Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 836

Of Course, Rob Ford Is Running for Re-Election

AP

For Torontonians who like their mayors on crack, probably in one of their drunken stupors, 2014 is beginning with some great news: Rob Ford is running for re-election.

Yes, it's true! Word came from Ford's spokesperson and was tweeted by CNN producer Vaughn Sterling:

CNN JUST IN: Toronto mayor Rob Ford Will File for Re-Election #2014

— Vaughn Sterling (@vplus) January 1, 2014

While it may seem completely insane for a politician to seek re-election after, well, everything Rob Ford has done, it's not a huge surprise. Though Ford's mayoral powers have been largely taken away from him, he's refused to step down and tried to lay low in the last month (except for that dance video. Oh, and the lawsuit over calling a reporter a pedophile. I mean, for Rob Ford, this is lying low), possibly hoping this whole thing might blow over by the October 27 election.

Indeed, the campaign to repair Rob Ford's image began in earnest today, when the Globe and Mail interviewed Ford's lawyer about the mayor's "road to redemption."

Dennis Morris told the paper that his client "did not acknowledge appropriately" his "substance abuse problem," but that was no reason for him to step aside:

What reason is there for him to step aside? I'm not really sure because I don't think there’s any precedent that anybody must step aside. What if he said, 'I overindulged in alcohol?' Is it because alcohol’s legal, crack cocaine isn't? I don't really know. And I think he made an excellent decision not to step aside because, as you see, he's rehabilitating himself as of the past [several] weeks.

Asked what he thought of Ford's re-election chances, Morris said:

I think they’re excellent. I think if you asked me that a few months ago, I’d think otherwise because people aren’t happy when an individual with substance abuse difficulties doesn’t acknowledge and do something about them. It’s a type of illness and if you’re able to overcome it and take steps to overcome it, I think people will be forgiving.

While Morris says everything is excellent, Globe and Mail's Jill Mahoney wasn't quite as optimistic, giving his chances a solid "maybe." (Her answers to questions about the fallout from the active police investigation and whether or not that video would ever come out were about as non-committal: "too early to tell" and "possibly," respectively.)

Meanwhile, Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno spoke for many of us with her opening line/written sigh: "Here we are, 2014, and guess who's still the mayor of Toronto."

Ford will file for re-election tomorrow. Today, he's busy meeting with his constituents at the New Year's Day levée (levées are some Canadian thing. Unfortunately The Wire's Canadian correspondent is probably at one today and so I can't ask him to clarify):

My 2014 Levee has started at City Hall, come down and say hello! pic.twitter.com/3OEZQDG0LJ

— Mayor Rob Ford (@TOMayorFord) January 1, 2014

Rob Ford and a baby pic.twitter.com/iNNzGNqOjX

— Ben Spurr (@BenSpurr) January 1, 2014

And while Ford's fans and those of us who get to write about his exploits are mostly thrilled at the announcement, there is one not-so-great aspect: now we all have to learn how Canada's municipal election process works.

 

       

Security Exploit Snapchat Was Warned About Has Compromised 4.6 Million Users' Information

Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel is too busy posing for photos to fix his company's API vulnerabilities (AP)

Snapchat, the temporary photo-sharing app that Reuters called one of 2013's "top smartphone apps,"
    

A Very Strong Man Stole a 250-Pound Safe

Here's how it could have happened ... (SHUTTERSTOCK)

Stockholders Restaurant owner Kevin Hynes thought a 250-pound safe would be enough to protect his money from thieves.

He found out last Sunday night that he did not take ridiculously strong people into account, when one man walked right on out of the Weymouth, Massachusetts eatery carrying his safe.

Surveillance footage showed a man walk through the restaurant's side door and down the stairs. Six minutes later, he walked out carrying a trash bag with a safe-shaped object inside.

Hynes wouldn't tell reporters how much money was in the safe, but said the theft was "brazen."

Stockholders diners Dana and Jordan Snowdale seemed amused by the theft.

"That's saying something for trash bags I guess," Dana said.

"I need to start going to the gym he goes to," said Jordan.

Hynes is offering a $2,500 reward for information leading to the ripped robber's arrest, as if bars could hold him. He's also bought an even heavier safe and bolted it to the floor, although that safe is only 315 pounds. Like a guy who walked up the stairs with a 250-pound safe isn't going to be able to lift that. Why not get that 1500-plus-pound safe that Amazon Prime ships for free?

He believes it's an inside job, but there is a statue thief loose in Tucson who could have made his way to Massachusetts for one big score. And we might want to check into all of these guys' alibis.

Here's the surveillance footage if you want to see the world's strongest thief for yourself:

Boston News, Weather, Sports | FOX 25 | MyFoxBoston

 

       

You Can Now Be a Gay Boy Scout, Unless You're an Adult

AP

It's 2014 and everything has changed. New York City has a new mayor. Los Angeles grocery stores can't give out plastic bags. Delaware has banned the sale of shark fins. And the Boy Scouts are allowing openly gay members. With a few caveats.

The National Council of the Boy Scouts of America voted in May to allow openly gay members. The resolution took effect today, letting people like Pascal Tessier to stay in the organization.

The move wasn't met with unanimous acceptance, of course. In California, the Pomona First Baptist Church severed its ties with Troop 101 after 103 years. North Carolina's Arapahoe Free Will Baptist Church did the same thing to Troop 683. Both troops quickly found new homes in other churches.

And while Tessier will now be able to apply for the Eagle Scout ranking he's always wanted, his remaining time in the Scouts will be short-lived. Tessier is 17, and the Scouts' new rule only applies to members under 18. When Tessier turns 18, he will have to leave. His 20-year-old brother, Lucien, also openly gay, is still banned from serving as a leader in the scouts. And Jennifer Tyrrell, who was forced to step down as the leader of her son's Cub Scout Pack because she is a lesbian, won't be able to come back.

Tessier's next project is to work to end the Scouts' rule against members 18 and over.

"You can't really say it's OK to be gay, but once you turn 18, it's not OK," he told the Los Angeles Times.

 

       

Justice Sotomayor Grants Last-Minute Contraception Mandate Stay, Rings in New Year

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, center, celebrates the new year a few hours after signing an emergency stay for a nonprofit Catholic group that opposed to ACA's contraception mandate (AP)

On her way to becoming the first Supreme Court justice to lead the Times Square New Year's Eve countdown, Sonia Sotomayor signed a last-minute stay on the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate for a Catholic organization.

Denver's Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged argued that the Act's compromise for religious nonprofits that did not want to pay for birth control coverage for their employees was not enough, and that signing the certification form authorizing a third party insurer to offer contraception would still violate their religious beliefs. Not signing the form would result in fines of an estimated $1.1 million. A federal district court denied the nuns' motion on December 27, so it was left to the Tenth Circuit Court's chief justice -- Sotomayor -- to either order a stay or leave the nuns to face the ACA as written when it became law today.

Sotomayor then headed to Times Square to push the button and begin the traditional ball drop, which went off without a hitch. She's the first Supreme Court justice to participate in the event, which raised a few eyebrows. She was kept separate from Miley Cyrus, so as to retain her judicial dignity.

Two for-profit companies' arguments against the contraceptive mandate on religious freedom grounds will be heard by the Supreme Court in March, but, as non-religious entities that happened to be run by religious people, they were not included in the ACA's exemption.

The government has until 10 am Friday to respond to Sotomayor's order.

 

 

       

17 Things People Who've Been Born in 2014 Will Never Experience

This tiny baby born in 2013 is older than every single person born this year. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Ready to feel ancient? People born in 2014 are already hours and hours old! Ready to feel even older? Here are a number of totally normal things that people born as recently as 2014 will never experience! (And now that we've written this, no one else needs to for 12 months.)

1. Kids born in 2014 will never know what it's like to have to blow into a Nintendo cartridge to get it to work, unless they buy a used Nintendo someday as like a throwback thing, in which case they can, although blowing in cartridges didn't really do anything anyway.

 

 

2. 2014 kids ("fourteeners") come into a world in which Michael Bolton never had a laughably horrible mullet.

From Bolton's "Said I Loved You, But I Lied" video.

 

3. They weren't around when Dubai set a record for fireworks back on New Year's Eve, 2013.

 

 

4. Or that insane moment in 1066 when English troops under the command of King Harold Godwinson swarmed Stamford Bridge, overcoming one brave, legendary Viking who briefly stood his ground and who to this day can serve as a symbol of the ultimate defeat of the Anglo-Saxons at the hands of the Normans.

This is actually the battle of Hastings that same year, but stupid newborn babies won't know that. (AP)

 

5. What about VHS tapes!

 

 

6. Do you remember when Disneyland opened in 1955? People born in 2014 don't! Nor do they remember the attack on Pearl Harbor.

AP

 

7. Kids born in 2014 weren't alive when Sen. Ted Cruz (in his first year in the Senate!) gave his epic filibuster.

 

 

8. And they'll never use rotary phones to call radio stations to request songs they recorded on cassette tapes they passed to friends in class where there are pencil sharpeners on the wall!

 

 

9. They'll never live in "B.C." times.

 

 

10. Fourteeners live in a world in which there has always been #YOLO.

 

 

11. But weren't around for that day in 1989 when President Ronald Reagan's vice president was suddenly sworn in as president himself!

 

 

12. Kids born in 2014 never did the Charleston, subverting adult expectations of what constituted appropriate behavior for young people in the early 20th century.

 

 

13. And they never had to wait in line for tickets to see Jurassic Park II in the theater when it first opened.

 

 

14. They didn't get to experience life on a prehistoric Earth in which actual dinosaurs lived and died, trampling vanished plants without any recognition that for a flicker of this eternity they ruled the planet.

 

 

15. They'll never get to enjoy a kid's meal from Taco Bell!

 

 

16. Kids born in 2014 never got to read articles about what won't be experienced by kids born in 2010 or 2011  or 2012 or 2013 or who are millennials more generally when they were first written.

 

 

17. And they didn't get to experience literally everything else that has ever happened, can you believe it.

 

GIFs via Giphy.

       

Happy New Year From 450,000 Fireworks and Dubai

Reuters

Dubai rang in the new year by basically exploding, setting a Guinness World Record for the largest fireworks display with 450,000 fireworks over six minutes. That trounced Kuwait's previous record of 77,000, set in October 2012, and made Kuwait's new year begin on a real loser note.

According to the AP, Dubai's big show was set to include fireworks in the shape of a falcon, the sunrise, and a flag of the United Arab Emirates, although "it was not immediately clear if the promised designs or world record had been achieved." (CNN reports that the world record was achieved. No word yet on the the falcon.)

The world's biggest fireworks show began at the world's tallest building, Burj Khalifa, before moving over to the world's largest man-made archipelago. See it for yourself below, and have a happy new year!

 

       

Latvia Joins the Eurozone As Europe's Currency Crisis Recedes

Newly-minted Latvian euros just waiting to be spent. (AP)

At the stroke of midnight, Latvian local time (seven hours plus ET), Latvia became the eighteenth member of the eurozone, with it citizens trading in their lats for euros.

The eurozone has had a rough past few years to say the least, with many thinking it was on the brink of collapse. Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Cyprus had to be bailed out and Greece was in danger of dropping the currency entirely. Though unemployment remains a huge problem (27 percent in Greece and 26 percent in Spain, the BBC reports), things have been looking up. Ireland exited the bailout on December 13, the first country to do so. And the euro rose 4.5 percent against the dollar in 2013. So why not bring another nation into the fold?

Latvians aren't necessarily thrilled with the prospect of having their currency tied to the fates of 17 other nations, according to the Guardian (The New York Times called them "ambivalent"), especially after the country so recently emerged from its own financial crisis. But they'll have just two weeks left to spend their lats before the euro becomes the country's only currency.

The country's outgoing prime minister, Valdis Dombrovskis, was expected to celebrate the new currency by withdrawing the first euro from an ATM at the stroke of midnight.

Lithuania will become the nineteenth country to join the eurozone in 2015, leaving seven European Union nations left to join, as per the terms of the treaty. It remains to be seen if they'll actually do so.

 

       

Ohio Has a Brand New and Untested Method of Executing its Prisoners

Left: Dennis McGuire, scheduled to be executed in January. Right: one of Ohio's lethal injection beds. (AP)

Ohio death row inmate Dennis McGuire is scheduled to be killed on January 16 using an untested two-drug lethal injection because the state has run out of pentobarbital, the sedative it used to use for executions.

Lundbeck, the Danish company that makes pentobarbital, ordered that it not be used to execute prisoners in 2011, saying: "Lundbeck adamantly opposes the distressing misuse of our product in capital punishment."

In September, Ohio used its last dose of pentobarbital on Henry Mitts Jr. Rather than stop executing prisoners until it can get its hands on another supply or switch to an alternative lethal cocktail that has been used before, the state decided to try a new shot of midazolam and hydromorphone.

The "untested backup execution method," as the AP, which broke the news, called it, was first meant to kill Ronald Phillips in November, but his execution was delayed. Now it's McGuire's turn and Ohio still hasn't found a compounding pharmacy that will make its pentobarbital, as the resourceful Georgia, Texas and South Carolina have done.

So backup execution plan it is! And why wait? It's not like this is irreversible and Ohio can't change its mind during the process if things don't go as planned for whatever reason, right?

McGuire raped and murdered Joy Stewart in 1989. She was eight months pregnant at the time.

 

       

New York's Gun Control Law Has Been (Mostly) Upheld

AP

New York's SAFE Act, introduced in January after the Sandy Hook shootings and among the most restrictive in the country, has been ruled constitutional by a federal judge. Sorry, NRA.

New York was the first state to enact gun legislation in response to the Sandy Hook shootings. The SAFE Act banned assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and loading a weapon with more than seven rounds.

In March, the state's NRA chapter sued New York, saying the law violated the second amendment. It asked for a hearing in November, with the chapter's president Tom King saying "When you are able to stand in front of someone and verbalize the case, it becomes abundantly clear how ridiculous some of these things are."

Judge William M. Skretny didn't agree, and ruled that the law was non-ridiculous, constitutional and would remain in effect except for the seven round limit, which he called "arbitrary." As for the rest:

The Court finds that the challenged provisions of the SAFE Act, including the Act’s definition and regulation of assault weapons and its ban on high-capacity magazines, further the state’s important interest in public safety and do not impermissibly infringe on Plaintiff’s Second Amendment rights.

For gun control advocates, this should be a bright spot on which to end an otherwise dark year, when more laws were passed that loosen gun regulations than tightened them.

The NRA is expected to appeal the ruling.