Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 79

Colin Powell, the Last Reasonable Man

Sometimes bad advice can be given with good intentions.

Writing to Hillary Clinton just after she took office as secretary of state, Colin Powell explained to Clinton in an email why and how he had used a personal email address during his time as secretary. Powell said that the intelligence community had been staunchly against him having a personal digital assistant, and so he’d just stopped asking and done it. He wrote that he was never satisfied about the security risk. However, he warned, the “real danger” is that “if it is public that you have a BlackBerry and it is government and you are using it, government or not, to do business, it may become an official record and become subject to law …. I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data.”

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Hillary Clinton's Latest Email Scapegoat: Colin Powell

Powell’s advice was prescient in that he foresaw how the emails could create a public-records snafu. But now he is getting a lesson in the dangers of assuming personal email is secure.

An organization called D.C. Leaks, which has been alleged to have ties to Russian intelligence, has hacked some of Powell’s emails and released them publicly. Powell confirmed to NBC that the messages were authentic, saying, “The hackers have a lot more.”

If the provenance of the emails is dubious, and reading them seems a bit prurient, some of them sketch an interesting portrait of Powell in late career. Despite an extraordinary record, and frequent references to hobnobbing with other foreign-policy luminaries, the Powell that emerges in the emails is a sort of everyman—the last rational American, maybe. He hates Donald Trump, finds Hillary Clinton bumbling and foolish, sees the Benghazi scandal as generally a farce, and remains angry about the Iraq War.

In the case of Iraq, it was Powell’s dramatic (and later debunked) testimony before the United Nations that helped clinch the case for war, at least with the American populace, thanks to Powell’s reputation. That moment has generally been treated as a stain on his record ever since. In July, Powell sent Condoleezza Rice, who was national security adviser at the time and later succeeded Powell at State, a link to a news item in which former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he was skeptical of waging war to bring democracy to Iraq. BuzzFeed reports Rice’s reaction:

First, we didn’t invade Iraq to bring democracy—but once we overthrew Saddam, we had a view of what should follow. If Don and the Pentagon had done their job (after claiming the rights to lead post-war rebuilding—things might have turned out differently)… Don should just stop talking. He puts his foot in his mouth every time.

Powell replied, agreeing: “Doug [Feith] and Paul [Wolfowitz] claims [sic] they had a plan (turn Iraq and our Army over to [Ahmed] Chalibi) and leave …  43 knew what had to be done, specifically rejected the Chalibi crowd and as you say the boys in the band were brain dead.”

Powell was similarly skeptical of efforts to turn the September 11, 2012, attacks in Benghazi, Libya, which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, into a political bludgeon.

“Benghazi is a stupid witch hunt. Basic fault falls on a courageous ambassador who thoughts Libyans now love me and I am ok in this very vulnerable place,” he wrote to Rice in December 2015, though he added, “But blame also rests on his leaders and supports back here. [Under Secretary of State] Pat Kennedy, Intel community, DS and yes HRC.” Rice agreed.

Despite dismissing that flap, Powell shows himself to have little patience for Hillary Clinton in the email flap, and particularly for her public-relations approach and her small cadre of closely held, extremely loyal aides, willing to go to great lengths to defend her.

In August 2015, as The Intercept reported, Powell complained, “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris.” At the time, he seemed most annoyed about the effects of the scandal on communications internally, adding, “They are going to dick up the legitimate and necessary use of email with friggin record rules.”

Over time, however, he seems to have become increasingly annoyed at what he viewed as the Clinton team’s attempts to draw him into the story. A month later, in September 2015, Powell wrote to his former aide Lawrence Wilkerson. “HRC and her mishandling of this has really given her a major problem I do not wish to get involved in, despite the best efforts of her team to drag me in,” Politico reports.

In February, apparently alluding to his BlackBerry advice, Powell wrote to former Reagan aide Ken Duberstein, “I didn't tell Hillary to have a private server at home, connected to the Clinton Foundation, two contractors, took away 60,000 emails, had her own domain.” He added, “Stupid State Department dragged me in and I had to take care of myself. I warned them. Don't say these unclassified messages are classified or should have been classified.”

In mid-August, journalist Joe Conason, who is close to the Clintons, reported that Powell had advised Clinton to use private email. On August 23, according to screenshots posted by The Intercept, Powell wrote that Clinton “should have done a ‘Full Monty’ at the beginning.” He also said:

I warned her staff three times over the past two years not to try to connect it to me. I am not sure HRC even knew or understood what was going on in the basement.

A few days later, he wrote that he had “spent last week with [Clinton aide] Cheryl Mills and the HRC team burying the email flap.”

Powell’s greatest anger, however, was reserved for Donald Trump. Powell said in various emails first reported by BuzzFeed that Trump “has no sense of shame,” and is “a national disgrace” and “international pariah.”

Writing to a former aide, Powell condemned the movement that questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States.

Yup, the whole birther movement was racist. That’s what the 99% believe. When Trump couldn’t keep that up he said he also wanted to see if the certificate noted that he was a Muslim. As I have said before, “What if he was?” Muslims are born as Americans everyday.

Repeatedly in the emails, Powell reveals himself as an amateur press critic. In December 2015, for example, he explained to the journalist Fareed Zakaria why he wasn’t speaking out.

“You guys are playing his game, you are his oxygen,” Powell wrote. “He outraged us again today with his comments on Paris no-go for police districts. I will watch and pick the timing, not respond to the latest outrage.” In another email, Powell wrote, “To go on and call him an idiot just emboldens him.”

When the news emerged that Roger Ailes, the former Fox News boss ousted for serial sexual harassment, was advising Trump, Powell wrote, “Ailes as an advisor wont heal women, don’t you think?”

One of the more intriguing comments came in the same June email where he called Trump a “national disgrace.” He wrote that the Republican nominee was “in the process of destroying himself, no need for Dems to attack him.”

Certainly that seemed true at the time. But these days, Trump is running much stronger. Though most polls still suggest Clinton has a lead, her advantage has narrowed both nationally and in several swing states.

Although he has always been a Republican, Powell crossed over to endorse Democrat Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012. This year, however, he has not backed a candidate. Nor has Rice. McKay Coppins reports that many Republicans are privately in a state of “panic” about the prospect that Trump might actually win. Behind closed doors on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, congressional Republicans reportedly hammered Trump’s running mate, former Representative Mike Pence, over the campaign’s stances and rhetorics.

If Powell comes out of the emails as a sort of everyman, his dilemma over the coming few weeks also mirrors the choice faced by many of those Republicans, from Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush to members of Congress. Do they back a Democrat who they see as flawed and error-prone, and in many cases with whom they have bad blood? Or do they keep quiet and pray that she’s able to beat a “national disgrace” without their help?

The Mysteries of Lil Wayne

The headlines generated Tuesday by Lil Wayne’s appearance on Fox Sports 1’s Skip and Shannon: Undisputed include “Lil Wayne Confirms Retirement” but also “Lil Wayne Denies Retirement.” What gives? As one of the greatest rappers of the aughts, his music has first represented his own human mind—unvarnished, complicated, idiosyncratic, and often profane. Right now the 33-year-old is in a phase that foregrounds his own vulnerability and uncertainty to the public; trying to pin him down is pointless.

Earlier this month, the rapper tweeted “I AM NOW DEFENSELESS AND mentally DEFEATED & I leave gracefully and thankful I luh my fanz but I’m dun.” It sounded like a retirement announcement; prominent rappers from Drake to Kendrick Lamar posted their support of Wayne, urging him not to bow out. It came after a period of unhappy news for him: He walked out of a concert in July, and he’s had SWAT teams falsely called on his Miami home a number of times this year in apparent hoaxes. But the largest presumed cause for Wayne’s mental defeat was a long-running dispute with his label boss and mentor Birdman over royalty payments and the ability to release Wayne’s album Tha Carter V, which was recorded years ago.

On Undisputed, Wayne explained that the tweet resulted from an argument about “business,” but said that he hadn’t taken the tweet down because he “still feels that way.” About being mentally defeated? About being done? Unclear. He also said that he’ll never work with Birdman again, and replied yes when asked if he just wants to get his money and move on.

But he also said that he’ll never stop rapping, and that he hasn’t reached the peak of what he can accomplish—good signs that his career isn’t finish, which other recent evidence would seem to support. This past weekend, he released a song called “Grateful” that announced a “new chapter.” He also just recorded Undisputed’s theme song, and there have been reports of a new mixtape on its way. Still, he seems to want the public to bear in mind that this is a period of strain for him, as would make sense: The “new chapter” he refers to is one after a bitter falling out with Birdman, a man he until recently considered a father figure.

The Undisputed interview generated some other splashy headlines, about Wayne’s beliefs—or lack of beliefs—regarding race. He said a few times that his extraordinarily successful life led him to believe that racism doesn’t exist. But the admission was in the context of seeming humbled and bewildered by the Black Lives Matter moment: “That whole wave just went by me too fast for me to try to give an opinion.”

When Skip Bayless pressed him about race relations in America, he said,

Skip, they wouldn’t want to ask me that. They wouldn’t want my answer to represent it, because God knows I have been nothing but blessed. My whole path, these 33 years, have been nothing but a blessing. I have never—and never is a strong word—never dealt with racism, and I’m glad I didn’t have to. And I don’t know if it’s because of my blessings, I don’t know, but it is my reality. So I would have to say not only that I thought it was over, but that I still believe it’s over. But obviously it isn’t.

That last sentence is crucial, an admission that should be included in all the stories saying Wayne doesn’t believe racism is a problem.

Mainly, it seemed he was being pushed outside his comfort zone and that he truly had not engaged with the current political discourse—a stance that was once unremarkable for celebrities but that, in this era, now can be controversial in itself. He winced a few times, whether when asked about Colin Kaepernick’s protest of the national anthem or the fact that white people love his music. “I don’t want to be bashed” he said at one point. He also listed the names of his kids and added, “That’s my nation. That’s my flag. That’s my world. That’s my protest. That’s my don’t protest. That’s all that matters, those four kids to me.”

The apathy toward larger social struggle fits with some but not all of his music. The most political he’s ever seemed has been in songs addressing the government response to Hurricane Katrina, an event that directly impact him and his hometown of New Orleans. One of the tracks to tackle the topic—blasting the president, the mayor, and wider American attitudes—was “Tie My Hands” off of 2008’s Tha Carter III. Even then, he added a caveat: “Accept my emotion / Do not take it as an offensive gesture,” which again seems to be his main message in this strange, unsure time for his fans.

The Arrival of Self-Driving Ubers in Pittsburgh

NEWS BRIEF The first self-driving Ubers will begin picking up passengers in Pittsburgh Wednesday, available to select customers. Journalists, however, were able to test the technology ahead of the official debut, and for the most part reporters seemed dazzled by their robotic chauffeurs—even if the cars tended to drive like your vision-impaired grandmother.

Reporters were greeted by the fleet of Ford Fusions near downtown Pittsburgh, where the company has sunk millions into its Advanced Technologies Center. Pennsylvania, as my colleague Adrienne LaFrance writes, has made itself amenable to the company and to self-driving technology through deregulation, which was vital for carrying out this trial. Pittsburgh, too, promised to be a prime testing ground, because with its 446 bridges, its sloped hills, narrow downtown roads, the tunnels, and the native “Pittsburgh left,” the city is the gantlet of potential driving disasters.

During the tests with reporters, and as it tries out the cars with the public, Uber hired drivers, “safety engineers,” to sit in the cars behind the wheel in case someone needed to take over. A few dozen local, national, and tech outlets tried the cars out, and for the most part they seemed to enjoy the experience, if not for a few hiccups where the safety driver took control.

Cameras and lasers atop the Ford Fusions took 1.4 million measurements per second. Particularly futuristic looking was a spinning cylinder that stuck up from the roof like a periscope. NPR’s reporter noted how customers in self-driving cars will double-check their destination on an iPad in the backseat, which also asks if the passenger’s seat belt is fastened. Then with a click of a button on the screen, it’s off to the road. NPR said:

The ride feels pretty much like a ride in any other car, with an extremely cautious driver. We go maybe one or two miles an hour over the speed limit. Turns in particular feel painfully slow.

That was something most reporters mentioned. Driving the speed limit at 25 miles per hour on a deserted road, while technically the law, is perhaps a bit of a new experience for many drivers and passengers. The other commonly frustrating maneuver were turns at red lights. This is nascent technology, and while the company envisions a driverless future in 10 years, the cars can’t manage right turns on a red light. That might frustrate some passengers, or the drivers waiting behind them, as it did in the case of  The Wall Street Journal’s reporter, who noted Uber is considering making the cars a bit more assertive.

Uber generally has programmed its cars to drive within speed limits, but it is considering making the cars a bit more aggressive to blend with traffic flows where people routinely speed.

In some situations, the safety drivers had to take over when the car stopped for too long, or encountered a situation it couldn’t compute. For The New York Times reporter that moment came when a truck backed out—illegally, the reporter noted—into the street. The safety driver pressed the brake and took over the car. This could be done at anytime, the Times wrote, by pressing:

… a big red button in the center console — suspiciously similar to a seat ejector switch from a James Bond film — to disengage from self-driving mode. To turn the self-driving feature back on, he need only press a sleek steel button next to an embossed nameplate stamped on the console.

For the NPR reporter, the safety driver took control when a parked car blocked the lane. The safety driver passed the car and then resumed self-driving mode.

The Wall Street Journal reporter had it worst. The driverless car stalled out behind a truck, stopped to wait for gawking pedestrians in the middle of the street, and was jostled when a car merged too closely.

But, overall, everyone seemed to feel safe in the cars. Unlike their human counterparts, the self-driving cars obey speed limits, don’t tailgate, and stop at a reasonable distance behind other cars at lights. Pittsburgh’s streets were compared to a “double-black diamond” ski trail, and the aside from driving a bit overly cautious, the self-driving Ubers seemed to do a fine job of navigating the roads.

From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, here’s a look at the Pittsburgh streets through the eyes of a self-driving car.

Britain's New Plastic Pound

NEWS BRIEF Cotton-based paper currency is so yesterday.

The Bank of England announced Tuesday it would introduce into circulation 440 million five-pound notes made of plastic. The new currency is expected to be cleaner, stronger, and more secure than the country’s existing paper currency.

The new fiver, as the five-pound note is known, is printed on a flexible polymer material. It will be 15 percent smaller and last two-and-a-half times longer than its cotton-based predecessor. The note, which pictures the Queen of England on the front and former Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill on the back, will be used exclusively after the old fiver is phased out in May.

Mark Carney, the head of the Bank of England, said the new currency is durable enough to survive a spin cycle in a washing machine. He went one step further to demonstrate the plastic fiver’s strength by dipping it in a tray of curry at London’s Whitecross Street Market.

Mark Carney proves that the new £5 note is durable, ruins the curry for everyone else. pic.twitter.com/3F3yuMOLyt

— Rich Evans (@richevans) September 13, 2016

The note’s design features several anti-counterfeiting elements. Parts of the note are transparent, and the image of Big Ben is printed in gold foil on the front and silver on the back—details far more difficult to fake.

The BBC reports new plastic 10-pound notes, featuring the novelist Jane Austen, and 20-pound notes, featuring the artist JMW Turner, are expected to be introduced into circulation in 2017 and 2020, respectively.

The Separatists' Cease-Fire in Ukraine

NEWS BRIEF Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine announced a unilateral cease-fire Tuesday, the first to be proposed by rebel groups since violent conflict began in that country in 2014.

Alexander Zakharchenko, a Ukrainian separatist leader and the head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, told Russian television the cease-fire would go into effect on Wednesday at midnight local time. Zakharchenko said his troops would cease military operations at that time, and called on the Ukrainian military to do the same. If successful, it could bring a pause to the two-year conflict that has killed at least 9,500 people.

“Military units of Donetsk People’s Republic do not consider it as a weakness rather than a demonstration of a good will,” Zakharchenko said, according to Ruptly TV, a news agency funded by the Russian government. “In case of any violation of the cease-fire by the Ukrainian side, our units will respond in kind. We won’t allow shelling of our territory to continue unpunished.”

The Luhansk People’s Republic, another self-proclaimed state in eastern Ukraine, also announced a cease-fire Tuesday, the Associated Press reports.

Zakharchenko gave his support for the Minsk agreements brokered last year, in which representatives of the Ukrainian government and separatist groups agreed to a number of conditions, including the withdrawal of heavy artillery from eastern Ukraine and the establishment of a demarcation line between Ukrainian forces and separatist troops. Zakharchenko called those accords “the only solution” to the ongoing conflict. But the Minsk agreements have so far failed to stop the violence.

The cease-fire announcement comes hours after Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said he expects parliament to vote on a constitutional amendment to extend greater autonomy to the two rebel-controlled areas in eastern Ukraine—a key concession to the two rebel groups who have long sought to assert their independence in the eastern region. Poroshenko has previously ruled out granting full independence in eastern Ukraine, warning that disunity would only allow neighboring Russia to “destroy us from within.”

Poroshenko also announced his plans to meet with leaders from Germany, France, Britain, and Poland Wednesday, in which the situation in Ukraine is expected to be discussed.

The unrest in Ukraine first began in 2014 following the ousting of then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych by street protesters. Conflict flared when Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea one month later, and Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian government forces have been locked in battle in eastern Ukraine since.

In the 24 hours before Tuesday’s cease-fire announcement, Ukrainian government officials said three government troops were killed and 15 wounded. One person was reported missing.

Shimon Peres's Health

Updated at 4:05 p.m.

NEWS BRIEF Shimon Peres, the former Israeli president, suffered a stroke with significant bleeding and was taken to hospital where he was sedated, the director of the hospital where he is being treated told reporters.

1st official update on Shimon Peres medical condition: "Peres underwent stroke with significant bleeding... currently sedated"

— Anshel Pfeffer (@AnshelPfeffer) September 13, 2016

BREAKING: Hospital director: Israel's Peres suffered stroke 'with lots of bleeding'

— The Associated Press (@AP) September 13, 2016

Chemi Peres, Peres’s son, told reporters: “This is a difficult time. We will have to make certain decisions.”

Peres was being treated at Sheba Medical Center in Tel HaShomer. Peres’s office had initially reported that the 93-year-old former president was conscious and stable, but he has suffered in recent years from ill health. Here’s more from the Times of Israel:

Earlier this month, Peres underwent surgery to receive an artificial pacemaker, after he was diagnosed with an abnormal heart rhythm in July following a series of minor health scares.

The implant was recommended by Peres’s doctors, including his personal physician, Dr. Raphi Walden, after he was diagnosed in July with atrial fibrillation.

He suffered a mild heart attack in January and underwent a cardiac angioplasty to open a blocked artery. He had been hospitalized twice after suffering chest pains.

The Israeli prime minister’s office tweeted that Benjamin Netanyahu “conveyed the prayers of the entire nation for former President Peres' quick recovery.”

“PM Netanyahu spoke with the director of the Chaim Sheba Medical Center and was updated on the medical condition of former President Peres,” it said.

Peres was born in Poland in 1923 and immigrated with his family in 1932 to what was then Palestine. During Israel’s war of independence, he was put in charge by David Ben-Gurion of weapons purchases and military recruitment. Peres was elected to the Knesset in 1959. He was mostly associated with the Labor Party, but over the decades held major positions with all the major centrist and center-left parties in Israeli politics. Peres was known for his relatively dovish stance on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Peres served in almost every major position in Israeli government over his more than six decades in political life: He was prime minister twice, and interim prime minister twice, as well. He was foreign minister in Yitzhak Rabin’s government, and his role in the talks that led to the Oslo Accords won him the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize (which he shared with Rabin and Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader). Peres became president in 2007 for one seven-year term. He retired in 2014, but has remained an influential figure in Israeli politics.

Edward Snowden's Suggestion for Obama: A Presidential Pardon

NEWS BRIEF Barack Obama has been on a clemency kick during his final months in office. Last month he commuted the sentences of more than 200 federal inmates, the most presidential clemencies granted in a single day in more than a century. There will likely be more commutations, and perhaps some pardons as well, an executive action that historically sits low on a president’s exit checklist. When that time comes, one American has a suggestion for who the president might pardon.

Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower who has been living in exile in Russia for more than three years, says Obama should pardon him before he leaves office next year. Snowden said he should be eligible for clemency because his decision to disclose classified information about U.S. and British surveillance programs was morally correct and benefitted the public.

“Yes, there are laws on the books that say one thing, but that is perhaps why the pardon power exists—for the exceptions, for the things that may seem unlawful in letters on a page but when we look at them morally, when we look at them ethically, when we look at the results, it seems these were necessary things, these were vital things,” Snowden said in an interview with The Guardian Monday that was published Tuesday.

Snowden spoke to The Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill through a video link from Moscow, where he has lived since June 2013 after he left the United States and traveled to Hong Kong to leak to journalists classified documents from the NSA, where he worked as a contractor. A steady drip of news reports followed, detailing secret and widespread government surveillance of the communication of millions of Americans, internet companies, and foreign governments. That led to national debate over privacy and legislation reforms targeting some of the programs Snowden exposed.

“If not for these disclosures, if not for these revelations, we would be worse off,” Snowden told MacAskill.

Presidential pardons apply to people who have been convicted or charged with crimes. In June 2013, Snowden was charged with three felonies: theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information, and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person. Those last two charges were brought under the Espionage Act of 1917, federal law that criminalizes and punishes spying. Each charge carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years.

“I think when people look at the calculations of benefit, it is clear that in the wake of 2013 the laws of our nation changed,” Snowden told The Guardian. “The [US] Congress, the courts and the president all changed their policies as a result of these disclosures. At the same time there has never been any public evidence that any individual came to harm as a result.”

For a fugitive, Snowden is in the public eye a lot. He sits on the board of directors for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which supports First Amendment rights. He regularly appears at various tech conferences around the world via video, giving speeches. He joined Twitter last September, where he trolls U.S. government officials.

The American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International said this week they will launch a campaign to petition the White House for a presidential pardon for Snowden. But the chances of Obama granting one are close to nonexistent. The White House said Monday, as it has before, that Snowden should face charges on American soil, where he would be “treated fairly and consistent with the law.” In July 2015, the White House rejected a petition to pardon Snowden that reached 168,000 signatures, two years after it met the 100,000-signature threshold the White House requires to provide an official response.

In May, Eric Holder, the former U.S. attorney general and a close friend of Obama, said while Snowden’s leak of classified information was “inappropriate and illegal,” the whistleblower had performed a “public service.”

But the two people next in line for the power to pardon don’t agree. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump last year called Snowden a “bad guy" and suggested he be executed. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton says Snowden should return to the U.S. to face trial.

Snowden has repeatedly said he wants to come back to the U.S. In the Guardian interview, he said, “in the fullness of time, I think I will end up back home.” And history, he said, will be on his side.

“Once the officials, who felt like they had to protect the programs, their positions, their careers, have left government and we start looking at things from a more historical perspective,” he said, “it will be pretty clear that this war on whistleblowers does not serve the interests of the United States; rather it harms them.”

The Hack on U.S. Olympians' Medical Records

NEWS BRIEF A hacking group that calls itself the “Fancy Bears Hack Team” broke into the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) database and released the medical records of top U.S. Olympic athletes, WADA has confirmed.

The hackers are believed to be Russian, and while the accuracy of the records isn’t known, WADA confirmed the breach Wednesday, saying hackers engineered a phishing scam on International Olympic Committee (IOC) emails to gain access.

Fancy Bears, on its website, said:

As predicted, the USA dominated the 2016 Olympics medal count with 46 gold, 37 silver, 38 bronze for 121 total. The U.S. team played well but not fair.

After detailed studying of the hacked WADA databases we figured out that dozens of American athletes had tested positive. The Rio Olympic medalists regularly used illicit strong drugs justified by certificates of approval for therapeutic use. In other words they just got their licenses for doping. This is other evidence that WADA and IOC's Medical and Scientific Department are corrupt and deceitful.

The Fancy Bears included downloadable copies of records they claim to have taken from WADA’s Anti-Doping Administration and Management System  (ADAMS). The U.S. olympians targeted were Simone Biles, Serena and Venus Williams, and Elena Delle Donne, the basketball player. Some of the drugs listed in the records are used to treat illnesses like ADHD and asthma, though the authenticity of these published records has not been confirmed.

In its statement, WADA said the hackers gained access to its system through a spear-phishing attack of email accounts. This is when an email appears to be from someone familiar, but is, in fact, someone trying to gain passwords and other protected information. Olivier Niggli, director general for WADA, said law enforcement believes the attacks originated in Russia. Niggli added, “Let it be known that these criminal acts are greatly compromising the effort by the global anti-doping community to re-establish trust in Russia.”

This is the second recent hack of WADA’s system. In August, hackers gained access the medical records of Yuliya Stepanova, the Russian athlete who helped uncover the details of a state-sponsored doping scheme in Russia. In that case, hacker also targeted Stepanova’s email. Stepanova lives outside of Russia, and it’s  believed she was forced to move homes after the attack in case hackers learned her address.

The Great British Break-Up

To say that The Great British Bake Off is a cultural phenomenon understates how extraordinarily popular the BBC cooking contest has become. Last month, more than 10 million viewers in the U.K. watched the first episode of the seventh season—roughly half of all the television-owning households in the land. In 2015, seven of the top 10 most-watched television episodes of the year were episodes of GBBO. (While the British version of the show airs in the U.S. on PBS and Netflix, it’s referred to as The Great British Baking Show due to the fact that Pillsbury owns a trademark on the term “bake-off.”)

Beyond sheer eyeballs, though, the show’s combination of gentle smuttiness and culinary magnificence has come to offer something of a balm to a nation experiencing turbulent times. One of the fundamental reasons for The Great British Bake Off’s appeal is that it’s an understated celebration of the essence of British identity—of afternoon tea, self-deprecation, and scones—but one that makes a deliberate effort to be inclusive of all of Britain’s 64 million residents, regardless of their gender, race, religion, or sexuality. Last year, the sixth series was won by Nadiya Hussein, a second-generation Bangladeshi Briton who wears a headscarf. Hussein was touted as a symbol of unity in Britain in the midst of an ugly debate about immigration, and was asked this year to bake a birthday cake for the Queen. “Essentially, it’s a baking show,” she told The Guardian after her sixth-season win, “but that tent is also a symbol of British society today.”

Which is what makes the news of The Great British Bake Off’s impending shake-up so potentially catastrophic for a nation still reeling from the aftermath of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. This week, it was announced that the show would be leaving the BBC, where it’s aired for all of its seven seasons, and moving to Channel 4, a broadcasting network that airs commercials. (The BBC is a public broadcasting service funded by license fees paid by taxpayers, and does not.) On Tuesday, it emerged that, due to the move, the show’s hosts, Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc, would be leaving. “We were very shocked and saddened to learn yesterday evening that Bake Off will be moving from its home,” they announced in a statement. “We made no secret of our desire for the show to remain where it was. The BBC nurtured the show from its infancy and helped give it its distinctive warmth and charm ... We’re not going with the dough.” There’s no confirmation yet on whether the judges Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood will accompany GBBO to Channel 4.

The implosion of the show, as Perkins and Giedroyc hinted at with characteristic use of puns, comes down to money. Love Productions, the company that makes GBBO, has been negotiating rights with the BBC, asking for £25 million a year. The BBC offered £15 million, and was thus outbid. None of the show’s stars is understood to have been involved in the negotiation process, although a Channel 4 spokesperson stated that the network had “no plans to change the incredibly successful format of the show which is much loved by viewers.” Unfortunately, the eighth season will have to continue without its hosts, in a new home.

Perkins and Giedroyc, who met at Cambridge University in 1991 and first became known as the comedy double act Mel and Sue, are a huge part of the show’s appeal. Their bawdy asides about the stiffness of meringues and the pert bottoms of fruit tarts encapsulate the kind of winking, sexually repressed humor that runs through British history, from seaside postcards to Benny Hill. They’re also the reason so many of the attempts to replicate The Great British Bake Off for international audiences have failed—as charming as Nia Vardalos and her husband might be in ABC’s holiday-themed spinoff, they can’t quite emulate the cheeky empathy that makes GBBO so unique. While its timed competitive bakes are often fraught with tension, Perkins and Giedroyc pop up throughout to offer double entendres and hugs in equal measure. It’s hard, after all, to collapse in a heap over the limpness of a Swiss roll when the two mistresses of ceremonies keep making jokes about floppy appendages.

It’s possible that Channel 4, despite the considerable size of its investment, might lose. Even if the show doesn’t suffer without its hosts, the furore over GBBO’s future has soured things significantly. At stake are the next three seasons of a show that’s come to offer something of a panacea for wounded British souls in recent years—a reminder that, no matter how bad things get, the fabric of the nation is built upon cups of tea and feather-light sponges. Now, a show built on gluttony is ultimately being threatened by greed.

Matt Bevin's Apocalyptic Warnings of Bloodshed

At the height of the Tea Party movement in 2009 and 2010, an old quote from Thomas Jefferson became newly popular. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” Jefferson wrote in 1787. (The quote is often presented without historical context, but actually refers to the recent suppression of an insurrection.)

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Donald Trump and the Politics of Fear

The Tea Party has since splintered. Despite powering a huge Republican wave in the 2010 midterm elections, it was unable to prevent Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012. Some elements are now represented in the hardline House Freedom Caucus. Other strains of Tea Party thought have resurfaced in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin has not forgotten the Jefferson quote. Speaking at the Values Voter Summit in Washington over the weekend, the Republican recalled it while suggesting that a Hillary Clinton victory in the presidential election could necessitate bloodshed:

I want us to be able to fight ideologically, mentally, spiritually, economically, so that we don’t have to do it physically. But that may, in fact, be the case….

Somebody asked me yesterday, I did an interview, “Do you think it’s possible, if Hillary Clinton were to win the election, do you think it’s possible that we’ll be able to survive, that we’d ever be able to recover as a nation?” And while there are people who have stood on this stage and said we would not, I would beg to differ. I do think it would be possible, but at what price? At what price? The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood of who? The tyrants, to be sure, but who else? The patriots.

Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren. I have nine children. It breaks my heart to think that it might be their blood is needed to redeem something, to reclaim something that we, through our apathy and our indifference, have given away. Don’t let it happen.

As the Lexington Herald-Leader reports, those comments took many listeners aback. On Monday, Bevin said in a statement that his comments had been misconstrued and referred to those fighting in the military.

“Today we have thousands of men and women in uniform fighting for us overseas and they need our full backing,” he said. “We cannot be complacent about the determination of radical Islamic extremists to destroy our freedoms.”

As the full context of Bevin’s VVS remarks demonstrate, that’s pure spin. Bevin was clearly suggesting that bloodshed might be necessary domestically in the event of a Clinton victory. (You can watch the speech here.)

Yet the fact that Bevin is trying to walk it back also demonstrates just how extreme the statement is: a sitting governor suggesting publicly that armed insurrection might be necessary if a legitimate presidential election doesn’t go the way he wants.

Implications about armed revolt were somewhat common at the height of the Tea Party movement, and at the height of that Jefferson quote’s prominence. Few of the cries for uprising came from elected officials. In 2010, Sharron Angle, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Nevada, said that she hoped “Second Amendment remedies” would not be necessary to deal with a “tyrannical” government—while clearly leaving the option open. Her statement was a huge national controversy; she ended up losing to Senator Harry Reid that November.

The 2016 election has been so strange that Bevin’s remark may barely register. In August, Republican presidential nominee made reference to the possible assassination of either Hillary Clinton or Supreme Court nominees, saying, “If she gets the pick of her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I dunno.” Trump and his backers tried to play it off as a poorly executed joke.

Bevin’s comments do, however, underscore the apocalyptic attitudes aroused by this election, which has been unusually marked by fear. It is common for partisans on both sides to declare each new election “the most important of our lifetime” or something similar, but the nominations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have produced similar reactions from each candidate’s fiercest opponents: a sense not just that a loss would be catastrophic, and not even just the worst of a lifetime, but that it would be existentially dangerous to the United States.

Such sentiments are not unheard of; liberals threatened (and for the most part failed) to move to Canada if George W. Bush was reelected, while Tea Partiers foresaw doom if Obama was reelected, a prediction that has not yet been borne out—except perhaps by voters’ choices in 2016.

Trump, with his manifest ignorance of the Constitution and disregard for international norms, has been the greatest focus of this worry. Many conservative national-security figures have come out against him, warning that he is not fit to control the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. But as my colleague Molly Ball has written, fear may also be Trump’s most important tool in the election. Bevin’s speech is a reminder that Clinton’s opponents harbor apocalyptic fears too.