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#OCC Hack The Planet
newstfionline · 1 year
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Tuesday, April 4, 2023
Tulare Lake Was Drained Off the Map. Nature Would Like a Word. (NYT) It is no secret to locals that the heart of California’s Central Valley was once the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River, dammed and drained into an empire of farms by the mid-20th century. Still, even longtime residents have been staggered this year by the brute swiftness with which Tulare Lake has resurfaced: In less than three weeks, a parched expanse of 30 square miles has been transformed by furious storms into a vast and rising sea. The lake’s rebirth has become a slow-motion disaster for farmers and residents in Kings County, home to 152,000 residents and a $2 billion agricultural industry that sends cotton, tomatoes, safflower, pistachios, milk and more around the planet. The wider and deeper Tulare Lake gets, the greater the risk that entire harvests will be lost, homes will be submerged and businesses will go under. Across the region, the surprise barrage of atmospheric rivers that swept through California over the past three months already has saturated the ground, overflowed canals and burst through levees. The fear now is that record walls of snow in the southern Sierra Nevada will liquefy in the intensifying spring heat into a downhill torrent that will inundate the Central Valley. And the resurrected Tulare Lake, already more vast than all but one of California’s reservoirs, could remain for two years or longer, causing billions of dollars in economic damage and displacing thousands of farmworkers while transforming the area into the giant natural habitat it had been before it was conquered by farmers. “The Big Melt,” unsettled meteorologists have begun to call it.
How the U.S. Came to Use Spyware It Was Trying to Kill (NYT) The secret contract was finalized on Nov. 8, 2021, a deal between a company that has acted as a front for the United States government and the American affiliate of a notorious Israeli hacking firm. Under the arrangement, the Israeli firm, NSO Group, gave the U.S. government access to one of its most powerful weapons—a geolocation tool that can covertly track mobile phones around the world without the phone user’s knowledge or consent. If the veiled nature of the deal was unusual—it was signed for the front company by a businessman using a fake name—the timing was extraordinary. Only five days earlier, the Biden administration had announced it was taking action against NSO, whose hacking tools for years had been abused by governments around the world to spy on political dissidents, human rights activists and journalists. The White House placed NSO on a Commerce Department blacklist, declaring the company a national security threat and sending the message that American companies should stop doing business with it. The secret contract—which The New York Times is disclosing for the first time—violates the Biden administration’s public policy, and still appears to be active. The contract, reviewed by The Times, stated that the “United States government” would be the ultimate user of the tool, although it is unclear which government agency authorized the deal and might be using the spyware.
A Presidential Candidate and a City Brace for a Consequential Week (NYT) Former President Donald J. Trump is preparing to walk into a Manhattan courtroom as both a defendant and a candidate, making final plans for his arrest on Tuesday while also trying to maximize his surrender for political benefit. Officials in New York, meanwhile, are bracing for the circuslike atmosphere that expected protests might bring. When he arrives in court, Mr. Trump, unlike typical defendants, will be surrounded by a phalanx of Secret Service agents, making all logistics much more complicated. He will be fingerprinted and will possibly have a police photo taken. While it is normal for defendants charged with felonies to be handcuffed, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Joseph Tacopina, has said he does not expect that to occur. Law enforcement officials were preparing for a chaotic atmosphere, with protests around Trump Tower and near the courthouse. Barricades were set up near Mr. Trump’s office tower, stretching several blocks. Police officers were warned that they might be called on for crowd control around the courthouse. And the presence of what is likely the most famous defendant the Manhattan Criminal Court has ever seen, with his own unique security needs, has led to all kinds of changes in how the courthouse will function that day.
Pension protests raise tension between French police, demonstrators (AP) French authorities see the police as protectors who are ensuring that citizens can peacefully protest President Emmanuel Macron’s contentious retirement age increase. But to human rights advocates and demonstrators who were clubbed or tear-gassed, officers have overstepped their mission. In the months since mass protests against the proposed pension changes began roiling France, some law enforcement officers have been accused of resorting to gratuitous violence. A man in Paris lost a testicle to an officer’s club, and a police grenade took the thumb of a woman in Rouen. A railroad worker hit by grenade fragments lost an eye. The violence adds to the anger in the streets and complicates efforts to invite dialogue between the government and labor unions, who are planning an 11th round of mass demonstrations Thursday.
Russia blames Ukraine for bomb that killed military blogger (AP) Russia’s top counterterrorism agency said Monday that the bombing attack that killed a well-known Russian military blogger was staged by Ukrainian security agencies. Russian officials said Vladlen Tatarsky, 40, was killed Sunday as he was leading a discussion at a cafe on the banks of the Neva River in the historic heart of St. Petersburg. Over 30 people were wounded by the blast, and 10 of them remain in grave condition, according to the authorities. The National Anti-Terrorist Committee, a state structure that coordinates counterterrorism, said that the attack on Tatarsky was “planned by Ukrainian special services” with the involvement of people who have cooperated with an anti-corruption foundation created by jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. It noted that the arrested suspect was an “active supporter” of Navalny’s group.
Russia’s crackdown on dissent (Washington Post) Russia’s arrest of Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich on charges of spying for the United States, while providing no evidence, marked a threshold moment, sending a chilling signal about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to lead an isolationist state dismissive of global norms. Another arrest and conviction this week, of an ordinary single dad sentenced to two years in prison after his 13-year-old daughter drew an antiwar picture in school, sent an equally terrifying message to Russians that opposing the war on Ukraine can cost all that is dear to them. Each case appeared to be the first of its kind since 1986, in the dying years of the Soviet Union. Together, they conveyed a portrait of a ruthless wartime Russian government, desperate for leverage on the geopolitical stage and willing to stop at nothing to crush even trivial dissent at home.
Ukraine puts Orthodox priest under house arrest for Russia ties (Washington Post) A Ukrainian court has placed the head of Kyiv’s most prominent monastery under house arrest on charges of justifying Russia’s armed aggression, the latest escalation in a long-simmering conflict between Ukrainian officials and a local branch of the Orthodox Church they say has ties to Moscow. Metropolitan Pavlo, the head of the Lavra monastery, appeared before a judge and denied the charges. “I didn’t do anything, I was never on the side of aggression and never will be,” he said, according to a video clip of his court appearance released by the Ukrainian Pravda news site. The move by Ukraine to detain a prominent cleric showed the extent to which the war has exacerbated religious tensions and deepened rifts within the Orthodox Church. Orthodox Christianity is one of the largest Christian communions in the world—after Catholicism and the Protestant church. Most of its roughly 260 million adherents are concentrated in Europe, Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. It is the dominant faith in both Russia and Ukraine. The Ukraine-based leadership of the Moscow Patriarchate insists that it is autonomous from the Russian Orthodox Church. But Ukrainian prosecutors have charged dozens of members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church with directly aiding Moscow, including through espionage, while accusing others of spreading pro-Russian rhetoric.
Israel to form national guard proposed by far-right minister Ben Gvir (Washington Post) Israel’s government on Sunday greenlit the formation of a national guard, handing a victory to the far-right minister who proposed the force and drawing condemnation from security officials who warned it could destabilize the country. Netanyahu endorsed Ben Gvir’s national guard proposal last week, in exchange for the minister’s support amid a national crisis over plans to restructure Israel’s judiciary. Ben Gvir, a member of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, backed the prime minister’s decision to freeze the judicial reform package. Ben Gvir, a former activist and attorney for settlers accused of violently attacking Palestinians, has been convicted dozens of times for charges that include support for terrorist organizations and anti-Palestinian incitement. Until 2020, he hung a portrait in his home of an Israeli gunman who killed 29 Palestinians in a West Bank mosque in 1994.
Mozambique works to contain cholera outbreak after cyclone (AP) Weeks after massive Cyclone Freddy hit Mozambique for a second time, the still-flooded country is facing a spiraling cholera outbreak that threatens to add to the devastation. There were over 19,000 confirmed cases of cholera across eight of Mozambique’s provinces as of March 27, according to U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, a figure which had almost doubled in a week. Freddy was likely the longest-lived cyclone ever, lasting over five weeks and hitting Mozambique twice. The tropical storm killed 165 people in Mozambique, 17 in Madagascar and 676 in Malawi. More than 530 people are still missing in Malawi two weeks later so that country’s death toll could well exceed 1,200.
This element is critical to human flourishing—yet missing from the news (Washington Post) Last summer, I wrote a piece in this newspaper admitting that I have been selectively avoiding contact with the news, even though I’m a journalist myself. Traditional news coverage, I had slowly come to realize, was missing half the story, distorting my view of reality. It frequently overlooked and underplayed storylines and dimensions that humans need to thrive in the modern world—with the three most notable elements being hope, agency and dignity. I heard from thousands of readers caught in the same struggle—wanting to be informed about the world but not bludgeoned into fatalism. As a journalist, it always felt safer to remain skeptical. But why can’t journalists make hope part of their job? It would mean asking totally different questions: What are realistic goals, in the face of a wicked problem? What are some of the ways other communities have tried to get there? And how did they manage to press on, even when things didn’t go as planned? We might see fewer column inches just describing (over and over again) the alarming rise in depression among teens and more stories investigating remedies. When it comes to crime coverage, we might become as obsessed with declines as we are with spikes. For journalists, hope is a defiant way of being in the world: ever on the lookout for what is but always alert to what might be.
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