Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 68

The Deadly Typhoon That Hit China and Taiwan

NEWS BRIEF A typhoon that has already devastated Taiwan has left nearly three dozen people missing in eastern China following a series of landslides.

Typhoon Megi killed four people and injured more than 520 Tuesday in Taiwan. As the powerful storm headed to China, it continued its destruction. Authorities are now searching for 32 people who were swept up in landslides, which brought debris from mountains down onto two Chinese villages.

The BBC describes one landslide that engulfed a village in Zhejiang province:

The landslide destroyed several houses in Sucun in Suichang county, said state media. Rescuers managed to pull 15 people out, and are digging through the debris for survivors.

One person in China has died as a result of heavy rains, state media reports. The storm has also left millions without power.

What an Unarmed Black Man Was Holding When He Was Shot by Police

NEWS BRIEF The black man who was shot and killed by police in a San Diego suburb Tuesday was unarmed, police now say.

Alfred Okwera Olango was confronted by El Cajon police while acting erratically and concealing his hands in his pants pockets. After ignoring several commands and pacing around, he “rapidly drew and object from his front pants pockets, placed both hands together on it, and extended it rapidly toward [one] officer, taking what appeared to be a shooting stance,” Police Chief Jeff Davis said Tuesday. An officer then shot Olango, while another fired a Taser.

Late Wednesday, police identified the object Olango pointed at an officer as a vape smoking device. In a statement, the department described the device:

The vape has an allsilver cylinder that is approximately 1” diameter and 3” long that was pointed toward the officer.

Olgango’s sister told officers the man suffered from a mental illness and needed help. Cell phone video captured after the shooting showed her crying, yelling toward police:

I called for help. I didn’t call you guys to kill him.

Protests soon broke out near the scene of the shooting, and continued Wednesday. Bill Wells, the mayor of El Cajon, attempted to ease concern in the community Wednesday afternoon at a press conference. He said:

I saw a man who was distraught, a man who was acting out like he was in great pain. I saw him get gunned down and killed. If it was my son, I would be devastated.

The mayor said the city will launch an investigation into the shooting with assistance from the FBI. Police have yet to release video of the shooting. The department did release a photo showing Olango in a shooting stance just before he was shot.

The Violent Tuition Protests in South Africa

NEWS BRIEF Police in South Africa fired rubber bullets at students Wednesday, as protests over tuition increases turned into violent clashes.

Demonstrations across the country, from Johannesburg to Cape Town, have been going on for the last 10 days after the government announced colleges would start setting new rate increases, which are capped at 8 percent.

AFP explains the outrage:

Unrest has hit many South African universities over the past year, as students have protested against the fee increases that they say force poorer, often black, pupils out of education.

Last year, students—many of them so-called “born frees” who grew up after apartheid—staged a series of major demonstrations which forced the government to abandon planned fee hikes for 2016.

In Grahamstown, 11 students at Rhodes University were arrested Wednesday for demonstrating. A local court order prohibits protests on university campuses. Police resorted to firing rubber bullets and stun grenades to control crowds.

Protests continued well into the night.

OPEC's Deal to Cut Oil Production

NEWS BRIEF The members of OPEC have agreed to reduce their production of crude oil for the first time in eight years.

After more than two years of falling oil prices, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries will cut output to between 32.5 million and 33 million barrels per day. That would bring levels down from around 33.24 million barrels per day.

The 14-member OPEC produces more than a third of the world’s oil. The group’s “exceptional decision” will help stabilize the market, Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh said after a meeting Wednesday in Algeria’s capital.

More on OPEC’s decision, from The Wall Street Journal:

Iran, Libya and Nigeria are all trying to increase production, while countries like Venezuela and Algeria can ill afford to lose oil revenue by reducing output. Saudi Arabia, the group’s largest producer, has been pumping at record levels in recent months and was expected to slow down output in the fall and winter anyway.

The meeting lacked the participation of the world’s largest producer of crude oil, Russia, which is pumping record levels of oil. Russia isn’t a member of OPEC but had been heavily involved in talks with the group about jointly slowing down production.

OPEC will meet in Vienna in November to determine further details of reduced production. Wednesday’s accord comes more than two years since oil prices plummeted, going from over $100 per barrel to $60 per barrel by early 2015, and then settling below $30 per barrel at the start of 2016. After news reports about the deal emerged Wednesday, oil prices rose more than 5 percent, to over $49 a barrel.

Beautiful? No Experience? You Can Get Hired by Trump

Donald Trump has faced a deficit among female voters throughout the campaign, and with just over a month left, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is seeking to throw gasoline on the fire.

In that effort, Clinton has a willing partner in arson: The ghost of Trump past.

On Wednesday, Pema Levy of Mother Jones dug up a video that will fuel the flames. It shows Trump at a 2007 appearance in San Francisco. A young woman steps to a microphone and asks how many jets she has and whether she can work on one. “Come on up here,” Trump says. “I think she’s hired.”

As the woman walks to the lectern, the crowd hoots. As she gets near, Trump takes a good long look at her décolletage, then says, “You’re hired.” What happens next is even stranger. He tells a story:

You know, I had a case that was very interesting. A beautiful girl who was 17 or 18 and applied to be a waitress. So beautiful. She's like a world-class beauty—like the young lady who just asked a question about the actress. She's so beautiful. And my people came and she said, "Mr. Trump, she has no experience." So I interviewed her anyway because she was so pretty. And I said, "Let me ask you, do you have any experience?" She goes, "No, sir." I say, "When can you start?"

As the young woman walks off the stage, Trump goes on:

See now, if she worked on my plane, that's like a death wish for me, right? That's like an alcoholic—I have a few friends, they’re wonderful people, they’re alcoholics. You put Scotch in front of them, it's like—this would be my form of alcoholism.

The exchange is striking for several reasons. Here is Trump, by now two years into his third marriage, delighting in publicly ogling a woman, and calling her a “death wish” for him. Then there’s the story of how he flirtatiously hired a woman he thought might be underage simply because she was attractive.

Trump was at the time more or less a full-time entertainer, and it’s clear that many of the people in the audience were entertained. The women certainly seems unbothered by the whole thing. To some viewers, and some voters, this will no doubt come across as winning or at least charmingly laddish. Look, he digs a hot chick, just like any red-blooded American male!

But it also fits all too well with the Clinton attack that Trump objectifies women. And it reinforces a key storyline coming out of Monday’s debate, where Clinton confronted Trump with the tale of Alicia Machado. Clinton said that Trump had insulted the Miss Universe and demanded that she lose weight (when she remained quite svelte by any standard). Instead of rebutting the charge, Trump was eager to confirm that Clinton’s retelling was accurate: He did say she gained weight.

In an NBC/SurveyMonkey poll released Wednesday, 30 percent of women said their opinion of Clinton had changed for the better following the debate, versus 11 percent who said that of Trump. The numbers were mirrored: 13 percent said their view of Clinton had gotten worse, versus 27 for Trump.

Elsewhere in the poll, a predictably lopsided portion of Democratic women (97-2) said Trump did not have the temperament to be president. But just three in four Republican woman said he has the right temperament, and more importantly, independent women said by a 4-1 margin that he has the wrong personality.

These aren’t the things that are likely to produce vast swings in the electorate. Most voters have already made up their minds. Some of them have not, and Trump’s long record of public statements mean there’s plenty of ammunition to back up the Clinton charge that Trump views women primarily as objects. On the other hand, the lengthy record also shows that for many voters, that’s no dealbreaker—and might even be an asset.

The Shooting at an Elementary School in South Carolina

Updated on September 28 at 5:36 p.m. ET

NEWS BRIEF At least three people, including two children, were shot Wednesday at an elementary school in Townville, South Carolina, an emergency official in Anderson County said. The suspect, a teenager, is in custody, the official said.

The two children were taken by helicopter to a hospital, he said, while the teacher was taken to a different medical facility by ambulance. Local officials said at a press conference that the students had been shot in the leg and foot, and the teacher had been shot in the shoulder.

Local media outlets are also reporting the alleged gunman’s father had been found dead at his residence, but local officials declined to immediately clarify whether his death was related to the shooting.

The remaining students from the Townville Elementary School are safe, he said, and were bused to the nearby Oakdale Church. Parents were asked to pick their children up at the church.

Townville is about 41 miles southwest of Greenville, South Carolina.

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

California's Sanctions Against Wells Fargo

NEWS BRIEF The state of California has suspended all official dealings with Wells Fargo, following a scandal that has brought heavy scrutiny to the San Francisco-based bank.

Wells Fargo was involved in a scheme that created phony bank and credit-card accounts to collect fees. Federal and California regulators have already fined the bank $185 million for the fraudulent practices, while the company fired 5,300 employees.

John Chiang, the state treasurer who oversees $2 trillion in bank transactions annually, announced the unprecedented sanctions Wednesday. In a letter to Wells Fargo, he asked, “How can I continue to entrust the public’s money to an organization which has shown such little regard for the legions of Californians who have placed their financial well-being in its care?”

NBC Bay Area details those sanctions:

They include suspending investments by the Treasurer’s Office in all Wells Fargo securities, not using Wells Fargo as a broker-dealer for buying investments, and stopping to employ Wells Fargo as a managing underwriter on negotiated sales of California state bonds where the treasurer appoints the underwriter.

The sanctions will be in effect for 12 months, taking place immediately. As a result of the sanctions, Wells Fargo will take a financial hit, as The New York Times reports:

The move could cost Wells millions of dollars in banking fees because California is the largest issuer of municipal debt in the country. The state treasurer manages $75 billion worth of investments…

So far this year, California has sold about $50 billion in municipal debt out of total of about $318 billion issued nationwide, according to Municipal Market Analytics, a research firm.

Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, who Tuesday announced he would forfeit $41 million in stock awards and his annual bonus, will appear before the House Financial Services Committee on Thursday.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on When Language Fails Her

In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah, her protagonist, Ifemelu, starts a blog about race in America from her perspective as a Nigerian immigrant. The blog, called “Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-­American Black,” is funny as well as insightful. After the book came out, Adichie started a real blog, in Ifemelu’s voice, called “The Small Redemptions of Lagos,” and kept up the commentary.

“The blog in Americanah—I wanted it to be funny. I wanted to poke fun, because I think many of the ways race manifests itself in this country are actually quite funny so I hoped that people would laugh,” Adichie said Wednesday at the Washington Ideas Forum, an event produced by The Aspen Institute and The Atlantic.

Her interviewer, Mary Louise Kelly, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, asked what Ifemelu might say about racial issues in America today.

“I think what’s going on now just doesn’t give me room for humor,” Adichie said, referring to the continual reports of black people killed by police. “I think that I’m so emotionally exhausted by the murders that I don’t think I could find any space to wrap humor around what’s been happening in the past one year, two years.”

Indeed, she hasn’t posted on “The Small Redemptions of Lagos” since November 2014, a few months after the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

“It’s not just that you shoot a man who’s unarmed, it’s that you handcuff him when he’s clearly dying,” she said. “There’s something about it that’s so unforgivably inhumane and to think that his race is part of the reason ... I really do think that one of the terrible things about racism in this country, is there’s a sense that blackness isn’t really seen as fully human in many quarters. I think that’s why these things happen. I think that’s why a man who is dying is handcuffed, that’s why a boy who is dead is left on the street for hours. It makes me wonder: What’s happened to that part of us that is good?”

An earlier part of Adichie and Kelly’s conversation focused on the power of storytelling to humanize, so Kelly asked, “Do you think you’ll be able to find a way to write about that?”

“Many times I’ve wanted to and I’ve started,” Adichie said. “But I almost always feel that language has failed me. So I don’t know.”

The Pressure to Stay Silent About Torture in Thailand

NEWS BRIEF Amnesty International had been scheduled to unveil research from the organization’s latest report, which found that Thailand’s military junta routinely tortured citizens, at a hotel in Bangkok Wednesday. But just as members prepared to give their speeches, police officers threatened them with arrest, the group said.

Police and men wearing jackets and tags identifying them as Ministry of Labour officials said the speakers would violate Thai labor law if the event went on. Amnesty International chose to cancel, and released the research online. The group claims it found 74 instances of torture, including suffocation with plastic bags, strangling by rope, waterboarding, and electric shock of the genitals, by the military against political opponents between 2014 and 2015.

Amnesty International condemned the threats of arrest. “The Thai authorities should be addressing torture, not human rights activists doing their legitimate work,” Minar Pimple, the group’s senior director of global operations, told the Bangkok Post Wednesday. “Instead of threatening us with arrest and prosecution, they should be holding the perpetrators of torture accountable.”

The military took power of the Thai government in 2014, a decision it called necessary to establish stability after months of street protests. Demonstrations had grown after a movement of mostly poor and rural voters organized against Thailand’s ruling royal class and wealthy elite. In August of this year, voters adopted a new constitution that ensures the military remains powerful after Thailand’s general election next year. The constitution includes a provision that allows the military to remove any political leader from office without resorting to a coup, which was sold as a way to protect the government against corruption. About 60 percent of voters approved the new constitution, which many have attributed to a vote for stability—not necessarily confidence in the military—in a country that ranks among the world’s top for coup d’etats.

Amnesty International’s report said the 2014 military coup has allowed “a culture of torture and other ill-treatment to flourish across the country.” It said the military now has legal authority to arbitrarily detain people for seven days at undisclosed locations. It’s during this time, the report says, that the military has tortured these victims, most often political opponents. “Most victims are too afraid to speak out. When they come forward to complain, the courts tend to ignore them,” the report claimed. “And yet, the same courts are willing to accept coerced confessions, even after they are retracted.”

Shimon Peres: The Last Link to Israel's Founding Fathers

The death of a statesman like Shimon Peres, who spent more than 60 years in public service, would mark a towering milestone in any nation. But in Israel, one of the world’s younger states, it takes on particular significance, as he represented one of the few remaining links to Israel’s founding generation. Peres, who was 93, was a first-hand witness and often a central participant in every moment in its history.

In addition to Israel’s youth—it’s less than 70 years old—and Peres’s longevity, the country’s political class has proven unusually long-lived, with leaders remaining part of government for decades on end. It helped that Peres belonged to the Labour Party, which dominated Israeli politics for decades, until a more recent period in the wilderness. It’s impossible to come up with an American analogue for Peres’s 67-year career. It would as though an aide-de-camp to George Washington had retired during the James Buchanan administration, after a career with turns as ambassador, secretary of state, and senator.

Peres was born in what was then Poland and what is now Belarus in 1923, but his family moved to Mandatory Palestine, then under British control, in 1932. When he arrived, he attended a school named for Arthur Balfour, who issued the 1917 British statement of support for a Jewish state—still a recent memory.

In 1947, Peres joined the Haganah, the predecessor of the Israel Defense Forces. While serving at Haganah headquarters that year, he met David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister, and Levi Eshkol, who would be the third. Peres became head of naval services in 1948, the year of the war of independence, and the following year Ben-Gurion sent him to the United States to work on arms procurement for the nascent state. In 2014, he boasted to The Washington Post that he had worked with 10 presidents over the course of his career.

After Peres returned to Israel, Ben-Gurion in 1953 appointed him director general of the defense department—the same year that Moshe Dayan became chief of staff for the IDF. He served in that role under Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, who briefly replaced Ben-Gurion, and continued after Ben-Gurion’s return.

In 1956, Peres was important enough an aide that he traveled with Ben-Gurion to Sevres, France, where they met with French and British ministers and made a secret agreement to invade and occupy the area around the Suez Canal after Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser seized control of it. Through his relations with the French, Peres was also instrumental in establishing Israel’s nuclear program—one whose existence the country neither confirms nor denies.

Then Peres jumped to electoral politics, joining the Knesset in 1959. A decade later, Golda Meir appointed him to her cabinet, where he served alongside Yigal Allon, the former general who had briefly been interim prime minister. When Meir stepped down in 1974, Peres competed with Yitzhak Rabin to succeed her and lost. His consolation prizes were the ministry of defense and a long-running feud with Rabin. Shortly after Peres took the post, Israel launched the daring raid against Palestinian terrorists at Entebbe airport in Libya. In 1977, Rabin was forced to step down and Peres was briefly prime minister, before being replaced by Menachem Begin. In 1983, Peres finally became prime minister in his own right, succeeding Yitzhak Shamir.

In 1992, Peres returned to the government as foreign minister under his old rival Rabin, and alongside Rabin and Yasser Arafat won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. When Rabin was assassinated in 1995, Peres once again became prime minister. Peres’s successor was Benjamin Netanyahu, which signaled a changing of the guard: Netanyahu was the first prime minister born after independence, and the first born within the state of Israel.

But Peres’ career wasn’t over. In 2001—following a failed run for president, a largely ceremonial post, in 2000—he became minister of foreign affairs once again, this time under Ariel Sharon, the general-turned-politician whom, of course, Peres had known for decades. Peres finally became president in 2007.

When Sharon finally succumbed in 2014 to a 2006 stroke that had incapacitated him, it fell to Peres to deliver a eulogy. Though Peres was five years older than Sharon, he had outlasted him, becoming the last giant standing. Ben-Gurion, Eshkol, Dayan, Sharett, Meir, Allon, Begin, Shamir, and Rabin—they were all gone. And now so is Peres.