Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 153

The End of Justin Trudeau's 'Elbowgate'

Three public apologies and one serious parliament discussion later, Justin Trudeau has been formally forgiven for tugging the arm of one legislator and elbowing another during a vote earlier this month.

Canada’s House of Commons decided Tuesday that the prime minister will not face parliamentary sanctions, or be asked for more apologies, for what some members of parliament called “unprecedented physical interaction.”

The controversy began May 18, during a heated vote on doctor-assisted suicide legislation. Members of the opposition New Democrat Party and other parties had blocked the aisle, seen by some as an attempt to prevent others from returning to their seats to begin the vote. Seeing this, Trudeau, who is in the Liberal Party , walked toward the group and pulled on Conservative whip Gord Brown’s arm and began to drag him out of the way, simultaneously elbowing New Democrat Party member Ellen Brosseau. The sequence of events caused an uproar among members of parliament, and opposition members spent the next few days criticizing Trudeau for “manhandling” the legislator. The incident became known as “Elbowgate,” taking on the suffix given to any public scandal these days. Trudeau apologized for the tussle three times in two days.

The Toronto Star reported Brosseau released this statement Tuesday:

“It left many members stunned and raised important questions about the conduct of the prime minister in a House that was already confronted with unprecedented government measures to limit debate.”

That was a reference to a motion, since withdrawn, that would have given the Liberal government more control over parliamentary procedures.

But Brosseau said the fact that the committee was considering the question of privilege, coupled with her acceptance of Trudeau’s apology, was the closure she was looking for.

Brosseau said she hoped all members of parliament “will work to ensure that we never see this conduct repeated.”

Trudeau had attributed his reaction to Brown in part to feeling under pressure in his new office, which he took in November. For Canadians, none of it really mattered. A poll about the incident a week later showed the majority of people thought of it as “no big deal” or, at most, a “momentary lapse of judgement.”

Where the World’s Slaves Live

This year, researchers surveyed residents of 15 states in India and asked them what it is like to live in conditions of contemporary slavery—the term used to describe human trafficking, forced labor, sexual exploitation, and other forms of illegal enslavement in the 21st century.

“I was physically and sexually assaulted when I was working in the field. I had also threat on my life and on my family,” said one unnamed person who was in bonded labor, a type of exploitation in which people are forced to work to repay debt, real or assumed. Another person, who was made a street beggar, said: “Though I am begging I am not paid a single amount. I have to deposit all to them. I am deprived of food and good sleep.”

These individuals are two of an estimated 18.4 million Indians who live in contemporary slavery, according to a new report from the Walk Free Foundation, an Australia-based organization. The group’s Global Slavery Index, released Tuesday, estimates a total of 45.8 million people are in some form of contemporary slavery in 167 countries. Nearly 60 percent of those live in just five nations: India, the country with the highest number of slaves, according to the index, followed China (3.4 million), Pakistan (2.1 million), Bangladesh (1.5 million), and Uzbekistan (1.2 million).

Slavery is illegal in every country; Mauritania became the last to outlaw it, abolishing the practice in 1981 but only criminalizing it in 2007. But it still exists in every country, and is common in some poor countries with oppressive governments or few human-rights protections.

North Korea has the most people enslaved in proportion to population, with 4.4 percent of the country’s population living in conditions of slavery. That equals about 1.1 million people out of 25 million. Uzbekistan is next with 4 percent of its population, followed by Cambodia (1.6 percent), India, (1.4 percent), and Qatar (1.4 percent).

Walk Free created the index using a Gallup survey of more than 42,000 respondents in 53 different languages, as well as statistical modeling.

People who are forced into labor most often work in the agriculture, food production, fishing, manufacturing, and construction industries. Migrant workers and indigenous people are among the most vulnerable. Women and girls are forced into sex work and marriages in nearly every country. There are as many as 20,000 North Korean workers in Russia who are required to hand over nearly all of their wages to the North Korean government. Victims of trafficking in Europe often come from Eastern European countries, forced to work abroad in dangerous conditions for little pay. In Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and the Palestinian territories, children have been forced into armed conflicts, coerced into become informants and suicide bombers.

The Global Security Index also ranks the responses of national governments to contemporary slavery inside their borders, based on laws, the availability of services for victims, labor standards, and other factors. At the top of the list are Western nations, including the Netherlands, the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Australia. The worst are North Korea, Iran, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, and Hong Kong.

Exact numbers of today’s victims of contemporary slavery are impossible to obtain, and estimates can vary by year and organization. Kevin Bales, a leading researcher of contemporary slavery and author of several books on the topic, estimates 35.8 million people are trapped in slavery. The International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency, puts the number at nearly 21 million.

Reshoot First: Rogue One’s Familiar Troubles

“The reports have been so gratuitous that I have tended to take them with a grain of salt,” wrote Peter S. Myers, an executive at 20th Century Fox, in a 1976 memo to his bosses about the buzz on a movie in production called Star Wars. One studio head had seen a cut with no music or special effects and “just flipped, claiming it is the best movie he has ever seen.” Some other early viewers, according to Myers, raved “that the picture has a look never seen on the screen before.” His conclusion: “Opinion makers and the public will be electrified and it is quite possible Star Wars will emerge the all time box-office champion.”

This prescient document about the 1977 space opera that did end up smashing box-office records comes to mind when reading about the recent rumors surrounding Rogue One, the Star Wars film scheduled for release in December 2016. Page Six reports that an early cut of the film isn’t testing well, and Disney has ordered four weeks of reshoots in July. Headlines with the words “crisis,” “bad,” and “panic” have ensued.

Two competing and purely speculative narratives have taken root in fans’ mind over this development. Rogue One is a standalone spinoff story about Rebel spies stealing Death Star plans before the events of A New Hope; its director, Gareth Edwards, known primarily for an indie creature feature before he led 2014’s surprisingly visionary Godzilla reboot, has promised a harrowing, Force-less war film “about the fact that God’s not coming to save us.” But after the crowd-pleasing heroics of The Force Awakens dominated box offices worldwide, has Disney decided a darker, scarier, film-geek-friendly Star Wars experience is too risky a move? Or has the relatively inexperienced Edwards simply not brought the pieces of a would-be-tentpole movie together with sufficient finesse?

Another possibility is that people should relax: Mixed reviews of rough cuts, and expensive reshoots, are typical of blockbuster filmmaking—as is demonstrated amply by the Star Wars franchise itself.

The ecstatic 1976 memo mentioned above was written during a time at 20th Century Fox otherwise defined by “skepticism on the part of the board of directors and some of the executive team” towards Lucas’s efforts, according to StarWars.com. Indeed, it seems for every tale of hype for the first Star Wars, you can counter with a tale of naysaying. As recounted in an excerpt of Dale Pollock’s Skywalking —The Life and Films of George Lucas, Lucas at one point showed a version of the film to a group of his friends, including Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, and the Time magazine film critic Jay Cocks. The reception was cold:

No one said anything at the movie’s completion. Lucas admitted the film needed work, but he was unprepared for the merciless assault that followed. Brian De Palma was especially sarcastic in a good-natured way, teasing Lucas about the “almighty Force” and indicating that the rough-cut version of the film was one of the worst things he had ever seen. Gloria Katz remembers, “Brian has a very wicked sense of humor and oh, he was so cruel.” It was not one of Lucas’s happier evenings.

Those who didn’t criticize Star Wars expressed sympathy. “They were all my real close friends and they felt sorry for me more than anything else. There were a lot of condolences, which is even worse than saying you didn’t like the movie,” Lucas recalls. Only Spielberg and Cocks reacted with enthusiasm—at dinner, they sat on one side of the table praising Star Wars, while De Palma faced them and made snide suggestions. “George didn’t lose his appetite, that’s the one thing I remember,” Spielberg says. “He kept eating his dinner, nodding his head, taking it all in. But I don’t believe he made any changes.” Lucas let De Palma and Cock rewrite the opening crawl, which he then modified. Other than that, he was resigned to the failure of Star Wars: “I figured, well, it’s just a silly movie. It ain’t going to work.”

Pre-release audience research also found “robots didn’t test well, nor did the science-fiction label Fox had stuck on the movie.” (Purported images of the survey that viewers might have filled out are amusing today—evidently, Annie Hall has something to do with Darth Vader).

While Fox would only give Lucas $20,000 to reshoot the cantina scene during creation of the first film, post-production became an increasingly important part of the Star Wars creative process as the franchise expanded. Reshoots on The Empire Strikes Back reportedly fed into tension between Lucas and the producer Gary Kurtz. Lucas, controversially, revised portions of the first trilogy for its ’90s rerelease. And one explanation for the woodenness of acting in the prequels was that the performers would frequently record dialogue that would be dubbed into scenes they’d filmed months earlier. Even with The Force Awakens, J.J. Abrams has been open about rejiggering the plot of the film during the editing process. For example, a character who’d been announced in earlier marketing barely ended up on screen, and Maz Kanata’s role was greatly reduced.

Star Wars has so thoroughly come to stand for the idea that the first round of shooting is a rough draft that Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has invoked the series when explaining why each Avengers-related film has a two-week window of reshooting built into its production schedule. Of course, one common criticism of his movies and of The Force Awakens is that the editing seams can be too easy to detect. But Rogue One fans, for their own anxiety’s sake, may want to take the same lesson from Star Wars history that Feige has: “You’ve heard about those famous early screenings where people were like, ‘Poor George. His career is over.’ That brings great solace to me when we screen our movies for the first time and they’re terrible and they’re a big mess. I remind myself to get calm and proceed.”

The European Travel Risk

The U.S. government is warning American travelers of the potential risk of terrorism if they are planning to visit Europe this summer.

On Tuesday, the State Department issued a travel alert, saying tourists should be wary of public locations and large events. Most notably, the State Department says the European Soccer Championship, which takes place in France from June 10 until July 10, might be a target. The department warns:

Euro Cup stadiums, fan zones, and unaffiliated entertainment venues broadcasting the tournaments in France and across Europe represent potential targets for terrorists, as do other large-scale sporting events and public gathering places throughout Europe. France has extended its state of emergency through July 26 to cover the period of the soccer championship, as well as the Tour de France cycling race which will be held from July 2- 24.

France has been in a state of emergency since last year’s terrorist attacks in Paris that left 130 dead. French authorities plan on using 90,000 police, soldiers, and private security personnel for the soccer tournament, the BBC reports.

The travel alert also draws attention to the Catholic Church’s World Youth Day, which will bring 2.5 million to Krakow, Poland, between July 26 and July 31. According to the BBC, this is only the third time in 20 years the State Department has listed Europe on one of its travel alerts.

Hollywood's Sequels Are Wearing Thin

Up until recently, the most common descriptor attached to Hollywood sequels was “critic-proof”—a backhanded compliment that describes how films cash out on fan interest and appeal to the lowest common denominator. Even the most generic action movies have spawned improbably prompt follow-ups, from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Olympus Has Fallen. In an age of superhero franchises, studios have doubled down on sequels, considering them the safest possible bets as the average budget of blockbusters swells close to $200 million. But looking at 2016’s box-office results, it’s possible 2016 may be the year the bubble bursts.

On the surface, the opening take this Memorial Day weekend for X-Men: Apocalypse doesn’t sound bad at all—it made an estimated $80 million over four days. But that’s down from the $110 million its predecessor Days of Future Past took on the same weekend in 2014, and not quite the $85 million that X2 made on its three-day weekend some 13 years ago. What did those films have going for them? Good reviews, but also, especially in X2’s case, a marketplace far less crowded with sequels. In 2003, X2 was the only sequel in wide release when it hit theaters. Last weekend, X-Men: Apocalypse was one of six.

It’s a slump that may pass: Hand-wringing about the proliferation of unoriginal moviemaking is as old as Hollywood itself, and of course, one of the most dominant films of 2016 is Captain America: Civil War, the third Captain America movie and the umpteenth installment from the interwoven “Marvel Cinematic Universe.” But increasingly, the Marvel strategy—which has been so readily copied by other studios—appears to be an exception rather than the norm, and with bombs like Zoolander 2 already on 2016’s flop pile, studios are beginning to worry publicly about where things might be going.

With an opening of $80 million, X-Men: Apocalypse is projected to earn around $170 million total at the domestic box office—less than Civil War earned in its opening weekend. Coupled with healthy international grosses, the film will make enough to cover its reported $178 million budget (studios take home about half of what a film grosses), but not enough to really justify the expense of making it. More important, the film’s shoddy buzz won’t do any favors for future franchise entries that are already in the works, especially since big stars like Jennifer Lawrence almost certainly won’t be returning.

Some of the other sequels that are underperforming this year include Alice Through the Looking Glass, which opened to $34 million and likely won’t even clear $100 million total—a number its 2010 predecessor outstripped in its opening weekend. The Huntsman: Winter’s War, a follow-up to the successful Snow White and the Huntsman, is about to exit theaters with a domestic total of $47 million, less than half of its budget. The third film in the young-adult Divergent series, Allegiant, finished at $66 million, down from the first film’s $150 million. Perhaps most prominent is Batman v Superman, which took a seemingly healthy $328 million—but as the $250 million-budgeted flagship film of a giant franchise, with eleven follow-up films already in the pipeline, it was enough of a disappointment to prompt a major shake-up of executives at Warner Bros. to try and right the ship.

All of these films were rated “rotten” on Rotten Tomatoes (unlike Civil War, a critical and commercial hit). The upcoming summer 2016 slate is full of similar red flags, follow-ups that were ordered on the back of limited audience enthusiasm. There’s the aforementioned Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows; Now You See Me 2; The Purge: Election Year; Ice Age: Collision Course—even a follow-up to Jason Statham’s forgotten action flick The Mechanic. There are also less risky bets—a revival of Independence Day, a reboot of Ghostbusters, a new Star Trek film, and a sequel to Pixar’s Finding Nemo—but when you put it all together, there are hardly any weekends when one of these films isn’t among the big new releases.

This isn’t to argue that Hollywood is about to start embracing originality, but rather that the straight-sequel model might have reached its peak. Among the hits of 2016 are The Jungle Book, in which Disney gives a CGI coat of paint to a classic animated work; Deadpool, a superhero movie that succeeded by thumbing its nose at the dull franchise model, indulging in ludicrous violence and meta-commentary; Zootopia, an animated hit that coasted on great word of mouth and strong reviews; and Civil War, which despite following a smoothed-out Marvel formula, did the same. The only obvious thing these movies have in common is that they emphasized storytelling and character development instead of mindlessly following a formula, and they were well-liked by critics as a result. While sequels will always be somewhat inevitable, studios could benefit now by paying attention to what works rather than repeating what doesn’t.

A Former Miss Turkey’s Punishment for Reposting a Poem to Instagram

A Turkish court convicted a former Miss Turkey on Tuesday for reposting a poem that officials say insulted president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The court sentenced Merve Büyüksarac to a 14-month suspended prison term, meaning she won’t serve time unless she repeats the offense within five years.

Büyüksarac was crowned Miss Turkey in 2006, and authorities detained the 27-year-old in 2014 after she posted a poem to her Instagram account. The poem was called “The Master’s Poem,” and some of its lines referenced a high-level corruption case. Lawyers representing Erdogan, who was prime minister at the time, argued her repost amounted to an attack on the Turkish leader’s personal rights.

Büyüksarac’s conviction has increased fears Turkey is becoming more authoritarian, the Associated Press reported:

Since becoming president in 2014, Erdogan has filed close to 2,000 defamation cases under a previously seldom-used law that bars insulting the president. Free speech advocates say the law is being used aggressively to silence and intimidate critics.

The trials have targeted journalists, academics and even schoolchildren. Coupled with a crackdown on opposition media and journalists, the trials have sounded alarms over the erosion of rights and freedoms in a country that was once seen as a model of Muslim democracy.

Thousands of people shared the same post, and Büyüksarac has said she did not post the poem to attack Erdogan.

“I shared it because I found it funny,” Büyüksarac had said.

A journalist accused of insulting Erdogan appeared in court Tuesday as well. Cengiz Candar wrote columns last year that criticized the president; he now faces up to four years in prison.

Republicans Beg Marco Rubio to Keep His Day Job

Marco Rubio finally got his wish. The Republican Party is, at long last, coalescing around his candidacy, begging him to save it from a demoralizing defeat in November.

There’s just one little twist: The unified GOP is backing Rubio for Senate, not president. And that’s a job the 45-year-old Floridian may no longer want.

Rubio is now finishing his first term in the Senate, having decided more than two years ago that if he ran president in 2016, he wouldn’t seek reelection at the same time. That campaign came and went, and Rubio hasn’t changed his mind. But Florida has one of the country’s latest filing deadlines, and the national leadership of the GOP, including just about every Republican in the Senate, has launched an unusual effort to publicly pressure Rubio to enter the race before that deadline finally passes on June 24. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, became the latest to jump on the Rubio train on Tuesday morning. Toward the end of his appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, McConnell brought up a potential Rubio bid unprompted. “We’re doing everything we can to encourage him to run,” he said.

“We’re doing everything we can to encourage him to run.”

The Senate seat isn’t even a consolation prize for Rubio after his failed presidential run. That would be the vice presidency, but he’s already taken himself out of the veepstakes, a decision that seemed obvious given how bitter his rhetorical war with Trump had become. How could a politician run alongside a candidate he repeatedly called “dangerous” and “a con artist”? “He will be best served by a running mate and by surrogates who fully embrace his campaign,” Rubio wrote of Trump earlier this month. “As such, I have never sought, will not seek and do not want to be considered for vice president.” Over the last week, Rubio has made a show of endorsing Trump in the most tepid way possible, barely mentioning the presumptive nominee’s name while explaining that he was always more Never Hillary than Never Trump.

For Republicans, the Rubio-for-Senate push is indicative of a broader effort to save their majority at a time when many in the party doubt they can win the White House. Florida is one of a handful of states that will be crucial in November, and none of the Republicans currently running have the household-name status of Rubio. If Representative Patrick Murphy ends up as the Democratic nominee—which party leaders are desperately hoping for—the seat would be at best a toss-up for Republicans without Rubio in the race.

In the days after he dropped his presidential bid, Rubio reiterated his plans to become exit public life in January, saying he would run neither for reelection to the Senate this year nor governor in 2018. He has held the line on the governor’s race, but his position on the Senate campaign seems to have opened ever so slightly. Rubio told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview broadcast Sunday that if Lieutenant Governor Carlos Lopez-Cantera were not running, he would “maybe” change his mind about the race. Lopez-Cantera is facing four other Republicans in a primary, and polls have shown him trailing Murphy in a hypothetical general-election matchup. Rubio held a fund-raiser for Lopez-Cantera as recently as last week, and he told donors on Friday that he was behind the campaign, the Miami Herald reported. “He’s a good friend, he’s a good candidate, he’ll be a great senator,” Rubio told reporters on Friday. “And so my answer today is no different than it was 24, 48, 72 hours ago.”

Yet if Rubio is sincere about not wanting to keep his Senate seat, the timing of his public reemergence is a bit curious. He laid low for two months after ending his White House bid, but in the last two weeks he has been granting interviews and taken back control of his Twitter handle, responding to reporters, fans, and critics alike. Rubio the Robot is gone, having been replaced by a nimbler, feistier, and even snarkier politician. He’s used the platform to mock speculation about his political future, explain his reluctant embrace of Trump’s candidacy, and stand up to Trump when he has criticized fellow Republicans.

There is little doubt Rubio wants to run for president again, perhaps as soon as 2020 if Trump loses this fall. He told Tapper it was a “safe assumption” that he would run for office again some day. While Trump and Hillary Clinton have shown that candidates don’t need to have a current post to mount a strong campaign for president, staying in the Senate would be an easy way for Rubio to remain in the spotlight and win over voters who might have thought he was too green for the White House this time around. With the vocal support of McConnell, GOP senators, and even Trump, he now has the political cover to change his mind.

So is this all a slyly coordinated campaign by Rubio to gently push Lopez-Cantera out of the race and retain his Senate seat? We’ll know the answer by June 24.

Why One Swiss Town Won’t Accept Refugees

A village in Switzerland would rather pay a fine of close to $290,000 than accept 10 refugees, required under the country’s quota to deal with the 1 million refugees and migrants who have arrived in Europe in recent years.

Residents of Oberwil-Lieli, one of the wealthiest villages in Switzerland, voted this weekend to keep the refugees out. They simply “wouldn’t fit in” at the village of 22,000, which has 300 millionaires, residents said. One resident told The Telegraph:

“We do not want them here, it is as simple as that. We have worked hard all our lives and have a lovely village that we do not want spoiled. We are not suited to take in refugees, they would not fit in here.”

Andreas Glarner, the mayor of the village, told The Telegraph he was concerned with the refugee-screening process, saying he was unsure if they were accepting Syrian refugees or economic migrants from other countries. He further said refugees “are better served by being helped in the camps nearer their homes.”

Switzerland accepted 30,000 refugees between September 2014 and September 2015, according to EU data.

Europe’s Purge of Hate Speech on Social Media

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Microsoft have agreed to purge their sites of hate speech within 24 hours in compliance with a new European Union code of conduct created to combat rising tensions with the refugee crisis and terrorism.

The code of conduct especially goes after accounts used to radicalize young Muslims. As Reuters reports:

As part of the pledge agreed with the European Commission, the web giants will review the majority of valid requests for removal of illegal hate speech in less than 24 hours and remove or disable access to the content if necessary.

They will also strengthen their cooperation with civil society organisations who help flag hateful content when it goes online and promote “counter-narratives” to hate speech.

The companies have long said they comply with the laws in the countries in which they operate—and this isn’t the first time European countries have pressured the tech giants to remove hate speech. Last year, Google, Facebook, and Twitter agreed to a German request and removed hate speech from their websites in 24 hours. And since the middle of 2015, Twitter has suspended 125,000 accounts that were associated with ISIS and promoting terrorism, Reuters reports.

An Investigation Into Wisconsin's 'Candy Land'

Updated May 31 at 4:45 p.m. EST

Investigators released a yearlong investigation on Tuesday that looked into painkiller abuse at Wisconsin’s Tomah Veterans Affairs Medical Center and found “systemic failures” in the way the facility operated.

The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs headed the investigation of the center, which has been called “Candy Land” by some veterans because doctors there were said to easily prescribe painkillers. The 359-page report also said the center’s psychiatrist, David Houlihan, and his nurse practitioner, Deborah Frasher, may also have been using the drugs they offered to veterans. Among veterans, Houlihan, who still has a medical license, was especially well-known for passing out pills.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported:

Johnson said a number of whistleblowers had raised questions about Houlihan and Frasher's personal use of prescription medication. He said the inspectors appear to have observed this problem firsthand, but left it to DeSanctis to follow up.

There was some talk, Johnson said, about conducting drug tests on the two medical professionals.

"We don't think that happened," Johnson said.

Still, Wisconsin's senior senator stopped short of saying he thinks Houlihan should be stripped of his license, saying that is up to the state's medical board. "I'm not a doctor myself, but I hope they read this report," Johnson said.

This report is a follow up to one conducted in 2014 by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, which found that over-prescribing painkillers may have led to three deaths.

The facility has been at the center of political attack ads during the U.S. Senate race between Republican Ron Johnson and Democrat Russ Feingold, who have blamed each other for ignoring the issue during their terms in the U.S. Senate. In 2011 Feingold lost his seat to Johnson, who now heads the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the committee leading the investigation.