Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 118

Cleveland Finally Gets Its Protests

CLEVELAND—The protests in Cleveland have been a dud—at least until Tuesday afternoon. Despite grave concerns about security, most demonstrations had been small, undersubscribed, and low-key.

That changed mid-afternoon in Public Square, in the center of the city. When I arrived a little before 4 p.m., the ratio of police to reporters to civilians was roughly 1:1:1. There were isolated pockets of demonstration: A man and his daughter, wearing camo pants and hand-written T-shirts, shouted about Tamir Rice. A Black Lives Matter supporter, a young African American, and an older man, also black, wearing a Second Amendment T-shirt, shouted at each other. But for the most part, things were calm.

Then Alex Jones, the talk-radio host and conspiracy theorist, showed up. Although his own rally in the Flats on Monday was unexpectedly small, a crowd of journalists surged around him as he shouted into a megaphone in the center of the square. A crowd of reporters, observers, and leftist activists stood on steps on the south side of the square, and a few—led by Pat Mahoney, who was waving a red flag and smoking a cigar—started singing to drown him out, delivering several verses of the union anthem “Solidarity Forever.” (Mahoney, of the eastern suburb of North Olmsted, was wearing an Industrial Workers of the World shirt and identified himself as a member of the Wobblies’ Northeast Ohio chapter.) The scrum around Jones surged toward the steps. There was shoving and shouting, and suddenly it seemed like fights might break out. But peace prevailed, and police made their way in, grabbed Jones, and hustled him out of the square and into his own waiting SUV—followed by cameramen and young men shouting, “InfoWars dot com!”—which then peeled out.

As Jones left, the Revolutionary Communist Party was setting up for a planned rally in the center of Public Square. They bore a huge banner with pictures of black people killed by police and small signs that read “America Was Never Great: We need to OVERTHROW the system.” With their own megaphones, they took turns railing against police violence. In their view, law enforcement’s problem isn’t a few bad apples—it’s that police departments are designed as a tool of systemic class oppression. As Mark Oppenheimer explained in a Boston Globe piece years ago, the Revolutionary Communists are an esoteric bunch, led by a reclusive leader named Bob Avakian. The keynote speaker for the rally was Cornel West, the academic and public intellectual who was a major backer of Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential run. West has the unusual distinction of being a member of the Democratic Party’s platform committee, endorsing Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and appearing at a rally for the Revolutionary Communists—although he identified himself as a revolutionary Christian.

Pat Mahoney (David A. Graham / The Atlantic)

Meanwhile, police began to move into the square, gradually blocking off areas with their bicycles: One for the Revolutionary Communists to the north, one for a group of Christian demonstrators to the east, and observers of all sorts all around. The police occupied the center of the square and eventually closed off the sides, letting people leave but not enter. It was a diverse coalition of cops: Cleveland Police; Cleveland Clinic Police; officers from the Ohio cities of Akron, Avon Lake, Columbus, and Wauseon; state troopers and highway patrol from Ohio, Georgia, Indiana, California, Utah, and South Carolina. Members of a special Cleveland police unit detailed to filming demonstrations roamed, holding digital cameras aloft. Cleveland Chief of Police Calvin Williams stalked between officers in his crisp white shirt and hat, directing things.

West finally spoke around 4:45 p.m. “We want the young people to know that there will be no peace unless there’s fairness. There will be no justice unless there’s accountability,” West said. Then he shuffled out of the crowd, surrounded by reporters. West’s departure seemed to pull the air out of the whole scene. The Revolutionary Communists were burnt out and ready to leave. The rest of the crowd had exhausted itself too, and the cops by this time controlled most of the square.

The police managed to prevent much in the way of confrontations, though heated words were exchanged. The irony was that in many cases, the parties involved in the furious shouting matches had different solutions in mind but agreed on the underlying point: The police need reform. Preston Kamler shouted at the RevComs, accusing them of being paid by George Soros. Kamler, who wore a red Trump T-shirt, told me he’d driven from Springfield, Missouri, to be there. He agreed that the police needed reforming, but he felt the way to do that was to end the war on drugs.

David A. Graham / The Atlantic

“The judicial system is prejudiced against the poor, not necessarily against blacks,” he said. “If you’re a rich white kid or a rich black kid, you can get off. If you want to end abuses, end the drug war. It gives them a reason to militarize.”

Earlier, during a West-led press conference to preview the rally, I spoke with Andrew Smith, a young man from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, who wore a camouflage Make America Great Again hat and a T-shirt that depicted Trump with a revolver, a la Dirty Harry, and read, “Go ahead ISIS, make my day.” Smith shook his head. “There are real problems with the police, but this stuff doesn’t help,” he said. Smith’s theory was as overarching as the communists: He believed police-reform movements were a cover for a progressive effort to federalize the police, which he said would only make things worse. The demonstrators and the Trump supporters on hand were, it seems, separated by a common language, as a well as dozens and dozens of bicycle police.

David A. Graham / The Atlantic

Many of the attendees were neither affiliated with the groups nor members of the press: They were just there to gawk and see what happened. Marty Thompson said he was backing Trump, but he hastened to distance himself from the hardest-core backers. Mostly, he was downtown to see what went down.

“When I got down here it was a little quiet,” he said. “I was hoping for a little excitement,” though not too much. And despite the very real tension and buzz of worry in Public Square—Would there be a crush? Would there be tear gas? What was the police strategy?—there were only hundreds of people in the square anyway. Just a block away, the streets were quiet, sunbaked, and mostly empty thoroughfares of summer in the city, peopled only by hot-dog vendors and tired bus drivers.

Donald Trump's Great Gay Rock-Star Spectacle

"Thank you everybody, thank you, we love you, thank you very much. Oh we're going to win, we're going to win so big, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. We're going to win so big, thank you very much ladies and gentlemen, thank you, we're going to win so big, thank you."

Those were Donald Trump’s first words to the crowd at the Republican National Convention, introducing his wife's speech Monday night. Perhaps he was less loquacious than usual because the song he’d taken the stage to had summed up victorious feelings as well as any song ever has: Queen’s “We Are the Champions” played as Trump emerged from dramatic silhouette.

“We Are the Champions” and its 1977 b-side “We Will Rock You” are staples of arena events, but typically the sporting kind. This was the writer and singer Freddie Mercury’s intention. “I was thinking about football when I wrote it,” he told Circus in 1978. “I wanted a participation song, something that the fans could latch on to. Of course, I've given it more theatrical subtlety than an ordinary football chant.”

The band’s living members have condemned Trump’s use of the song, saying they don’t like their music being used for campaigning, and indeed “We Are the Champions” doesn’t appear to have been a staple of any previous major presidential bids. Trump using the song in such a splashy manner is remarkable—because it announces victory before it has been obtained, because a thoroughly British work is being used to “Make America Great Again,” and because of the obvious contradiction between the GOP’s stance on LGBT rights and the fact that the Mercury is a queer icon.

I spoke with Ken McLeod, the author of We are the Champions: The Politics of Sports and Popular Music, for his thoughts on Trump’s use of one of the all-time great (and gayest) sports anthems. He teaches music history and culture at the University of Toronto. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Spencer Kornhaber: What did you make of Trump’s arrival at the RNC to “We Are the Champions”?

Ken McLeod: It's very much a rock star moment, isn't it? He's using a song that's quintessentially associated with rock stardom. He's in backlighting and you see him in profile, and then he reveals himself. Very theatrical.

"We Are the Champions" first comes out in 1977. It's a top-10 hit. But then it really makes an image for itself in the sports world because you have this very powerful unison chorus—a hyper-masculine chorus that has this defiant notion of mastery and conquest. But, of course, it's done to carry a message of homosexual liberation. It includes lyrics like, "I've done my sentence but committed no crime," and "we mean to go on and on and on," these thinly veiled allusions to Freddie Mercury's semi-closeted lifestyle. And then as the song becomes a staple at sporting events, it gets sort of inverted as a heteronormative anthem and those homosexual connotations get lost.

It's very much in keeping with notions of the spectacle and atmosphere of the carnivalesque that sporting events—and political rallies, for that matter—depend on creating. [The critical theorist] Mikhail Bakhtin has the most famous definition of the carnivalesque as temporary suspension of hierarchy, so you get these inversions of high and low culture, old and young, male and female identities. That was what the carnival was meant to do: You put on a mask for a period of a time. Look at the original video for “We Are the Champions.” Freddie Mercury is in a harlequin outfit, a commedia dell'arte character.

Queen and Freddie Mercury are famous for their ability to blend high art and operatic culture and rock music together, so you get this very liminal masking of identities in Queen. Of course, Mercury's sexual identity was never overtly stated. But it's hard to miss the meaning of a song like, "I Want to Break Free," which they did in drag, and a song like “Bicycle Race,” a thinly veiled allusion to bisexuality. If you're an adolescent male fan in 1970s and early ‘80s when Queen was at the height of their popularity, you sort of overlooked all that. All these songs were probably about homosexual liberation, but you read them as was adolescent liberation. The lyrics were vague enough.

Kornhaber: You put “We Are the Champions” in the title of your book about sports and music. Is it the ultimate song of this kind—an arena song or however you'd like to term it?

McLeod: I think that and "We Will Rock You” are, yeah. It's surprising how many of these songs that have been taken up as sporting anthems sort of promulgate a homosexual or alternative-lifestyle message. The Village People's “YMCA” being another example, where it's okay to get up at a baseball game and dance to a homosexual anthem. You get the carnivalesque, the flipping of the hierarchy.

“Spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image. That is Trump, right?”

Kornhaber: There's a certain amount of overlap between music that gets played at sporting events and political events. How similar do you see the two fields as being?

McLeod: That's where we get into this notion of spectacle. Guy Debord is the great critical theorist on the notion of spectacle. He claimed that spectacle was capital—economic capital—accumulated to the point where it becomes image. Just think about that: Capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image. That is Trump, right? That is Donald Trump.

A political convention and a mass-sporting event both rely on that communal spectacle to bring people together. We all are one, even though that's not how things really are. You can think of politics as being a team sport—I'm not the first to make that analogy.

Kornhaber: Hillary Clinton's campaign song, "Fight Song" by Rachel Platten, has these uplifting choruses and down-in-the-ditches verses. It occurred to me that structurally it is very similar to “We Are the Champions.”

McLeod: One of the things you can't overlook is: What is the motivation for using these songs? Well, number one, you've got to have a cool song. It's gotta sound good and get the crowd riled up.  Does the music appeal to your political base?

Again, Queen is one of these odd liminal cases where people overlook Freddie Mercury's sexuality and they overlook the meaning of the lyrics. It's just vague enough, and because it's got this masculine guitar sound, this powerful drummer, it's easy to overlook what actually was at stake with the meanings of the songs.

That’s where Trump gets it a little bit wrong. Bruce Springsteen and Ronald Reagan had their famous run-in with “Born in the USA.” It sounds on the outside like it's going to be a big uplift-America anthem and it's not—it's very critical of the U.S. Again, you don't pay attention to what's actually at stake in the song itself.

Kornhaber: There are so many examples like that. Does it make you cynical about whether it's possible for a song to have a pointed, nuanced message that actually gets through? How often does music ever accomplish political goals other than rallying a crowd?

McLeod: I think there are lots of cases where music does affect values or can affect political values. There's the Meghan Trainor song “All About That Bass” [about] young girls’ body image—that's a song that has a message and can make a difference. But a song that's overtly aligned with a political campaign is unlikely to resonate in that way. In most cases campaigns are just trying to associate themselves with the feeling of the song, with a loose sentiment of positivity or something like that. That's why the actual lyrics and meaning of the song as imbued by the artist often gets overlooked.

Kornhaber: What are some other examples of spectacle and the carnivalesque in sports and politics?

McLeod: Carnivalesque is about this idea of flipping social convention and flipping identity. In a sporting event, it's okay for a man to kiss another man; that isn't acceptable behavior on the street for a lot of people. Hugging and crying and all those stereotypically non-masculine behaviors become acceptable. And at a [political] convention, everybody is supposed to be equal and you become, hopefully, one unified homogenous party. You're all wearing a mask because of it, leaving your true identity and your true beliefs at the door.

Our common definition of spectacle is an enormous event that achieves a high degree of notoriety and public attention. But the theoretical definition of spectacle is the notion of image overriding everything. Again, capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image. It's the spending of money. We have nothing better to do in our society than to create spectacle. The Olympic Games are spectacle. Usually we associate it with sporting events, but it's equally true of these big political conventions. And, I'm sorry to say as a Canadian, it's equally true of the U.S. political system, which is just a spectacle—it's a spending of a huge amount of money for image. Donald Trump can do it, he's been able to do it his entire career, because he has money.

Boris Johnson's Awkward News Conference With John Kerry

Boris Johnson is discovering first-hand the perils of the long career in journalism he used to skewer institutions, continents, and world leaders. Part of the first question to Johnson at his first news conference as foreign secretary:

“Can I give you the opportunity to apologize to the world leaders you may or may not have been rude to over the past 12 months, and ask what your strategy is to build trust?”

And that was from the BBC—the apparent home team.

The reporters from the Associated Press and The New York Times, who were traveling to London with John Kerry, the visiting American secretary of state, were far harsher. To wit:

You’ve accused the current U.S. president, Barack Obama, of harboring a part-Kenyan’s ‘ancestral dislike for the British empire’ while claiming, I think, untruthfully at the time that he didn’t want a Churchill bust in the White House. You’ve described a possible future U.S. president, Hillary Clinton, as someone with “dyed-blonde hair and pouty lips, and steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital.’ You’ve also likened her to Lady Macbeth. Do you take these comments back or do you want to take them with you to your new job as some sort of indicator of the type of diplomacy you will practice?

And:

You have an unusually long history of wild exaggerations and, frankly, outright lies that, I think, few foreign secretaries have prior to this job. And, I’m wondering, how Mr. Kerry and others should believe what you say considering this very, very long history?        

Reporters from outlets in the U.S. and the U.K. each asked two questions, and each question contained some variation on one theme: Johnson. The foreign secretary, who led the charge for the U.K. to leave the EU, looked visibly uncomfortable as he chuckled and mumbled his way through the answers. At one point he responded:

There is a rich thesaurus of things that I have said that have one way or the other I don’t know how that has been misconstrued. Most people when they read these things in their proper context can see what was intended, and indeed virtually everyone I have met in this job understands that very well particularly on the international scene. We have very serious issues before us today we have an unfolding humanitarian crisis in Syria that is getting worse. We have a crisis in Yemen that is intractable and a burgeoning crisis on Egypt and those are to my mind far more important than any obiter dicta you may have disinterred from 30 years of journalism.

TL;DR: I’ve said many things, but we have more important things to focus on. One of which was Turkey, the scene of last week’s coup attempt and the home country of Johnson’s paternal grandfather—a country Johnson apparently misidentified as Egypt in his reply.

The questions to Kerry, when they weren’t about the U.K.’s decision to leave the European Union, or the U.S.-U.K. special relationship, or global trade, were about Johnson.

“In all your years as as statesman,” he was asked by one reporter, “have you ever come across anybody quite like Boris Johnson?”

Kerry’s reply was—how to put it—diplomatic?

“I’ve spent 28 years in the United State Senate, a year-and-a-half, two years, as a lieutenant governor. I was a prosecutor for many years. I ran for president of the United States, and I’ve now been secretary of state for three-and-a-half years,” he said. “I’ve met everybody in the world like Boris Johnson—or not. I don’t know even know what you mean: like Boris Johnson.”  

But his feelings about the questions directed at his counterpart are perhaps best summarized by this image:

John Kerry's face when a US journalist accuses Boris of making "outright lies" is quite something. pic.twitter.com/s8zR55BE1r

— Richard James (@richjamesuk) July 19, 2016

Still, Kerry played the seasoned diplomat. He noted that Anthony Gardner, the U.S. ambassador to the EU, was a friend of Johnson’s from Oxford.  He “told me this man is a very smart and capable man,” Kerry said.

Johnson’s response: “Fantastic, I can live with that ... Phew! We can stop there.”

“It’s called diplomacy,” Kerry replied to laughter.

And for once the former journalist and London mayor, who reads Voltaire in French and sings in German, and drops Latin phrases like a very clever schoolboy, was without a fitting riposte.

“I think,” he said, “we got through that one all right.”

The Story of Making a Murderer Isn't Over Yet

Most people who watched all 10 episodes of Netflix’s true-crime docuseries Making a Murderer can probably recall the sinking sensation they felt when the final credits rolled. The series told the story of Steven Avery, a Wisconsin man convicted in 2007 of rape and murder, after spending 18 years in prison for a different attack he didn’t commit. Its filmmakers, Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, spent 10 years researching and creating Making a Murderer, which was fairly unambiguous in its implication that Avery was targeted and framed by resentful authorities in Manitowoc County. It was an exhausting and depressing experience sitting through several hours of evidence, legal documents, courtroom footage, and prison phone calls, only to be left with the conclusion that the criminal-justice system had brutally failed in this case.

But on Tuesday Netflix announced that Ricciardi and Demos would be making new episodes of the series, focusing on the post-conviction process and its emotional toll on involved.

It's not over. #MakingAMurderer will return.

— Making A Murderer (@MakingAMurderer) July 19, 2016

Making a Murderer’s continuation of Avery and Dassey’s stories sets the docuseries apart from two other recent true-crime sensations—the first season of the podcast Serial and HBO’s miniseries The Jinx. While there have been new developments with both of the underlying cases (for Adnan Syed and Robert Durst, respectively), neither Serial nor The Jinx continued to officially document the procedural twists or personal fallout that ensued. Perhaps seizing upon the enormous interest in Making a Murderer’s first season (released in December 2015), Netflix is electing to give Demos and Ricciardi the platform to follow up on their initial investigation.

The first 10 seasons of Making a Murderer won plenty of acclaim (just last week it earned six Emmy nominations, including one for outstanding documentary or nonfiction series). But the hype around the show, and the fact that many people binge-watched the entire thing in a relatively short amount of time, didn’t lend itself well to more critical reflection—it seemed almost everyone who watched (including myself) felt the series had vigorously and impressively proven the innocence of Avery and Dassey in the murder of the 25-year-old photographer Teresa Halbach. A month after the series debuted, The New Yorker ran a piece by Kathryn Schulz that eloquently captured one of the more common critiques about Making a Murderer: that it was a biased work of vigilantism masquerading as an objective documentary.

It’s likely that those who were floored by the rigor and comprehensiveness on display in Making a Murderer’s first run have encountered similar criticisms in the past several months. Or, spurred by their interest in the case, they did some digging on their own and found some details omitted in the series (like that Avery and Halbach knew each other, or that there was extra DNA evidence against Avery). Avery and Dassey could very well be innocent, but either way, it’s safe to say Making a Murderer will return to an audience that’s willing to be more skeptical than they were when the series first came out in December.

Which isn’t necessarily a fault of the filmmakers—it’s more an inevitable consequence of the documentary inspiring a wave of amateur sleuthing, as well as prompting the prosecution to speak out and share its side of the story. As a result, the narrative stakes will be higher whenever Making a Murderer does release the new episodes. But it could also make for an even more engaging viewing experience—regardless of how fans currently feel about Avery and Dassey’s guilt, there’s something to be said for being able to follow a story as it evolves, whatever the “ending” may be.

That Wasn't An Earthquake

NEWS BRIEF Florida is home to several disasters: the hurricanes, the sinkholes that swallow homes, and the #Floridaman hashtag. It is not known for earthquakes. So when a magnitude-3.7 temblor struck 100 miles off the coast of Daytona Beach over the weekend, news outlets reported the phenomenon with headlines like this one from FOX4: Earthquakes in Florida?

But not so fast.

The U.S. Geological Survey picked up the rumbling around 4 p.m. Saturday. The shaking didn’t cause any damage––no earthquake has in Florida since 1879––and the Associated Press, local outlets, and Weather.com all quickly noted how peculiar it was. Some outlets even referenced another earthquake that hit in June, with the exact same magnitude, in almost the same spot. Was this the work of a dormant fault shaking to life?

On Monday, The Daytona Beach News-Journal cleared the mystery up:

It appears the “earthquake” detected on Saturday by seismographs as far away as Venezuela and across the United States and Caribbean was triggered by a man-made explosion designed to test the seaworthiness of a new U.S. Navy vessel.  

It was called a shock trial, and this is the second in a series of tests like it since 2008. The first was in June, which explains the other rare “earthquake” reported off the coast of St. Augustine, just north of Daytona. The ship being tested is the USS Jackson, an anti-submarine boat that was commissioned last December. Essentially what happens during the shock trial is the Navy detonates a massive explosion––a magnitude-3.7 earthquake-sized explosion––right next to the ship in order to test the hull. In May, Rear Admiral Brian Antonio described what happens during a shock trial to the United Naval Institute News:

“This is no kidding, things moving, stuff falling off of bulkheads. Some things are going to break.”

The Navy informed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but apparently not any news outlets, or the U.S. Geological Survey, which recorded the explosion as an earthquake as far away as Minnesota and Texas.

Here’s a video of another shock trial on the USS Winston S. Churchill.

A Militiaman's Foiled Great Escape or a Rancher Tying a Rope?

Updated on July 19 at 3:50 p.m. ET

NEWS BRIEF A federal judge in Oregon has ordered Ryan and Ammon Bundy, who led the standoff to take Malheur National Wildlife Refuge away from the federal government, to remain in custody during the trial, partly because of a possible escape attempt.

In his decision Tuesday, Judge Robert E. Jones of the U.S. District Court of Oregon said the two brothers’ don’t necessarily pose a risk of fleeing the country, but that twice they’ve refused to cooperate with the federal government, which they “justified by their interpretation of the Constitution.”

“Thus, I find it likely that if released, they may well ignore the conditions of release,” Jones wrote.  

Both Ammon and Ryan helped lead the armed protesters who tried to overtake the national refuge in January. The standoff lasted more than a month. It ended with the militiamen surrendering, and with the death of one man. At the federal hearing on Monday, Ryan’s attorney had asked that he be released from jail during the trial. It was then that federal prosecutors brought up the curious supplies bailiffs had found in Ryan’s cell.

As Oregon public radio, OPB, reported:

“We have actual evidence that he tried to escape,” Assistant U.S. Prosecutor Geoffrey Barrow told the court during a pre-trial detention hearing in Portland.

Barrow said jail staff found the braided rope under Bundy’s mattress when they searched his cell on April 8. Barrow also said Bundy had stored containers of extra food along with six pillowcases, a chair, two extra pairs of boxers and more torn sheets.

The rope was about 15 feet long, made from torn sheets. This, along with the stashed-away food, were not supplies for an escape, Ryan contested. The extra pillowcases were “for comfort,” and he told the bailiff at the time that the tied sheets were just “a rancher, trying to practice braiding rope.”

The judge didn’t agree with that explanation, and wrote that he rejected Ryan’s “excuse that he was practicing braiding.”

Ryan and his brother have both pleaded not guilty to charges that include conspiracy to commit an offense against the U.S., conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer, assault on a federal officer, interference with interstate commerce by extortion, among others. The brothers contend the federal government has no right over the refuge, and that the FBI never asked them to leave.

On the stand Monday, Ammon, said, "There never was a standoff.”

The Victims of the Attack in Nice

We are learning more about those killed in Thursday’s attack in Nice, France. French authorities say 84 people lost their lives when a truck drove through a crowd celebrating Bastille Day. The death toll could rise as dozens in the hospital are, in the words of French President François Hollande, “between life and death.”  

Here is an updating list of those killed:

David Bonnet, 44

Bonnet, a father and fish farmer, attended the Bastille Day celebrations with his partner. He was the son of the first deputy mayor of Nérondes, in central France. His death was confirmed by the town’s website:

The Municipality of Nérondes lost one of its children on July 14 in the Nice attack … This terrible tragedy that has struck this family leaves us in shock—there are no words that might comfort them.

He is survived by his 21-year-old daughter.

Hommages à David Bonnet, Berrichon tué dans l'#attentat de #Nice #AttentatdeNice #Cher https://t.co/CsVnUtUoew pic.twitter.com/IiXkblrkjc

— Le Journal Du Centre (@lejdc_fr) July 17, 2016

Laura Borla, 14

Borla joined the Bastille Day festivities with her twin sister and their mother before getting separated from them in the midst of the chaos, The New York Times reports. Her family learned of her death Sunday, and her 19-year-old sister Lucie posted on Facebook saying, “We miss you already; we will love you always.”

Linda Casanova, 54

Casanova, a Swiss citizen from Agno Ticino, was vacationing with her husband in Nice. Ivano Casanova, her brother, said she was due to return soon to Ticino, where she served as a customs expert.

He told Corriere del Ticino:

My sister was on holiday on the French Riviera with her husband Gilles, a French national, and would have to return to Ticino tomorrow. Linda was hit in the middle of the truck, who killed her instantly. ...

Fatima Charrihi

Her son, Hamza, identified Charrihi as one of the first victims. He described her as an “amazing mom” who was attending the Bastille Day celebrations with her nieces and nephews.

He told L’Express:

She wore the headscarf and practiced the proper Islam—the real Islam. Not the terrorists’ version.

Igor Chelechko, 47

A father of four of Russian descent, Chelechko moved to Nice four months ago, according to reports. Andrey Eliseev, the arch-priest of the Saint-Nicolas cathedral in Nice, described him as a “pious man.”

Sean Copeland, 51, and Brodie Copeland, 11

Copeland and his 11-year-old son, Brodie, were Americans from Austin, Texas, who were vacationing in Nice during the time of the attack. Their family, in a statement to the Austin American Statesman, said:

We are heartbroken and in shock over the loss of Brodie Copeland, an amazing son and brother who lit up our lives, and Sean Copeland, a wonderful husband and father. They are so loved.

Heather Copeland, a family member, posted on social media:

#PrayForNice #PrayersForFrance pic.twitter.com/NEh2N4yRT2

— heather copeland (@_hcopeland) July 15, 2016

Yanis Coviaux, 4

Four-year-old Yanis Coviaux was looking forward to attending the fireworks with his parents, Samira and Michael, according to Le Parisien. He had been playing with other children just moments before the truck came barreling through the crowd.

“When I saw him on the ground, I immediately understood,” Michael Coviaux told Le Parisien. “He resembled Aylan, the little refugee boy who drowned on the beach in Turkey.”

#Nice A relative paid tribute to 4 y-o Yanis Coviaux, killed in the truck attack.@dmitrykostyukov for @nytimesphoto pic.twitter.com/fPEtArpjCI

— Photojournalism (@photojournalink) July 19, 2016

Timothé Fournier, 27

A tobacconist from Paris, Fournier died protecting his seven-months pregnant wife from the oncoming truck that drove through the crowd on Bastille Day, according to reports by Agence France-Presse.

Parmi les victimes niçoises, Timothé, 27 ans, mort en protégeant sa femme enceinte de 7 mois #AFP pic.twitter.com/qV1s0xlihU

— Guillaume Daudin (@GuillaumeDaudin) July 15, 2016

Fournier’s cousin, Anaïs, described him as someone who was “always  there for his wife and future child.”

Emmanuel Grout, 48

Grout, who served as a deputy commissioner of the local border police, was off-duty enjoying the fireworks with his girlfriend and their daughter at the time of the attack, according to the Associated Press. In a tribute to Grout, Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi said France’s police ranks lost “a great personality.”

Victime de l'attentat de Nice : Emmanuel Grout a protégé sa belle-fille https://t.co/SWG7KFSj2Y pic.twitter.com/LFc8Sdipql

— Le Parisien (@le_Parisien) July 18, 2016

Olfa Bint al Suwayeh Khalfallah, 31, and Kylan Mejri, 4

Khalfallah and her son, Kylan, were waiting to watch the fireworks. Khalfallah, a Lyon native of Tunisian descent, was vacationing with her son and husband, Tahar Mejri, according to the Associated Press.

Angela Nissa, a friend of the family, posted a tribute to Khalfallah and her son on Facebook, saying, “Rest in peace. I hope the gates of heaven are wide open.”

Nicolas Leslie, 20

Leslie, a junior studying environmental science at the University of California, Berkeley, attended the Bastille Day celebrations while studying abroad in Nice. According to a statement from the university, Leslie was one of 85 UC Berkeley students participating in a summer entrepreneurship program.  

Leslie is the second UC Berkeley student killed in recent attacks. Eighteen-year-old sophomore Tarishi Jain was killed during an attack in Dhaka, Bangladesh, two weeks ago. UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said in a statement:

All of us in the UC Berkeley family — both here on campus, and around the world — are heartbroken to learn that another promising young student has been lost to senseless violence. I join Nick’s parents, friends and the entire campus community in condemning this horrific attack, and in mourning the loss of one of our own.

Leslie, who was originally from Milan, Italy, lived in Southern California and attended San Diego's Torrey Pines High School before enrolling at UC Berkeley. According to the university, he planned to enroll at the Haas School of Business when he returned to school in the fall.

His aunt, Antolla, told the Los Angeles Times that Leslie was an only child who was "adored by everyone," describing him as wonderful, caring, and extremely motivated.

UC Berkeley confirms 20 yo study abroad student Nicolas Leslie killed in Nice terror attack.Vigil planned for Monday pic.twitter.com/j67b7qtMuv

— Maureen Naylor (@MaureenKTVU) July 17, 2016

François Locatelli, 82; Christiane Locatelli, 78; Veronique Lion, 55; Michel Pellegrini, 28; Gisele Lion, 63; Germain Lion, 68

The Locatellis were on vacation with their daughter, Veronique Lion, their grandson, Pellegrini, and Lion’s in-laws, Gisele Lion and Germain Lion, at the time of the attack. The family of six from Herserange, in northeastern France, were killed as they returned from the Bastille Day fireworks, according to France 3. Pellegrini taught high school economics and social sciences, his employer said.

Robert Marchand, 60

Marchard was an industrial supervisor from Marcigny, a small town in eastern France, where he also served as a coach in the town’s athletic club. Louis Poncet, the Marcigny mayor, described Marchard as a “dedicated, passionate man who advanced the athletic club to the highest levels,” according to Le Journal de Saône et Loire. He is survived by his wife and their daughter.

Viktoria Savchenko, 20

The Russian national studied at the Academy of Finance in Moscow, which confirmed her death.

Our student, Victoria Savchenko, died in Nice. We express our condolences to the family! Her friend Pauline Serebryannikova is in the hospital.

— Financial University (@FinUniver) July 15, 2016

Savchenko was also identified by Russian TV.

Killed in an attack in Nice, Viktoria Savchenko was 20 years old. pic.twitter.com/Q2GXOnbyEl

— НТВ (@ntvru) July 15, 2016

This is a developing story and we'll update it as we learn more.

Fight Night at the Republican National Convention

CLEVELAND—What does a political convention celebrating a candidate look like when many of the conventioneers still aren’t willing to accept him as a nominee?

The first night of the Republican National Convention on Monday offered clues about how Donald Trump’s coronation this week might go. Set around the theme “Make America Safe Again,” the program was a catalog of the dark threats facing the nation: radical Islam, Black Lives Matter, illegal immigrants, and Hillary Clinton, not necessarily in that order. In short, it was an evening of red meat. The series of speakers were calibrated to appeal to a certain segment of the Republican electorate, but there were plenty of Republicans inside the Quicken Loans Arena who were still wounded from the primary, and weren’t necessarily interested in using the red meat to treat their bruises.

In many ways, it was a classic convention night: a long series of speeches, ranging from riveting to workaday to simply dull. An obstreperous, noisy Rudy Giuliani uplifted the police and lashed out at President Obama. Mark Geist and John Tiegen, two veterans of the security team in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, delivered a long narrative of their battle there. The parents of several people killed by illegal immigrants remembered their slain children. The actors Scott Baio and Antonio Sabato Jr. stood and talked about ... well, something. As delegates filed out at the end of a long day, the retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn offered a long, shouty broadside against Obama and Clinton. Sample zinger: “War is not about bathrooms!” By the time Senator Joni Ernst, a well-loved rising GOP star, got up around 11 p.m., the Q was mostly empty.

The Republican Party is increasingly a party of white people, and given Trump’s unpopularity with women, it is increasingly a party of white men. Nevertheless, the three most electrifying speakers on Monday were two black men and one Slovenian-born woman.

The first was Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee, a tough-on-crime black conservative who fits Trump’s recent adoption of “law and order” to a T—and whose dismissal of Black Lives Matter and the broad police-reform movement was perfectly timed for the aftermath of the murders of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge. Clarke was the first candidate to elicit a uniformly excited response from the Q, and he started off throwing a punch: “Blue. Lives. Matter in America!”

The second was Darryl Glenn, an African American commissioner in El Paso County, Colorado, who is running against Democratic U.S. Senator Michael Bennet. Glenn is a typical convention speaker: a rising star in a tough race who could benefit from the spotlight. Any time a young African American speaks at a convention, it’s bound to draw comparisons to another Senate candidate, the one who spoke at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Unlike Obama, Glenn is a strong underdog in November, but he made the most of his slot, and managed to get in an echo of that 2004 Obama speech.

“I am often asked, why are you Republican?” he said. (He didn’t need to explain the racial subtext. At another point, he quipped: “Somebody with a nice tan needs to say this: All lives matter.”) “It's because the Democrat Party is the party of handouts. After more than seven years the only thing we have left in our pockets is change … Mr. President, I have a message. This is not about black America, white America, brown America. This is about the United States of America.”

If Republicans hoped Melania could help to humanize and soften Donald, this wasn’t the speech to do it.

The third speaker was Melania Trump. After a surprisingly brief introduction by her husband, she strode on to the stage and delivered a strong speech. An inexperienced and reportedly uneasy public speaker, she stumbled once or twice, and her accent was occasionally thick, but she seemed to win over the room, telling of her childhood in Slovenia and her gratitude at becoming an American citizen. In a somewhat surreal moment, she was delegated the task of honoring retired Senator Bob Dole, the only previous Republican nominee attending the convention. Mostly, she spoke about her husband, a man she said was honest, driven, and kind.

“He will never, ever give up and most importantly he will never, ever let you down,” she said. Some lines sounded like they might have been written by Trump himself: “Now is the time to use [his] gifts as never before for purposes far greater than ever, and he will do this better than anyone else can, and it won’t even be close.”

Melania Trump’s speech was strong, but if Republicans hoped she could help to humanize and soften Donald, this wasn’t the speech to do it. For the most part, it emphasized traits that are already well known: determination, stubbornness, ambition. In that way, it raised the same question as so many of the evening’s speeches: Who is this meant to convince? The Benghazi narrative—which began fascinating but dragged on too long to keep delegates engaged—is unlikely to convince anyone who doesn’t already believe Clinton was negligent that night. The fierce attack on “illegal aliens” won’t win over voters who weren’t already on the Trump train. The dismissal of concerns about police violence falls afoul of many conservative critics of law enforcement.

Set aside the attitudes of those watching on television; plenty of those in the hall weren’t having it. It wasn’t hard to spot the pockets of delegates who were pledged to other candidates, because they were the ones glued to their seats, sitting on their hands, while other delegates applauded energetically. Many of them were smarting from a bizarre turn in the convention hall earlier Monday afternoon. Never Trump forces—written off as dead late last week—had been suddenly resurrected, managing to almost force a roll-call vote that could have deposed Trump as nominee. As my colleague Russell Berman reported, the effort fell short, but with the help of some slick maneuvering (a secretary hid behind locked doors) and a dubious determination by the chair on the outcome of a voice vote. Making small talk with a Colorado delegate on the floor while Geist and Tiegen spoke, I suddenly realized she was Kendal Unruh, a leader of the Never Trump faction.

“They’ve got the microphone, they can railroad the meeting.” She shrugged.

“They’ve got the microphone, they can railroad the meeting,” she shrugged. Nonetheless, she said, all her faction wanted was the right to count votes. “Kind of an important thing in America. This is not a banana republic.”

Unruh was resigned but not regretful, and was keeping a sense of humor about things. “I’ve had 1,000 death threats. Steve House, our state chairman, had had 3,000. It’s not right—he’s beating me 3-to-1, and I’m very competitive,” she joked, but said other delegates had told her they supported her cause but were unwilling to subject their family to threats and intimidation that came with going public.

Where does Never Trump go from here? Mostly home, it would seem, but Unruh said if the party expected people like her to suck it up and do the essential organizing work that wins elections, they were kidding themselves. She cited a harsh ad the Clinton campaign rolled out last week, featuring children watching television clips of Trump’s most outlandish statements. “She doesn’t have to do a thing,” Unruh said; she can just let Trump hang himself.

Across the arena, Bob Orr mentioned the same ad, shaking his head sadly. Orr, a North Carolina delegate and former state supreme-court justice, was sitting away from the Old North State’s delegation in part because he was an unreconciled backer of Ohio Governor John Kasich. He doesn’t plan to vote for Trump in November.

“I think Trump is dangerous for the country. He’s singularly unqualified to be commander in chief,” Orr said. “I don’t think Donald Trump cares about the Republican Party.” Attending the convention is a bittersweet experience for him. “I just see this diminution of a party that has had a lot of historical and personal importance to me.”

Orr wasn’t exaggerating. It isn’t just that he has voted for every Republican since Richard Nixon in 1968, even casting an absentee ballot from his post in the U.S. Army. Orr’s great-grandfather, a farmer in the mountains of Western North Carolina, had refused to fight for the Confederacy, instead crossing into Tennessee and enlisting with the Union Army. He came back from the war a staunch Lincoln Republican, Orr said. Now, the party of Lincoln seemed to be slipping away for good.

It all depends on who you ask, though. George Engelbach, a Missouri delegate, was on the floor in stove-pipe hat, frock coat, and majestically Lincoln-esque beard—nearly the spitting image of Abe. Who would Lincoln back in this contest? Engelbach didn’t hesitate: “Trump Trump Trump Trump!”

An Attack on a German Train

What we know on Monday:

—A suspect armed with an axe and a knife attacked a passenger train in central Germany.

—The suspect is a 17-year-old Afghan refugee.

—Police shot and killed the suspect on the scene.

—We’re live-blogging the major updates. All updates are in Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4).

7:21 p.m.

Wuerzburg police said three people suffered serious injuries from the attack, while another person was injured less severely. While initial reports said there were more than 20 victims, police say 14 people were treated for shock on the scene.

7:16 p.m.

Germany has become a home for many of the refugees fleeing Syria, Afghanistan, and other war-torn countries in recent years. In 2015 alone, Germany registered 1.1 million asylum seekers, among them 150,000 Afghans. From January to June of this year, Germany has accepted 220,000 asylum-seekers.

The prospect of an Afghan asylum-seeker getting refugee status in German is considerably lower than that of a Syrian, Iraq, or Eritrean.

While Germany has been one of the more welcoming European nations for refugees, there has been an increasingly difficult debate there over the future of its refugee program.

In May, the German government approved legislation designed to help refugees in Germany integrate better into society by expanding permanent residency from two years to five years. To qualify, refugees are required to have elementary knowledge of the German language, have a job, and take courses on German culture and society.

Unlike the U.S. or Canada, where refugees can stay permanently, asylum-seekers to Germany who are granted refugee status must reapply after that five-year period. Under the law, they can stay—or be repatriated—based on the conditions in their home countries.

“We expect that people take the opportunities that we offer to integrate themselves,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said.

The move was also to reassure Germans concerned with the problems other European nations face in Muslim communities, isolated from mainstream society and more prone to radicalism.

The motives of Monday’s attacker, himself an asylum-seeker from Afghanistan, is still unknown.

6:35 p.m.

In an interview with BR public television, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said:

“I am appalled about this. He injured a number of people, slashing around himself with a hatchet and a knife.”

The suspect was shot dead, police now say.

6:24 p.m.

In May, a man with a four-inch knife attacked a group of passengers at a train station near Munich, killing one person and wounding another three.

Authorities said the man, a 27-year-old German national, suffered from psychological problems and drug addiction. While he did shout “Allahu akbar” (“God is great” in Arabic), authorities found no connection to Islamist extremists.

6:06 p.m.

Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann says the suspect is a 17-year-old Afghan, who came to Germany as an unaccompanied refugee.

Innenminister #Herrmann in

Rundschau Nacht: Täter v. #Würzburg war 17-j. Afghane, als unbegleiteter Flüchtling nach Deutschland gekommen.

— BR24 (@BR24) July 18, 2016

6:01 p.m.

Three people were “seriously injured” in the attack Monday, German police said. More than a dozen others were also injured.

These are still initial reports and numbers like these will often change.

5:40 p.m.

The suspect was shot by police on the scene, reports Deutsche Welle.

Bavaria's Interior Ministry confirmed shortly after that the suspect was shot by police as he attempted to flee the scene.

There are varying reports on injuries from German media, however there has yet to be a tally from officials.

5:32 p.m.

Several people were injured Monday on a train in Germany when a suspect with an axe attacked passengers, according to local media reports.

The train was between Würzburg-Heidingsfeld and Ochsenfurt in the central part of the country, 90 minutes from Frankfurt. The train line has been closed.

Auf der Bahnstrecke #Würzburg-#Ochsenfurt soll ein Mann mehrere Menschen mit einer Axt angegriffen haben. Offenbar gibt es 21 Verletzte.

— tagesthemen (@tagesthemen) July 18, 2016

We will update this breaking news story as more information becomes available.

The War Over 'That Bitch'

It’s instantly iconic, the last line of Taylor Swift’s latest statement on her media tiff with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian: “I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that I have never been asked to be a part of, since 2009.”

Not long ago—pre-2009?—it might have seemed strange for most people outside an English seminar to casually throw around the word “narrative,” much less a Nashville pop star known for her love of cats and Christmas. But here we are in the age of the personal brand, where people like Swift, West, and Kim Kardashian have popularized the notion of popular culture—and maybe all of life—as a tangle of managed storylines that may or may not be rooted in fact. There are political and personal and social readings to be made of the ongoing spat between these three celebrities. Yet Swift has presented her current problem as purely meta: She’s mad, explicitly, at not being in control of this narrative.

The loss of control indeed began in 2009 with rather on-the-nose symbolism when West grabbed the mic from Swift at the MTV VMAs to protest her winning an award. This last August, she’d given the appearance of brokering peace—and regaining subjectivity in this particular story—by presenting West with a lifetime achievement award at the 2015 VMAs. But the feud reignited with this year’s Kanye West song “Famous,” which features the lines, “For all my Southside niggas that know me best / I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous.” After furor at the song erupted, West tweeted that Swift had pre-approved the lyrics during an hourlong phone conversation with him, but Swift’s rep denied that was the case:

Kanye did not call for approval, but to ask Taylor to release his single “Famous” on her Twitter account. She declined and cautioned him about releasing a song with such a strong misogynistic message. Taylor was never made aware of the actual lyric, “I made that bitch famous.”

Now, Kim Kardashian has thrown herself into what she has described as her full-time job: being her husband’s publicist. In GQ last month, she told a reporter that there was footage of Swift giving West permission for “Famous,” and last night’s Keeping Up With the Kardashians devoted itself to the controversy. When the episode finished, Kardashian’s Snapchat followers received an edited version of the much-hyped West/Swift exchange. In it, Swift says she’s very thankful he checked with her about the line “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex,” and that it’s true West felt like he’d made her famous at the 2009 VMAs: “You honestly didn’t know who I was before that. It doesn't matter that I sold 7 million of that album before you did.” (A glorious diss and brag, no?) They appear to be discussing two possible versions of the lyrics, and Swift says, “Go with whatever line you think is better. It's obviously very tongue-in-cheek either way.”

Swift’s first batch of complaints have been rendered dubious by this video: It certainly doesn’t sound like she and West were discussing whether she’d release the song on her Twitter account, nor do we hear her caution him about misogyny (though remember: Kardashian edited the conversation down to less than three minutes). And if she didn’t know he was going to say he made her famous, why did they talk about him believing he’d made her famous?

But the Snapchat video is most remarkable for seeming to give a peek into pop-music PR collusion. Here’s Swift on the phone with West:

… You know, if people ask me about it I think it would be great for me to be like, “Look, he called me and told me the line before it came out. Jokes on you guys, We're fine.” You guys want to call this a feud; you want to call this throwing shade but right after the song comes out I'm going to be on a Grammys red carpet and they're going to ask me about it and I'll be like, “He called me.”

Why did the plan fall through? Swift has said she didn’t know the call was recorded, and so maybe she simply misremembered its details when her reps put out her initial anti-“Famous” statement. Or maybe she just decided the risks of spinning a story were outweighed by the benefits of objecting to the song. In any case, Kardashian release the footage has had its intended effect of making Swift seem like a liar in having called West a liar. The resulting social-media outpouring against Swift has been also amplified by recent criticism she’s received for seeming to leak information to the media about secretly writing a hit by her ex boyfriend Calvin Harris. A manipulator, this narrative goes, has been exposed.

But Swift has now refined her version of events. “Where is the video of Kanye telling me he was going to call me ‘that bitch’ in his song?” she wrote on Instagram last night. “It doesn’t it exist because it never happened.” This is the new crux of the fight: “that bitch.” West has previously tweeted that he meant “bitch” as a term of endearment, which is how it’s sometimes used in hip-hop, though the song deploys it in lines that don’t praise Swift but rather strip her of everything but her potential as a sex object. For her part, Swift writes that, “You don't get to control someone's emotional response to being called 'that bitch' in front of the entire world.”

Objecting to the word is a savvy move for her. It shifts the narrative away from one about her own honesty and toward a topic she feels more comfortable with: feminism. This was also the initial maneuver she used against the “Famous” lyrics, using her Grammys Album of the Year acceptance speech to “say to all the young women out there: There are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame.” But it is also a tactic—or, hey, maybe even an honest response—that has backfired, as when she blasted Nicki Minaj for seeming to “pit women against each other” when Minaj made a race-based complaint about music awards.

For Swift to allow herself to be called “bitch” in a rap song really would be a betrayal of her own brand.

Gender and race may indeed be at the heart of why Swift didn’t let “Famous” pass by with the conspiratorial “Who cares?” she’d talked about on the phone. Her own self-presentation—her “red-lip classic thing that you like,” where (until recently) not even the belly-button is exposed—is so lower-c conservative, so unrelated to hip-hop in sound and look, that she’s accidentally attracted a faction of neo-Nazi fans in addition to middle-American parents who find her to offer pop music that’s safe for the whole family. Kim Kardashian, a white woman married to a black rapper, with an empire rooted in the sex appeal of her bared body, is exactly the kind of female icon Swift exists in contrast with. The gulf between them can be summed up in the fact that one finds the word “bitch” offensive and the other finds it innocuous. For Swift to allow herself to be called that term in a rap song really would be a betrayal of her own brand.

Why are West and Kardashian continuing to antagonize her, though? They say it’s an issue of fairness. West went out of his way to give her the heads-up about the song, and for her to say he didn’t feeds into the narrative that has long enraged him: that he’s a cruel “jackass” (Barack Obama’s term) who acts out without reason. There’s always a reason for West’s provocations, and he typically says that reason is art. Within the context of his album The Life of Pablo, the Swift verse comes across like a jarring airing of lust and bravado as he looks back on a wild life from a place of newly married stability.

Of course, the “art” label doesn’t remove the imperative to be a decent human being, and for all the negative publicity he receives, West loves to talk about being a positive person who improves the world. He seemed to think the Taylor Swift phone call was in that vein: “I don't want to do rap that makes people feel bad,” he told her. Whether the need for what he called “responsibility … as a friend” on the phone extended to the uber-creepy video for “Famous,” which featured Taylor Swift in its smorgasbord of naked celebrities, is unclear.

Kardashian has presented her role in this mess as a matter of loyalty: “I've had it with people blatantly treating my husband a certain a way and making him look a certain way," she said on Keeping Up With the Kardashians. But it’s impossible to avoid the fact that trying to embarrass Swift has drawn more eyes to Kardashian’s GQ story, her TV show, and her Snapchat account. “Taylor cannot understand why Kanye West, and now Kim Kardashian, will not just leave her alone,” Swift’s publicist said recently. The answer may lie in the fact that as irritating as this narrative of celebrity beef may be for Swift, in all measurable ways it has benefitted the person who's gained control of it: Kim Kardashian, who West once referred to as “my perfect bitch.”