George Packer's Blog, page 196

The Non-Political Political Arrest of Nikita Belykh in Russia

A Russian governor has been arrested on bribery charges. The country’s Investigative Committee, which takes charge of all high-profile cases, announced the news on its Web site on Friday. Like several top-level Russian government agencies, the Committee has a bizarrely prominent spokesman, Vladimir Markin, who writes press releases in the first person. This time he wrote, “I’d like to chill the fervor of all the colleagues and supporters [of the accused], who are sure to get hysterical: crimes of corruption have no political shade.” The governor, Nikita Belykh, once headed a liberal opposition party, and Markin knew that the case would likely to be interpreted as political. He was right: the BBC and the Associated Press reports on the arrest noted Belykh’s opposition credentials in their third paragraphs.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Boris Johnson and the Crisis of British Leadership
An Independent London?
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, June 29th

Boris Johnson and the Crisis of British Leadership

Having started out as a drama and turned into a tragedy, the Brexit story line has now descended into farce. On a day when the governor of the Bank of England indicated that he and his colleagues would have to take emergency action to protect the British economy from the disastrous results of last week’s vote, Boris Johnson, the mop-topped Tory cheerleader for the Leave campaign, took to a podium at St. Ermin’s Hotel, in Westminster, and said, “This is not a time to quail; it is not a crisis, nor should we see it as an excuse for wobbling or self-doubt.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
An Independent London?
What’s Up with the U.K.? A Handy Lexicon of Exiting
Marine Le Pen Prepares for a “Frexit”

The Court Slams the Door on Domestic Abusers Owning Guns

In 2009, a logger named Stephen Voisine shot and killed an American bald eagle. Bald eagles are protected under federal law, though Voisine said he’d believed it to be a hawk, which is also illegal to kill in his home state of Maine. Bird classification notwithstanding, Voisine’s problems were just beginning. It turned out he had a history of domestic-violence charges, including violation of a restraining order, and a misdemeanor conviction related to hitting the woman he was living with. Federal law has long banned violent felons from owning or possessing firearms, and a 1996 law added to that category anyone convicted of domestic-violence misdemeanors. Voisine was sentenced to a year and a day in prison, and his guns were taken away. But Voisine, along with another defendant, named William Armstrong, who also had a history of domestic violence and possessed firearms, appealed, and their case made it to the Supreme Court, where Justice Clarence Thomas shocked Court-watchers last February by taking part in oral arguments for the first time in a decade: “One question,” he said. “This is a misdemeanor violation. It suspends a constitutional right. Can you give me another area where a misdemeanor violation suspends a constitutional right?”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Obama’s Failed Promise to Immigrant Families
Clarence Thomas Has His Own Constitution
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, June 28th

Obama’s Failed Promise to Immigrant Families

In November, 2014, I attended a prayer circle at the home of a woman named Melida Lemus, in Trenton, New Jersey. Lemus grew up in Guatemala and came to America more than a decade ago, following her husband, Alfredo Godoy. Today, Lemus and Godoy are the parents of a thirteen-year-old U.S. citizen, Kathryn, and three teen-agers who fled Guatemala in recent years, who are, like their parents, undocumented. Just days before the prayer circle, President Obama had announced historic executive actions that promised to protect nearly five million undocumented immigrants from deportation.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Court Slams the Door on Domestic Abusers Owning Guns
Clarence Thomas Has His Own Constitution
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, June 28th

An Independent London?

A hundred and seventy-seven thousand people have signed an online petition asking Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, to declare London independent from the United Kingdom and apply to join the European Union. “London is an international city, and we want to remain at the heart of Europe,” the petition’s author, a man named James O’Malley, wrote; obviously, the rest of England did not feel the same way. “Rather than passive aggressively vote against each other at every election, let’s make the divorce official and move in with our friends in Europe.” O’Malley didn’t seem to be all that serious (“Ummm, we’ll talk about the Euro later,” he wrote), but after the trauma of Brexit it was nice for cosmopolitans to have something to sign, some subsidiary act that muted the despair of the main one. “Mayor Sadiq,” O’Malley pleaded, “wouldn’t you prefer to be President Sadiq? Make it happen!”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Boris Johnson and the Crisis of British Leadership
What’s Up with the U.K.? A Handy Lexicon of Exiting
Marine Le Pen Prepares for a “Frexit”

Clarence Thomas Has His Own Constitution

This year’s Supreme Court term abounded in so much drama—the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the tie votes among the remaining Justices, the liberal victories in the final days—that it was possible to miss a curious subplot: the full flowering of Justice Clarence Thomas’s judicial eccentricity.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Court Slams the Door on Domestic Abusers Owning Guns
Obama’s Failed Promise to Immigrant Families
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, June 28th

What’s Up with the U.K.? A Handy Lexicon of Exiting

Events in the United Kingdom, in the past week, have been so remarkable that onlookers from afar could be forgiven for having slumped into a state of boneless bewilderment. If it is any consolation, the British themselves are in exactly the same pickle. Every day can be relied upon to bring a fresh crisis, which transfigures one’s outlook on all that has gone before. Nonetheless, it might be worth pausing, at this juncture, to review the current palaver, and, in particular, to list the somewhat confusing array of options that now confront not only the proud people of Britain but also the Continent that they have, in their collective wisdom, chosen to rebuff.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Boris Johnson and the Crisis of British Leadership
An Independent London?
Marine Le Pen Prepares for a “Frexit”

An E-Commerce Challenge in Africa: Selling to People Who Aren’t Online

While stuck in traffic in Lagos a few years ago, I noticed a couple of delivery motorcycles buzzing in between the stopped cars. Emblazoned across the sides of the motorbikes was the logo of Jumia, a company that brands itself as the “largest e-commerce platform in Africa.” I’d heard about the bikes, but this was the first time I’d seen them in action: a bespoke solution to the problem of commercial delivery in Nigeria. All around, Lagos’s street-level trading culture was bustling despite the ninety-degree heat. Beneath umbrella-covered stands, dozens of curbside merchants sold products as varied as mobile phones and kola nuts. Venders walked in the congested lanes with goods stacked on their heads, hawking batteries, DVDs, road maps, drinks, and snacks to drivers. The motorbikes throttled around them, at times coming alarmingly close to the peddlers, threatening a literal collision between present and future Nigerian commerce.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
An African Photography Exhibit That Spans the Continent and the Globe
Shootout in Garamba
On the Run in Burundi

Marcus Willis’s (Very) Brief Wimbledon Fairy Tale

The story of Marcus Willis’s wild ride at Wimbledon almost wrote itself. Willis, a twenty-five-year-old from Slough, England, is ranked seven-hundred-and-seventy-second in the world. Before he attempted to qualify for Wimbledon, his only earnings as a professional tennis player this year were the three hundred and fifty-six dollars he made at a low-level tournament. He worked by giving private lessons—to seniors, toddlers, whomever—at the Warwick Boat Club, charging thirty pounds an hour. He lived with his parents. He was about to quit tennis and move to America when, in February—you guessed it—he met a girl, Jennifer Bate, a dentist, and fell in love. She convinced him to stay, turn his life around, and play. “I was a bit of a loser. I was overweight,” he said, following his first-round win. “I just looked at myself in the mirror. I said, ‘You’re better than this.’ ” Willis had to qualify for the qualifying tournament in Wimbledon’s main draw, claiming the last direct-entry spot in the tournament for British hopefuls. He had to win six matches just to make it into Wimbledon’s main draw. The road from Slough is long and winding.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Can John McEnroe Help Milos Raonic Win Wimbledon?
Bill Simmons Finally Looks Good on Television
Gordie Howe Was the Ideal Canadian Athlete

The Arrivals Hall at Atatürk Airport

After last night’s suicide attack at Istanbul’s Atatürk International Airport, which killed forty-one people and injured more than two hundred others, a question kept nagging at me: Why did the three attackers choose the arrivals hall? Having lived in Istanbul for the past couple of years, I’ve spent a great deal of time at Atatürk, where travellers pass through security before checking in for their flights. The entry-control points at departures are thick with crowds waiting to X-ray their luggage. Those at arrivals are largely empty. When the airport is especially busy, I’ve often entered through arrivals and then hustled upstairs to departures to make a flight. The attack appears likely to be the work of ISIS (as Dexter Filkins explains), but no group has claimed responsibility for it.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Who Bombed the Istanbul Airport?
The Security Firm That Employed the Orlando Shooter Protects American Nuclear Facilities
Former Ambassador Robert Ford on the State Department Mutiny on Syria