. 

Walker has long had a disturbing take on race; as Daily Kos has reported, Walker took full advantage of his “minority business” red seal while running his company but has spent a lot of time on the campaign trail condemning the very federal programs that offer Black business owners a fair chance at success, as first reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC). 

Walker’s company, Renaissance Man Food Services, has taken full advantage of being “a certified minority-owned food company” and winner of “Marriott’s 2016 Diversity Supplier of the year” and the “Marriott International Diversity & Inclusion Award” in 2014, per their website. But during a Hall County, Georgia, Republican event in July, Walker launched into the usual GOP rhetoric of dragging the designation of “minority-owned” as “affirmative action.”  

“They have regulations for everything … I found out that I was Black, so my company was a minority-owned business. Like wow, a minority-owned business, what does that mean? It means you’ve got to fill out all of these forms,” Walker said. “I was like, ‘I got to fill out forms to be Black?’”

The problem with Walker’s latest claim about being Cherokee is that he is a notorious liar. So much of what he’s said since launching his campaign has been false that without proof, it’s difficult to believe anything he says.

Since Daily Kos began reporting on Walker, we’ve covered lie upon lie about everything from his graduating from the University of Georgia, as reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; to hiding the fact that he had any children other than his 22-year-old son Christian; to the mammoth exaggerations about his business acumen; to the tall tale about the time he founded (or co-founded) the veterans’ organization Patriot Support—which he did not. He recently tried to deny that former President Donald Trump ever said the 2020 election was stolen, and lies about his companies’ alleged charitable donations, nearly none of which were able to be verified by The Washington Post.

The fact is that Walker doesn’t seem to know how to tell the truth. He stands on the platform of Christian values, but as we know, when it comes to abortion, for example, there’s a long history of hypocrisy. If elected, he’d have no issues taking away a pregnant person’s right to terminate a pregnancy, but when it came to his own ex-girlfriend, there was another story altogether. 

This latest claim by the Trump-endorsed candidate is just another example of his ubiquitous falsehoods. 

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After an eruption of even more scandals among Republican Senate candidates, FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich returns to The Downballot to discuss the effect these sorts of scandals can have on competitive races; whether Democrats stand a chance to keep the House; and the different ways pollsters create likely voter models.

Trans youth (and in some places, even trans adults) having access to safe, age-appropriate, gender-affirming health care is one of the latest topics to incite fear, hysteria, and hate in Republicans. As we know when it comes to reproductive health (including abortion access), we should have safe, affordable health care and privacy in making decisions. But just like conservatives are attacking the autonomy of pregnant people and people who could become pregnant, they’re attacking the bodily autonomy of people who want gender-affirming health care. The hate and control all come from the same place.

Daily Kos has covered multiple Republican efforts at the state level to limit or ban access to lifesaving gender-affirming care, including, for example, it becoming a felony for physicians to provide such care to youth in Alabama, Ohio lawmakers seeking to ban even mental health care that’s trans-affirming for people under 18, and of course, efforts from the QAnon Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene to ban access to gender-affirming care for youth, period. 

One recent example comes to us out of Michigan, where State Rep. Ryan Berman introduced the evil HB 6454, which, in short, frames gender-affirming care as child abuse. The bill argues that anyone—whether physicians or parents—who “knowingly or intentionally consents to, obtains, or assists” with gender-affirming care can be subject to first-degree child abuse charges, which could result in literally going to jail—with a maximum penalty of a life sentence. 

RELATED STORY: Fired substitute teacher in Georgia seems entirely shocked to see consequences for her actions

Berman introduced the bill on Tuesday with the support of fellow Republican state representatives including Steve Carra, Steve Marino, Luke Meerman, and Beau LaFave. 

In a phone call with The Hill on Tuesday, LaFave made his case by saying it’s “logically incoherent” to offer surgeries and prescriptions to people who are not yet old enough to have sex. He said people are “abusing” these young people and that people aren’t responsible enough to “smoke a cigarette” until they’re 21. (Obviously, there’s a lot that’s logically incorrect in there, to use LaFave’s own language, but I digress.)

Gender-affirming care is lifesaving care. Conservatives are absolutely fixated on the idea that young children are walking into the hospital and getting surgeries whenever they want, and that’s so far from reality it’s almost funny. In many, many cases, gender-affirming care comes in the form of mental health care. Hormones and puberty blockers, for example, can be popular routes depending on the individual’s age, needs, and desires. Surgeries are typically only available once you’re 18. 

Regardless of all of that reality, Republicans have pushed similar anti-trans bills across the country, like a bill in Idaho that would sentence licensed medical providers who offer gender-affirming care to trans youth to life in prison. A candidate for school board elections in Florida called for physicians who provide such care to be hanged. This stuff is legitimately scary.

Studies show trans young people who receive gender-affirming care report a much-improved quality of life afterward and that trans folks who started hormones as teens report better mental health later when compared to their peers. We’ve also seen research that suggests trans youth report lower rates of suicidal ideation when their gender is affirmed. Again: This is lifesaving care. 

With Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in office, I don’t think this bill has any chance of making it into law. But these bills are still insidious in that they give these extreme anti-trans views a sense of legitimacy and can potentially pull moderates further to the right. We also can’t rely on there always being a Democrat in office able to counter these discriminatory measures. That’s yet another reason it’s so important to keep voters engaged and active in all levels of government, including our state and location elections. 

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