George Packer's Blog, page 87

The Lessons of the Chibok Kidnappings, Three Years Later

Three years ago this week, more than three hundred teen-age girls were at a boarding school in a farming hamlet called Chibok, in northeastern Nigeria, tired and exhilarated after a long day of final exams. It was April 14th, a Monday, and there would be more tests that week, and so many girls were already asleep when, at around 10 P.M., hundreds of militants from the extremist group Boko Haram showed up to take them away from their papers, their books, their beds. In the weeks that followed, only a few dozen girls would manage to escape from the group’s camps in the tangles of the Sambisa Forest; the military was unable to rescue the others. As the years stretched on, the parents of the missing girls heard little news of their daughters, and had only horrific reports of sex slavery to contemplate. But, last October, Boko Haram released twenty-one of the kidnapped schoolgirls in a negotiated deal with the Nigerian government, which Switzerland and the International Committee of the Red Cross helped mediate. (Three other students also escaped or were rescued last year.) Rumors persist that Nigeria paid a ransom, or released Boko Haram leaders, in exchange for the girls, but the government denies the claims.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
President Trump’s Guantánamo Delusion
Trump’s Divisive New Travel Ban
Don’t Be Fooled. Donald Trump Didn’t Pivot

What Did Rex Tillerson Accomplish in Moscow?

On Thursday morning, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson left Moscow after a two-day visit. Not too long ago, the trip had been expected to signal a kind of grand rapprochement between the U.S. and Russia—but after President Trump ordered a missile strike against the Syrian government, last week, those expectations gave way to nervousness and even talk of possible military confrontation. What ultimately took place was something rather milquetoast—Tillerson left with U.S.-Russian relations neither on the path to fairy-tale goodwill (what Trump’s campaign promises led some in Moscow to daydream about) nor at a disconcerting standoff (which the Trump Administration’s inconsistent, at times belligerent, rhetoric of recent days had led some to fear).

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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A Russian Fast-Food Chain Tries Its Luck in America
What Toronto Knows about Trump after Living through Rob Ford
The Non-Transformation of Donald J. Trump

A Reporter’s Path to Uncovering Human Trafficking

Last September, I boarded a rescue boat run by the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières. My intention was to write about the two deadliest stretches of the mass-migration route from Africa into Europe—the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea. We left Malta at dawn, and, after several days of searching for boats in distress near the coast of Libya, the crew rescued three hundred and fifty-five migrants out of disposable inflatable dinghies. The boats had left from beaches near Tripoli with only enough fuel to reach international waters; without N.G.O.s carrying out search-and-rescue operations in the area, many of the migrants would have drowned.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump, Lost in Africa
The Magnificent Cross-Cultural Recordings of Kenya’s Kipsigis Tribe
Bringing African Books Back Home

The Non-Transformation of Donald J. Trump

It’s astonishing, isn’t it, how suddenly Donald J. Trump is being viewed, in certain precincts, as—what’s the word?—yes, “Presidential,” and all it took was for him to issue an order to launch fifty-nine cruise missiles against a Syrian airbase. It’s as if a national-amnesia button got pushed, one able to wipe out memories of the actual President: the former reality-show star, real-estate brander, double-talker, and serial distorter of reality. Although some Trump supporters seemed confused by this new tack (the talk-show host Laura Ingraham tweeted, “Missiles flying. Rubio’s happy. McCain ecstatic. Hillary’s on board. A complete policy change in 48 hrs.”), there was wide approval from the foreign-policy establishment. The former Secretary of State John Kerry was said to be “absolutely supportive” and “gratified to see that it happened quickly,” and there’s been non-stop gushing within the Trumpian orbit. Kellyanne Conway, gusher-in-chief and Presidential counsellor, spoke about “our very tough, very resolute, very decisive President.” She added, “What the world saw last night was the United States Commander-in-Chief, and also a father and grandfather,” as if her boss had not launched his first act of war but had simply administered a resolute spanking of the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, with a warning not to misbehave again.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What Did Rex Tillerson Accomplish in Moscow?
What Toronto Knows about Trump after Living through Rob Ford
Sean Spicer Is Very Sorry About His Holocaust Comments

Jon Ossoff and the Al Jazeera Effect

Next week, voters in Georgia’s Sixth District will elect a replacement for Representative Tom Price, who resigned his seat, in February, to become Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. Of the eighteen candidates who have entered the race, one has drawn national attention as a kind of mascot for the Trump resistance—Jon Ossoff, a photogenic thirty-year-old Democrat and documentary filmmaker. Ossoff is polling at forty-three per cent and has raised a record $8.3 million, in mostly out-of-state donations. Not surprisingly, this has made him a conservative target. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, has run numerous ads and mailers attacking Ossoff. In one recent TV commercial, he is depicted as an ally of hoodie-wearing vandals. An eerie baritone proclaims, over footage of an Inauguration Day riot: “Liberal extremists will stop at nothing to push their radical agenda. . . . Ossoff is one of them.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Unlikely Liberal Hero Adam Schiff Is Ready to Investigate Trump
Can This Democrat Win the Georgia Sixth?
Trump’s Speech to Congress Was Not “Normal”

The Season of Russell Westbrook and a New Era in N.B.A. Fandom

On Sunday night, as I watched a game between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Denver Nuggets, I realized that the past two or so N.B.A. seasons have changed me, maybe permanently, as a fan. I barely glanced at the score, or, for that matter, at the vast majority of the players who spent time on the floor. Instead, I watched Russell Westbrook. I appreciated—as it has become almost a cliché of basketball fandom to appreciate—his ferocity and fearlessness, intensity and reckless control, all of which verge on the insane. He leapt for rebounds, then exploded—as usual—into careening downcourt swoops, often stopping on a dime at the free-throw line to execute his signature pull-up jumper. But it was hard, on this night, to maintain a narrow focus on his sheer athletic excellence: I was praying for assists. Westbrook’s quest to average a triple-double for the season—purposeful and highly personal, despite his season-long claims to the contrary—had already been accomplished; the only milestone left was to break Oscar Robertson’s record of forty-one triple-doubles in a single season. By halftime it was clear that he’d have enough points and rebounds, and so, until the tenth assist—a whip pass to the rookie Semaj Christon, who hit a corner three—I cursed Westbrook’s teammates as they missed shot after shot that would have finished the deed.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A World Cup for Tennis?
Tiger Woods and the Amazing 1997 Masters
Knicks Game Memory, from the Year 2018

Sean Spicer Is Very Sorry About His Holocaust Comments

“Let’s start with yesterday—the Holocaust situation,” Greta Van Susteren said to Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, who always seems to be in one situation or another, on Wednesday, at a forum at Washington’s Newseum. There was, from the audience, a faint sound of stilted laughter, of the sort conveying not pleasure but a sense of the absurd. Spicer had already apologized, on CNN, for comments he made the day before, favorably comparing Adolf Hitler to Bashar al-Assad, through the nexus of chemical weapons, and so the main interest was in seeing how abjectly he would do so this time—and what else he might get wrong.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What Would Be Wrong with Trump Restoring Glass-Steagall?
Putin Angrily Resigns from Trump’s Reëlection Campaign
The Kansas Election and Our National Divide

What Would Be Wrong with Trump Restoring Glass-Steagall?

Last week, Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs executive who is the head of Trump’s National Economic Council and, supposedly, a figure of growing influence in the Administration, told a group of senators that he’s open to reviving the Glass-Steagall Act, the 1933 law that separated commercial and investment banking. This was played as a man-bites-dog story. The dismantling of that separation was raised as one suspect in the 2008 financial crisis, and its restoration has been mainly a cause of the left: Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are vocal supporters. What was a Wall Street guy like Cohn doing agreeing with them?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Sean Spicer Is Very Sorry About His Holocaust Comments
Putin Angrily Resigns from Trump’s Reëlection Campaign
The Kansas Election and Our National Divide

Why Is Arkansas Rushing to Execute Seven People?

The state of Arkansas plans to execute seven death-row inmates between Monday and the end of the month. Since 1976, when the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment, no state has executed so many people in such a short period of time. In late March, the inmates asked the Supreme Court to hear their cases on the ground that Arkansas’s hurried schedule was “an affront” to their “basic human dignity.” The Justices are expected to consider the petition on Thursday, four days before the first two executions are slated to take place—but the prospects for the Court taking action are not good.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Growing Gap Between the U.S. and the International Anti-Death-Penalty Consensus
The Strange Case of the American Death Penalty
Will the Supreme Court Stop Texas from Executing the Intellectually Disabled?

The Kansas Election and Our National Divide

Last night, the Republican Treasurer of Kansas, Ron Estes, defeated James Thompson, a Democratic plaintiff’s lawyer from Wichita, for an open seat in Congress, by a margin of about seven percentage points, or about eight thousand votes. Just five months ago, Donald Trump won that district’s votes in a rout (his margin was about twenty-seven points), but an atmosphere of uncertainty had come to surround the race, just in the past couple of days, spurred by the broader ambiguities about the shape of American politics right now.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Sean Spicer Is Very Sorry About His Holocaust Comments
What Would Be Wrong with Trump Restoring Glass-Steagall?
Putin Angrily Resigns from Trump’s Reëlection Campaign