Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 225

Obama’s Last Guantanamo Pitch to Congress

Updated on February 23 at 11:26 a.m. EST

In his first week as president, Barack Obama ordered his new administration to close Guantanamo Bay, the prison whose operation he once described as a “a sad chapter in history.” Now, with a few months left in office, Obama is making one of his final attempts to convince Congress to close the book on the facility for good.

“For many years, it’s been clear that the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay does not advance our national security,” Obama said Tuesday in remarks from the White House. “It undermines it.”

Obama on Tuesday sent Congress a plan outlining the closure of the prison in Cuba, established in January 2002 to house suspected foreign terrorists detained in the war on terrorism. According to a New York Times database, there are 91 detainees remaining at Guantanamo. Of the roughly 780 people who have been detained there, 680 have been returned to their home countries or resettled in countries that were willing to take them—in all, 57 nations. The majority have gone to Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. Last month, the prisoner population dipped below 100 for the first time since the facility opened.

Obama said he wants that number to reach 60 or fewer in the coming months. He proposed transferring detainees to a detention site in the United States, but did not name a particular location.

Current law prohibits the use of government funds to transfer prisoners to American soil and the construction of facilities to house them, and the Republican-controlled Congress has shown no interest in relenting on the matter. While Obama has an ally in former presidential rival Senator John McCain, who has long called for the closure of Guantanamo, congressional leaders have vowed to keep the prison open. Days after taking office last fall, House Speaker Paul Ryan said Guantanamo prisoners should remain there, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell last month called Guantanamo “the perfect place for terrorists.”​ The most recent polling on public sentiment on Guantanamo, from 2014, shows most Americans don’t want the prison to close.

The administration has hoped that as the prisoner population dwindles, the annual cost to taxpayers of maintaining a facility built to house hundreds—which in 2013, was $454 million—would convince lawmakers that keeping it open isn’t worth it. Indeed, the remaining prisoners at Guantanamo are outnumbered by the 2,000 or so guards and prison staff at the facility, according to The Miami Herald. Obama’s proposal calls for housing detainees in a U.S. facility that would require up to $475 million in construction costs and would save as much as $180 million per year in operating costs, according to the Associated Press.

Obama said Tuesday that for the American public, “the notion of having terrorists held in the United States rather than in some distant place can be scary.” But, he said, “we're already holding a bunch of really dangerous terrorists here in the United States … we’ve managed it just fine.” Federal prisons currently hold several hundred inmates convicted of domestic and international terrorism, including Richard Reid, the convicted shoe bomber, and Faisal Shahzad, the convicted Times Square plotter.

The plan met a provision in the current National Defense Authorization Act, approved in November, which directed the administration to send lawmakers within 90 days a “comprehensive strategy” for holding current and future detainees. The defense legislation also imposed new restrictions on transfers to countries whose security situations are considered unstable to accept former suspected terrorists, including Libya, Syria, Yemen and Somalia.

Of the prisoners remaining at Guantanamo, 35 have been cleared for release, deemed to no longer be a threat to national security. Obama said his administration will accelerate the review process for the others, and improve the military commissions system, the legal process by which 10 detainees are currently being tried.

Last year, the Pentagon scouted federal prisons in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and Charleston, South Carolina, as well as state and federal facilities in Florence, Colorado, as potential sites to house detainees.

To his Republican critics, Obama pointed that more than 500 detainees were removed from Guantanamo under the previous administration. In 2006, President George W. Bush said he wanted to close the facility.

Mac Thornberry, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, has said his panel would hold a hearing on a closure plan. Some Republican lawmakers feel Obama will act unilaterally to close the prison in the coming months as the president enters legacy mode, trying to check off the boxes on his list of campaign promises. The administration has taken minimal pains to assuage those concerns, and Obama may have stoked them Tuesday when he vowed to keep making his case to Congress.

“The fact that I’m no longer running, Joe [Biden] is no longer running, we’re not on the ballot—it gives us the capacity to not have to worry about the politics,” he said.

But legacy mode is a busy season. The closure plan faces stiff competition for attention with the debate over the nomination of a Supreme Court justice and the presidential race, where Republican frontrunners have suggested adding prisoners to Guantanamo, not emptying it.

Kesha's Vital Public Relations Victory

In the legal complaint the singer Kesha filed against Dr. Luke for abuse and harassment in October 2014, there’s a passage that alleges the music producer born Lukasz Gottwald at one point “took her down to the beach alone to ‘have a talk’ with her.” Gottwald, the lawsuit says, then “threatened that if she ever mentioned the rape to anyone, he would shut her career down, take away all her publishing and recording rights, and otherwise destroy not only her life but her entire family’s lives as well.”

Kesha’s publishing and recording rights are, in fact, under contention now that she has accused Gottwald—the prolific hitmaker who signed her in 2005, when she was 18—of a pattern of sexual assault and mental abuse. But, despite a court setback, perhaps the events of the past 72 hours eased some concerns about her long-term prospects for a career in the public eye. A legal defeat on Friday has generated an outpouring of support from high-profile members of the music industry, whose statements, taken together, suggest that at the very least Kesha won’t emerge from this saga as a pariah among her peers.

After a New York judge denied Kesha’s lawyer’s motion for a preliminary injunction that would release her from terms of her contract with Gottwald’s label Kemosabe Records, the image of Kesha sobbing in the courtroom rocketed around the Internet. A #FreeKesha hashtag that predated even this lawsuit—fans have long suspected an unhealthy relationship between Kesha and Gottwald—blew up on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere. Jack Antonoff, the rock musician who produced parts of Taylor Swift’s 1989, publicly offered to work with Kesha, contracts be damned. Swift herself sent $250,000 to help out with Kesha’s expenses. But the messages that seemed the most potent came from people who had worked with Gottwald, including Kelly Clarkson, who tweeted that she was saying nothing about the producer because she had nothing nice to say about him. In response, Gottwald, for the first time, has personally commented on the case, asserting his innocence on Twitter and reminding the public that he’s been charged with no crimes at all.

Positive Instagram posts and hefty checks, of course, can’t reverse the psychological damage that Kesha says she sustained while working for Gottwald. But the #FreeKesha movement highlights just how much Kesha is like other professed victims of abuse, and how much she isn’t. Many people who accuse powerful mentors of misconduct fear isolation and shunning. Most of those people, though, can’t rely on the support of a fanbase or of sympathetic celebrity entertainers. Neither are they called a liar on quite as grand a scale as Kesha has been.

* * *

The PR avalanche has, perhaps, been outsized in comparison to the court action that prompted it. Kesha’s case against Gottwald is not yet decided. The putative matter at hand is over whether Kesha, who is under contract to create albums with Gottwald, can release music under her name without being forced to work with him. The recent injunction motion from her lawyer, Mark Geragos, argued that Kesha’s career was sustaining such terrible harm with each passing day, and that her claims were so obviously likely to prevail once they were heard in trial, that the judge should just go ahead and exempt her from her contract now. The judge, Shirley Werner Kornreich, did not agree, calling the request “extraordinary.”

Kornreich also pointed out an important but confusing aspect of the dispute: Kemosabe’s parent company Sony has apparently offered to let Kesha fulfill her contract without the direct involvement of Dr. Luke. Previous versions of her record deal specified that some songs on each of her album must be produced by him, but statements from Sony and Luke’s representatives give the appearance that either those provisions are no longer in place or would not be enforced. Kornreich said that this fact “decimates” Kesha’s argument that she’s being railroaded into a career stalemate. On Monday, a statement from Luke’s lawyer doubled down: “Kesha is already ‘free’ to record and release music without working with Dr. Luke as a producer if she doesn’t want to. Any claim that she isn’t ‘free’ is a myth.”

Kesha wants the exploitation that she alleges to stop not only on a personal level, but a financial one.

The truth is that Kesha’s case is not merely about being freed from having to make music with Dr. Luke. It’s from having to make music that would be put out under an imprint that Luke founded, that remains affiliated with him, and that would likely cut him a check off any profits that future Kesha albums make. If Sony has offered to allow Kesha to record under a different imprint, that hasn’t been made clear to the public. So as far as I can tell—Geragos hasn’t returned my calls as of this writing—Kesha’s argument is that the exploitation that allegedly happened to her should stop not only on a personal level, but a financial one.

The other interpretation of the matter would be the one that Gottwald’s lawyers put forward: That the allegations are being leveled to ensure a more “lucrative” arrangement for Kesha than the five-album contract she signed years ago (she has three albums to go). Previous attempts to break out of long-term record deals have included Prince’s early-’90s name change and TLC’s bankruptcy filing. Accusing a high-profile producer of rape simply for financial reasons, though, would be a horrifying ploy of a whole other level.

In court on Friday, Geragos reportedly dissed Sony’s offer for Kesha to record sans Luke. He said it was an “illusory promise,” which means it’s one that the courts can’t enforce. He also said that Sony could not be trusted to promote any album created without Luke. No one outside of Sony knows whether that’s right—whether the company would sabotage its own artist out of spite. But the public outpouring for Kesha right now suggests that Sony’s treatment of her would be scrutinized if she released another album with the company, and that there would be wide interest in her music regardless of how it’s marketed.

In fact, many people have said they’re surprised Sony hasn’t yet decided to let Kesha walk, given the optics. “There is probably a number in which Sony—particularly if it’s sensitive to the potential backlash of growing support for Kesha on social media—would strongly consider releasing Kesha,” the attorney James Sammataro told Billboard. It may turn out the publicity around this case and the dynamics it entails—a young woman going against a powerful man and powerful company in an industry where powerful men and companies have routinely exploited young woman—give Kesha a degree of power, too.

A Potential Cease-Fire in Syria

The United States and Russia have agreed to terms for a cease-fire in Syria, marking the second formal attempt this month by world powers to halt the violence of Syria’s civil war.

The two countries announced in a joint statement Monday that they had reached a deal for a “cessation of hostilities” among the various forces in the conflict, which has resulted in the deaths of more than 200,000 people since 2011. The agreement requires all sides involved to accept the terms no later than Friday at noon, Damascus time.

“The United States and the Russian Federation together call upon all Syrian parties, regional states, and others in the international community to support the immediate cessation of violence and bloodshed in Syria,” the statement said.

President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke by phone Monday about the agreement, the White House said.

The U.S. and Russia chair the International Syria Support Group, a 17-member organization that includes the European Union and the Arab League. The two nations say they want a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, but their support of opposing sides has stymied even the most basic of peace negotiations for months. The Americans want Syrian President Bashar al-Assad removed from power and have trained and equipped opposition militias fighting against his government, while the Russians have been bombing rebels on Assad’s behalf and supporting government troops with air power.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said in an interview with Spain’s El Pais published Sunday he is “definitely” prepared to recognize a ceasefire brokered by Washington and Moscow. But Assad and other Syrian government officials have repeatedly vowed to recapture territory from rebels, and that effort in the northern province of Aleppo has killed hundreds of civilians this month.

The statement said the U.S. and Russia will exchange information regarding territory and who controls what in Syria, as well as work together to prevent groups party to the cease-fire from being attacked by the Russian military and the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State.

The latest agreement does not apply to the fight against the extremist Islamic State group, which both countries are targeting with airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. It does not call for the U.S. or Russia to end their air campaigns against the group and others in the region that are designated by the United Nations as terrorist organizations. Over the weekend, Islamic State bombs killed more than 150 people in Syrian city of Homs and in the suburbs of Damascus.

While the agreement requires the various factions in the conflict to effectively cease all attacks against each other, diplomats have stopped short of labeling it a cease-fire. Kerry referred to this month’s first and ultimately unsuccessful attempt at halting violence as not quite a cease-fire, but a “pause.” Assad said Sunday that cease-fire was not an accurate description “because a cease-fire is between two armies or two countries—it’s better to say cessation of hostility, or, let’s say, stopping the operations.”

But a cease-fire by any other name would be as tentative. A similar “cessation of hostilities” brokered by the U.S. and Russia earlier this month was swiftly ignored. While the agreement allowed humanitarian workers to reach and deliver much-needed supplies to besieged Syrian neighborhoods, fighting continued in full force. Syrian state media reported Sunday that government forces had taken over 19 villages in the Aleppo province held by rebels.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking to reporters in Jordan on Sunday, acknowledged the difficulty of bringing such deals to fruition.

"Will every single party agree automatically?” he said. “Not necessarily.”

Ted Cruz Sacks His Spokesman

Ted Cruz just fired his top national spokesman for spreading a false story about Marco Rubio.

Citing “a grave error in judgment,” the Republican presidential candidate told reporters Monday afternoon that he had asked for the resignation of his campaign’s communications director, Rick Tyler. On Saturday, the day of the South Carolina primary, Tyler had posted on social media a link to a story with a video of Marco Rubio making a comment to a Cruz staffer who was reading the Bible. The audio on the video was unclear, but the transcript that accompanied it showed Rubio making a disparaging remark to the staffer about the Bible, saying there were “not many answers in it.”

Rubio said he was in fact praising the Bible—that he’d said, “All the answers are in there”—and on Monday, the newspaper that made the original transcription updated its story to say that the audio was unclear. Rubio’s campaign promptly accused Tyler and Cruz of playing dirty tricks. Tyler apologized on Facebook for posting "an inaccurate story” about Rubio:

I want to apologize to Senator Marco Rubio for posting an inaccurate story about him here earlier today. The story...

Posted by Rick Tyler on Sunday, February 21, 2016

Tyler later went on Fox News to amplify his apology, but it apparently wasn’t enough for Cruz. “I had made clear in this campaign that we will conduct this campaign with the very highest standards of integrity,” Cruz told reporters, according to The Daily Beast’s Gideon Resnick.

That has been how we've conducted it from day one. It is why when other campaigns attack us personally, impugn my integrity or my character, I don't respond in kind. None of you have heard me throw the kind of insults at Marco Rubio that he throws at me every single day. If other candidates choose to go into the gutter, we will not do the same. Rick Tyler's a good man. This was a grave error of judgment. It turned out the news story he sent around was false, but I'll tell you, even if it was true, we are not a campaign that is going to question the faith of another candidate.

Cruz made the decision rather abruptly. Tyler, who hasn’t commented yet, was tweeting on behalf of his campaign as of an hour before the announcement and was reportedly about to go on MSNBC just before Cruz told reporters of his sacking. Campaign staffers have been spared for doing a lot worse than spreading false stories about opponents, and the Rubio-Bible flap arguably wasn’t even the most problematic thing Cruz’s campaign has done in the last few weeks.

The Rubio campaign insisted that the issue wasn’t Tyler—but rather his boss. “Rick is a really good spokesman who had the unenviable task of working for a candidate willing to do or say anything to get elected,” said Alex Conant, Rubio’s communications director. “There is a culture in the Cruz campaign, from top to bottom, that no lie is too big and no trick too dirty. Rick did the right thing by apologizing to Marco. It's high time for Ted Cruz to do the right thing and stop the lies.”

So what is this really about?

Cruz’s statement offers a few clues. “If other candidates choose to go into the gutter, we will not do the same,” he said. Some of those other candidates believe that he already has. In Iowa, Cruz was accused of scaring Republicans into caucusing for him by sending them a mailer masked as an official government communication warning of a “voter violation.” He then seized on an erroneous report that Ben Carson was dropping out of the race, angering Carson and his campaign. In South Carolina, Cruz sent out a mailer morphing Rubio’s face with President Obama’s that some suggested was racially charged.

Cruz finished a disappointing third behind Rubio in South Carolina, a state that figured to be strong for him given its large share of evangelical voters. The accusations of “dirty tricks” have piled up, and over the last two days, so have endorsements—for Rubio. Cruz needed both to grab back some of the spotlight and turn around the perception that his campaign was sliding into sleaziness.

Then there’s also the nature of the specific charge. Evangelical voters are the crucial constituency for Cruz heading into the March 1 “SEC Primary” in the Bible-belt states, and falsely accusing an opponent of disrespecting the Bible is not likely to go over well. Or perhaps he just wanted to shake up his campaign, and this controversy gave him a reason to do so.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that Cruz was simply angered by Rick Tyler’s Facebook post about Rubio and considered it a fireable offense. Chances are, though, there was a bit more to it than that.

The High-Def Majesty of Planet Earth Returns

Anyone who’s visited an American Best Buy in the last 10 years has almost certainly seen widescreen TVs playing images of sweeping vistas from around the world—from gleaming snowcaps to the subterranean world of caves to vibrant jungle canopies. They’re the same scenes of visual splendor that first found enormous popularity in Britain and that may soon find a new legion of fans worldwide: The BBC has confirmed that its nature documentary series Planet Earth will return a decade after the original served as an inadvertent advertisement for the high-definition revolution. The new series will debut later this year with six episodes presented by the famed naturalist David Attenborough, who provided narration for the original show and who’s considered a national treasure in Britain.

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When it was released in 2006, Planet Earth was simply the latest (and the most expensive) in a long line of BBC nature documentaries, though it was the first to take advantage of the development of high-definition filming techniques. Planet Earth 2 will be similarly forward-thinking—it’s been shot with ultra high-definition cameras over the last three years, employing drones and remote recording. It’ll likely serve as a similar native commercial for 4K televisions, the industry’s next big product, which have so far struggled to find TV content to match their ultra-detailed pictures. But just as Planet Earth helped boost advances in TV technology, HD images sparked a remarkable resurgence of interest in nature documentaries, with the show breaking ratings records in both the U.S. and the U.K.

Attenborough’s return to Planet Earth 2 is fitting and auspicious for the series. He’s been narrating nature documentaries for the BBC since the mid-1950s, including the legendary Life on Earth (1979), The Living Planet (1984), and The Blue Planet (2001). It might seem tempting to call Planet Earth 2 a swan song for the presenter, who’s 89, if only he weren’t so busy with other projects—he made five nature shows in 2015 alone. Still, his measured tones are largely unfamiliar to global audiences, since BBC shows are regularly redubbed for international viewers. The U.S. version of Planet Earth used Sigourney Weaver’s voice, which was thought to be more familiar to Americans, and it seems likely the new series will get the same treatment.

The original Planet Earth also produced a (less well-received) film spinoff called Earth, narrated in Britain by Patrick Stewart and in the U.S. by James Earl Jones. It made $109 million worldwide and is also getting a sequel called Earth: One Amazing Day in 2017. Though these serve as mere footnotes to the sterling work of Attenborough and the BBC’s Natural History Unit, it’s fascinating to examine the commercial implications of a work that, on paper, seems so resolutely un-commercial.

Perhaps the most surprising factor in the original series’s success was its appeal to an unlikely demographic of viewers: potheads. The majesty and cruelty of Earth’s creatures, seen dwarfed by the backdrop of the deserts, rain forests, and oceans in which they live, is catnip for an audience that’s under the influence. In America, the phenomenon is so widely recognized that Jimmy Kimmel filmed a spoof version narrated by Snoop Dogg. A petition to have the rapper “narrate a whole season” of Planet Earth has more than 64,000 signatories, and his fans may now have their chance—at least, if Sigourney Weaver’s busy.

Toasts, Not Roasts: How to Eulogize the Living

“I’m so glad you did this while I’m still around,” James Burrows told the crowd on Sunday night, “because I wouldn’t want to miss it.” The legendary director—of shows like Friends and Taxi and Frasier and The Big Bang Theory and Will & Grace and Mike & Molly and the list goes —had just been celebrated through an NBC special revealingly titled Must See TV: An All-Star Tribute to James Burrows. When it was Burrows’s turn, at the end of the show, to deliver a speech, the director acknowledged the obvious: that the evening’s proceedings, their wacky pageantry aside, had read a little bit like a eulogy. As my watching companion asked at one point, “Why are they doing this? Is he dead?”

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No, he is not. The show was not a teary tribute (or a campy one), but rather—ostensibly—a celebration of Burrows’s recent direction of his 1,000th TV episode. The special, produced by Will & Grace’s Sean Hayes, was also meant to serve as a broader celebration of This Business of Show, reuniting the casts of classic, Burrows-directed sitcoms like Taxi and Frasier and (the most awaited semi-reunion of all) Friends. This was, definitely, NBC failing the categorical imperative, using one of its most successful directors as an excuse to remind viewers of the glory days of Must See TV. (And of the glory days of sitcoms in general: The gala also included the casts of the CBS juggernauts The Big Bang Theory, Mike & Molly, and Two and a Half Men. Charlie Sheen even made an appearance to declare that “I think the common thread with all of Jim Burrows’s shows is extra-galactic success.”)

But while you could read cynicism into any show like this, the tribute to Burrows was ultimately, in its tone, propelled by kindness: It was the Bizarro-world version of one of those cringe-worthy Comedy Central roasts. Even when it was joking, it was earnest. It was loving. It was a bunch of Burrows’s friends and colleagues, thanking him (“we owe our careers to you,” Kelsey Grammar summed it up) and praising him.

Interviewers Andy Cohen, Jane Lynch, and Bill Nye (yes, the Science Guy) gathered the actors onstage and onto a very large couch, show by show, to share memories of Burrows and pay tribute to him. Will & Grace’s Eric McCormack shared his rumbling “Jimmy Burrows” impression. Lisa Kudrow reminisced about how Burrows had lent the Friends cast his dressing room so that the famously chummy actors could play poker together between takes. Danny DeVito recalled the Burrowsian tell that, on the set of Taxi, would reveal to his actors when a joke had really, really landed: The director would leap out of his chair and grab his crotch.

So many obituaries make you think, “It would’ve been so nice if they’d been around to read that.”

Which is the stuff—a mix of funny memories and wistful ones—normally reserved for eulogies and obits. It’s very similar to the stories that came out about, for example, Alan Rickman after he died. (Emma Thompson: “He was the ultimate ally. In life, art and politics. I trusted him absolutely. He was, above all things, a rare and unique human being and we shall not see his like again.” Kate Winslet: “He was the kindest and best of men. He had the patience of a saint. He was a warm-hearted puppy dog, who would do anything for anyone if it made them happy.”) And about David Bowie. And about Antonin Scalia. And about Harper Lee. And on and on.

Which is to say that they’re the kind of remembrances, ultimately, that make you wish you’d known more about people when they were still alive. The kind that are so sweet, and so summative, that they make you think, “It would’ve been so nice if he’d been around to hear that,” or “I wish she’d been able to see that.”

So Jimmy Burrows, by way of this otherwise extremely cheesy NBC special, got an experience very few us will: He got to be around to hear that. He got to know, first-hand, some of his friends’ and co-workers’ favorite memories of him. He got to hear himself, essentially, eulogized. He got to know how loved and appreciated he is while he is still around to acknowledge that love and appreciation. He got to have the same existentially odd but spiritually fulfilling experience that one of his characters, Frasier Crane, did: He read his own obituary. Burrows’s insight into how he will be remembered, however, came not as a result of a sitcomedy of errors, but as a result of months of careful planning.

The best things that will be said about us—publicly, openly, audibly—will not technically be said to us. Eulogies are wasted on the dead.

We can’t all be James Burrows, of course. Indeed, the point of last night’s proceedings was largely that nobody else can be James Burrows. But his tribute is a reminder of how sadly rare it is that we find ways to praise each other as a matter of cultural ritual. The luckiest celebrities will get feted at the Grammys, or the Golden Globes, or the Kennedy Center Honors. The rest of us will settle, generally, for toasts given at birthday parties and graduation parties and retirement parties—speeches meant to carve a little space for celebrating the people we love. Appreciations that can function, Wikipedia informs its readers, as “living eulogies.”

But those secular ceremonies, if they involve praise at all, tend to focus on discrete accomplishments—working, aging, exam-passing—rather than overall ones. Wedding toasts tend to focus on couples as a unit rather than as individuals. Professional performance reviews tend to focus on targeted skills. There is no ritual that is meant to tell a person the thing—the ultimate thing—many of us want, and need, to hear: “Good job at being a person.” Americans can be awkward about praise—giving it and, especially, receiving it. Our customs reflect that. Which has created a situation in which, often, the best things that will be said about us—publicly, openly, audibly—will not technically be said to us. Eulogies are wasted on the dead. NBC’s tribute to Burrows suggests the ways, big and small, that its logic might be reclaimed for the living.

The Fight Over Britain’s Membership in the European Union

Should Britain stay in the European Union or leave?

That’s the question facing Britons, who are being asked to vote on a potential “Brexit” from the EU, the economic and political union that allows goods and people to move across its 28 member states as if they were one country. Critics of Britain’s membership in the bloc say it chips away at the country’s sovereignty and takes more than it gives back. Supporters argue EU membership strengthens Britain.

On Monday, Prime Minister David Cameron told lawmakers why he thinks Britain should remain in the European Union, just days after he secured concessions from his fellow European leaders over the U.K.’s membership in the bloc.

“Britain can have best of both worlds,” he said. He described leaving the EU as a “leap into the dark.”

When do Britons decide?

On June 23, Britons will vote in a referendum that asks the following question: “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?”

British, Irish, and citizens from the Commonwealth who are over 18 and who live in the U.K. can vote, as can U.K. nationals who have lived outside the country for less than 15 years. Their answer—a simple “yes” or “no”—will determine not only Britain’s future in the bloc, but also that of post-war Europe’s most ambitious experiment.

Why is a referendum being held in the first place?

At the heart of the debate in Britain is the question: Does EU membership benefit the U.K.? Britons voted in a referendum in 1975 on whether to stay in what was then called the European Economic Community (EEC). But the bloc has evolved since then: It has grown from 12 member states in the EEC to 28, has its own currency, and its decisions have a wider impact across the bloc now than at any time in the past. Critics of the EU want Briton to have a say once again on whether to be part of the bloc because, they say, the EU is eroding Britain’s sovereignty, and hurts British businesses because of its onerous regulations. In 2013, Cameron backed their demand for a referendum.  

What are the issues at play?

Cameron had sought changes in four areas of Britain’s membership of the EU: economic governance, competitiveness, sovereignty, and immigration. He’s received concessions—in varying amounts—in all those areas. Among those major concessions, which were announced last week following a meeting with European leaders, Britain “is not committed to further political integration into the European Union”; can limit benefit payments to workers from other EU countries (in-work benefits) for four years; and will not be disadvantaged because it has not adopted the euro, the common EU currency that is used by 19 of the bloc’s 28 members.

For a full assessment of each of Cameron’s demands to the EU—and how he fared—go here.

Do these concessions satisfy skeptics of EU membership?

Probably not. But we’ve known for some time that the country is evenly divided on the issue of EU membership—as is evinced by divisions within Cameron’s own Cabinet. Six Cabinet ministers will campaign for Britain to leave the EU, and Boris Johnson, the London mayor, has said Britain’s continued presence in the EU would lead to an “erosion of democracy.” But supporters of membership, including Defense Secretary Michael Fallon, said the country would be taking a “big gamble” with its security if it votes to leave. Supporters of continued membership believe the EU is a boon to the United Kingdom. It makes trade easier; provides young, cheaper workers from other European countries; and makes the country more secure. Cameron’s position on membership is also supported by some of Britain’s biggest companies.

The Labour Party, the main opposition; the Scottish National Party, which governs Scotland; Plaid Cymru, the Welsh party; and Liberal Democrats are campaigning to stay in. The Conservatives say they will remain neutral. The U.K. Independence Party, which is deeply skeptical of the EU, will campaign to leave.

What does Europe think of all this?

European leaders presumably want Britain to stay because they have negotiated with Cameron to give him many of the things he wants, including special exceptions currently not enjoyed by many other members. European lawmakers fear a “Brexit” would threaten the EU itself, causing the bloc that has been buffeted since 2008 by crises of economy, security, and migration to breakup. And Europe’s citizens want Britain to stay—by a fairly wide margin. We’ll know if Britons share that view in four months.

A Battle Over Caste Spills Into Delhi’s Water Supply

Four days of caste-related protests in the Indian state of Haryana have left 19 people dead and 10 million residents of neighboring Delhi without water.

At the heart of demonstrations is the Jat community, a historically more affluent group, which has launched demonstrations calling for the same economic benefits typically afforded those groups who occupy a lower position in Hinduism’s often-abstruse caste hierarchy. Discrimination based on caste is, in theory, illegal, though reports of atrocities against lower castes surface on a nearly daily basis. In an attempt to level the playing field, members of the perceived lower castes receive government quotas in schools and jobs—a process called reservation, which is similar to affirmative action in the U.S.  

Over the weekend, protesters in Haryana, home to about 25 million people, of whom Jats make up about 30 percent, brought traffic in parts of the state to a halt. They eventually captured and damaged a canal that provides Delhi with 60 percent of its water supply. On Monday, Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s chief minister, declared the crisis had gotten dire.

We've completely run out of water. I appeal to the centre with folded hands to immediately intervene and get munak canal started in Haryana

— Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) February 22, 2016

The Indian army was eventually deployed and retook the canal on Monday. By evening, a deal had been reached to end the protests as the leaders of the Jat community secured a pledge for more civil jobs.

In essence, the fight has had resembled something of a reverse affirmative-action initiative, where the Jats have sought to be designated as an “Other Backward Caste,” which receives more economic assistance.

“Almost half of government jobs and university seats in the country are reserved for members of special groups,” notes The New York Times. “This has led many others to demand similar status as they struggle to find employment in a country with severe shortages of good colleges and jobs.”

As the BBC pointed out, last year India’s Supreme Court rejected the Jats’ bid for a special-group designation.

With the political crisis seemingly paused, how Delhi’s water supply was so precarious is another point of concern. Beyond its canal, the landlocked area relies on a polluted river and ground reserves for its water.

“The state hasn’t built, dredged or maintained areas that historically collected water as infrastructure has failed to keep up with rapid urbanization,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

Residents started boiling water stored in tanks as the supply grew short and schools remained closed on Monday in an effort to conserve water. Officials expect it may take another three days before normal supplies return.

Some Inescapable Facts About Hollywood's Diversity Crisis

For every female character speaking or named in a widely distributed TV show or movie, there are two male characters. For every female director making those shows and movies, there are 5.6 men. For every woman in the highest levels of decision-making at Hollywood studios, there are four men.

For every non-white character on screen, there are roughly 2.5 white ones. For every non-white director, there are roughly 6.7 white ones.

Just two percent of characters are identified as LGBT.

The top-line takeaways from USC’s Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity in Entertainment, released today, paint a bleak picture of inclusivity in Hollywood, at a time when movements including #OscarsSoWhite and a campaign to reduce the gender gap seem to be constantly making headlines. The statistics also undercut the critics or viewers who claim that “political correctness” rules TV casting decisions. By almost no metric does popular entertainment reflect the diversity of the United States: There are more white people, more men, and more straight people on-screen than there are in the general population, sometimes by a drastic measure.

The USC report looked at 109 major-studio movies released in 2014 and 305 scripted shows from TV networks and streaming services released from September 2014 to the end of August 2015. It examined the gender, racial, and sexual-minority status of characters with speaking roles; the gender and race of directors for movies and TV premiere episodes; the gender of writers of movies and of TV premiere episodes; and the gender of top-level executives at major entertainment companies. It also assigned “inclusivity ratings” to each of the studios, most of which were found to have failed by nearly every standard.

Reading the report in full gives a good sense for how various sectors of media differ. Film, for example, tends to lag behind TV when it comes to racial and gender diversity. Streaming services are more inclusive in some areas (i.e. transgender characters), and less in others (e.g. female directors). A number of findings show very specific sorts of inequality: There are very few roles for women over 40; white gay men far outnumber any other kind of LGBT person on TV; only two black women directed a major-distributor movie in 2014.

Still, the difficult tangle of cause and effect around inclusivity remains hard to understand. Can Hollywood hope to fix itself when long-term, systemic racism and sexism remains a documented fact of life in America? And is Hollywood extraordinarily un-diverse, or is it in line with other industries? An analysis of U.S. census data last year found that arts and entertainment made for the third-whitest employment sector, nearly as white as the legal profession and social sciences. A study of the Fortune 250 in 2013 found that in top companies across the economy, only 18.5 percent of board of director members were female—almost exactly the same percentage that the USC report found for female board-of-directors members of Hollywood companies (19 percent).

What’s clear is that despite persistent gaps, some companies are finding ways to buck the trend. While film distributors were rated as “not inclusive” in nearly all categories tracked by the USC study, Sony and Viacom did, at least, release slates of movies where the percentage of non-white characters basically matched the U.S. population. And among TV distributors, Disney, the CW, Viacom, and Hulu each received some “fully inclusive” scores, with Hulu achieving full gender parity on screen as well as a non-white character percentage in line with the wider population. None of these studios received unanimously good marks, but the fact that in some areas they’ve been able to break from the overwhelmingly white, male tradition supports the belief that progress is possible. Whether or not it actually manifests probably depends on how seriously the entertainment industry takes the idea that it needs to change.

What We Know About the Alleged Kalamazoo Shooter

Updated on February 22 at 2:57 p.m. ET

The Uber driver who is accused of a shooting spree in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Saturday night apparently chose his victims at random and may have picked up passengers in between killing six people.

The shootings, which occurred at three locations in Kalamazoo County, lasted about seven hours. The first victim was shot at an apartment complex at 5:42 p.m. on Saturday. State police said the gunman, whom they identified as Jason B. Dalton, 45, shot a woman in the parking lot, then drove away (the woman’s name was not released). Four hours later, authorities said there was another shooting at a car dealership, where Tyler Smith, 17, and his father, Richard Smith, 53, were killed. About 15 minutes later, police said Dalton shot five woman as they waited in their cars outside a Cracker Barrel restaurant. Four of the women died. They were Mary Lou Nye, 62, Mary Jo Nye, 60, Dorothy Brown, 74, and Barbara Hawthorne, 68. A a 14-year-old girl who was in the passenger seat was in critical condition. The victims were apparently picked at random, and seem to have no connection to the accused shooter.

“How do you go and tell the families of these victims that they weren’t targeted for any reason other than they were there to be a target?” said Jeff Getting, the Kalamazoo County prosecutor.

Police arrested Dalton at 12:40 a.m. on Sunday. He was still driving the dark-colored Chevrolet HHR that had been described by someone from the Cracker Barrel shooting. An officer spotted the car, and on Dalton they found a semi-automatic handgun, police said. Investigators were looking at Dalton’s cellphone to understand what happened in those seven hours, but several people told media Dalton picked up passengers before, after, and during the killing spree.

One passenger, a man named Matt Mellen, said Dalton picked him up around 4:30 p.m.––an hour before the first shooting––but introduced himself as “Me-Me.” Dalton had his dog in the back of the car, Mellen told WWMT, a local news station. Soon after he climbed in, he said, Dalton sped up to 80 mph.

“We were driving through medians, driving through the lawn, speeding along and when we came to a stop, I jumped out the car and ran away,” Mellen told WWMT.

Mellen said he posted a warning to Facebook about the ride, and also called Uber to complain.

“He was surprisingly calm,” Mellen said of Dalton. “I was freaking out.”

Dalton’s very last ride, just after midnight, was with a man who would only identify himself as Derek. The man told local station WOODTV that during the seven-minute ride to a hotel, he and his father-in-law brought up the news of the shootings.

“I kind of jokingly said to the driver, ‘You’re not the shooter, are you?,’” the man told WOODTV. “He gave me some sort of a ‘no’ response. I said, ‘Are you sure?’ And he said, ‘No, I’m not, I’m just tired.’ And we proceeded to have a pretty normal conversation after that.”

Dalton reportedly has a wife and two children, and had previously worked for Progressive Insurance, which the company has confirmed. Police said he had no prior criminal record. He told one passenger he’d only recently begun working as an Uber driver. Dalton’s neighbors said he was quiet, kind, shy, and liked to work on cars in his garage. They also said Dalton’s house had been broken into, and it seemed to have shaken him. After the burglary, Dalton bought a guard dog and a gun, and “he periodically shot his gun out the back door,” one neighbor told The New York Times. “He would shoot randomly into the air.”

Dalton, who was charged with six counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder, was arraigned Monday. He was denied bail.