“The first time Lydia Bulas chased a private jet down the runway at Florida’s Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport, it was May of 1983 and America was losing the war on drugs. She was a 31-year-old rookie special agent, slouched in a surveillance car and watching a Cuban load 17 cardboard boxes on to a Learjet. The balding man staggered up the stairs as the twin engines started to whine. She eyed her radio, willing it to crackle to life, but it didn’t comply. The aircraft lurched forward and made for the runway. Finally, Bulas got the call from customs — whatever the man was transporting, he hadn’t signed a form. She roared on to the runway in hot pursuit. A legion of cop cars joined the drag race, but the jet was picking up speed. Bulas was neck and neck with the cockpit and running out of runway. She swung in front of the aircraft, forcing the pilot to screech to a halt. Revolver drawn, she leapt out into the heat. Agents with shotguns stormed the cabin and tore open the boxes. Inside, they found more than $5mn in cash — exactly what Bulas was looking for. Cartels were importing a then new drug, cocaine, by plane and boat, but their challenge was sending their profits in cash back to Colombia. A government audit of the US banking system’s cash flow had recently discovered more than $6bn in unexplained banknotes flowing from banks in South Florida — more than the entire US currency surplus and theoretically enough to sink the actual American economy. So the government dispatched undercover operatives to stop it. But Bulas wasn’t with the DEA or FBI. She worked for the IRS, on a secret operation that had nothing to do with tax refunds.” (Jeff Maysh and Keith Moore/FT)
“It took seven months almost to the day, but Joe Biden appears to have, finally, reached a public moment of reckoning over Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. On Wednesday morning, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed that the Biden Administration had paused delivery of thirty-five hundred heavy bombs to Israel. That evening, the President himself explained why, admitting that ‘civilians have been killed in Gaza’ as a result of American-supplied weapons and saying flatly that he could not accept them being used in a military offensive against Hamas in the densely populated city of Rafah, which Israel has threatened to carry out. Biden insisted that the U.S. would continue to help Israel secure itself from external threats, but he laid down what appeared to be an uncrossable line for the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. ‘If they go into Rafah,’ the President told CNN’s Erin Burnett, ‘I’m not supplying the weapons.’ His decision amounts to the most high-profile example in decades of a U.S. President publicly imposing such limits on American military assistance to Israel, and it came accompanied by a stark rebuke of how Israel has treated Palestinian civilians. ‘It’s just wrong,’ Biden said. Translation: the long Biden-Bibi bear hug is over. The President of the United States is now all but publicly daring the Prime Minister of Israel to defy him.” (Susan B. Glasser/TNY)
“FreedomWorks, a libertarian political organization that became a major player in the Tea Party movement, is shutting down after its fundraising swooned and a moderate re-brand didn’t take. ‘A lot of our base aged, and so the new activists that have come in… tend to be much more populist,’ FreedomWorks President Adam Brandon told Politico, which first reported the decision. ‘So you look at the base and that just kind of shifted.’ Founded in 2004, spun off from the Koch-funded group Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks was one of the first right-leaning groups to organize conservative grassroots opposition to the Obama administration in 2009 … After CNBC pundit Rick Santelli went on a viral jeremiad against the new president’s mortgage relief proposal, FreedomWorks launched an ‘Angry Renter’ campaign to organize conservatives against it. As the Affordable Care Act moved through Congress, Brandon’s group put together a ‘Taxpayer March on Washington,’ and trained activists across the country on how to elect more Republicans. But FreedomWorks lost relevance and donors after Donald Trump’s 2016 primary victory, as the remnants of the Tea Party movement got behind a candidate whose economic nationalism clashed with the group’s philosophy.” (David Weigel/semafor)
“According to a statement released by the Oxfordshire County Council, a Bronze Age well lined with wood was uncovered during an investigation conducted by Oxford Archaeology ahead of a road construction project in southeastern England. The well is thought to have been used for agricultural purposes by people living in a nearby settlement. “When investigating what appeared to be a standard pit for the site, the archaeological team started exposing the remains of a preserved wooden post driven vertically into the ground,” said archaeologist John Boothroyd. “Further excavation revealed that these posts formed the uprights of a wattle structure that lined the edge of the pit,” he added, explaining that the waterlogged ground preserved the pieces of wood. The wooden lining was carefully dismantled for removal, and a sample was sent for analysis.” (Archaeology)
“Late last year, over 50 African leaders gathered in Riyadh for the first ever Saudi-Africa summit. Convened by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, it brought together a mélange of democrats and dictators, reformers and kleptocrats, young go-getters and long-ruling dinosaurs. Their objective? To wangle a slice of the $40 billion Saudi Arabia plans to invest in Africa. For the African leaders in attendance, the summit was a golden opportunity to obtain generous aid and inexpensive loans from one of the world’s richest countries. But to those tuned into geopolitics, the gathering spoke to a much bigger trend: the recent expansion of economic and political links between the Gulf petro-states and their African counterparts … The exponential increase in Africa-Gulf connections is undeniable. In 2023 alone, Gulf states made investment pledges worth over $53 billion—almost four times more than the United States.” (Matthew T Page and Ricardo Soares de Olivieira/Time)
“‘Black Twitter gave the internet its own language in many ways,’ says Parham. ‘It is in part the slang that we use online,’ he adds. ‘This idea of, you know, shade and calling for receipts. But it’s also meme and GIF culture, the way we talk visually, the way we communicate digitally now.’ Black Twitter has been the place for ‘everything,’ says Wortham, from ‘up-to-the-minute commentary, cultural criticism, processing, working through the highs and lows of modern life with images and video culture. It’s sort of like a running soundtrack to trying to process the extreme amount of information that we’re all digesting all the time.’” (Vanity Fair)
“French President Emmanuel Macron’s ambition to transform his country’s relationship with China isn’t new. Macron’s first visit to China dates to 2018, mere months after he was elected president. He then vowed to come back at least once a year to cement Franco-Chinese ties. The following year, he hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping in Paris, alongside Angela Merkel, then Germany’s chancellor, and Jean-Claude Juncker, then the president of the European Commission. Xi’s 2019 visit came right after the European Commission published its new EU-China strategy, which formalized the triptych systemic rival-competitor-partner relationship, as it would come to be characterized. Even back then, Macron wanted to give Xi’s visit to France a European flavor. He reiterated the same willingness when he visited China in 2023 with Ursula von der Leyen, the current president of the European Commission. Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic had occurred in the meantime, precipitating Europe’s reckoning with its dependencies on China, and the subsequent weaponization of those dependencies by Beijing. Macron’s visit to China last year made waves when he told reporters that Europe must resist pressure to become America’s vassal, giving the impression that Europe was caught between America and China. This modus operandi is characteristic of Macron, who is adept at pushing sensitive buttons and sometimes too eager to have difficult conversations. His trip last year happened not only after COVID-19, but also while Russia, a very close partner to China, was—and still is—waging war against Ukraine. Before his trip, Macron asserted that he wanted to convince Xi to get Putin to back down. That was to no avail.” (Tara Varma/Brookings)
“Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel by far, producing more particulate air pollution and global warming gasses than any other, per unit of energy. But for some countries — even ones with the money and the motivation to go green — coal can be hard to quit. Last month in Italy, members of the G7 — a consortium of industrialized democracies that includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union — agreed in a communiqué to ‘phase out existing unabated coal power generation’ by 2035. Such a pledge, if followed through, is meaningful: The bloc is collectively responsible for one-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions. ‘This announcement is sending a very positive signal,’ said Ryna Cui, research director for the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland. ‘Having a specific leadership signal from the G7 really can have an important influence.’ The word ‘unabated,’ though, is doing some heavy lifting. It refers to carbon dioxide emissions that are not captured or somehow balanced out. Theoretically, a coal-fired power plant could continue running with a carbon capture and storage system in place or use an offsetting mechanism under this language, but the technology has yet to prove efficient and cost-effective at scale. For some G7 countries, this is a light lift. In nations like Italy, Canada, and France, coal is clinging to single-digit percentage shares of their energy mixes. The UK’s last coal-fired power plant is scheduled to shut down this year. These countries will likely coast to zero coal well ahead of schedule. For others, this is a massive burden. Japan’s 125 million residents get around 27 percent of their overall energy from coal, and the country depends on burning rocks for 31 percent of its electricity to power homes and businesses. Despite Japan’s high-tech reputation, its energy mix looks more like those of many middle- and lower-income countries.” (Umair Irfan/ Vox)
“The women at the center of the 1990s scandals, Paula Jones, who sued Clinton for sexual harassment in the mid-1990s, and Monica Lewinsky, the intern at the center of Clinton’s impeachment, were mocked and belittled, frequently dismissed, dragged unwittingly into the arena and left to suffer there alone. At one memorable point in the saga, Jones broke down crying at a press conference; the spotlight was too harsh, the pressure was too much. At Trump’s trial, it was his longtime aide Hope Hicks who sobbed under pressure on the witness stand. Daniels, the woman with the bedroom stories, seemed unfazed. That says something about her own personality: confident, defiant, sex-positive. But it also says something about a culture that gives her more freedom to present herself that way — and the tools to push back at her detractors. Anyone who lived through the Clinton scandals remembers the deep unkindness to the women at their center, and the power dynamics that made the cruelty possible. A 1998 Wall Street Journal editorial called Lewinsky a ‘little tart.’ Men with late-night television megaphones mocked Lewinsky’s weight and Jones’ nose. Men at the center of politics made dismissive statements that revealed as much class snobbery as misogyny: James Carville famously said of Jones, ‘Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.’ Today, Trump’s defense attorneys are using the same playbook to try to neutralize Daniels’ testimony, arguing that she was an unsavory character, looking for extortion money, when she took a $130,000 payment for hiding her story. But Daniels cuts a decidedly different figure.” (Joanna Weiss/Politico)_
“As a medium, autofiction has long been a source of controversy, but rarely has an autobiographical work of fiction come with as many built-in issues as Netflix’s hit Baby Reindeer. The show, a seven-episode limited series from British comedian Richard Gadd, chronicles Gadd’s history of allegedly being stalked for years by an older woman, as well as his experience of allegedly being sexually assaulted by a male mentor. The show is a breakout word-of-mouth phenomenon, drawing more than 13 million viewers in its first week of release and over 22 million in its second. Audiences and critics have praised the series for its wild twists and comedic yet vulnerable glimpses into a difficult story. Yet the real draw for many viewers seems to be less about Gadd’s experience and more about the mystery afforded by his extremely transparent depictions of other characters — particularly Gadd’s stalker. Gadd and his fellow cast members have quickly tried to staunch the public reaction, which has now escalated to doxing and harassing private citizens believed to be the real perpetrators behind the show’s events. This hunt culminated with a woman named Fiona Harvey appearing on the YouTube show Piers Morgan Uncensored, claiming to be the real-life version of the stalker character, ‘Martha.’ The series’ grim real-life side effect seems to be both an epic case of viewers missing the point (don’t stalk people!) and an entirely predictable outcome based on Gadd’s treatment of the story.” (Aja Romano/Vox)
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