13 Oct
News and Analyses, A Foreign Perspective
Nearly all of these are English-edition daily newspapers. These sites have interesting editorials and essays, and many have links to other good news sources. We try to limit this list to those sites which are regularly updated, reliable, with a high percentage of “up” time.
Recommended:
Elections have consequences. Denying science has consequences. And we are reaping what we sow.
An American flag battered by Hurricane Michael continues to fly in the in the purple colored light of sunset at Shell Point Beach on October 10, 2018 in Crawfordville, Florida. Photograph: Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images
Floridians are staring down a very powerful Category 4 typhoon that is causing extensive damage. The high winds, heavy rains, and storm surge will cost billions of dollars.
We know that climate change is making these storms stronger. The storms feed off of warm ocean waters, and those waters are much warmer now because of climate change. I have written about the science in more detail here and here. But basically, Michael strengthened because it passed over really warm waters. Waters that were hotter because of human-caused warming.
Water ocean temperatures around Florida as Hurricane Michael evolved. Illustration: NASA EOSDIS/LANCE
Predictably, the hurricane strengthened as it hit shore. As I write this, Michael is coming ashore and the pressure is still falling (low pressures in a hurricane signify a stronger storm). It appears that Michael may have the third-lowest pressure for a hurricane hitting the USA.
Infrared image of Hurricane Michael Photograph: NASA/NOAA/UW-SSEC-CIMSS, William Straka III
It is a wonder that a state like Florida, which will get pummeled by Michael, could vote for someone that denies climate change. Think of how backwards the situation is – the Florida Department of Environmental Protection has reportedly been banned from using the terms “climate change” and “global warming”. This policy reportedly went into effect when Florida elected a science denier, Rick Scott, to governor.
Rick Scott has been condemned by people in Florida for his backward stance. It is climate denial like his that has contributed to the suffering of residents in the state.
It’s not that my colleagues haven’t tried to help Governor Scott understand how his policies hurt his state. A few years ago, scientists met with him and urged him to take climate change seriously. He remained silent.
Fortunately, while Rick Scott is now running for Senate, he’s being challenged by Democrat Bill Nelson. He understands science and believes in facts. Nelson writes,
Climate change is real, and we must take action to protect ourselves. Denial of this scientific reality is simply not an option, especially in Florida.
Rick Scott isn’t the only politician from the state of Florida to reject science and diminish climate change. Senator Marco Rubio has as well.
Florida voters could put an end to this nonsense. In the current race for state Governor to succeed Scott, Republican candidate Ron DeSantis is ignoring science. He recently claimed that climate change is not an issue for states to mitigate. Say what?
Let’s hope Ron DeSantis loses. His opponent is Andrew Gillum, who is clear as day when he says,
Climate change is real, it is impacting Floridians directly, and we will not be silenced on the matter. When I’m Governor, we will not just talk about climate change — we will put Floridians to work to make our state more energy independent and resilient and transform our state into the Solar Capital of the United States!
But it’s not just Florida; there are other states getting hit by Hurricane Michael that are also led by climate deniers. For instance, Georgia will be hit by Hurricane Michael. One of the senators there, David Perdue, congratulated President Trump when he pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord. Georgia’s other Senator, Johnny Isakson also denies the science. He too supported President Trump’s reckless actions.
At the congressional district level, the denial continues. Republican Representative Barry Loudermilk was pleased when President Trump walked away from the Paris Agreement. His opponent, Flynn Broady trusts and understands science, however. His position could not be any clearer as he writes,
We have the technology and knowledge to develop and place into practice renewable energy sources, reduce carbon emissions, and move our energy needs away from carbon fuels. We owe it to the world to participate in the Paris Agreement and the Kyoto Protocol. As the leading industrial nation we must lead the effort.
Climate deniers will try to say this article is gleeful about a hurricane. It is not. First of all, this hurricane and all hurricanes that hit land can cause death and destruction. I pray that people heed warnings and get out of the way. I hope people stay safe, regardless of their understanding of climate change and its effect on storms.
More On The Environment
World Politics
United States
As he runs for Senate in Utah, Romney’s comments jar with his harsh rebukes of Trump during 2016 campaign
Mitt Romney warned Republicans against nominating Donald Trump and refused to vote for him in the 2016 election. Photograph: Rick Bowmer/AP
Mitt Romney on Friday told reporters he has not been a leader of the “Never Trump” movement among Republicans, a statement that contradicted strongly critical remarks made on the 2016 campaign trail and in the years since.
The former Massachusetts governor and 2012 Republican presidential nominee is running for Senate in Utah. On Friday, he attended a rally in a suburb of Phoenix in support of the GOP senatorial candidate in Arizona, Martha McSally.
Asked, “You led the Never Trump movement, what happened with that?” a smiling Romney said: “I don’t think that was the case.
“President Trump was not the person I wanted to become the nominee of our party but he’s president now.
“The policies he’s promoted have been pretty effective and I support a lot of those policies. When there’s a place where I disagree I point that out.”
In March 2016, Romney opened fire on the then Republican frontrunner when he told a crowd in Salt Lake City: “If we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee, the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished.”
That jarred with what he added on Friday night in Arizona: “Right now we’re in a place where we’re going to say, ‘Are we going to be guided by conservative principles or are we going to take a sharp turn left?’ And conservative principles work and that’s why I think people are going to get behind Martha McSally and Republicans across the country.”
Asked if he would support investigations into Trump if he reaches the Senate, Romney smiled and walked away.
Trump smiled and walked away from Romney during his presidential transition, when he dangled the role of secretary of state in front of his rival before choosing the oil executive Rex Tillerson in what many saw as a deliberate humiliation.
Former Republican US presidential nominee Mitt Romney gave a blistering rebuke of Donald Trump on Thursday, calling him a ‘phony’ and ‘fraud’, and systematically attacking his business career, personality and policy proposals. Romney, an elder statesman in the party, stopped short of endorsing anyone but urged Republicans in states that have not yet held nominating contests to vote for Trump’s opponents.
Romney subsequently criticised Trump over his equivocal response to the white nationalist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, and his support for the far-right judge Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate election.
In his Salt Lake City speech in March 2016, Romney also called Trump a “phony” and a “fraud” and questioned his business acumen. He kept up his opposition in the months that followed, saying Trump’s effect on the Republican party was “breaking my heart”.
In response, Trump said Romney “choked like a dog” when running for the nomination in 2008 and the presidency in 2012. In the latter year, the billionaire said, Romney begged for his endorsement.
“I could have said, ‘Mitt, drop to your knees’,” Trump said. “He would have dropped to his knees.”
This year, with Democrats favoured to take the House, Republicans hope a favourable set of Senate contests will help them keep control of the upper chamber.
Utah is a deep-red state which Trump won comfortably in 2016, although an independent anti-Trump conservative, Evan McMullin, won 21% of the vote. Romney has a clear lead this year, against the Democrat Jenny Wilson.
McSally is in a much tighter contest, against Kyrsten Sinema. Neither she nor Romney mentioned Trump in their remarks to the Phoenix rally.
In May, Romney revealed who he voted for in 2016. It wasn’t Trump. Nor was it Hillary Clinton. Instead, the former nominee cast a write-in vote for his wife, Ann.
We can no longer count on our governments to protect us from a tide of disinformation. Our security rests in the hands of open source intelligence, as pioneered by Bellingcat
Eliot Higgins founded Bellingcat from a laptop on his sofa. Photograph: Simon Dawson/Reuters
When the story of 2018 is told, historians may be hard pressed to say which was weirdest: that a deadly nerve agent was deployed in a quiet cathedral town on the edge of Salisbury Plain, at the heart of our military establishment. Or that the Russian suspects were identified not by British intelligence but a group described last week as “armchair investigators”.
Because we now know not just the identities of the two men who travelled to Salisbury with a military-grade chemical weapon but also the arm of the Russian army that deployed them – thanks to Bellingcat, a citizen investigation site founded by Eliot Higgins, a former blogger who started it from a laptop on his sofa in breaks from caring for his daughter.
Taken separately these stories are gobsmacking but what’s been lost in the reporting is how they are two sides of the same story, imperfect reflections of what many believe to be the defining story of our age: disinformation, the central role of the technology platforms in disseminating it, and the inadequacy of governments to counter it.
Because the sleuthing of the identity of these men is a truly remarkable tale that shows how the power of the crowd and a suite of open-source techniques can achieve feats that remind us of how we thought the web used to be, the tech-utopian dreamspace that has taken such an existential battering in the last two years. Bellingcat’s pioneering achievements are an inspiring reminder of what is still possible.
But it’s also a window into the darkness that the web has become – a site of propaganda, distortion, subversion. Because last week Bellingcat identified the second suspect as Alexander Mishkin, an officer in Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU. And that’s the clue. It’s the key that unlocks both the gravity and the audacity of what we are witnessing. It’s the GRU that is at the very heart of the attack on western democracies.
It’s the GRU that has learned how to weaponise the tech platforms that we use every day and that underpin our news and information systems in ways we have singularly failed to protect. It’s the GRU that reports have claimed attacked Nato, the German parliament and the French presidential election. And it’s the GRU that was named in the special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s recent indictments into the attack on the US presidential election.
On Friday 13 July, the day hundreds of thousands took to London’s streets to protest against President Trump’s visit to his eager new ally, Mueller released the indictments of 12 GRU officers for hacking into the computers of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic national convention, an extraordinary piece of work that gives a blow-by-blow account of precisely how the GRU targeted more than 300 people and leaked tens of thousands of stolen documents that would go on to play a hugely consequential role in the presidential poll.
The same agency that we now know has targeted Britain.
Mueller understands what he is dealing with. James Comey, former FBI chief, understood it too. He was sacked after confirming, more than 18 months ago, a “counterintelligence mission” to investigate “the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election”.
But what has become plain is that the British government shows no sign of even acknowledging the scale or complexity of the national security threat we face, let alone how to deal with it, as Hillary Clinton – the target of the GRU’s operation – appeared to acknowledge when she spoke in Oxford last week.
She described how the foundation of western liberal democracy is under assault and made pointed remarks at both the nature of Russia’s attacks on Britain and Britain’s failure to investigate, name-checking both Damian Collins, head of the select committee for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, for warning of “a crisis in British democracy” and Tom Watson, the deputy Labour leader, who have both called for a public inquiry with “Mueller-style” powers.
What Bellingcat exposes is how citizen investigations are not only surpassing traditional mainstream organisations, they also seem streets ahead of government agencies. Investigators who use publicly available sources have been quietly joining a citizen’s battle against this flood not just of disinformation, but of corporate secrets, dark money thinktanks, networks of political influence, Trump-Russia collusion, overspending in the referendum, up to and including mass murder.
This month, BBC Africa Eye published a stunning investigation using techniques Bellingcat has developed, identifying the location and identity of men who’d killed two women and two young children through forensic analysis of online sources.
Cambridge Analytica’s former chief executive Alexander Nix arrives to give evidence to parliament’s digital, culture, media and sport committee in June. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images
And, less hi-tech but also hugely valuable, the entire Cambridge Analytica investigation owes a huge debt to open source investigators. After Harry Davies published his first article in the Guardian about the firm in 2015, it was Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a professor of maths in Geneva, who was profoundly troubled by the way personal data was being abused, who took it upon himself to produce an open-source document that he made freely available to journalists.
And when the firm threatened to sue the Guardian, it was the pioneering work of another open-source investigator, Wendy Siegelman, working with US journalist Ann Marlowe, who created a chart of its many complicated corporate structures that the Observer and Guardian’s lawyers drew upon in our response.
An ex-Met intelligence officer who resigned after blowing the whistle on the falsification of police crime reports, James Patrick (@j_amesp), has been crowdfunding the only extensive reporting on Russian interference that’s being published in Britain and whenever I have a question about the Brexit campaign’s figures, it’s @brexit_sham I turn to, a Liverpool-based duo who met ten years ago through football fan activism, researching offshore finance used by the Premier League.
For 18 months Mueller has investigated how Russia targeted the US via information space; an information space that we in Britain share. In February, he unsealed indictments of 13 Russians and three companies that revealed how in 2014, Moscow launched a sophisticated operation to target US citizens by subverting their own social media platforms against them.
It was a key moment in our understanding of this brave new world. A world that we see every day – on our screens, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, YouTube suggestions, Google searches – but remains murky and complicated. It’s notable that the counter-offensive is taking place on these same platforms that enabled it. That dedicated Twitter sleuths, like @RVAwonk and @conspirator0 and @MikeH_PR), track the bots and trolls.
But then, in the absence of any government being able to hold Facebook to account – Zuckerberg has refused three requests from parliament to appear – it’s all there is. A citizen-fuelled effort that combines counter-disinformation, counter-intelligence and even counter-attacks.
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