Florida police failed to unlock phone using a dead man’s finger — but corpses may still help in hacking handsets SCMP
Professional athletes are ditching Ibuprofen for CBD, an anti-inflammatory extracted from marijuana.
↩︎ Outside Magazine
Professional athletes are ditching Ibuprofen for CBD, an anti-inflammatory extracted from marijuana.
iPhone X is dead as consumers turn their backs on pricey smartphones – analyst RT
Little known, widely respected: It’s another Pulitzer season for Post's Alice Crites
One Pulitzer can make a career. Two can make a legend.
Library-trained researcher Alice Crites has helped out
on a half-dozen Pulitzer-winning teams. The latest was announced
last week, for an
investigation of Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama. The year before,
she worked with David
Fahrenthold on the Post’s Pulitzer-winning investigation of Donald Trump’s
charitable giving.
Crites, along with editorial research colleagues such as
frequent Pulitzer winner Julie Tate, has been at the backbone of Washington
Post national, political and national security investigations in recent
years. She also was on teams that won for investigating
the unusually high number of D.C. police shootings (1999) and finding abuse
and neglect of citizens in homes for the mentally impaired (2000). She
worked with winning reporters on the bribery
case, charges and conviction of GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff (2006)
and for lapses in Secret Service security, particularly
around a presidential visit to Cartagena, Colombia (2015).
This year, one of Crites’ key moments came with her growing
suspicion that something the Post was being fed was NOT news — a salacious,
and fictitious, account being peddled by a right-wing group to sabotage the
Post’s legitimate reporting and reputation. She
shared in the byline of that report about how an outside group had
planned to fool them, and the Post's painstaking reporting and efforts to
confirm information, which ended up burnishing the paper’s reputation. It
also shed a light on the team, which included Stephanie McCrummen, an Alabama
native who began the work on Moore, and Beth Reinhard, a veteran political
reporter just starting at the Post. Editors David Finkel and Eric Rich
respected and challenged them, Crites said.
In the heat of the story, Crites’ work fended off accusations
from furious Moore supporters as the accusations of then-teen girls against
the much older Moore multiplied. Moore backers at one point said the Post
wrongly had an accuser’s family still living in the area in 1979. Crites
produced a story from a 1980 break-in showing the family was still at its
local address even a year after that.
“They were so mad they said the Washington Post was a
worthless piece of crap, and I kind of liked that,” she says.
Crites’ research also refuted a direct Moore challenge. The
candidate disputed an account that he gave liquor to an accuser, saying the
county didn’t sell alcohol. Crites produced evidence that the county had
begun allowing liquor sales seven years before the incident.
Crites, the daughter of an NIH cancer researcher and a
librarian for the Montgomery County Schools, said she always was a news
junkie, but the idea of being a librarian “never occurred to me.” She studied
Chaucer and got a master’s in literary criticism at Carnegie-Mellon before
finding herself back in Washington, looking for work.
She started working as a clerk at the Library of Congress,
went to the library and information sciences school at University of Maryland
and learned to find key materials before VuText, Lexis/Nexis and other search
vehicles existed. With her knowledge of legislation and current events, she
began working a weekend shift at the Post in 1990 and was hired full-time in
1992.
Over the years, researchers and reporters have gotten more
collegial and able to partner. Part of that teamwork, she says, is a need for
speed as well as accuracy. “In the Politics pod, you don’t have that many
one-person stories anymore,” she said. “We don’t compete with the reporters;
we partner with them.”
The award comes in a year when library-trained news researchers
exposed
a senior White House aide (Rob Porter) for his assaults on his former
wives and came
up with numerous scoops on Russia’s disinformation factory and its role
in the Trump-Clinton election.
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Quick hits
NO NEWS IS: .... not good news, at least for the 174-year-old Chicago
Sun-Times. The
tabloid published a blank front page on Monday, urging readers to
subscribe digitally for $7.49 a month or face the prospect the news outlet
would close.
VICE LAWSUIT: The journalist was sexually assaulted by a group of men
while on assignment. VICE, she alleges, blamed the attack on her and
ultimately forced her out of her jobs, NBC
News’s Brandy Zadrozny reports. Zadrozny, in her previous job as
researcher-reporter for the Daily Beast, had a series
of stories on sexual harassment and misconduct at VICE.
LOW PROFILE: YouTube content is still awash in Nazis, pedophilia and
conspiracies, but YouTube has stayed relatively quiet during the last period
of Facebook-bashing. It’s time could come, reports Lucia
Moses of Digiday. “We think there are enormous issues with YouTube and
privacy and Google more broadly,” said Josh Golin, executive director of the
Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which earlier this month called on
the Federal Trade Commission to investigate YouTube for illegally tracking
kids. … Separately, Christopher Mims asked in the Wall Street Journal that if
Google has collected more personal data on us than Facebook, why
aren’t we talking about Google?
WATCHING YOU: For generations, aspiring BBC journalists faced a hurdle
beyond the “old-boy network” and, oh, merit. British
spies reviewed job applicants until the 1990s, the BBC itself reported.
The practice had been denied for decades. For what reason was British
internal security allowed to infiltrate the process? To weed out potential
“subversives,” the BBC reported. "Policy: keep head down and stonewall
all questions,” a BBC official wrote in the 1980s. Note: It is widely
believed former BBC producer George Orwell modeled hell in “1984” — Room 101
— after
a similarly numbered room at Broadcasting House in London.
PROMOTED: Danyelle S.T. Wright to the newly created role of vice
president, employment and labor law, and chief diversity officer of E.W.
Scripps Company. In this role, Wright will lead Scripps’ enterprise-wide
diversity and inclusion strategies. She will work closely with human
resources leadership to bring these strategies to life. Wright will continue
to serve as the employment attorney for the company, a role she has held for
three years.
NEWS NERDS ONLY: The Wall Street Journal dropped the honorific “Dr.” for
sexual assaulter and former Olympic team doctor Larry Nassar. The WSJ’s
Rebecca D. O’Brien explains
why.
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What we're reading(Screengrab from The Daily Beast) UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU: With unemployment rates low and only 1 of 4 Americans from 17-24 eligible for recruitment, the U.S. Army is marching to enlist former inmates. “When recruits are hard to come by, standards previously considered sacrosanct get waived,” retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich told The Daily Beast. “Offering waivers to convicted felons suggests that the services—probably the army in particular—are struggling to meet their quotas of warm and willing bodies. As to whether military service offers a way to turn your life around, there's no easy answer. For some, sure. For others, it's probably a dumb idea for the individual and for the service.”
BIAS? WHAT BIAS?: Four
times more blacks than whites are suspended in this Texas school
district. The investigation has been dropped by the Trump administration,
ProPublica reports.
AFFLICTING THE AFFLICTED?’: The choice that
Wisconsin
is forcing upon its poor: Choose between feeding your family or the
rundown car that could someday get you to a job. By Robert Samuels. (Hat tip:
Beth Reinhard)
IMPROVING AMERICA: A ProPublica analysis found
clear ways to better the U.S. asylum-seeking process, from moving
immigration courts out of the Justice Department, to giving asylum-seekers
greater access to lawyers and more resources to process refugee claims
faster. Another basic change: update the definition of a refugee to include
modern conflicts. That said, all sides acknowledge some, but not large-scale,
abuse. “If you are going to make a mistake in the immigration area, make this
mistake,” Bill Hing, director of the University of San Francisco’s
Immigration and Deportation Defense Clinic, told Kavitha Surana. “Protect
people that may not need protecting, but don’t make the mistake of not
protecting people who need it.”
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What we're experiencing
THE WAITING GAME: Sometimes, the
humdrum (and the horror) of a refugee journey works best as a game
"participant." A decade ago, I sweated out the fate of a woman and
a child in a decade-old “game” set in the Sudanese famine, giving me much
greater understanding of the South Sudan. With the ProPublica asylum story
(above), the news site wove in images, text and sound to re-create five actual
refugee journeys. It's gripping journalism, by Sisi Wei, Nick Fortugno
and WNYC. Pictured on this odyssey:
Egypt. Central America. Mexico. A gun.
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What we're listening to
(Screengrab)
IT’S BEYCHELLA, MOMS: The public radio show The Takeaway turned into a nationwide daughter-mother intervention as Vulture’s Hunter Harris explained the most important female singer and media figure in the world to her mom, Yvonne Lewis, who saw Queen Bey as a propitious follower of the brave paths cut by Patti LaBelle and Whitney Houston.
Beychella, however (Beyoncé’s triumphant cultural cornucopia
at the Coachella Music Festival) moved mom from her days of banning
certain Destiny’s Child tracks in the Mazda. "From the back of the bus
to the forefront of social media, fractured voices now sing in unison with
Beyoncé leading the chorus" Lewis concluded, on air.
“Wow,” her daughter responded, stunned: “I totally agree.”
Hear
the conversation. Last week, we featured a similar Road-to-Damascus
moment, when Mat Hooper finally persuaded his dad, Tampa Bay Times bureau
chief Ernest Hooper, of the value of Kendrick Lamar. Of course, Mat had a
little help from Pulitzer Prize judges, which gave Lamar’s “DAMN” the
musical award last week. (Hat-tip: Arwa Gunja)
WSJ – Though technology is making our lives ever more convenient, it also may be having the unintended effect of lowering our skill set. Gregg Easterbrook reviews “The Efficiency Paradox” by Edward Tenner. “‘Big Data” is the Big Bad of our moment. Companies and governments amass enormous troves of information about our online and offline activities, so they can understand them better than we do. Recently we learned that creepy firms like Cambridge Analytica mine Big Data from websites such as Facebook, using “psychographic microtargeting”— Orwell would have considered the term extreme—to alter public opinion, spread falsehoods and influence elections. Facebook itself seems increasingly creepy, grounded in lying to the public about what happens to the data it collects. In the future, will Big Data help physicians cure diseases or help health insurers deny claims? Make factories and products safer or accelerate layoffs? Ultimately spawn some kind of hostile artificial intelligence? Right now it’s fair to suppose that many people would favor putting the Big Data genie back into the bottle. Such questions set the stage for “The Efficiency Paradox,” a skillful and lucid book by Edward Tenner, a technology commentator best known for his 1996 volume “Why Things Bite Back.” Mr. Tenner’s specialty is the unintended consequences of scientific, engineering and electronic developments. Authors cannot control the current-events environment into which their works are launched, but the timing for “The Efficiency Paradox” seems propitious. The book arrives as the boomerang-and-backfire effects of Big Data are in the papers, or on your phone, as the case may be…” |