Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 205

The Disturbing Appeal of the Punisher

When the Punisher first entered the world of Marvel Comics, in a 1974 issue of The Amazing-Spider Man, he was supposed to be called “Assassin.” The series’s writer, Gerry Conway, envisioned the character as a villain who would eventually become an antihero, but Marvel’s Stan Lee advised against the name, saying it could never be used for a good guy. Lee, at least as he told Alter Ego magazine in a 2005 interview, suggested “The Punisher” instead.

In both that 1974 issue and the second season of Netflix’s Daredevil (which premiered this month), the Punisher is undoubtedly an assassin, gunning down New York mobsters with impunity. But his appeal is all thanks to Stan Lee’s clever name: Here, finally, is a disciplinarian who will set the bad guys straight.

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The Paradox of Daredevil

As played by Jon Bernthal, Daredevil’s Punisher makes his intentions very clear from the start. Initially, when gangsters are first being murdered all over the city, he’s mistaken for a paramilitary organization with exceptional force, but it turns out that he’s just one man, with a lot of weapons and an extraordinarily deadly aim. If the mob has a meeting, he’s there with military-grade assault rifles. He occasionally stores the bodies of his victims on meat hooks. He has no sympathy for Daredevil (Charlie Cox), who’s been fighting organized crime in Hell’s Kitchen for a year now, deriding him as a “half-measure” and shooting him off a roof the first time they meet. Totally uncompromising in his mission, the Punisher is undoubtedly a hero for the Donald Trump era: a take-no-prisoners mercenary whose methods are remarkably simple and disturbingly easy to root for.

Perhaps that’s why the Punisher’s popularity has fluctuated so wildly since 1974. An immediate hit with readers, he graduated from pestering Spider-Man and Daredevil to getting his own comic-book title in 1986, one that sought to soften his murderous tendencies by retroactively explaining that he’d been under the influence of mind-altering drugs. Still, The Punisher was a harbinger of a brutal era in comics, where heroes toting massive machine guns were suddenly the norm and the death’s-head logo emblazoned on his costume became a ubiquitous cultural symbol, a sticker to plaster on a kid’s lunchbox. At the height of his popularity, there were four Punisher comic book titles: The Punisher, The Punisher: War Zone, The Punisher: War Journal, and The Punisher Armory, advertised as featuring “His thoughts! His feelings! His weapons!”

This was a phenomenon of the late ’80s and early ’90s—villains-turned-heroes like DC’s Deadshot, Marvel’s Deadpool, and Image’s Spawn, people who weren’t afraid to kill and derided the caped do-gooders who were. Their bloody excesses fell out of fashion by the late ’90s, and Marvel eventually canceled all of the Punisher titles. But every trend comes back around, if only in a different medium. The long-running success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe owes a lot to a consistently bright, peppy tone across each franchise, and a reliance on quippy, handsome stars like Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Pratt. But there had to be blowback at some point, and the massive success of the ultra-violent Deadpool on the silver screen, followed only weeks later by Bernthal’s Punisher, doesn’t feel like a coincidence.

Ryan Reynolds’s Deadpool at least tells snarky jokes as he chops his enemies into pieces. The Punisher (also known as Frank Castle) isn’t one for humor—that’s the kind of thing that falls by the wayside when you have meat lockers full of hanging bodies, perhaps. But he still manages to dominate season two of Daredevil, especially in the early episodes, when Cox’s Matt Murdock barely feels present in the story at all. After a year of watching him slowly dismantle the empire of the villainous Kingpin, it’s almost jarring to be faced with the Punisher’s approach, which just involves bullets—lots of them, mostly in the face. Like Daredevil, he operates by a strict code of justice, but unlike him, murder is right at the core of it.

It’s not uncommon for villains to be the real stars of superhero movies, especially in sequels, which Daredevil season two amounts to. Just as Heath Ledger’s Joker taught Batman the limits of his philosophy in The Dark Knight, the Punisher exists to undermine Daredevil’s brand of vigilante justice. What difference does beating up gangsters and tossing them in the slammer make in the long run? As the Punisher points out, they’ll be out and back on the street within a week. Meanwhile, Bernthal’s magnetic performance adds to Frank Castle’s appeal, while the series reveals his backstory (he’s a military veteran whose family were gunned down by the mob). As Daredevil embarks on side-adventures fighting dark ninjas with old flame Elektra (Elodie Yung), the Punisher’s arc becomes Daredevil’s most propulsive, engrossing element.

One episode, where Irish mobsters threaten to torture and kill Castle’s dog, reminded me of another recent vigilante, the stone-faced former hitman John Wick (played by Keanu Reeves in the 2014 action film of the same name). There, a Russian gangster kills Wick’s dog, the final gift from his deceased wife, and awakens his murderous rage. The background villains of Daredevil exist in a similar binary form. They’re stupid, one-dimensional fools whose only intent is perpetuating street-level crime (weapons dealing, drugs, prostitution), and it’s easy to cheer for the Punisher as he’s wiping them out. While the show ostensibly wrestles with the morality of killing criminals, offering an extended debate between Daredevil and the Punisher on the merits of both their approaches, the fact that the Punisher is so much more compelling as a hero seems to favor a Trump-like, medieval worldview: Do unto criminals as they would do unto you.

Marvel is reportedly planning a spinoff series for the Punisher, who may also pop up in Daredevil season three. Either way, Bernthal is a breakout star for the brand, largely thanks to the dispassionate way in which his character fires shotgun rounds into people’s faces. It’s indefensible, yet there’s a simplicity to his philosophy that’s hard to deny. Don’t want to die? Don’t be a criminal, and definitely don’t touch the Punisher’s dog.

A Vote on New Zealand’s Flag Identity Crisis

New Zealand’s search for a new flag design took two years, $17 million, and 10,000 options. The idea was to replace the colonial-era flag—the Southern Cross and the Union Jack on a blue background—with something uniquely Kiwi.

After all that work, New Zealand put it to the people. And on Wednesday night, 56 percent (versus 43 percent) of the public voted for the status quo.

New Zealand has voted to retain our current flag. I encourage all NZers to use it, embrace it and, more importantly, be proud of it.

— John Key (@johnkeypm) March 24, 2016

From the reaction, the result was not so much adoration or nostalgia for the old, but a distaste for the new design. That flag, designed by Kyle Lockwood, an architectural technologist, and selected in a referendum, was a mix of old and new.

Flag referendum: Black and blue silver fern design wins the first public vote https://t.co/YKVAEPHdVi pic.twitter.com/j2F3VPDZCj

— Stuff.co.nz News (@NZStuff) December 11, 2015

Some people liked the new design.

“Get rid of the Union Jack and let’s get a Silver Fern up there,” Bill Ralston, a former broadcaster, told the New Zealand Herald.

Another reason many wanted a new flag was its striking resemblance to the flag of trans-Tasman rival Australia.

eGuide Travel / Flickr

But the new design was still not enough. In a column in New Zealand Herald, Francis Lui, a feng shui master, said the new flag had a design heavy on yin, “which wasn’t good, and black on top was a bad omen.”

Paul Moon, a professor of history at Auckland University of Technology, told The Guardian the whole process had been “insipid and unimaginative. And to make matters worse, for all the talk of inclusivity, serious Indigenous input was largely whitewashed. What we were left with was culturally monochromatic and aesthetically neutered design to go up against the incumbent.”

John Key, New Zealand’s prime minister, had pushed for a new design. He’d said the old flag represented the colonial era of the country’s past.

“Naturally, I’m a little bit disappointed,” Key said at a news conference after the vote.

The design process had seen thousands of submissions, from a kiwi bird with green lasers shooting from its eyes to one with the Union Jack stamped on its backside. Last year, 12 judges picked five finalists. In December, voters chose one of Lockwood’s designs to run against the current flag.

“I do think it is time we put a symbol on the flagpole that speaks more of the country we are, rather than where we’ve come from,” Bob Parker, the former Christchurch mayor, told the New Zealand Herald. “But it’s fine. That’s democracy.”

North Carolina Overturns LGBT-Discrimination Bans

DURHAM, N.C.—The North Carolina General Assembly called lawmakers back to Raleigh on Wednesday for a special session. The reason wasn’t a pressing budget crisis, a natural disaster, or court-mandated redistricting. (That happened last month.)

Instead, legislators returned to the state house to overrule a local ordinance in Charlotte banning discrimination against LGBT people. A bill written for that purpose passed Wednesday evening and was signed by Governor Pat McCrory, a Republican. In the House, every Republican and 11 Democrats backed the bill. In the Senate, Democrats walked out when a vote was called, resulting in a 32-0 passage by Republicans. The law not only overturns Charlotte’s ban: It also prevents any local governments from passing their own non-discrimination ordinances, mandates that students in the state’s schools use bathrooms corresponding to the gender on their birth certificate, and prevents cities from enacting minimum wages higher than the state’s.

The push by Republican leaders is the latest front in a battle in the Old North State between liberal-leaning cities and more conservative areas of the state, and it’s also the latest front in a national battle over LGBT rights.

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Charlotte’s updated ordinance was passed in February, after a contentious process. Existing rules prevented businesses from discriminating against customers based on race, age, religion, and gender, and the new ones added gay, lesbian, or transgender customers to the list. The most controversial provision allows transgender people to use the bathroom corresponding to the gender with which they identify. Such provisions are not uncommon—many major cities, as well as smaller ones, have them on the books.

Almost immediately, Republicans in the state legislature vowed to overturn the law, even though the assembly is not in session. North Carolina has become a fierce battleground for culture war issues. Since the GOP captured the legislature in 2010 and the governorship in 2012, there’s been a steady stream of conservative changes, from much stricter voter laws to looser gun laws to overhauling taxes. The legislature even considered a proposal to establish Christianity as the official state religion.

The state is deeply divided between liberal cities and conservative rural areas, and with few prospects to take back control in Raleigh, progressives have looked to local government as a way to enact change. The general assembly has not looked kindly on those efforts. In September, just as the legislative calendar was ending, lawmakers heard a bill that would prevent cities from passing higher minimum-wage laws, establishing affordable-housing mandates, or instituting rules about landlord-tenant relations. It would also have likely banned any LGBT-discrimination bans. Another failed bill would have required state approval for cities wishing to create new bike lanes.

Read Follow-Up Notes


Why did N.C.'s anti-LGBT law pass while others failed?

Although the push to preempt city laws failed as the clock ran out, Charlotte’s new ordinance created a new impetus. McCrory, a former mayor of Charlotte, opposed the law but declined to call a special session, so on Monday lawmakers did so themselves. On Wednesday, members who could make it in time traipsed back to Raleigh to overturn the Charlotte rule. (Some missed the session, saying they did not have time to travel.) What exactly would be in the bill remained a mystery almost up to the moment the session gaveled in—the text was made public just minutes ahead of time.

Once released, it was clear that the legislative language was more sweeping than expected. Not only does it prevent local governments from writing ordinances that allow people to use the bathroom corresponding to the gender with with they identify, it also preempts cities from passing their own nondiscrimination standards, saying the state’s rules—which are more conservative—supersede localities. Local school district would be barred from allowing transgender students to use bathrooms or locker rooms that don’t correspond to the gender listed on their birth certificate. The bill would also ban cities from passing their own minimum-wage laws.

It’s a striking example of how North Carolina’s Republicans have decided that culture-war issues ought to take precedence over traditional conservative preference for local control. But they also pit the North Carolina GOP’s professed desire to improve the business climate in the state against social conservative impulses. Representative Paul Stam, a sponsor of the bill, called it a commerce bill, but many large corporations have stated their opposition to this law and others, concerned that they could interfere with business or hiring.

There were just 30 minutes allocated for public comment in the House during the session. (Committee members only got five minutes to read the bill before voting, though.) There was further time for comment in the Senate.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court made same-sex marriage the law of the land in June 2015, the new front in LGBT rights concerns non-discrimination laws. In one especially noted example, a non-discrimination proposal in Houston was defeated in November, in large part because of controversy over transgender use of bathrooms. The laws pit advocates who say that the laws create ostracism and danger for a transgender population already subject to threats and violence against opponents who maintain that allowing transgender individuals to use the bathroom with which they identify endangers privacy or creates a threat of sexual assault. (Experiences in places with transgender accommodation suggest there’s little risk of sexual assault.)

Two states have passed laws that preempt local non-discrimination provisions. In 2011, Tennessee passed such a law, and Arkansas passed one in 2015—both in responses to cities adopting or considering ordinances, noted Cathryn Oakley, a senior legislative counsel at the Human Rights Campaign, which opposes the laws.

Bills that mandate that students use the bathroom corresponding to their “biological sex” or some similar phrase—tied to what a birth certificate says in the North Carolina case—are more common, but none has entered law. In February, South Dakota lawmakers passed a similar bill, but Republican Governor Dennis Daugaard vetoed it, saying the law did not answer any pressing need and that local authorities were better-equipped to handle the issue than state lawmakers. The student-restroom laws raise other questions, such as how schools might seek to enforce then, and whether enforcement would make schools fall afoul of federal Title IX regulation and thus endanger federal funding. (It would be somewhat ironic if the state’s attempt to preempt cities was itself preempted by federal law.)

The law could have far-reaching implications both statewide and nationally. North Carolina cities will see local ordinances and minimum-wage laws rolled back and have to adjust. There are likely to be legal challenges. The law will be an issue in this year’s gubernatorial election, in which McCrory is set to face Attorney General Roy Cooper, a Democrat who called the bill “shameful.” And as perhaps the first law of its kind in the nation, it will create a template for other conservative legislatures to pursue. That’s unfortunate, suggested Robin Wilson, a law professor at the University of Illinois who helped broker a compromise on a Utah religious-liberty law between LGBT activists and conservative advocates. “For the state to just come behind and wipe that clean without thinking about commonsense solutions—I [don’t] think that’s the point we want to come to,” she said.

Making Football's Most Dangerous Play Safer

The kickoff is both one of the most exciting and most dangerous plays in football. Several times in the course of a game, players line up, hurl themselves downfield as fast they can, and then collide with other players. Kickoffs result in the highest number of injuries and, according to the NFL, injuries and concussions during kickoffs actually rose last year, despite rule changes in previous years.

On Wednesday, NFL team owners, wary of the league’s image crisis about player safety, voted to change a rule that would discourage teams from running the ball out of the end zone on kickoffs. The new rule, which will be tested out for the 2016 season, gives the receiving team the ball at 25-yard-line instead of the 20-yard-line on a touchback.

Back in 2011, as some were proposing banning kickoffs altogether, the league moved the kickoff up to the 35-yard-line from the 30-yard-line to ensure that more kicks would end up in the end zone. While touchbacks did increase, kick returners were still tempted to take the ball out.

“I feel like we get past the 20-yard line no matter what,” Leon Washington, one of the league’s premiere kickoff returners in 2011, said at the time. “We’re going to do business as usual.”

Rather than make it more difficult to return a kick, which is what the 2011 rules did, this new experimental rule incentivizes the receiving team by offering them another five yards. As Barry Petchesky of Deadspin noted, the average kickoff return is about 23 yards.

Nevertheless, players and coaches were vehemently opposed to rule change, which alters a fundamental play of the game. Following the announced change, for example, Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh suggested he might instruct his kicker to aim the kick higher and shorter in order to hem the receiving team in.

We’re going to look at it in a way that we may kick it off at the goal line as high as we can and get the return team at the 12, 15-yard line. It’s going to be really hard for us to say, hey we’re going to surrender the 25-yard line as a kickoff coverage team. That’s really not in the spirit of competition and what we’re trying to accomplish here.

In another controversial rule change, players will now be ejected after receiving two unsportsmanlike conduct penalties. The 15-yard penalties are generally seen as pretty severe on their own, however, the change is meant to dissuade players from taunting and allowing post-play skirmishes to escalate. Following this rule change, a few coaches and players expressed fears that players might try to bait other players in order to draw penalties and ejections.

“You can cheap-shot guys now to get them to retaliate,” Arizona Cardinals coach Bruce Arians said. “So now I got one on you in the first half. I'm damn sure going after you in the second half.”

Echoing that sentiment was Richard Sherman, Seattle’s ever-outspoken cornerback. Sherman took direct aim at NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in his remarks on the new rule:

I think it's foolish. But it sounds like something somebody who's never played the game would say, something that they would suggest, because he doesn't understand. He's just a face. He's just a suit. He's never stepped foot on the field and understood how you can get a personal foul.

Phife Dawg’s Walk on the Wild Side

There are very few canonical moments in hip-hop like the one where Phife Dawg introduces himself over the vibrating bass line on “Bugging Out.” His opening words on the 1991 Tribe Called Quest song—“Yo, microphone check, one, two, what is? / The five-foot assassin with the roughneck business”—are some of the most mimicked lines any MC  has ever uttered, borrowed by Lil Wayne, Eminem, Juelz Santana, The Game, and many more.

Phife, also known as Malik Isaac Taylor, died Wednesday morning at the age of 45. His tenacity as an MC helped mold Tribe’s classic blend of grit and funk with his graceful style and articulation, complementing the nonchalance of his bandmate Q-Tip. Though Taylor stood only 5 foot 3 inches tall, his presence lent the group a kind of raw power that allowed it to reign from Queens, New York, without the aggression of rap groups from across the Hudson River like the Wu-Tang Clan and Public Enemy.

Taylor was born in Brooklyn in November, 1970, but his high school years, and subsequently his Tribe years, were spent in Queens. As a young, aspiring MC of Trinidadian descent, he brought a unique vibrancy to the hard-edged New York style of rap. His humorous lyrics and jocular demeanor helped solidify his place alongside his high school classmates (Q-Tip, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and Jarobi White) when the four formed A Tribe Called Quest in 1985.

Tribe’s first album, People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, which was released in the spring of 1990, received a mild reception at best, despite the fact that it contained some of the group’s most recognizable hits, including “Can I Kick It?” and “Bonita Applebum.” It wasn’t until the group’s second album, The Low End Theory, that Tribe’s youthful and hip Afro-centricism began to change the landscape of ’90s hip-hop. It was during this time that Taylor was also diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

Phife’s tenacity as an MC helped mold Tribe’s classic blend of grit and funk.

Taylor seemed to tackle his illness with the same levity he brought to his music. On Tribe’s third album, Midnight Marauders, he ends a verse with, “When’s the last time you heard a funky diabetic?” With that line, and without holding a press conference, Taylor shared his diagnosis directly with his fans. While he was always open about his condition, he didn’t refer to himself a spokesperson until much later in his life, when he began receiving dialysis treatment three times a week. A two-time kidney-transplant recipient, Taylor used his platform to spread awareness about diabetes, renal failure, and lupus; at the time of his death, he was in the planning phase of creating a charity called Fight for Life to do just that.

For Taylor, diabetes was one of several obstacles he faced as an MC. The fact that Tribe had three albums go platinum undoubtedly put enormous pressure on the group. While there are still questions about precisely why Tribe broke up, Michael Rapaport’s documentary, Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest, does a spectacular job unearthing the subtle divisions that arose within the group, most notably between Q-Tip and Taylor. The 2011 film shows how their contentious relationship eventually led to the separation of the group. Despite Taylor arguably being the most lyrically talented member, Q-Tip’s role as a producer opened up avenues for him to launch his own solo career, while Taylor kept a low profile, releasing only one album on his own—Ventilation: Da LP, which received critical praise but little commercial success.

Still, despite their diverging paths and varying levels of success, Taylor, Q-Tip, and Muhammad eventually reestablished the rapport of their teenage years at reunion concerts over the past decade, recalling a time when the three wore dashikis, Africa pendants, and starter caps.

Nodding to Taylor’s influence as a musician and a representative of New York City, the office for Mayor Bill de Blasio offered its condolences using the hashtag #RIPPhifeDawg.

A Tribe Called Quest blessed our city with beats, rhymes, and life. Saying goodbye to a true Queens legend, #RIPPhifeDawg. #CheckTheRhime

— NYC Mayor's Office (@NYCMayorsOffice) March 23, 2016

Taylor’s career also speaks volumes about hip-hop, an art form built for the moment it was created in. He rapped with the intensity of an musician always trying to make it big, but with the composure of someone who already had. He also represented the lesser-sung artists in the genre, regularly overshadowed by frontmen and bold personalities like Flava Flav, Q-Tip, Rev Run, and Method Man. Taylor embodied the essence of hip-hop, the rambunctiousness of being young, the bravado of being a black man, and the spiritedness of someone used to wielding humor against pain. Deemed the “five-foot assassin,” Taylor mastered the most vicious weapon for any young black teenager at the time: his flow.

The Mystery of Bangladesh's Missing Millions

It wasn’t a conventional heist. No masked robbers with guns. No large sacks of cash. In February, someone––or more likely, a group––tried to steal almost $1 billion from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, out of an account Bangladesh uses for international settlements. The thieves got away with $81 million, and it’s being called one of the biggest heists in history.

For the past two weeks, bank employees, an ambassador, and businessmen, have all testified at a Senate hearing in the Philippines, where the money ended up. Until recently, little was known about who orchestrated the heist. But on Tuesday, investigators in the Philippines filed criminal complaints against two men: a businessman who organizes casino gambling trips and the president of a casino.

It’s unclear how long thieves had planned the heist, but some of the accounts at the Filipino bank used to steal the money were created in May 2015. On the first Friday in February, hackers bombarded the New York Fed with dozens of requests to transfer nearly $1 billion to accounts across the world. The Bangladeshi weekend begins on Friday––as does much of the Muslim world’s––so it wasn’t until Sunday, when employees at the Bangladesh Bank began their workweek, that they saw messages from the Fed asking to confirm some of the enormous transfers. The Bangladesh Bank’s messaging system was reportedly broken, so employees tried to reach the Fed by fax and email. But it was still the weekend in the U.S., so it was only on Monday that the true scale of the heist became clear.

In all, the thieves sent 35 transfer requests; just four—totaling $81 million—went through. (Deutsche Bank froze a fifth request for $20 million in Sri Lanka because of a spelling error.) Two weeks ago, the Filipino Senate panel learned that the funds had made their way into four accounts at the Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation (RCBC), a Filipino bank.

The Philippines has some of the strictest bank-secrecy laws in the world, and its casinos are lightly regulated. This effectively means a casino there has no obligation to report––and is even protected from reporting––suspicious transactions, like, say, someone dumping tens of millions of dollars into an account and transferring those funds into gambling chips, a move that would conceal the source of the cash.

When the banks in the Philippines opened after the weekend, an attorney for RCBC said, Maia Santos Deguito, an RCBC branch manager in Makati, the financial capital, ignored an alert from the Bangladesh Bank to freeze the four accounts into which the money had been transferred. Instead, the lawyers said, Deguito transferred funds to RCBC accounts owned by a businessman named William Go. She then sent the money through a currency-exchange company called Philrem Service Corporation to the casinos.

Go has denied owning the accounts through which the money was consolidated, or to playing any role in the heist. A representative of Philrem told the Senate panel that Deguito instructed the company to transfer the money to two casinos, as well as to an account owned by a businessman named Weikang Xu.

Xu reporedly received $30 million; $29 million passed to a casino resort called Solarie. The rest landed in yet another casino, this one owned by Eastern Hawaii Leisure Company Limited. The president of that company, a man named Kam Sin Wong, who also goes by Kim Wong, was described by Filipino Senator Sergio Osmeña III as “a missing link” in the story.

“There is an orchestrator here, a mastermind, and right now, it looks like it’s Kim Wong,” Osmeña told reporters.

The head of Bangladesh’s central bank, Atiur Rahman, kept it all quiet for a month. When he reached out to the Anti-Money Laundering Council, word got out. The Bangladesh Bank blamed the Fed for transferring the money (and by Wednesday, it looked like it might sue). The Fed said all the requests were legitimate, that its system wasn’t compromised, and that whoever made the requests had all the right authentication protocols. Rahman resigned from the Bangladesh Bank last week. Fazle Kabir, the former finance secretary, took over that position on Sunday.

Reuters reported that experts at a Silicon Valley-based investigative company believe whoever pulled off the heist “had deep knowledge of the Bangladeshi institution’s internal workings, likely gained by spying on bank workers.” In other words, an inside job. And much of last couple week’s Senate hearing in the Philippines has centered on Deguito, the RCBC branch manager.

The bank’s cameras were down, but her boss, Romualdo Agarrado, testified he saw her withdraw more than $400,000 (her alleged cut of the money), stash it in a paper bag, and carry it to her car. Go, the businessman, said Deguito met him at a restaurant, confessed, and offered him money to help cover her tracks.

“Upon seating, she told me, ‘Sir, I’m sorry. I did something wrong to you. I opened an account for you at RCBC,’” Go testified, according to the Philippine Daily Inquirer. She then allegedly offered Go money to help cover up the heist. He said he declined the offer.  

Deguito has offered another version of the story: that bank executives helped plan and direct the heist, and that Go was in on it. A former assistant manager at RCBC testified last Thursday that, indeed, there had been a cover up. Deguito was just the patsy.

“Almost all of Mr. Agarrado’s statements in the Senate hearing yesterday were lies,” Angela Torres, the former assistant manager, said, according to the Philippine Daily Inquirer. “The cash was not put in a paper bag, instead it was placed in a box and was loaded to William Go’s Lexus.”

Go had personally opened the account used to transfer the money, Torres said, and he signed the withdrawal slip for the cut she says was taken to his car.

This view—that Deguito is taking the fall for a far larger operation—has other supporters, among them John Gomes, the Bangladeshi ambassador to the Philippines.

“I feel, as an outsider, there was a coverup,” Gomes testified, adding that when senators pushed RCBC executives, they invoked the country’s bank-secrecy act. Asked if he thought Deguito could have done it alone, Gomes said, “I don’t think so. I don’t believe a manager of any bank in the world could handle millions of dollars which suddenly appeared in some accounts.”

Even before the hearings, the Philippine Daily Inquirer had obtained internal statements that, if true, might damn Go and RCBC executives. On March 9, the paper reported:

A representative of the bank manager—who has since been suspended as part of the bank’s internal investigation—showed the Inquirer documents alleging that the transactions had the imprimatur of top bank officials ever since the manager was ordered to open five bank accounts as early as May 2015.

To support the opening of these bank accounts, the RCBC branch manager was provided with five identification documents or ID cards, all of which were determined to carry fictitious identities after the controversy broke out.

“The branch manager is now willing to speak out because she’s afraid the bank will pin it all on her,” a representative of the official told the Inquirer on late Monday. “But, in fact, she was ordered to facilitate these transactions. You can’t do anything this big without higher-ups not knowing.”

In other words, there were more people involved. On Tuesday, local investigators at Philippines’s anti-money-laundering agency filed criminal complaints against both Xu and Wong, alleging they’d both received some of the stolen money. The Wall Street Journal reported that Wong’s lawyer said he intended to testify at the Senate hearings in the Philippines, but he was out of the country. And while this latest development may have provided another glimpse into how the money was taken, there seems to be little chance Bangladesh will recoup it.

“That’s where the money trail ends,” Julia Bacay-Abad, the executive director of the Philippine Anti-Money Laundering Council, told the Nikkei Asian Review.

The heist has led many Filipino officials and executives to demand the country lift its bank and casino-secrecy laws. And as these Internet bank heists happen again, and again, and again, it reminds us the Internet can be an anarchic place where an individual––even an entire country––can be held up with just a few keystrokes.

The Fight Against Female Genital Mutilation in Somalia

Somali Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke is joining a campaign to end female genital mutilation (FGM) in Somalia.

Sharmarke signed an online petition proposing a federal ban of the long-standing practice that 98 percent of Somali women undergo. Ifrah Ahmed, an anti-FGM activist, who herself underwent the procedure as a child, told the BBC she persuaded Sharmarke to sign the petition. Sahra Samatar, Somalia’s minister of women and human rights, said Sharmarke’s support is a “huge boost” to the campaign for a national anti-FGM legislation.

The online campaign, with more than 1.2 million supporters, comes after Puntland, a region in northeast Somalia, instituted a comprehensive ban on the procedure. The  campaign urges the national government to follow the precedent of “adopting [Puntland’s] progressive legislation.”

The Somali parliament has never passed a bill barring FGM, though the constitution forbids the practice. Ahmed told RFI that Cabinet support for the measure would give it a boost in Parliament.

Ahmed has been campaigning for politicians’ support for years. She left Somalia for Ireland at age 17 and in 2014, The Irish Times reported, she spoke with Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud while campaigning in Brussels.

“We’re doing our level best. We are only getting finger-pointing and criticism from the outside world,” Mohamoud told her. “With the meager resources we have, we are doing our best.”

The campaigners are optimistic in their message.

“If Somalia enacts a full ban law now, and follows with massive public education campaigns, it could become the champion to lead the world to zero tolerance,” they say on the campaign page.  

Ahmed and other anti-FGM activists recognize their proposed political shift must be followed by a cultural one in order for legislation to be effective. She said, according to the BBC, an educational campaign and “willingness to enforce the legislation” were necessary.

Brussels Attacks: The Latest

Updated on March 23 at 3:48 p.m. ET

Here’s what we know so far on Wednesday:

—The Belgian federal prosecutor has identified two of the men who carried out Tuesday’s attacks in Brussels. A third suspect is still on the run, the prosecutor said.

—The first victims of the attacks have been identified. Other names are emerging.

—Belgium held a minute of silence at noon and is marking three days of mourning.

—The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks that killed at least 32 people and wounded more than 230 others.  

The Belgian federal prosecutor said Wednesday two brothers carried out Tuesday’s suicide attacks on Brussels Airport and the city’s subway system, and a third suspect was on the run.  

At a news conference, Frederic Van Leeuw, the Belgian federal prosecutor, identified Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, 30, as one of the men responsible for the attack at Zaventem airport. El-Bakraoui’s brother Khalid el-Bakraoui, 27, carried out the attack on the subway train at Maelbeek station, he said.

Van Leeuw said the second suicide bomber at the airport hadn’t been identified. RTBF, the Belgian state broadcaster, had earlier reported that the brothers had carried out the airport attack. RTBF also reported the brothers were known to police and authorities had been searching for the el-Bakraouis since a raid on March 15 on an apartment in Brussels’s Forest district.

A third attacker, whose photograph was released Tuesday, is still on the run, Van Leeuw said. He did not identify him, but several Belgian news reports, citing anonymous sources, are naming him.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, at a news conference in Ankara with his Romanian counterpart, said Wednesday that Turkey had deported one of the Brussels attackers to Belgium last year and had warned the government he was a foreign fighter. The Belgians proceeded to release the man, he said.

“One of the perpetrators of the Brussels attack is a person whom we detained in June 2015 in [the southeastern province of] Gaziantep and deported,” Erdoğan said. “We informed the Brussels Embassy of the deportation process of the attacker with a note on July 14, 2015. However, the Belgians released the attacker despite his deportation.”

But The Associated Press, citing a Turkish government official, reported that the attacker was deported to the Netherlands—not Belgium. The news service, and others, added that Erdogan was referring to Ibrahim el-Bakraoui.

The attackers struck the airport and the city’s subway system, killing at least 32 people and wounded more than 230 others. Belgium, which is holding three days of mourning for the victims of Tuesday’s attack, marked a moment of silence at noon local time (7 a.m. ET).

VIDEO - Brussels terror attacks: Minute of silence held to honor attack victims https://t.co/ciiLLb0CgF pic.twitter.com/fXkyi8D6IB

— FRANCE 24 English (@France24_en) March 23, 2016

On Tuesday, Van Leeuw said raids were being conducted across Belgium in connection with the attacks. Speaking at the same news conference, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel said the blasts were an attack on freedom, comparing Brussels to Paris and, before it, London and Madrid.

“It is a common fight,” Michel said. “It is a fight without borders.”

Speaking to the nation Tuesday on television, King Philippe said Belgians would “continue to work together calmly, surely, and with dignity.”

“We must continue to trust ourselves,” he said. “This is our strength.”

There were two explosions at Zaventem airport at about 8 a.m. local time (3 a.m. ET) Tuesday near the check-in desks at the departure terminal. Lodewijk De Witte, the provincial governor of Brabant Flanders, said security services had found and detonated a third bomb at the airport. At least 12 people were killed here, the Belgian government’s Crisis Center said.

Then, at 9 a.m., during rush hour, a blast hit a train at Maelbeek station, which is near the main European Union buildings. The crisis center said 20 people were killed here and 130 wounded.

On Wednesday, Van Leeuw put the toll as 32 dead and 270 injured. Other news organizations are reporting other tolls based on quotes from Belgian officials. All the numbers are provisional and are likely to increase.  

ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack—in Arabic, English, and French—through its Amaq News Agency, according to the SITE intelligence group and others who monitor terrorist activity.  

In response to the attacks, Zaventem airport was closed—and will remain closed until Saturday. The city’s main train stations have reopened Wednesday amid tight security.

Long lines for pre-security check earlier today at #Brussels south (Charleroi). It worked well. #BrusselsAttacks pic.twitter.com/b8XjQSV6JM

— Dimitris Dimitriadis (@ddimitriadis) March 23, 2016

Metro was partially operating but was scheduled to close from 7 p.m. onward.

Belgium raised its terror-threat level from three to four, the maximum level. Police were searching for suspects in the Schaerbeek district, and Van Leeuw said a nail bomb, an Islamic State flag, and some chemicals had been recovered. On Wednesday, he said the attackers had traveled to the airport by taxi from Schaerbeek.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will visit Brussels on Friday to discuss the attacks and offer his condolences. President Obama, speaking in Argentina, said defeating ISIS was his top priority.

“My top priority is to defeat ISIL and to eliminate the scourge of this barbaric terrorism that’s been taking place around the world,” Obama said.

He added: “This is difficult work. It’s not because we don’t have the best and the brightest working on it, it’s not because we are not taking the threat seriously, it is because it’s challenging to find and identify very small groups of people who are willing to die themselves and can walk into a crowd and detonate a bomb.”

Tuesday’s attacks come four days after the capture of Salah Abdeslam, the accused logistical planner of the Paris attacks, in Brussels. Belgium’s capital has been on edge since the November 15 attack that killed 130 people in Paris, an operation organized by the Islamic State. Many of the attackers were Belgian nationals or residents. As my colleague David Graham has previously noted, Belgium has become Europe’s hub for Islamist radicals. Belgian officials warned their country’s citizens of a serious, imminent threat of terrorism, and later cancelled the New Year’s Eve fireworks in the capital. Those fears now appear realized—though Van Leeuw said it was too early to link the two attacks.

Still, as Thomas Joscelyn, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and senior editor of The Long War Journal, told Fox News Tuesday morning: “If you talk to any Belgian counterterrorism or intelligence officials, no one—no one—is surprised by this,” he said. “You can go all the way back to 2014 to Belgian authorities saying this was coming. They’ve launched a series of counterterrorism raids because they know that known terrorists are operating on their spoil. This is the least surprising outcome that you could see.”

Victims of the Attack

Meanwhile, the first victims of the attacks were publicly identified.

Adelma Tapia Ruiz, a Peruvian-born woman who lived in Brussels with her Belgian husband and their twin 3-year-old girls, was among those killed. Her brother in Peru confirmed Ruiz’s death.  

Saint Louis University in Brussels said Leopold Hecht, one of its students, was killed.

Cher(e)s Etudiant(e)s,J’ai l’immense tristesse de vous informer du décès de Léopold HECHT, étudiant du deuxième bloc...

Posted by Université Saint-Louis - Bruxelles on Wednesday, March 23, 2016

A British man named David Dixon who was thought to have been at Maelbeek during the attacks is still missing. His friend, Simon Hartley-Jones, told the BBC the man’s partner, Charlotte Sutcliffe, is “desperately trying to find out where he is and make contact with him.”

The friends and family of Sascha and Alexander Pinczowski said they were also looking for the brother and sister from New York who were traveling to Belgium. Once they’d landed in Brussels, the siblings had called their family in the U.S. to let them know they’d arrived safely. Since that call, no one has heard from them, according to friends and family who’ve posted on Facebook.

A married American couple were also still missing, according to local reports, and from a tweet from the mayor of Lexington, Kentucky. WVLT reported that for the last two years Stephanie and Justin Shults had lived in Brussels, working as accountants. Stephanie’s mother had come to visit, and around the time of the attack they’d dropped her off at the airport.

India’s external affairs minister, Sushma Swaraj, confirmed that an Indian national named Raghavendra Ganeshan was among the missing. She tweeted that Ganeshan, who worked for Infosys, the India-based IT firm, spoke with his mother an hour before the attack, but no that one has heard from his since.

American Airstrikes Become Deadlier

An American airstrike on an al-Qaeda training camp in southern Yemen killed at least 50 fighters on Tuesday, according to the Pentagon and local reports. “The attack took place as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) recruits queued for dinner at the camp, west of the port city of Mukalla on Yemen’s south coast,” Reuters reported.

The episode was the latest large-scale attack in a series that, over the past month, has included the bombing of an al-Shabaab training facility in Somalia, which killed 150 people, and strikes against an Islamic State camp in Libya, which killed more than 40 people, including two Serbian hostages.

Writing in The Guardian, Spencer Ackerman observes a potential divergence of policy in play. Conceding that American counterterrorism efforts tend not to be accompanied by public remark, he explains that “years’ worth of outside analysis has suggested that the strikes typically kill fewer than a dozen fighters at once—either by design or due to the relatively small Hellfire missile carried by US drones.”

So what does this increase in more lethal attacks signify? Commenting on Tuesday’s strikes, Gregory Johnsen, an expert on Yemen, noted on Twitter that the seizing of territory by al-Qaeda in Yemen, which is in the midst of a bloody civil war, is what makes it an easier target. The same could easily be said for ISIS in Libya, which has been doubling its ranks and gaining new territory in recent months.

Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that the scaling up of American attacks would come without an ideological policy component. As Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told The Guardian, “The Somalia and Yemen strikes suggest that the White House has authorized a significant opening of the aperture to target gatherings of suspected terror groups, rather than named individuals who pose imminent threats.”

For those already critical of American drone strikes and counterterrorism efforts, this is unlikely to be welcome news.

Nora Ephron: Prophet of Privacy

“When you slip on a banana peel,” Nora Ephron liked to say, “people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh.”

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Nora Ephron's Edge

This was a guiding principle of her life: power, via sharing. Control, via opening up. You tell the story, so the story doesn’t tell you. Banana-peel logic informs another Ephronism, the one that gives its name to the documentary about Ephron’s life that is currently airing on HBO: “Everything is copy.” The line comes from Ephron’s mother, who—like pretty much everyone else in her family, including both of her parents, all three of her sisters, all three of her husbands, and one of her two sons—was also a professional writer. And it’s a fitting motto for Ephron, who, on top of everything else she accomplished, anticipated the searing, first-person confessional that would become one of the defining modes of Internet writing.

“Writers are cannibals,” Ephron told Charlie Rose in a long-ago interview. “They really are. They are predators, and if you are friends with them, and if you say anything funny at dinner, or if anything good happens to you, you are in big trouble.”

Everything Is Copy was created by Ephron’s son, Jacob Bernstein (the son who is a professional journalist) as an act of tribute, and questioning, and sense-making. And the documentary is—as Ephron herself was, it suggests—witty and generous and occasionally brutal in its honesty. Through interviews with Ephron’s many famous friends and colleagues (Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, Steven Spielberg, Gay Talese, Rosie O’Donnell, Meg Ryan, Mike Nichols, and on and on) Bernstein presents his mother as a writer who lived out loud, insistently. The film is composed of the two layers that most good writing involves, somehow: declaration and exploration, with the one animating the other.

She wrote about fake orgasms, and fake breasts, and the various indignities heaped upon women for the crime of failing to die young.

The “declaration” aspect is clear enough: Everything Is Copy presents the many ways in which Ephron made good on her word, through words. She relied, professionally and personally, on the alchemy of the anecdote. She transformed her experiences—the good and especially the bad, the big and especially the small—into stories. Through her early essays in Esquire, through her novel, through her later essays and plays and screenplays, she wrote about family, and friendship, and motherhood, and womanhood. She grieved her divorce from Carl Bernstein, and in some sense got revenge for it (she’d caught him cheating on her while she was pregnant with their second son) by writing a thinly veiled novel about the experience. She wrote about finding love again. She wrote about being betrayed by our culture’s optimism about romance; she wrote about being redeemed by it. She wrote about fake orgasms, and fake breasts, and the various indignities heaped upon women for the crime of failing to die young. She wrote about her neck. She wrote about her sons. She wrote about pie.

Ephron was the consummate “over-sharer,” using her copious capacity for honesty—“I feel like her allegiance to language was sometimes stronger than her allegiance to someone’s feelings,” Meg Ryan puts it—to exert control over others, and over herself. (Bernstein postulates that his mother’s “control freak” tendencies might have had to do with the fact that both of her parents became, late in their lives, alcoholics: She sought the control that their own lives failed to afford.)

But all of that is the “declaration”: She told the stories so the stories wouldn’t tell her. The “exploration,” though, is more interesting. And it has to do with the one time in Ephron’s life when she violated her own edict: her refusal to write about, and indeed even to talk about, the illness that would, in 2012, take her life. That she was sick—during the filming of Julie & Julia, during the production of the Ephron-written and Tom Hanks-starring Broadway play Lucky Guy—was a secret she kept from all but her closest family members. (“It was very hard,” Meryl Streep, who shot Julie & Julia with Ephron during her illness, tells Bernstein of being kept in the dark. “Because it was an ambush.”)

So: Why?, Bernstein—on behalf of Ephron’s family and friends and fans—asks in the film. Why did the woman who spent her life so ardently and wittily refusing to acknowledge the “T” in “TMI” finally decide to clam up? Why did this most public of people end her life so fiercely guarding her privacy?

That she kept her own secret for so long was just one more way that she translated her personal experience into a broader cultural truth.

The answer, Bernstein postulates, comes back to the banana peel: Ephron’s need to control the story. Coupled with, perhaps, her recognition that “control,” life being what it is, is largely a lie. “I think at the end of my mom’s life she believed that everything is not copy,” Bernstein concludes—“that the things you want to keep are not copy, that the people you love are not copy, that what is copy is the stuff you’ve lost, the stuff you’re willing to give away, the things that have been taken from you.”

In that sense, for someone who saw storytelling not just as a vehicle of human connection, but of control, it follows that the one thing that so cruelly deprives a person of both—death—would be the exception that proves the rule. “Once she became ill,” Bernstein writes, “the means of controlling the story became to make it not exist.”

This was another way, in the end, that Ephron anticipated the culture of the moment—one that embraces radical transparency, aided by social media, but that also recognizes limitations to that transparency. We live in a world—all that posting and Instagramming and Snapping and sexting—that would seem to believe, like Ephron, that everything is copy. And yet it’s a world that also acknowledges limits to that belief. Some things can’t be ‘grammed. Some things are bigger than a status update.

Everything Is Copy, its title notwithstanding, recognizes that fact. It advocates, in the end, for strategic privacy: for acts and experiences that are made all the more meaningful because they are not shared—except, perhaps, with those who are closest to us. That Ephron kept her biggest secret for so long was one more way in which she translated her personal experience into a broader cultural truth. “She’s the one who said, ‘There is no privacy,’” Meryl Streep recalls in the film, still grappling with the shock of Ephron’s death. “‘Forget privacy, it’s gone.’ And this is the most fascinating thing in the world to me, because she achieved a private act in a world where the most superficial parts of the most intimate acts are everywhere.”

The overarching irony of the film, of course, is that it is Ephron’s son who is reversing that intimacy, who is exposing his mother’s long-guarded secret—guided, it seems, by the very instinct his mother gave to him, and that her mother gave to her. Ephron ceded the control to her son, not just because because death robbed her of the ability to say otherwise, but because she seems to have recognized, in the end, the other power that comes from sharing: love. Ephron spent her life slipping on banana peels, maybe, but she also spent much of it loving her son. Now, he is turning that love into stories. And weaving those stories into her legacy.