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.
Disney announced the full cast for its 2019 live-action remake of “The Lion King” on Wednesday to thunderous roars of approval.
Donald Glover will voice the character of Simba and Beyoncé will voice Nala. James Earl Jones, who was in the original 1994 film, will return to lend his voice as Simba’s father, Mufasa, once more. A trio of comedians, John Oliver, Seth Rogan and Billy Eichner, will play Zazu, Pumbaa and Timon, respectively.
Many of the original songs are expected to return, according to reports, and the film will be a live-action remake similar to what Disney has done with “The Jungle Book,” which was released last year and went on to become a box office smash grossing nearly $1 billion worldwide.
The film, directed by Jon Favreau, will be released in the summer of 2019.
Alex Wubbels, the Utah nurse who was violently arrested in July for doing her job, has reached a $500,000 settlement with Salt Lake City and the university that runs the hospital where she works. Wubbels said at a Tuesday news conference that she will donate part of the settlement to a local nurses union and apportion some of it to fund legal help for others trying to obtain body camera footage from police.
“We all deserve to know the truth and the truth comes when you see the actual raw footage and that’s what happened in my case,” Wubbels told reporters, per The Salt Lake Tribune. “No matter how truthful I was in telling my story, it was nothing compared to what people saw and the visceral reaction people experienced when watching the footage of the experience that I went through.”
Wubbels was arrested on July 26 at University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City. Body cam footage showed Detective Jeff Payne manhandling the nurse after she refused to allow him to draw blood from an unconscious patient who had been involved in a car crash.
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Handout/Reuters
Nurse Alex Wubbels is shown during an incident at University of Utah Hospital in this still photo taken from a police body camera video on July 26, 2017.
Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was indicted on federal conspiracy and money laundering charges Monday, has a long history of ties to pro-Putin groups in Ukraine. He also has a long history of connections to Donald Trump. According to leaked texts sent and received by his daughter, Andrea Manafort Shand, the two pals were “perfect allies.”
The Trump administration has been working overtime to downplay Manafort’s role in last year’s campaign.
“Paul Manafort was brought in to lead the delegate process, which he did, and was dismissed not too long after that,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday. “Paul was brought on sometime in June, and by the middle of August he was no longer with the campaign,” then-press secretary Sean Spicer said in March.
Spicer’s statement was untrue, and Sanders’ claim was misleading.
Eight people are dead and at least 11 injured after a truck mowed down pedestrians and cyclists and rammed into a school bus in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon.
The suspect, 29-year-old Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, is in police custody.
The first five people killed were identified as friends from Argentina in New York to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their graduation. One Belgian was also among the dead.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio called the incident an “act of terror.”
At least eight people were killed and 11 people injured Tuesday afternoon after a man drove a Home Depot rental truck down a bike path in lower Manhattan in New York City, striking several people, authorities said.
According to police, the driver went down the wrong way of a bike path on the West Side Highway, hitting pedestrians and cyclists. He then rammed into a Stuyvesant High School bus, injuring two adults and two children. (One of the children is in critical condition, a New York Department of Education official confirmed.) The suspect then exited the vehicle brandishing what police described as “imitation firearms,” later identified as a paintball gun and a pellet gun. A police officer then confronted and shot the driver, who was then transported to the hospital.
“This was an act of terror, and a particularly cowardly act of terror, aimed at innocent civilians,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said during a press conference Tuesday evening.
There have been so many horrifying stories about male predatory behavior since the Harvey Weinstein story broke earlier this month, but one quote has truly stood out.
In a damning memo about her boss, a Weinstein Co. employee named Lauren O’Connor neatly explained how the Hollywood producer could get away with sexually harassing so many women.
“The balance of power is me: 0, Harvey Weinstein: 10,” she reportedly wrote.
That one sentence sums up more than the situation with Weinstein, now accused of sexual harassing or assaulting more than 50 women. That same power imbalance exists in every corner of the country, in the White House, Congress, the media, police departments, academia, most big law firms, and nearly every major corporate boardroom, corner office and C-suite.
“Weinstein is the embodiment of the power differential that plays out all over the workplace in the United States,” said Teresa Boyer, the director of the Anne Welsh McNulty Institute for Women’s Leadership at Villanova University.
In post-Charlottesville America, any large gathering of racists and fascists becomes both spectacle and specter. The threat of violence is omnipresent. Locals must “brace” themselves for “chaos and bloodshed.” Everyone dreads “another Charlottesville.” Dread is what Nazis want.
In two small cities near Nashville in Middle Tennessee, the fear was palpable ahead of two “White Lives Matter” rallies here on Saturday.
“So … what brings you to town?” a wary clerk asked guests as they checked into a hotel in Murfreesboro, home to Middle Tennessee State University and 132,000 residents, where one rally will be held Saturday afternoon outside the Rutherford County Courthouse. I heard some version of this question three times before I’d even found my room.
In nearby Shelbyville, a town of 21,000 south of Murfreesboro in Tennessee horse country, another rally ― organized by the same racists and fascists ― is scheduled for Saturday morning. Many Shelbyville residents will stay indoors or clear out altogether, according to local police.
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Justin Ide/Reuters
Matthew Heimbach, seen here after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, is head of the Traditionalist Worker Party.
I have met Trump haters before, lots of them, the kind who seize upon every conspiracy theory and refuse to give him any benefit of any doubt. The four people I recently spent the morning with at Solly’s Tavern in D.C. (sans booze, don’t worry) were not Trump haters. They were, however, Trump quitters.
All of them, at some point over the course of the last nine months, had left their posts within the current administration, having decided that they could better serve their country from outside the government than from within. They weren’t happy about quitting, either. They were civil servants who wanted to remain civil servants, who, except for one, had worked under presidents of both parties. They had disagreed with superiors over the years, they had been fearful of new regulations and wary of political appointees, but they stayed on because that’s the nature of career work in government. This was different.
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Four Quitters Walk Into a Bar…
To swap war stories from an administration they couldn’t serve for one more minute.
Richard Spencer, a leader of what he calls the “alt-right” and the man known to most as the “Nazi who got punched,” agreed to talk to HuffPost the night before his speech at the University of Florida in Gainesville last week.
He and his followers had rented a house in the Florida countryside for security reasons, they said. A hotel in Gainesville wasn’t an option.
After driving down dirt roads, HuffPost found Spencer standing in the dark, smoking a cigar and drinking Angel’s Envy bourbon out of a tall glass. Behind him, about a dozen of his followers filtered in and out of the house’s front door.
It looked as though maybe they were having a small party. Just 14 hours to go until Spencer, their movement’s figurehead, took the stage at the University of Florida in an elaborate and expensive troll aimed at spreading their rebranded version of organized racism.
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.
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Four Quitters Walk Into a Bar…
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James' World 2 