Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 83

More Charges in the November Paris Attacks

NEWS BRIEF Austrian prosecutors announced two men were charged Thursday in connection with the attacks in Paris that killed 130 people last November, the Associated Press reports.

Salzburg prosecutors say the men are suspected of  “gathering information and arranging contacts,” as well as belonging to a criminal organization. The two individuals, who have only been identified as a 26-year-old Moroccan man and a 40-year-old Algerian man, have been charged with coordinating logistics with two other suspects whom Austria extradited to France in July. All four men are believed to have traveled to Europe together, posing as refugees.

Meanwhile, Salah Abdeslam, who is said to be the sole survivor of the 10-person ISIS team that conducted the attacks, reaffirmed his right to remain silent for the third time in a hearing Thursday in Paris. Frank Berton, Abdeslam’s lawyer, attributed his client’s silence to the 24-hour video surveillance of his prison cell. Berton previously requested the round-the-clock monitor be removed, citing psychological damage. The request, however, was struck down by French authorities, who argued the surveillance was necessary to ensure Abdeslam doesn’t commit suicide.

Abdeslam, a Belgian-born French national, was arrested in Brussels last March and later extradited to France, where he faced several charges, including participating in a terrorist organization and terrorist murders. Authorities said they hoped Abdeslam would provide more information about his role in the November attacks, as his precise role in the operation has yet to be determined.

Ryan Lochte's Suspension From the U.S. National Team

NEWS BRIEF Ryan Lochte, the Olympic gold medalist who apparently fabricated a robbery story to Brazilian authorities, has been suspended from the U.S. national swim team for 10 months.

As a result of his suspension, during which he will not receive a monthly stipend, Lochte will miss the national and world championships next year. He also must forfeit the $100,000 bonus he received for winning medals during the Rio Olympics.

American swimmers Gunnar Bentz, Jack Conger, and James Feigen, who were also involved in the incident in which they claimed to have been robbed at gunpoint, were each suspended four months from the national team. The four men were not robbed, but had actually vandalized a gas-station bathroom; security guards had demanded money from them to pay for the damages.

Scott Blackmun, the U.S. Olympic Committee CEO, called the four athletes’ behavior “not acceptable.” In a statement Thursday, he said:

It unfairly maligned our hosts and diverted attention away from the historic achievements of Team USA. Each of the athletes has accepted responsibility for his actions and accepted the appropriate sanctions.

Brazilian authorities have demanded that Lochte return to Rio and be charged with providing false testimony, which could result in an 18-month prison sentence.

The 32-year-old swimmer has also lost several endorsement deals as a result of the incident, including from Speedo and Ralph Lauren. He will be a guest of this season of Dancing With the Stars.

The Disappearance and Return of the Original Ground Zero Flag

After the twin towers fell, three firefighters hoisted a 3-foot-by-5-foot flag up a lanyard above ground zero and a photographer captured the moment. The Associated Press picked up the photo, as did Newsweek, and countless other media outlets. It became a stamp and a symbol.

Twelve days later, Rudy Giuliani, at the time the New York City mayor, signed the flag at Yankee Stadium. It was also signed by his successor, Michael Bloomberg, and by New York Governor George E. Pataki. It would travel to naval ships in the Middle East, and in 2002 it returned to City Hall. Except the flag that had been signed and did all the traveling was not the flag pictured in the photo, the one raised in the hours after the September 11 attacks. For starters, this flag was 5 feet by 8 feet. So what happened to the original flag?

That remains, in part, a mystery. But on Thursday, the original flag, verified by forensic scientists, goes on permanent display at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York.

How the flag became lost and how it reappeared is a somewhat unsatisfying story, because there are so many unanswered questions. What’s known is it showed up at a fire station in Everett, Washington, in 2014, four days after the History Channel featured an episode on its disappearance.

The flag had originally belonged to a New York couple who’d hung it from the back of their yacht. One of the firefighters in the photo had taken it from the vessel and hoisted the flag above the rubble of the towers. In 2014 the History Channel’s Brad Meltzer asked for help solving the mystery in an article he wrote for The Huffington Post. In it, he said, they’d found a clue, which led to another dead end. Meltzer wrote:

On the night of 9/11, a New York police officer was shooting surveillance footage at Ground Zero. In this footage, at 10:30 p.m., the famous flagpole from the photo is bare. The flag is already gone, meaning that it had already been taken down within five hours of the iconic photo.

To this day, New York City has no leads, nor does the FDNY. Some experts suggest the real flag was misplaced at Ground Zero in the days after 9/11. Others suggest it was stolen. Others guess it may have been used to cover the body of a slain first responder and therefore could be stored in a morgue.

A week later, Meltzer’s episode on the mysterious disappearance of the ground zero flag ran on the History Channel’s spinoff, H2. Apparently, someone in Everett, Washington, was watching, because four days later a flag was dropped off at a fire station by a man named Brian.

“At least that’s what the firefighters recall him using,” Mark St. Clair, the deputy chief of operations, told The New York Times. The man said he was a former Marine, the Times reported, and that he’d been given the flag by someone at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who had been given the flag by a widow of a September 11 victim. That story has been called questionable.

Regardless of how the man came to own the flag, firefighters told the local police, and investigators looked into the claim that this flag, which was 3 feet by 5 feet, was the original featured in the iconic photograph.

The flag was turned over to a Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory forensic materials scientist who, as the Times reported, analyzed dust samples on the flag and compared them with those taken after the towers fell. They matched.

There still remain questions, like who took it from the pole in the five hours after the September 11 attacks? And  how did it end up on the other side of the country?

But Thursday the flag returns home, and that much is true.

What to Watch This Fall

The fall TV season was once a carefully curated smorgasbord of mass appeal: a chance for broadcast networks to introduce new shows by pairing them with existing hits and building out whole nights of programming to hook new viewers. No more. In this moment of “peak TV,” every month brings an onslaught of new scripted programs, and it’s no longer reasonable to expect to be able to see everything in the fall, when the usual swell of broadcast debuts combines with countless cable and streaming shows. But that also means that the range of stories being told in the medium is broader than ever, often while featuring characters from demographics that are typically underrepresented in popular culture.

High Maintenance / HBO

Son of Zorn (September 11, Fox) is a bizarre-looking combination of animation and live action, in which a He-Man-type cartoon hero (voiced by Jason Sudeikis) struggles to raise a teenager in the real world—an odd piece of nostalgia that casts a subversive glance at the childhood heroes of Saturday morning cartoons. The sixth season of American Horror Story (September 14, FX) is still refusing to tell audiences what it’s even about, a strange meta-extension of the show’s serial mystery format. The return of Documentary Now! (September 16, IFC) is parodying films like Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Stop Making Sense, and The Kid Stays in the Picture this year. The shaggy weed comedy High Maintenance (September 16, HBO) finally makes the leap from acclaimed webseries to premium cable star this this fall, bringing its wry humor, surprising guest stars, and humane storytelling to a deservingly bigger audience.

The Good Place / NBC

Even broadcast networks are getting in on more experimental storytelling—The Good Place (September 19, NBC) is a beguiling new comedy set in heaven from the Parks & Recreation creator Mike Schur. He says one of his biggest influences for the show, which stars Ted Danson and Kristen Bell, was Lost, and indeed there’s an odd mystery to unravel at the show’s center. Gentle mockumentary, this is not. On the more traditional end of things, there’s Kevin James’s return to the multi-camera sitcom with Kevin Can Wait (September 19, CBS), which feels just like The King of Queens except this time he’s playing a retired New York City cop, rather than a working mailman. The country’s most popular network is happy to stick to the formula that appeals to its older audience: There’s also Bull (September 20, CBS), a legal drama starring Michael Weatherly that’s based on the early career of … Dr. Phil McGraw. (Yes, Dr. Phil once worked as a psychological consultant for legal firms.)

Speechless / ABC

If CBS is taking the fewest risks, NBC is taking the most. Along with The Good Place there’s This Is Us (September 20, NBC), a family drama about three seemingly disconnected storylines that are interlinked in a bizarre way—you’ll have to watch to learn the twist. Joining TV’s vast stable of gritty political dramas is Designated Survivor (September 21, ABC), in which Kiefer Sutherland plays the Secretary of Housing, who is named President after the rest of the country’s leaders perish in an attack during the State of the Union. A decade ago, Sutherland might have worked as the star of a Lethal Weapon reboot (September 21, FOX), but instead viewers are stuck with one starring Clayne Crawford and Damon Wayans. Speechless (September 21, ABC) takes the most staid format of all—the family sitcom—and like ABC’s hits Black-ish and Fresh Off the Boat, tries to have it reflect an underrepresented demographic. An actor with cerebral palsy is playing a non-verbal, special-needs child on the show, a relative rarity in an industry where 95 percent of characters with disabilities are played by able-bodied actors.

Pitch / FOX

Pitch (September 22, Fox) tackles another underwritten area of TV by fictionally shattering a still-unbroken barrier in sports: Kylie Bunbury stars as the first woman to play for a Major League baseball team, and (predictably), conflict ensues. Mark-Paul Gosselaar co-stars as her grumpy catcher. It’s one of Fox’s only original shows this year; along with the Lethal Weapon reboot, there’s The Exorcist (September 23, Fox), the umpteenth take on the legendary horror movie, and MacGyver (September 23, Fox), an update on the hero of ’80s action TV, now starring X-Men: First Class’s Lucas Till. No hoary old culture property could be less appealing than Woody Allen, but Amazon has made a big bet on him with Crisis in Six Scenes (September 30, Amazon), a pleasant-looking comedy starring Allen, Miley Cyrus, and Elaine May that seems sure to generate more attention for the controversy surrounding its creator than its actual content.

Luke Cage / Netflix

The Marvel TV Universe will likely continue its successful run with Luke Cage (September 30, Netflix), which spins off the bulletproof protector of Harlem (played by Mike Colter) after he first showed up as a love interest on Jessica Jones last year. Another long-awaited genre drama, Westworld (October 2, HBO), is finally landing after a troubled production and repeated delays. If nothing else, the sci-fi/western/exploitation mash-up about a theme park of robots gone amok looks expensive, and has an all-star cast (Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris, Thandie Newton) to go with it. If its throwback look is too polished, viewers could also opt for the far sillier Timeless (October 3, NBC), in which a team of nerds travels through time to stop a criminal from rewriting U.S. history. It’s even dumber than it sounds, but twice as fun.

Insecure / HBO

Despite Westworld’s fancy visuals, HBO is far more likely to succeed with its block of quiet dramedies airing alongside it. Divorce (October 9, HBO), created by Catastrophe’s Sharon Horgan, is a low-key work charting the break-up of a New York couple played by Sarah Jessica Parker and Thomas Haden Church. Insecure (October 9, HBO), is a little more upbeat but just as complex. It’s an extension of the comedian Issa Rae’s webseries Awkward Black Girl, which explores the life of a young African American woman, while deftly dodging every known TV cliché in the process. Hugh Laurie rejoins the TV world in Chance (October 19, Hulu), an adaptation of Kem Nunn’s noir novel about a forensic neuropsychiatrist. Expect the growly grumpiness he brought to House, but with more bad language.

Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life / Netflix

Amazon’s new wave of scripted dramas includes the promising Good Girls Revolt (October 28, Amazon), an adaptation of Lynn Povich’s book about the female Newsweek employees who launched a groundbreaking discrimination lawsuit in 1970. Meanwhile, Netflix is officially the home of beloved TV properties given a second chance (amid sky-high expectations). Black Mirror (October 21, Netflix) promises six more tales of bleak, technological dystopia for its eager, ever-growing audience. Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (November 25, Netflix) will provide a gentler dose of nostalgia to viewers, bringing back the classic family dramedy so that it can right the wrongs of its catastrophic final broadcast season (which aired without the involvement of the creator Amy Sherman-Palladino). Fall will be that kind of a TV season—for all the promising new programs, with their formulaic re-hashing or bold, experimental narratives, the revival of a long-dead show might be the biggest story of the year.

The Charge Against the Hungarian Camerawoman Who Kicked Migrants

NEWS BRIEF One week after a picture of a drowned 3-year-old Syrian boy washed ashore in Turkey circulated online last September, another image from Europe’s migrant crisis went viral: a camerawoman kicking and tripping refugees as they fled police at the Hungary-Serbia border.

A year later, Petra Laszlo, who was soon after fired from her job at a far-right Hungarian television channel, is now facing criminal charges for the incident. Hungarian prosecutors said Wednesday her actions were a “breach of peace.” The New York Times explains the charges and her potential punishment:

The charge, breach of peace, is defined in Hungarian law as antisocial, violent behavior capable of inciting indignation or alarm, and it carries a maximum sentence of two years in prison unless there are aggravating circumstances.

Hungarian prosecutors say Laszlo did not cause injury and was not motivated by racism.

The incident was captured on German television channel RTL Aktuell. Laszlo kicked two migrants and appeared to trip another man holding his child.

The man she tripped, Osama Abdul Mohsen, was coming from Turkey. He now lives in Spain as a permanent resident with two of his children. After the video appeared online, a soccer coach academy in Getafe, a town just outside of Madrid, offered him a job, an apartment, and free Spanish-language lessons. He even met international soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo.

But his wife and two other children remain in Turkey. Mohsen recently told Al-Jazeera that his life is incomplete without his entire family. “I would do anything so we can live together,” he said. “And if that means we have to move to another country, we will do so.”

Laszlo apologized for the incident soon after, claiming she was scared and was only trying to protect herself. But she has attacked Mohsen in the Hungarian press, saying he has ties to terrorist organizations. The New York Times has called those claims “unfounded.”

The trial date for Laszlo has not been set yet.

Who Was Bill Clinton, Anyway?

DURHAM, N.C.—The mercury was well above 90 inside the small gymnasium, and the crowd was starting to look a little wilted from an hour of waiting. But Bill Clinton was just getting started. Clad in his customary suit and tie, the Big Dog was roaming the stage, mic in hand, cracking jokes.

“A couple weeks ago I celebrated my 70th birthday—I still can’t believe it,” he said, chuckling. “All the young people, they’re probably wondering why I’m not wrapped like a mummy or something.”

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Getting Bill Out of the House

That’s a helpful, if somewhat macabre, shorthand for thinking about Bill Clinton’s role on his wife’s campaign for president. With the home stretch of the election just beginning, and Clinton unable to open up a wide lead over Donald Trump, he’s hitting the trail along with a flock of other big-name surrogates. What does the 42nd president have to offer Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president, how diminished are his gifts, and is his campaigning worth the risks? Bill Clinton is a piece of living history (to borrow a phrase), but he’s stumping for the woman who wants to represent America’s future.

Bill Clinton’s popularity isn’t what it was just a couple years ago. He’s been buffeted by the acrimonious campaign as well as attacks on central elements of his presidential legacy, including the 1994 crime bill (from the left) and NAFTA (from both left and right). Just four years ago, seven in 10 Americans had a favorable view of him, according to Gallup. These days that’s down to 49 favorable and 46 unfavorable. Bloomberg found him at a stronger but still diminished 50-43.

While his own record has become an occasional liability for the Clinton campaign, he remains a major draw and an intuitively natural campaigner. In his speech at a community center in Durham Tuesday afternoon, Clinton’s political talents and long track record were amply on display. He was careful to name and thank each of the speakers before him, even the sixth grader who led the Pledge of Allegiance. A capacity crowd of 720 braved the heat to hear him, and another 100 were stuck outside.

“A couple weeks ago I celebrated by 70th birthday. All the young people, they’re probably wondering why I’m not wrapped like a mummy or something.”

What they heard was partly a detailed rundown of Hillary Clinton’s policies, and partly an act of self-defense. Since Bill Clinton left office—more than 15 years ago now—he’s focused on the Clinton Foundation, which has lately become another liability for his wife’s campaign. Releases of emails from the State Department have shown the frequent communication between the foundation and Foggy Bottom, and raised serious questions about whether there were quid-pro-quos for foundation donors. Critics, including major newspapers and some Democrats, have called on the Clintons to separate entirely from the foundation, or even to shut it down.

That seems like a simple, straightforward solution from the outside, but it doesn’t take much time watching Bill Clinton on the stump to see why the Clintons show little sign of budging. He has now run the foundation for longer than he was president and longer than he was governor of Arkansas. On Tuesday, he spoke lovingly about traveling the globe and doing Clinton Foundation work. For Donald Trump, the Clinton Foundation represents a useful bludgeon. For Hillary Clinton HQ in Brooklyn, it represents a political headache. But for Bill Clinton, it’s his post-presidential life’s work, and he takes the attacks personally.

“I got tickled the other day when Mr. Trump called my foundation a criminal enterprise. That was pretty funny, considering,” Clinton said. “Considering that the three major evaluators of foundations gave it the highest grade they can give, and the most recent one rated it even higher than the Red Cross. Unlike him we actually say who gives us money and what we spend it on, and disclose our tax returns and stuff like that.”

Clinton kept going, attacking the Republican nominee for an illegal $25,000 donation that his foundation gave to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was at the time considering whether to pursue a fraud investigation into Trump University and the Trump Institute. “And mysteriously, the investigation vanished!” Clinton laughed.

It was hard at times not to hear Clinton as the voice of the past. Who could begrudge him the chance to burnish his legacy a little bit, boasting of the nation’s successes when he was president? At other times, he sounded like the septuagenarian he was.

“Everywhere the difference is all that matters, some people may win a few elections, but good things don’t happen,” he warned. “North Carolina at its best represents the future of America, and I think the rest of the world, by embracing your diversity. The problem is we live in a Snapchat, Twitter world where it’s easier to just discredit people and call them names.”

Clinton mostly avoided the meandering which has become more common in his public appearances in recent years. (Of course, Clinton always spoke for a long time, and often far too long. Is he really meandering that much more, or does it just seem that way as he gets frailer?) A couple notable digressions came as Clinton tried to make the case that the good old days weren’t that great. Citing Will Rogers, he wended his way through a biographical riff about the cowboy-politician. Then he added his own experience.

“The problem is we live in a Snapchat, Twitter world where it’s easier to just discredit people and call them names.”

“I hope I will be the last American president who can ever say that when I was a small child, I spent some time on a small farm that didn’t have indoor plumbing. In the wintertime, the outhouse is way overrated. Why am I telling you this?” he asked, as a few audience members nodded in puzzled agreement. “Because we need to live in the future, not the past,” he said, bringing it all home. He followed that up with nearly 20 minutes of heavy-duty policy speech, applying his familiar talent for making dry detail comprehensible as he boosted Hillary Clinton’s plans for expanding broadband internet, encouraging small-business lending, and reducing the cost of a college education.

There was one thing he decided not to delve into: the State Department correspondence being released on a regular basis.

“They make a big deal out of these emails—look, I will not try to disabuse you of that, because I would lose you trying to explain it,” he said. “Just remember this: A huge number of  prominent Republicans have endorsed her for president. The vast majority of them spent their life in national security trying to protect us all. They have reached the judgment that the national-security arguments favor her, not undermine her.”

For older voters, the Hillary Clinton campaign is inextricable from her husband’s term in office, whether for good or ill. The complex legacy of the Clinton years intersects in particularly powerful ways with young voters, a demographic Hillary Clinton has struggled to win over. In the crowd on Tuesday were a number of students from Duke University, who’d come from campus less than two miles away. Did they even remember the Clinton administration?

“I took [AP U.S. History],” Miles Todzo, a freshman, said with a somewhat sheepish grin. He said he thought the ex-president was a major asset to the Clinton campaign, “because a lot of people associate him with prosperity.”

Akanksha Ray, another freshman, admitted her memories of the Clinton years weren’t all that strong either—but, she added, “My parents loved him.” She thought of the ’90s as a time of hope for that generation, and added, “I think Hillary Clinton and her plan for America are what I want for my future.”

The idea of hope—as in The Man From Hope, rather than the Shepard Fairey poster—kept coming up. “Growing up in a post-9/11 America, there’s a lot of cynicism and vitriol,” Jay Rora told me. “The Clinton administration was a time when people had hope.”

For an older observer, the idea that the era of Monica, government shutdowns, and Dan Burton’s backyard demonstrations was an age of optimistic comity in politics might seem peculiar. For Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, these rosy impressions are highly welcome, even if they come at the expense of thinking about the Big Dog as a mummified relic.

The Sectarian Spat Over the Hajj

NEWS BRIEF Millions of Muslims from around the world are descending upon Mecca this week to take part in the Hajj, an annual Islamic pilgrimage and one of the world’s largest gatherings. This unifying holy ritual, however, has not prevented sectarian rivalries from erupting between Muslim leaders in Saudi Arabia and Iran, who have publicly sparred over which country is best representative of Islam.

This latest diplomatic row follows comments made by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Monday on the anniversary of last year’s deadly Hajj stampede, which killed as many as 2,411 pilgrims. Khamenei accused Saudi Arabia of incompetence and called on Muslims to reconsider Saudi control over Islamic holy sites like Mecca. He said:

The heartless and murderous Saudis locked up the injured with the dead in containers- instead of providing medical treatment and helping them or at least quenching their thirst. … Because of these rulers’ oppressive behavior towards God’s guests, the world of Islam must fundamentally reconsider the management of the two holy places and the issue of hajj. Negligence in this regard will confront the Islamic Ummah with more serious problems in the future.

Grand Mufti Abdulaziz Al Sheikh, Saudi Arabia’s top cleric, responded Tuesday, saying Iran’s leaders were not real Muslims. He accused Iranian leaders of being sons of “majuws,” referring to Zoroastrians, one of Iran’s oldest religious minorities.

“We must understand that they are not Muslims, for they are the descendants of Majuws, and their enmity toward Muslims, especially the Sunnis, is very old,” Al Sheikh told Saudi Arabia’s Makkah newspaper.

The cleric’s remarks prompted a response from Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, who criticized Saudi Arabia’s conservative brand of Sunni Islam on Twitter:

Indeed; no resemblance between Islam of Iranians & most Muslims & bigoted extremism that Wahhabi top cleric & Saudi terror masters preach.

— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) September 6, 2016

Tensions between the two countries have only risen since the two broke off diplomatic ties in January following Saudi Arabia’s execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent Shiite Muslim cleric, and the subsequent storming of the Saudi embassy in Tehran by Iranian protesters. The severing of diplomatic relations follows years of political and religious tension. In addition to vying for regional legitimacy over who best represents Islam, both countries have engaged in the five-year Syrian civil war from opposing sides, with Saudi Arabia supporting Syria’s opposition forces while Iran aligns itself with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

In May, Iran announced it would not allow any of its citizens to travel to Mecca for the annual pilgrimage, citing “obstacles created by Saudi officials.” The five-day ritual begins Saturday.

Sia’s Wonderful and Sad Music Video for Orlando

You’re not supposed to know what a Sia video really means the first time you watch it, or even the fifth. She’s the pop star of inscrutable meaning but unmistakable emotion, of inspirational slogans applicable to nearly any situation, of wigs and flesh-toned leotards and cute everykids doing dance moves that resemble mundane life remixed in a dream. The first time I watched the video for her new song “The Greatest,” I didn’t know what it was about. I just knew it was wonderful, and heavy.

Other viewers, though, picked up on something pretty obvious: The video must be connected to the June massacre of 49 people at an Orlando gay bar during a Latin night. Sia herself hasn’t confirmed this interpretation, but some of the performers in the video have posted messages that made it clear. There are 49 young dancers on screen. Their leader, Maddie Ziegler, paints rainbows on her face. At the end, everyone falls down in what seems to be a nightclub, revealing what looks like a bullet-riddled wall.

Making pop about a specific tragedy is necessarily a tricky job. So it’s no crime that some of the other mainstream original songs memorializing Orlando have been as rote as issue-oriented singles are often stereotyped as being. Jennifer Lopez and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Love Makes the World Go Round” is an airing of strained cheer; Interscope Records’ “Hands”—featuring 24 musicians, including Britney Spears, Selena Gomez, and Imagine Dragons—grossly overextends the metaphor of its title as it aims for “We Are the World” wistfulness. Both songs are sincere, admirable, and philanthropic. Both are less about the victims than about how the rest of the world might move on, conquering an abstract idea of hate with an abstract idea of love. And both feel like side projects for the artists involved.

But “The Greatest” is very potent, a work of art, not charity (though one would hope the proceeds are going somewhere other than to music industry—Sia’s camp hasn’t said). There’s no break here from the rest of Sia’s catalogue about pain and release in everyday life: You hear a sad voice wailing about bucking up, very stark emotional peaks and valleys, and a danceable backing of explosive drums, toy-box melodies, and reggae grooves. Sia and Greg Kurstin may have written the song even before the massacre. But in the context of Orlando, the possible platitude of the chorus becomes gutting: “I’m free to be the greatest / I’m alive.” She’s pepping the listener up, but she’s also defining the value of life, marking the human potential that’s been lost.

The video is also an extension of her previous work, with the hugely talented young dancer Maddie Ziegler continuing in her role as Sia’s on-screen avatar, though this time she trades her blonde wig for a black one. The dingy settings resemble the dilapidated home of “Chandelier” and the grimy cage of “Elastic Heart.” And a lot of the dance moves, especially the most zany ones—hands used as eyeglasses, feet as telephones—have shown up in her previous clips.

There’s a clear, if abstract, narrative. Ziegler summons the kids from sleep and busts them from a jail cell—an obvious image of liberation. They dance in what resembles a flop house. And then, at the most ecstatic point, they’re in a room with disco lights, probably meant to be a nightclub. There are shots that evoke flirting, gossipy conversations, and going wild on the dance floor. Toward the the end everyone stands in a mass, bouncing up and down, tongues out: pure energy. Then they fall down.

Ryan Heffington’s choreography is maniacal but precise, with each of the 49 dancers on their own paths yet moving as a group, their individual actions often syncing up with the people around them during climactic points in the song. The video’s directors, Sia and Daniel Askill, use long tracking shots, peering around corners and swooping over the pack and zigzagging between the dancers. Whenever the camera settles it has a portrait-like effect, facing the revelers in a moment of unison.

These people did have stamina, and they were still cut down.

Absent of any social context, it’s all striking and beautiful and ineffably sad. With the knowledge that it was inspired by queer youths and friends gunned down in the act of coming together and enjoying themselves, it becomes almost unbearably poignant. Sia keeps singing about having stamina; Kendrick Lamar’s verse, omitted from the video, is all about surviving adversity and haters. What’s so potent about the video—and so specifically awful about this massacre—is that its subjects do seem to have struggled and triumphed to find the freedom to flip out together, and they are still cut down. It’s bookended by Ziegler crying: As is appropriate, there’s no take-home moral to make what happened seem okay.

“The Greatest” recalls in message if not sound the only other really effective piece of Orlando-related music I’ve come across: the indie-rocker Sharon Van Etten’s “Not Myself,” which also seems to be about the unique tragedy of these victims. “Please, darling, believe in something,” Van Etten sings. “I want you to be yourself around me.” Sia’s shown us one vision of how glorious it can be for that sort of plea to go answered, and how deep a violation it is for the potential to answer to be taken away.

Exporting a Controversial War on Drugs to Indonesia

Updated on September 7 at 12:40 p.m. ET

NEWS BRIEF More than 2,400 people have been killed in the Philippines since the new president began his war on drugs—many in extra-judicial killings that have been criticized by human-rights activists. But on Tuesday, the head of the anti-narcotics unit in neighboring Indonesia said he’d like to replicate the Philippines’s policy in his own country.

Budi Waseso said Indonesia has already begun to add heavy weapons, drug-sniffing dogs, and police personnel to carry out a crackdown. Waseso, like Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, is known for his controversial remarks; last year he said he’d like to jail drug traffickers on an island prison surrounded by crocodiles.  

“The life of a dealer is meaningless,” Waseso said Tuesday, because a dealer “carries out mass murder. How can we respect that?”

On Wednesday, Agence France-Presse quoted a spokesman from the Indonesian anti-narcotics unit who tried to soften Waseso’s words:

Agency spokesman Slamet Pribadi sought Wednesday to play down the comments, saying a Philippines-style policy would only be followed “if our law makes it possible,” adding: “We can’t shoot criminals just like that, we have to follow the rules.”

But he acknowledged that Waseso was “strict” and had told staff members that “we should not keep our guns in a safe, we must use them — but only for law enforcement.”

Indonesia already has some of the harshest penalties for drug traffickers. In April 2015, it executed eight people convicted of drug smuggling, including seven foreign citizens, two of them Australian. The executions prompted Australia to recall its ambassador. In July, Indonesia executed another four people convicted of drug crimes, three of them Nigerians.

Duterte’s approach in the Philippines has drawn criticism from the international community. Earlier this week, a reporter asked him what he would say to U.S. President Obama at a scheduled meeting in Laos if questioned about his methods. Duterte’s response: “Son of a bitch, I will swear at you.” The U.S. had canceled the proposed meeting, but on Wednesday the Philippines Foreign Secretary confirmed with the Associated Press that the two leaders talked informally; although, there was no information on what they talked about.

'Germany Will Remain Germany'

NEWS BRIEF German Chancellor Angela Merkel, coming off a dramatic loss last weekend for her Christian Democratic Union to a new right-wing, anti-migrant party, said Wednesday “Germany will remain Germany” despite the influx of asylum-seekers, and warned against inflammatory political rhetoric directed at the newcomers.

The comments to the Bundestag were Merkel’s most comprehensive after the center-right CDU’s third-place finish in local elections in her home state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania. The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) finished second while the center-left Social Democrats retained power.

In her remarks Wednesday, Merkel showcased the economic gains under her chancellorship, but her comments about the asylum-seekers—of whom Germany has accepted more than 1 million since last year—made the most news given the CDU’s election performance and growing unease in Germany not only with the newcomers, but with the growing influence of the AfD. The situation, Merkel said in comments translated by Deutsche Welle, “is much better now than a year ago” when hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers entered the country, “but there remains a lot to do.”

“Germany will remain Germany,” she said, “and so will all that is dear to it.”

Merkel also acknowledged that the AfD’s rise posed a “challenge,” but warned against inflammatory rhetoric on issues such as migration.

“When we join in with this behavior where facts are ignored or brushed aside, then a responsible and constructive debate is no longer possible,” she said.

Last year, amid intense fighting in the Syrian civil war, Merkel threw open Germany’s doors for those affected by the violence. The decision led to a massive flow of migrants from Syria and elsewhere to Europe. Faced with the most-severe migrant crisis since World War II, many European countries closed their borders to the newcomers, others made it difficult for them to settle, but Germany, Sweden, Greece, and a handful of other nations maintained their open-doors policy.

Germans initially supported Merkel’s policy, but as the number of migrants grew, so did the opposition, including from politicians and members of Merkel’s own ruling coalition. That opposition was reflected in the numbers of migrants entering Germany: More than 1 million people entered in 2015. From January to July 2016, according to the Associated Press, Germany registered some 238,424 new arrivals, mostly early in the year.