“(Like) Mr Hazzard, (Mr Trump,) is living with his own moral choice” via Nom
Rudy Giuliani throws Trump's legal team into disarray
The timeline of Donald Trump's explanations for the Stormy Daniels
↩︎ Genii OnlineThe Justice Dept. is revising its guidelines. Recently deleted: a "Need for Free Press and Public Trial" section.
Mossack
said the notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar was “a baby” compared with
Quintero and was worried he might come knocking (you can read the email yourself!) Now, the FBI has posted a $20 million reward for information on Quintero and added
him to their top-10 most wanted list. The notorious drug lord is wanted in
relation to a kidnapping and murder from 1985. Maybe Mossack’s fear was
warranted...
A historian of prisons says "daily degradations" wore down South Carolina inmates' before deadly riots. ↩︎ The New York Times
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian reveals her Syria connection
↩︎ BuzzFeed
When Mossack Fonseca co-founder Jurgen Mossack realized his firm was representing an offshore company owned by drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, they quickly dropped Quintero’s business.
When Mossack Fonseca co-founder Jurgen Mossack realized his firm was representing an offshore company owned by drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, they quickly dropped Quintero’s business.
Why Do So Many Judges Cite Jane Austen in Legal Decision
though others may feel put upun: If You Think You Hate Puns, You're Wrong - In Defense of Puns.
though others may feel put upun: If You Think You Hate Puns, You're Wrong - In Defense of Puns.
ATTENTION SPANS: Normally we extol short, clear writing. But brevity, Roy Peter
Clark says, rarely can take us on a journey, or unroll a carefully nuanced
argument. Clark praises the joys of a story that can accept complexity and
abounds in important ideas and language. "The deepest power of story is
felt only by spending time,” Clark
writes for Poynter. “Have we abandoned the long story — to our peril?”
Vic judge blasts ATO over victims' debt
How AI Might Make The Vatican’s Amazing Archives Accessible
The Vatican Secret Archive isn’t much use to modern scholars, because it’s so inaccessible. Of those 53 miles, just a few millimeters’ worth of pages have been scanned and made available online. Even fewer pages have been transcribed into computer text and made searchable. If you want to peruse anything else, you have to apply for special access, schlep all the way to Rome, and go through every page by hand. But a new project could change all that. Known as In Codice Ratio, it uses a combination of artificial intelligence and optical-character-recognition (OCR) software to scour these neglected texts and make their transcripts available for the very first time.
A historian of prisons says "daily degradations" wore down South Carolina inmates' before deadly riots. ↩︎ The New York Times
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian reveals her Syria connection
-
The NSW Premier will tonight tell the Sydney Institute how her family's experience shaped her as a person, as colleagues encourage her to open up to the public ahead of next year's election
How AI Might Make The Vatican’s Amazing Archives Accessible
The Vatican Secret Archive isn’t much use to modern scholars, because it’s so inaccessible. Of those 53 miles, just a few millimeters’ worth of pages have been scanned and made available online. Even fewer pages have been transcribed into computer text and made searchable. If you want to peruse anything else, you have to apply for special access, schlep all the way to Rome, and go through every page by hand. But a new project could change all that. Known as In Codice Ratio, it uses a combination of artificial intelligence and optical-character-recognition (OCR) software to scour these neglected texts and make their transcripts available for the very first time.
How AI Might Make The Vatican’s Amazing Archives Accessible
The Vatican Secret Archive isn’t much use to modern scholars, because it’s so inaccessible. Of those 53 miles, just a few millimeters’ worth of pages have been scanned and made available online. Even fewer pages have been transcribed into computer text and made searchable. If you want to peruse anything else, you have to apply for special access, schlep all the way to Rome, and go through every page by hand. But a new project could change all that. Known as In Codice Ratio, it uses a combination of artificial intelligence and optical-character-recognition (OCR) software to scour these neglected texts and make their transcripts available for the very first time.
An awards night where the world dominated
Four-time Pulitzer-winning photographer Carol Guzy stood
before the Overseas Press Club in New York on Thursday night, having just
accepted this year’s Robert Capa Gold Medal Award for photojournalism. Then
she mused about one of that famous Spanish civil war photographer’s most
famous guidelines: improve the work by showing the courage to push closer.
 Guzy, already known for her
unflinching gaze in places such as Haiti, got closer in documenting the
scars that war left on the children of Mosul, Iraq.
Incredibly close.
But that wasn’t her point Thursday night.
Courage, Guzy said, was not about getting there; it’s
about staying there, even when that story is shredding your heart. She
dedicated the award last night to the bruised, scarred children left
behind in Mosul. They are showing true courage, Guzy said, with their
resilience and grace.
Her view of courage and humility was echoed by the feature photography winner, Getty Images’ Kevin Frayer. He covered Myanmar’s pogrom of its Rohingya minority, driving nearly a million people from their homes. There were times when, Frayer said in a message, "surrounded in sadness, I could find beauty in nothing."  Detail:
A Kevin Frayer photograph of a fleeing Rohingya family (Screenshot)
He urged the crowd to support the release of the two Reuters
reporters in Myanmar who have been imprisoned for months for doing their
jobs. Other winners included the AP for the big award, the Hal Boyle award,
on the Rohingya flight, and to the AP’s Maggie Michael, who found secret
Saudi-led camps where Yemeni prisoners were being tortured. Other awardees
showed the economic destruction of Venezuela and rampant corruption in
Mexico, important stories often lost in awards season and the day-to-day
coverage of America's mercurial leader.
Judges awarded the magazine award to Azmat Khan and Anand
Gopal of the New York Times Magazine for their nearly two-year
effort, "visiting about 150 bomb sites in northern Iraq, often at great
personal risk," to show that civilian casualties caused by
U.S.-led coalition airstrikes were considerably higher than previously
reported.
A Reuters team, as with the Pulitzers, won for its
coverage of the Philippines under vigilante president Rodrigo
Duterte. Judges said "their exhaustive, meticulous reporting
exposes the scope of the state’s role in the slaughter of its own
citizens." NBC Left Field, the network’s digital news video unit, took
an award for “The
Kill List,” a documentary on Duterte. Here
are all the winners.
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Trump's 'Friends' cut him off
President Donald
Trump’s phone-in to his security blanket, “Fox and Friends,” Thursday morning
generated exponential amounts of coverage, not just for the newsy
nuggets coming out of it (courtesy of Trump), but because it
was a chance to see the president in full defensive mode on live TV —
something that heretofore had only been described in news stories by “sources
close to the president.”
And what a display it was. He went on for close to 30 minutes,
many times with his voice getting louder and louder, before show co-host
Brian Kilmeade — sounding like a harried mom having to deal with a gossipy
neighbor — told him, ““We could talk to you all day, but it looks like you
have a million things to do.” (Translation:
This is getting old, dude, let me help you out ...)
Here are some of the stories we liked that captured this
unprecedented venting:
·
The
case for “Fox and Friends." Erik Wemple of the Washington Post says
it’s good to at last see a tirade like this in person instead of getting it
second-hand.
·
Chris Cillizza of CNN summarized “The
53 most stunning lines from Donald Trump's 'Fox & Friends' interview”
·
The entire
transcript, annotated, by the Washington Post.
·
Along the same lines, HuffPost offers up “A
Guide To Unscrambling Trump’s Bonkers ‘Fox & Friends’ Interview.”
·
And this, for the headline alone: “Old
man yells at country,” via Slate.
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Quick hits
NO MORE KNOW-IT-ALL: In a major report for the American
Press Institute, P. Kim Bui casts a broad net in seeking how to build trust
in reporting and in a newsroom. Empathy, humility and transparency go a long
way. In reporting, do your homework, but don’t act the expert, she
writes. In a newsroom, you can go a long way in training, starting with
admitting mistakes, but not everyone will be able to do it all, NPR’s
Keith Woods tells Bui. “That’s all empathy is at the end of the day, is
standing in someone else’s shoes,” Woods says. “You don’t have to wear them.
You don’t have to like them.” The report is engaging, but if you’re
time-pressed, here are 9
steps for storymakers and 10 steps for the story editors and supervisors.
BROKAW ALLEGATIONS: Variety
and the Washington
Post cite a former employee as saying that former NBC Nightly News anchor
Tom Brokaw groped her in a meeting in the 1990s. Brokaw acknowledged meeting
her but denied the allegations. We'll be going through the stories, of which
the Brokaw incident is just a part, throughout the day.
HE STARTED THE WAR: Back in 1986, “Gallup was finding
that 65 percent of Americans still felt a ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of
confidence in the press.” The following year, Brent Bozell started his
advocacy group, the Media Research Center, in order to root out and expose
liberal bias in the media. And thus the war on the press began, writes
Tim Alberta for Politico Magazine. Flash forward 30 years, and the Gallup
numbers show confidence in the press is at an all-time low of 32 percent, and
at just 14 percent for Republicans. Mission accomplished?
SPEED BRIEFING: For longtime New York Times photographer Sara Krulwich,
there's something new at this year's Tonys: Her
very own award, writes Michael Paulson. … Two Southern California public
television stations, KCET and KOCE, are
merging, says Meg James. ... the president of the group that runs The New
Orleans Times-Picayune is stepping down and will not be replaced, the
Advocate’s Richard Thompson reports.
TURKEY CRACKS DOWN: A Turkish court has
sentenced 14 journalists and newspaper employees working for a Turkish
opposition newspaper to prison sentences up to 7 ½ years. The charges were
terrorism-related and came after a failed coup attempt. The move is raising
alarm bells over press freedoms under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
‘WE WERE WRONG:’ On the same day that a new
memorial opened in town that honored victims of lynchings, the Montgomery
(Alabama) Advertiser published
an editorial owning up to its own role in perpetuating violence against
African-Americans. “The Advertiser was careless in how it covered mob
violence and the terror foisted upon African-Americans from Reconstruction
through the 1950s. We dehumanized human beings.” One of the headlines the
paper published: Dead! Riley Webb hanged in Selma by orderly mob.
(Emphasis ours.)
A VAMPIRE SQUID: That’s how a British lawmaker described
Facebook on Thursday. So, yes there is such a thing, but the foot-long
cephalopod isn’t too scary, despite its fearsome name. It hangs in the
low-oxygen, low-predator ocean deep — and doesn’t eat much.
 AnnFriedman.com
THE VAMPIRE GRAPHIC: Quartz’s Dan Kopf on why you should
never use a pie chart — and why, no matter how hard you try, you can’t kill
data visualization’s Walking Dead. Nor should there be a silver bullet (or a
cross or garlic or whatever), argue fans of idiosyncratic and brilliant
pie-charter Ann Friedman. They are
right. (Hat tip: Mel Grau)
A SHARING PROBLEM?: The Newseum has created a poster
for educators, libraries and others (editors?) to help Americans get wiser
about what stories online they would share. It’s part of a media literacy
effort at the Washington museum, says Anna Kassinger, director of curriculum
for the Newseum’s educational wing. You can check out the poster and/or
download it from
here.
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What we’re reading
DO YOU BELIEVE?: A Pew poll shows most Americans believe in God or a higher
being. It’s just not
always the God in the Bible. Get this: About the same percentage of
nonwhite Democrats and Republicans in general agreed on the God in the Bible.
Three other takeaways, although 1 and 2 may seem contradictory: 1) Belief in
the God of the Bible declines with age. 2) Those under age 50 viewed God as
less powerful and less involved in earthly affairs than do older Americans.
3) Among college graduates, only 45 percent believe in the God of the Bible.
(Hat tip: David Dockterman)
FAREWELL, FREE JOURNALISM: Post Opinions
commentator Megan McArdle on the reported move of her former employer,
Bloomberg News, behind
a paywall: “The old open Internet was a marvelous gift to readers, a vast
cornucopia of great writing upon which we’ve been gorging for the past two
decades. But there’s a limit to how long one can keep handing out gifts
without some reciprocity. At the end of the day, however much information
wants to be free, writers still want to get paid.”
THE REST OF THE STORY: “I hope you’ve monetized this,”
Donald Trump said to the two North Carolina sisters known as Diamond &
Silk before sending them out to do their routine to a campaign audience. Oh,
they have, Donald. They have. Here’s everything
you need to know, by the Washington Post’s Monica Hesse and Dan Zak.
 OVERLOOKED NO MORE: Maria Bochkareva jammed three lifetimes into her 30 years. Married at 15 and split up not much later, the semiliterate peasant petitioned Russia’s czar to enter the military during World War I. She loved it, wrote the NYT’s Elisabeth Goodridge in the latest of the paper’s obituaries of “overlooked” women of note. By 1917, Bochkareva was commanding an all-women’s “strike force” that was on the wrong side of the Russian Revolution. Touring the West, she raised money from Theodore Roosevelt and “wrote” an autobiography. Returning home, she was imprisoned by the victorious Bolsheviks — and executed. What you need to know about your student debt before heading ...
The politics behind the competitive neutrality inquiry into ABC and SBS |
