What Happened Today: July 08, 2022
Assassination of Japan's former prime minister Shinzo Aba; FBI's surveillance app; monsters and gods at Wimbledon
The Big Story
Japan’s longest-serving leader of the post-war era, Shinzo Abe, was assassinated by a lone gunman during a roadside campaign speech on Friday. Ahead of Japan’s upper house elections on Sunday, the influential former prime minister was stumping for a junior member of the heavily favored Liberal Democratic Party. Shot from behind by what police say was a homemade gun, Abe suffered wounds to his neck and heart and died hours later in an emergency room from a fatal loss of blood, according to a hospital official. Apprehended at the scene, the 41-year-old suspect confessed he was motivated to kill Abe because of his affiliation with an unidentified group with whom the suspect had “a grudge,” according to law enforcement.
The son of an affluent political family, Abe served a year as prime minister in 2006 and then again from 2012 through 2020; he was best known for lifting the Japanese economy out of deflation with his trademark Abenomics stimulus program. Condolence messages from current and past world leaders have poured in from around the world; Japan’s current prime minister, Fumio Kishida, promised that residents will still vote on Sunday “to protect free and fair elections,” he said, adding that “this heinous act of brutality” had left him at a “loss of words.” With extremely stringent gun restrictions in Japan, violent shootings are a rare occurrence: 2021 saw only 10 shooting incidents nationwide.
Yet in the modern era of the past 150 years, political murder itself has been a common worldwide phenomenon. At least 60 political leaders have been killed in what amounts to more than 300 assignation attempts over the past century and a half. From Austria to Afghanistan, Panama to Paraguay, on average once every three years another king or prime minister has fallen to the hand of an assassin, either by knife, gun, or explosive device. Such frequency, however, offers no comfort to the Japanese, where the assassination has disturbed a widely shared conception of the peaceful nation unperturbed by acts of radical violence.
Read More: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-abe-idAFKBN2OJ04Z
In the Back Pages: Your Weekend Reads
The Rest
→ The FBI was secretly running an encrypted messaging app, Anom, that it used to surveil tens of millions of messages over several years before storing them without warrants. Under the auspices of Operation Trojan Shield, as the program was called, the FBI created the messaging app, marketed it to criminals, and then had access to all messages sent across the platform, leading to thousands of arrests and sizable asset seizures that included weapons and narcotics. On Thursday, “due to the public interest in understanding how law enforcement agencies are tackling the so-called Going Dark problem, where criminals use encryption to keep their communications out of the hands of the authorities,” Vice News published portions of the application’s code.
Read More: https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7veg8/anom-app-source-code-operation-trojan-shield-an0m
→ A massive outage is crippling Canada’s telecommunications systems, as Rogers Communications Inc., one of the largest wireless companies in the country, is reporting severe service disruptions that have led to a 25% reduction in internet traffic. Roughly 11 million subscribers are estimated to be kicked offline, with the glitch knocking out ATMs, access to financial services, and border patrol computers and halting passport offices from regular operation.
→ Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, the former president of Theranos, the infamous Silicon Valley startup that solicited investments by touting its revolutionary blood-testing technology that did not exist, was found guilty on all counts of fraud, just months after the company’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes, was found guilty of the same charges. Balwani’s lawyers had sought to prove that “he didn’t start Theranos, he didn’t control Theranos,” to which prosecutors responded by showing a text message Balwani sent Holmes, saying, “I am responsible for everything at Theranos. All have been my decisions too.” Theranos had been valued at $9 billion before the house of cards came down.
→ WIMBLEDON WATCH: Maybe Rothko was thinking of tennis when he said “without monsters and gods, art cannot enact our drama.” The last two weeks at the Wimbledon Championships have been chock-full of moments pitting the worst and best human impulses against each other, most notably the fourth-round contest between two of the tour’s more divisive players, Aussie Nick Kyrgios and Greek Stefanos Tsitsipas. As wildly talented as he is inconsistent, for years Kyrgios sacrificed victory at the altar of his own temper, undermining momentum and focus to scream at defenseless umpires or hurl racquets and balls like a spoiled child. (Behavior that John McEnroe shined into a nearly endearing defect because he won major titles—accomplishments that have eluded the Aussie.) During his match against Tsitsipas, Kyrgios’ berating of the umpire and trick shot serves snapped Tsitsipas’ cool, who by the end of the loss had smacked one ball into the crowd, narrowly avoiding a spectator, along with several other balls aimed at Kyrgios, one of which landed. At the press conference afterward, a fragile Tsitsipas apologized for the crowd zinger while justifying his aggression toward the “bully” Kyrgios, saying his opponent suffers from “a very evil side to him, which if it’s exposed, it can really do a lot of harm.” An entertainer above all else, Kyrgios brushed off his perennial critics, telling the broadcaster interviewing him to look around at the packed stadium: “The media says I’m bad for the sport, but look at the crowd tonight, and that tells you who’s right.” On Sunday, a sold-out Centre Courte will eagerly await to see how well Kyrgios governs his nerves playing in his first grand slam final. He holds a 2-0 lifetime record against his opponent, the heavily favored Novak Djokovic, who’s mounted a typically dominant campaign in his attempt to secure his 21st major title and close the gap on Rafael Nadal’s record of 22. As a bona fide tennis deity, all the pressure will be on Djokovic, which means that even a bedeviled Kyrgios could play dangerously wild and free with nothing to lose.
→ The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts the 2022 hurricane season could see as many as 10 hurricanes, a threat of potential flooding and water damage that New York City Mayor Eric Adams said the city could withstand by giving away inflatable dams to qualified residents. The $2.5 million Rainfall Ready NYC plan will take some of the responsibility to protect residents off the city and place the burden on the roughly 8,000 homes spread out across New York’s more flood-prone areas. Before the hurricane season picks up in August, residents will be able to fortify themselves with the inflatable dams and free sandbags. Hopefully, any storm that comes will also avoid Hunts Point Market, where the city has likewise done little to protect the major food distribution hub that’s responsible for roughly half of New York City’s meat, fish, and produce. Plans to protect Hunts Point Market have largely stalled since Hurricane Sandy in 2012, when officials realized that if the Long Island Sound was at high tide, the market, and the city’s food supply, would suffer catastrophic damages.
→ Retailers of sweatpants in the Netherlands are eagerly tracking new legislation in the Dutch parliament after a bill that would codify working remotely from home as a legal right won approval in the lower house and now awaits the final sign off from the Senate. Already home to a robust remote workforce, some 14% of Dutch employees worked outside of the office before the COVID-19 pandemic, with many large employers like ING Groep, a major bank, allowing its 15,000 workers the chance to WFH half of the week. Now, under the new proposal, workers can request to stay at home full-time, with bosses legally required to offer an explanation if they deny the request. The move will likely make WFH-permissive employers more competitive to white-collar workers and lead to more adopting a remote-friendly policy. In a spring survey, the ADP Research Institute found that more than 60% of the 32,000 U.S. workers they asked would seek a new job if their current employer required them to return to the office.
→ Map of the Day: Take a tour through the “most disproportionately popular jobs” in 383 metro areas across the country. Culled from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this Business Insider map can tell you not only that the most disproportionately popular gig in New York City is “subway and streetcar operators” and that “fire inspectors and investigators” take that title in Miami, but also what these workers typically get paid.
→ The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is developing rules for the use of long-distance drones, as investors eye the commercial drone industry and the air space overhead as the newest frontiers for financial gain. The FAA is currently equipped to manage 5,400 airborne aircraft at a given time; it is anticipating the possibility of millions of private drones divvying up the sky, with worries beginning to mount that the FAA’s “ration[ing] of airspace and routes how it sees fit” will be the “recipe for technology lock-in and intractable regulatory battles,” as Brent Skorup wrote for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology’s Substack page.
Read More: https://www.cspicenter.com/p/drone-airspace-a-new-global-asset
→ Sacha Baron Cohen, the British comedian behind Borat, Brüno, and more recently, his Showtime series What Is America?, beat a defamation suit from former Alabama judge Roy Moore, which the ex-judge filed in the wake of the interview linked above. The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled unanimously that the interview was constitutionally protected speech, stating that it was “clearly comedy and that no reasonable viewer would conclude otherwise.” In addition to deciding that it was constitutionally protected speech, the court noted that Moore had lost his right to the $95 million lawsuit by signing a consent agreement prior to the interview.
→ James Caan, one of the most dynamic and enduring actors of the 1970s whose powerful portrayal of the irascible and violent Sonny Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, died on Wednesday at the age of 82. Caan was “my fictional brother and my lifelong friend,” wrote Al Pacino, and was “someone who stretched through my life longer and closer than any motion picture figure I’ve ever known,” Francis Ford Coppola said. In memoriam, watch Caan’s brilliant moment of improvisation bring “bada bing” into the mainstream American vernacular.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
Weekend Reads
→ In this New York Times magazine piece, Kim Tingley documents how researchers have made some progress finding similarities to our circadian rhythms, which dictate our natural sleep cycles, to the inner mechanical processes of human genes. Of a person’s approximate 20,000 genes, as many as half are regulated by a predictable rhythm, a gene clock of activity that has significant implications for, among other things, the effectiveness and side effects that could rise or fall depending when a person takes a prescription drug.
In the past two decades, however, researchers have discovered that the clock in the brain is by no means the only one in our body. It turns out that most of our cells contain a group of genes that might be thought of as gears in a mechanical watch, keeping time everywhere internally. These “clock genes”—there are at least six that are considered integral to the watch’s operation—work together the same way in each cell. And just as they cause the release of hormones in the brain, they dictate other processes in other parts of the body. In the early 2000s, advances in the ability to detect the activity of genes in various tissues revealed that the cell clocks are organized into separate organ-level clocks representing every physiological system: There’s a skin clock and a liver clock and an immune-system clock; there’s a clock for the kidney, heart, lungs, muscles and reproductive system. Each of those clocks syncs itself to the central clock in the brain like an orchestra section following its conductor. But those sections also adjust how and when they perform based on guidance they receive both from the environment and from one another, and their timing can provide feedback to the central clock and cause it to adjust the time it keeps too.
Read More: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/magazine/circadian-medicine.html
→ Unless immune to spontaneous moments of joy, this 30 seconds of a dancer at a wedding in Africa is worth your attention. We suggest that you then close the tab, because any more time on Twitter will immediately erode your moment of zen.
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→ In this survey of Sheila Heti’s recent novel, Pure Colour, Jonathan Baskin writes how most of Heti’s works of fiction “have been published during a decade in which strong evaluations have trended in one direction: toward that of the fixers.” Heti’s recent novel features a character who is herself a fixer, a politically active type of person who demonstrates “a kind of therapeutic moralism, which takes little notice of the compromise and contestation traditionally thought of as intrinsic to political life.” Correctly, Baskin notes the pervasiveness of this political alignment, in which “the most common response of contemporary novelists to the encroachment of this ethos has been to submit their manuscripts dutifully to the panels of fixers for judgment [and] approval.”
Much has been made in recent years about the problem of political polarization, but just as distinctive of the period—perhaps more distinctive, since polarization in American politics is perennial, and inevitable—has been the accompanying encroachment of the ethos of the fixers across the categories of left-liberal society and culture. This includes the categories of art and literature, much as it might seem that aesthetic values would preclude the utilitarian bias at the heart of therapeutic moralism. Dispiritingly, the most common response of contemporary novelists to the encroachment of this ethos has been to submit their manuscripts dutifully to the panels of fixers for judgment, approval and, occasionally, a surely justified censure. “Our art has become exhaustively political, but it is no longer discernibly subversive,” observed the writer Greg Jackson about the literature of the Trump years. “It is what major cultural institutions, foundations, and media organizations find congenial.”
Heti, while feeling the same pressures as other artists, has chosen a different tack, of which Pure Colour is only the most explicit example.
Read More: https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/sheila-heti-and-the-fight-for-art/
“ encroachment of the ethos?” What’s she saying? Plain English would be welcome