It’s been almost a year since Donald Trump emerged from an election campaign of threats, lies and vitriol as the future president of the United States of America.
His victory speech on Nov. 9, 2016, sparked cautious optimism that perhaps his presidency would not be quite as hate-filled as his campaign.
“We will deal fairly with everyone, with everyone — all people and all other nations,” Trump vowed. “We will seek common ground, not hostility; partnership, not conflict.”
But within weeks, he had unleashed the first of a seemingly endless stream of Twitter tirades from his new bully pulpit. He lambasted the “failing” New York Times, the “highly overrated” Broadway musical “Hamilton,” the “unwatchable” “Saturday Night Live” and, of course, the “crooked” media, to name a few.
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John MacDougall/Pool/Reuters
Trump and British Prime Minister Theresa May wait at the start of the first working session of the G-20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, on July 7.
Federal investigators have gathered enough evidence to bring charges in their investigation of President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser and his son as part of the probe into Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation.
Michael T. Flynn, who was fired after just 24 days on the job, was one of the first Trump associates to come under scrutiny in the federal probe now led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into possible collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign.
Mueller is applying renewed pressure on Flynn following his indictment of Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, three sources familiar with the investigation told NBC News.
The investigators are speaking to multiple witnesses in coming days to gain more information surrounding Flynn’s lobbying work, including whether he laundered money or lied to federal agents about his overseas contacts, according to three sources familiar with the investigation.
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From left, retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, his son Michael G. Flynn, and Boris Epshteyn, a spokesman for President-elect Donald Trump, board an elevator at Trump Tower in New York on Nov. 17, 2016. Carolyn Kaster / AP file
Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary in the Trump administration, shares business interests with Vladimir Putin’s immediate family, and he failed to clearly disclose those interests when he was being confirmed for his cabinet position.
Ross — a billionaire industrialist — retains an interest in a shipping company, Navigator Holdings, that was partially owned by his former investment company. One of Navigator’s most important business relationships is with a Russian energy firm controlled, in turn, by Putin’s son-in-law and other members of the Russian president’s inner circle.
Some of the details of Ross’s continuing financial holdings — much of which were not disclosed during his confirmation process — are revealed in a trove of more than 7 million internal documents of Appleby, a Bermuda-based law firm, that was leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The documents consist of emails, presentations and other electronic data. These were then shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists — a global network that won the Pulitzer Prize this year for its work on the Panama Papers — and its international media partners. NBC News was given access to some of the leaked documents, which the ICIJ calls the “Paradise Papers.”
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Wilbur Ross, picked by President-elect Donald Trump to serve as his commerce secretary, arrives to testify at his confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Commerce Committee on Capitol Hill on January 18, 2017 in Washington. Joe Raedle / Getty Images file
In fall 2010, the Russian billionaire investor Yuri Milner took the stage for a Q. and A. at a technology conference in San Francisco. Mr. Milner, whose holdings have included major stakes in Facebook and Twitter, is known for expounding on everything from the future of social media to the frontiers of space travel. But when someone asked a question that had swirled around his Silicon Valley ascent — who were his investors? — he did not answer, turning repeatedly to the moderator with a look of incomprehension.
Now, leaked documents examined by The New York Times offer a partial answer: Behind Mr. Milner’s investments in Facebook and Twitter were hundreds of millions of dollars from the Kremlin.
Obscured by a maze of offshore shell companies, the Twitter investment was backed by VTB, a Russian state-controlled bank often used for politically strategic deals.
And a big investor in Mr. Milner’s Facebook deal received financing from Gazprom Investholding, another government-controlled financial institution, according to the documents. They include a cache of records from the Bermuda law firm Appleby that were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and reviewed by The Times in collaboration with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
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By The New York Times
Mr. Milner, right, with Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook. The company, along with Twitter and other social media sites, has become a major focus of investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.Credit Kimberly White/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize
Jonathan Rothberg, a entrepreneur who prides himself on drastically disrupting the biomedical industry every so often, has typically big claims for his new product. The Butterfly iQ, a cheap handheld ultrasound tool with AI smarts tucked inside, will 1) revolutionize medical imaging in hospitals and clinics, 2) change the game in global health, and 3) eventually become a consumer product that will be as ubiquitous as the household thermometer, he says.
Today, Rothberg’s startup Butterfly Network unveiled the tool and announced its FDA clearance for 13 clinical applications, including cardiac scans, fetal and obstetric exams, and musculoskeletal checks. Rather than using a dedicated piece of hardware for the controls and image display, the iQ works with the user’s iPhone. The company says it will start shipping units in 2018 at an initial price of about $2,000.
But that’s just the beginning, Rothberg tells IEEE Spectrum. He expects to bring the price down on the handheld gadget, and is already looking ahead to radically new products. “In the next two years we’ll release a patch that uses ultrasound to monitor patients, and a pill you can swallow to look at cancer from within the body,” he says.
One of the crazier facts about life in America is this: For roughly two decades, nobody had any clue what time it was.
In office buildings, it could be 4 p.m. on one floor and 5 p.m. on another — an important matter for several reasons, including who punched out first to get to happy hour. People would step off airplanes with no idea how to set their watches. Ponder this head-scratcher:
“A short trip from Steubenville, Ohio, to Moundsville, West Virginia became a symbol of the deteriorating situation. A bus ride down this thirty-five-mile stretch of highway took less than an hour. But along that route, the local time changed seven times.”
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Preparing for daylight saving, a worker adjust hands on a stainless steel tower clock at Electric Time Company in Medfield, Mass., on March 7, 2014. (Elise Amendola/AP)
When I got a cochlear implant seven years ago, after being profoundly deaf for my entire life, hearing friends and acquaintances started asking me the same few questions: Had I heard music yet? Did I like it? What did it sound like?
I was 20 years old then. Aside from the amplified noises I’d heard through my hearing aids, which sounded more like murmurs distorted by thick insulation swaddling, I had never heard music, not really. But that did not mean I wasn’t in some way musical. I played piano and guitar as a child, and I remember enjoying the feel of my hands picking out the piano keys in rhythm, as well as the rich vibrations of the guitar soundboard against my chest. I would tap out a beat to many other daily tasks, too.
For several years, I became privately obsessed with marching in rhythm when walking around the block, counting out my steps like a metronome: One, two. One, two. Watching visual rhythms, from the flow of water to clapping hands and the rich expression of sign language, fascinated me. But in the hearing world, those experiences often didn’t count as music. And I gathered that my inability to hear music, at least in the view the people I knew, seemed unthinkable.
Mark Zuckerberg’s original motto for Facebook was “Move fast and break things.” It now appears that the CEO is going to have to answer for moving too fast and breaking too many things.
After years of trying to avoid oversight from Washington, the 2-billion-person social network platform is set for a reckoning. This past week, Facebook faced its first major congressional oversight hearings since it revealed that a Russian “troll factory,” called the Internet Research Agency, had purchased ads on the site in order to influence the 2016 election.
In three committee hearings, representatives from Facebook, Google and Twitter were grilled about their sites’ roles in facilitating the foreign influence operation. Lawmakers from both parties poked at the companies’ failure to reckon with questions about the lack of transparency in online advertising and the vast power they hold over our lives.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) took particular umbrage with Facebook: “Your power sometimes scares me.”
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JAMES LAWLER DUGGAN/Reuters
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, and Elliot Schrage, its vice president of global communications and public policy, meet with lawmakers on Capitol Hill on Oct. 12.
Over the past two years and up until at least August, Russian Twitter accounts masquerading as American people, news outlets and political groups regularly appeared in the articles published in many of the United States’ most famous media outlets. This wasn’t a matter of fake news; this was “real” news made a little less so.
The Boston Globe quoted @Pamela_Moore13, who hated a Stephen Colbert joke about Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. NBC News, in the aftermath of the Pulse night club shooting, gave space to @lgbtunitedcom on the subject of the Chicago gay pride parade. Vox and HuffPost both turned to the thoughts of @Crystal1Johnson, the former on the bullet holes in an Emmett Till sign and the latter on quadruplets attending Yale together.
We know now that these were trolls working on behalf of the Russian government. Without knowing, we laughed or scowled at their jokes. We mocked or cheered their opinions. We looked at their photos and watched their videos, and few if any of us batted an eye as they covertly shaped the way we looked at our own country.
In the world, human beings are facing various problems. People who are full of greed, anger, and ignorance are seen to be fighting with each other in words and deeds. As the fighting continues, various problems such as civil wars, wars of aggression, and wars of aggression are occurring. As world peace is being destroyed, humans are facing unbearable problems. Innocent children and women are not getting the rights they deserve and deserve. I can't think of one thing every time. What is it? The United Nations. If we look at the responsibilities and duties of the United Nations, I think it is not suitable for solving the problems that are happening in the world today. In fact, the United Nations and the World Security Council, such an organization must rule the world, must be able to give orders, and must have various ways to obey orders. There must be no organization that can influence more than that organization. There should be experts from each country. They can even dominate the superpowers like the US, China, and Britain. Only then will global peace be achieved quickly. Now, if a country with power develops more militarily, economically, or socially than its own country, then powerful countries will jealously seek out enemies and wage war. Or they will attack with fighter jets. In this, innocent people are losing their lives. No one understands the value of a life. You should think about how to achieve global peace by controlling these. If the US continues to be the permanent president of the UN, world peace will never be achieved. If you think carefully, no one sees that they are working for the common good, but for their own benefit, for the benefit of their own country. The permanent president of the UN and the Security Council has rejected this, As a young Rohingya, I have come to realize that only by electing the president and secretary from among the countries in the world through a secret ballot system and governing the world fairly can we achieve global peace. The United Nations and the Security Council are organizations in which any country must govern, give orders, and make them obey their orders. For example, only when a defendant is tried in court can we hold the leaders of the countries in check and control them, can we achieve global peace smoothly. Otherwise, it will not be easy for powerful countries to use various excuses to end this war every year, every year, for the benefit of themselves and their countries. No country's leaders pay any attention to the words of the United Nations and the Security Council. If we look at it in practice, look at the Rohingya issue. Myanmar is a small country. Even that country has been under siege for 8 years. What action can be taken? Why is the UN and the Security Council Powerless? Without such Power, how can the organization bring about global peace? Everyone should think about it. Whether there is a veto or a strong one, all countries in the world can only achieve global peace if they are subject to the UN and the Security Council. Seek peace in the quiet embrace of nature. Peace is an indispensable need of the human race. It is not as if one person can kill another person, and it is as if one country can attack another country, but instead of trying to build peace, we must try to destroy the peace now, and the world is getting hotter and is on the verge of collapse. I especially appeal to all the world experts to urgently try to bring about peace in all parts of the world. Mr, Noor Muhamed Arkhan Rohingya Youth Myanmar
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
By The New York Times
Guang Dong – Pas de deux
Photo: Butterfly Network
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