TOP TECH NEWS

Monday, March 2, 2020

Hillary Clinton Ordered To Show Up in Court Over Email Server Controversy

It just won't go away.

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Goodbye, Pete Buttigieg. You were always more of a symptom than a cure

When Joe Biden failed to crumble, there was no reason for Pete Buttigieg to exist. It’s still incredible that he got so farThe idea of Pete Buttigieg was so much better in the original Norwegian.The nation’s favorite small-town Indiana mayor looked and sounded so much like the part of a presidential candidate. His debate delivery was flawless, like his stubble. His intonation was measured, like his intelligence.All that was missing was a reason for being: a purpose, a mission. Something with more meaning than a talented youngish man who was on the rise. Something more meaningful than a preternatural prescience that the former vice-president would implode.When Joe Biden failed to do so, there was no reason for Pete Buttigieg.Mayor Pete, as he was branded, was more of a symptom than a cure: a sign of a party’s desperate need for a new generation of leaders and ideas, especially from the spiritual center of successful politics: the actual center.But having managed a small town of 102,000 souls, Pete’s best claim to becoming commander-in-chief was that he lived in something close to the center of the country. Geography is rarely destiny, especially if it involves a place called South Bend.Pete wanted Washington to be “like our best-run communities” but that folksy, gauzy vision sounded both small and intangible in the fight to fire a corrupt and racist president.Still, the Buttigieg campaign achieved several remarkable feats that initially seemed as unlikely as his last name.He broke through as the first openly gay candidate for president with a claim to the top tier. In fact he smashed that barrier for anyone who follows, including himself in any future presidential cycle.Unlike the candidate he clearly modeled himself on, Buttigieg had even less Washington experience than Barack Obama when he ran for president as a freshman senator: which is to say, none at all. His ability to rise close to the top of the 2020 pack spoke volumes about his political talent and the team of staffers and consultants around him.Like Obama, Mayor Pete had one shot at winning the nomination and it started and ended in Iowa. Remarkably Buttigieg edged out a win there, but Iowa’s democratic party did its best to walk all over his win through a catastrophic case of vote-tallying incompetence.The lack of clarity about the Iowa caucuses effectively destroyed the rocket from South Bend while it was on the launchpad. It also probably destroyed the Iowa caucuses forever.It is traditional to gloss over the flaws of candidates when they finally reach the sad state of their own demise. But at this time, when the political world is promising such a bright future for Mayor Pete, it’s also worth remembering the bright future of Beto O’Rourke, which never came to pass.To understand Mayor Pete’s limitations, you need look no further than the last Democratic debate, staged in such chaos last week in South Carolina.When asked whether Mike Bloomberg’s embrace of stop-and-frisk policing was racist, Buttigieg said yes. He went on to explain, in nuanced and perfectly constructed sentences, how that judgement was not judgmental, and how he entirely understood something he could never fully understand.“I’m not here to score points,” he began, notching up the points. “I come at this with a great deal of humility, because we have had a lot of issues, especially when it comes to racial justice and policing in my own community.”Somehow that humility sounded less humble when he said it out loud.“And I come to this with some humility because I’m conscious of the fact that there are seven white people on this stage talking about racial justice,” he continued. “None of us – none of us have the experience, the lived experience of, for example, walking down the street, or in a mall, and feeling eyes on us, regarding us as dangerous, without knowing the first thing about us just because the color of our skin.”Without this experience of being African-American, Buttigieg still sounded so experienced. It was even more remarkable when he white-mansplained what it was like to be a woman of color.“None of us had the experience that black women have had that drives that maternal mortality gap that we are all rightly horrified by, of going into a doctor, and being less likely to have your description of being in pain believed because of your race,” he said, sounding both wonkish and wokish at the same time.“Since we don’t have the experience, the next best thing we can do,” he told the voters of South Carolina, “is actually listen to those who do.”He spoke so many words, so perfectly, as he told us all to listen to someone else.And so, in keeping with the flawless rise of his own campaign, Pete Buttigieg shuffled off this presidential stage with flawless timing and flawlessly emotive language. Just before Super Tuesday, so he could keep his vice-presidential ambitions alive.“We walk on in the knowledge that better leadership is possible,” he wrote to his supporters. “One day we will stand in the future we create, a future where every American is empowered and everyone belongs.”Is it truly possible? Can we really walk on in the belief that we can one day stand in the future we create?For we might still be sitting, awed by the sight and sound of this tale, told by a Rhodes scholar, full of hope and rhetoric, signifying nothing. * Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist

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Democratic voters in Texas and California view Sanders's socialism more favorably than capitalism, new poll shows

Joe Biden now has a convincing Democratic presidential primary win under his belt after he soundly defeated the field in South Carolina on Saturday. But Sen. Bernie Sanders remains the national favorite for the nomination, and a new poll from CBS suggests he's not giving up that standing anytime soon.

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Eddie Gallagher: 60 Minutes segment profiling Navy SEAL accused of 'normalising' war crimes

CBS news program 60 Minutes is facing criticism and calls for boycott for a piece the program aired profiling alleged war criminal Eddie Gallagher, whose punishment after posing for a “trophy photo” with a dead teenage ISIS fighter was reversed by President Donald Trump.The program featured 60 Minutes correspondent David Martin interviewing Mr Gallagher - a Navy SEAL who was tried for war crimes - at his home in Florida, conducting interviews and questioning him about his life since his war crimes trial. Mr Martin doesn’t shy away from asking Mr Gallagher about his involvement in the death of a wounded, sedated teenage ISIS fighter who he was accused of stabbing in the neck while he was deployed in Iraq.

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Fox News Host Claims Chinese People Eating ‘Raw Bats’ to Blame for Coronavirus

Fox News host Jesse Watters demanded a formal apology from China on Monday before pushing unproven rumors that the new coronavirus came from Chinese citizens “eating raw bats and snakes.”With fears heightening around the virus as the death toll in the United States jumped to at least six on Monday, Watters began Monday’s broadcast of Fox News chatfest The Five by lashing out at China, which has been the epicenter of the growing pandemic.“I would like to just ask the Chinese for a formal apology,” Watters said. “This coronavirus originated in China, and I have not heard one word from the Chinese. A simple ‘I am sorry’ would do.”As the rest of his colleagues appeared somewhat embarrassed and tried to laugh off his rant, Watters then insisted that the virus originated from the Chinese eating diseased uncooked animals.“Let me tell you why it happened in China,” he declared. “They have these markets where they were eating raw bats and snakes.”“No, Jesse,” co-host Dana Perino pleaded as the other hosts could be seen face-palming.“They are very hungry people,” Watters continued, causing more laughter. “The Chinese communist government cannot feed the people. And they are desperate, this food is uncooked, it is unsafe. And that is why scientists believe that’s where it originated from.”“And according to The New York Times, Dana, the Chinese government has been very deceitful and deceptive in the communicating the extent of the infections to the world,” Watters concluded. “So, as I said, tomorrow I will expect an apology.”Except it is not clear that COVID-19, as it the disease is officially known, originated at a Chinese market in which shoppers purchased bats to eat. Earlier this year, right-wing media was abuzz over claims that “bat soup” was to blame for the disease spreading, based largely on a viral video that was later debunked. (The video was actually of a travel show host in a Pacific island nation, and bats aren’t considered a delicacy in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus first exploded.)Furthermore, while a “wet market”—markets that sell live animals for food and medicine—was initially believed to be the origin of the outbreak, it appears that specific market may not have been the cause at all, as the earliest known victims had no contact with it. And while the virus likely originated with bats, it still hasn’t been fully established how it moved from the bats to humans.Watters, meanwhile, has a history of making culturally insensitive remarks and innuendo, particularly about Asians. The Fox personality sparked outrage in 2016 for a Chinatown segment that featured blatantly racist mockery of Asian-Americans, prompting an apology.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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Homophobia hurt Pete Buttigieg — as much as America wished it didn't

Lessons from his campaign are an opportunity for us to be honest about the challenges that LGBTQ candidates face.

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Coronavirus might be the end of international travel as we know it

Here is a scenario I find all too plausible: President Trump drops his surprisingly laissez-faire approach to coronavirus and shifts authoritarian. He uses the threat of a pandemic to severely restrict international travel to the United States and institutes stringent new limits on U.S. citizens' ability to travel abroad — perhaps mandatory medical testing, biometric data collection, or vaccination before you leave; extended interviews with Customs agents to vet the reasons for your trip; or even a near-complete embargo on visits to China and other countries where coronavirus outbreak coincides, in Trump's mind, with an economic threat to America. ("You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," after all, because "it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not before.")And then, a few years down the line, after the worst of coronavirus has passed, the new rules simply never go away.Civil libertarians like me would raise a fuss, certainly, but we raise lots of fusses about lots of things (TSA, NSA, etc.) to no real end, because once the state claims new power over our lives, it is rarely relinquished. Prevention is always more feasible than reform — which is why, as coronavirus spreads, we should have an eye to stopping our freedom of movement from being permanently curtailed.This would not be the first time a crisis has been used to fundamentally change global mobility: Just over a century ago, the passport system we now take for granted did not yet exist. In the decades before the first World War, international travel was generally unhindered. Travel papers had been required in some places in the past, but the Industrial Revolution led to a trend of travel liberalization in the 19th century. A train might cross multiple borders in Europe within a single day, and the logistics of controlling border crossings became overly complicated. Consequently, travelers could typically travel whenever, wherever, and for whatever reason they wanted.During World War I, the Triple Alliance nations (Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Italy) began requiring passport use, and both Triple Entente states and neutral countries soon followed suit. After the war, the United Nations' precursor, the League of Nations, was tasked with making "provision to secure and maintain freedom of communications and of transit" for all member states. Thus, in October 1920, the League held the first passport conference in Paris. Its aim, as Speranta Dumitru, a professor of political science at the University of Paris Descartes, explained in a 2016 history of passports, "was to restore the pre-war regime of freedom of movement." That aim was not achieved.Participants agreed transit was "hindered by passport and Customs formalities," as it said in the resolution adopted, and these "difficulties affecting the personal relations between peoples of various countries constitute a serious obstacle to the resumption of normal intercourse and to the economic recovery of the world." But while the resolution made some reforms, Dumitru writes, rather than abolishing passports, it established "a uniform, international passport, issued for a single journey or for a period of two years."The 1920 resolution also expressed hope for further deregulation in the future, but that never happened. Instead, the uniform passport became the basis for the system we've had ever since. Further attempts to return to pre-war travel freedoms also failed, Dumitru documents, in 1924, 1926, 1947, and 1963. Today, the cause of passport abolition has fallen right out of the Overton Window. We've become so accustomed to carrying papers when we travel that the debate has moved on to whether we must carry them all the time.Permanent, serious strictures on our freedom to travel may seem unlikely at the moment. This is the age of tourism, with international arrivals nearly tripling between 1995 and 2018 alone. Air travel demand has been booming. Even with the added bureaucratic limits of passports and visas, modern means of transport allow the average person to travel more often and easily than royalty in eras past. And wouldn't such repressive measures, particularly those affecting U.S. citizens, be widely unpopular?Yes, but what would people do about it? March in the streets? That doesn't have a great track record with this administration. Did the Women's March, the Science March, or any of the other big anti-Trump gatherings actually change any policy? Do we have any reason to think a post-coronavirus March for Tourism would do better?And anyway, passports were once widely unpopular, too. The 1926 passport conference observed that the public desired "a resolution contemplating the abolition of passports at the earliest possible date." It was a desire unmet.Public health experts say travel restrictions and large-scale quarantines are typically ineffective and come with serious drawbacks, though sometimes, depending on the type of disease, targeted quarantines can help contain the spread of infection. Yet as the coronavirus crisis is used to curtail international travel — there's already a ban on U.S. entry by foreign nationals who have been in China in the previous two weeks and a mandatory quarantine for U.S. citizens returning from Hubei province — we would do well to take care from the outset that measures are as minimal as possible and firmly bounded by expiration dates.Draconian travel restrictions are not an inconceivable outcome here, and, if history is any guide, once done, they won't be easy to undo.More stories from theweek.com It's not 1972 and Bernie Sanders isn't George McGovern The undoing of Mayor Pete Americans are growing less confident in Trump's coronavirus response, poll shows

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Amy Klobuchar is ending her presidential bid, will endorse Biden

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar ended her Democratic presidential campaign on Monday and plans to endorse rival Joe Biden in an effort to unify moderate voters behind the former vice president's White House bid.

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Ex-guard frees dozens of hostages in Manila mall, is subdued

A recently dismissed security guard freed dozens of hostages and was subdued by police after walking out of a shopping mall in the Philippine capital on Monday, ending a daylong hostage crisis in an upscale commercial district near the police and military headquarters, officials said. The former guard at the Greenhills shopping center, identified by police as Archie Paray, left the mall in San Juan City in metropolitan Manila with the remaining hostages, who were then secured by police.

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A member of the inner circle of Iran's Supreme Leader died of the coronavirus, as the country records more deaths than anywhere outside China

Iran is accused of hiding the true number of coronavirus cases. Some researchers estimate there could be 23 times more infections than stated.

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'Totally Unacceptable.' San Antonio Mayor Blasts CDC After Releasing Patient Who Eventually Tested Positive for COVID-19

The patient has since been returned to isolation at a local medical facility

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Super Tuesday: Professor who predicted last 9 elections says Democrats could face first brokered convention in nearly 70 years

Days out from Super Tuesday, when voters in 14 states will cast ballots in the Democratic primary, a professor who predicted the past nine elections says that the United States may well be staring down its first brokered convention in nearly 70 years.It’s a prospect that has stirred considerable consternation among Democratic Party officials and voters, many of whom have said their primary concern is beating Donald Trump in November — even as an enthusiastic debate over the future of democratic politics has raged on the campaign trail.

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A Democrat asked Mike Pompeo to point to things on a blank map in a nod to his awkward geography quiz

"To your left, you'll see a map of the world," the lawmaker told Pompeo.

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Wristwatch overshadows South Korea sect leader's coronavirus apology

When the elderly leader of a South Korean religious sect knelt before the nation on Monday, he had hoped to defuse public anger over his church's role in spreading the coronavirus. The gold-colored watch, visible on his left wrist, was apparently given by disgraced former President Park Geun-hye, who was impeached and jailed in 2017 for corruption and abuse of power. Images of the watch quickly trended on Twitter, while "Lee Man-hee watch" was the most searched phrase on South Korea's biggest search portal Naver.

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An adviser to Iran's supreme leader has died of the coronavirus

A top Iranian official and member of a council advising Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has died after contracting the COVID-19 coronavirus, The Associated Press reports.Mohammad Mirmohammadi of Iran's Expediency Council died Monday in a Tehran hospital at the age of 71, state media reported. This, the AP notes, is the first instance of a top official in Iran dying from the coronavirus. Numerous Iranian government officials have tested positive for the virus, including Iran's vice president for women and family affairs, as well as the country's deputy health minister. Iranian media also previously reported that Hadi Khosroshahi, former ambassador to the Vatican, died at 81 after testing positive for the coronavirus. Iran has so far announced about 1,500 coronavirus cases and 66 deaths, which is the highest death toll outside of China; experts have suggested the number of cases might be higher, the AP notes. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently said the United States has offered to help Iran with its coronavirus response, saying, "Their healthcare infrastructure is not robust and to date, their willingness to share information about what’s really going on inside ... Iran has not been robust and I am very concerned that ... it is Iran that is not sharing information."More stories from theweek.com Apple reportedly agrees to $500 million settlement for slowing old iPhones It's not 1972 and Bernie Sanders isn't George McGovern Coronavirus might be the end of international travel as we know it

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Bloomberg rips Sanders for boycotting AIPAC, calls his bigotry comments 'dead wrong'

The Vermont senator had said the pro-Israel lobbying group provides a platform "for leaders who express bigotry and oppose basic Palestinian rights."

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Barack Obama told Joe Biden he won’t endorse him yet, report claims

Despite Joe Biden’s commanding victory in Saturday’s South Carolina primary, in which he garnered close to 50 per cent of the vote, an endorsement from the president with whom he served seems not to be forthcoming.Speaking to CNN, a source close to Barack Obama said that in a congratulatory phonecall after Mr Biden’s victory, the president told Mr Biden he would not be endorsing him any time soon, citing worries that he could badly divide the party during a still-messy nominating process.

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