What Happened Today: May 17, 2022
Ukraine surrenders Mariupol; Musk’s Twitter stall; Secrets of Ed Koch
The Big Story
After 82 days spent defending the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol’s sprawling steel mill from Russian attack while the surrounding port city was obliterated by bombardment, the Ukrainian military has ordered the soldiers defending the mill to surrender to the Russians, retiring the last significant defense blocking Russia’s control over a key expanse of Ukraine’s southern region, stretching from the Russian border to Crimea. Some 260 soldiers, including four dozen wounded, laid down arms to be evacuated by Russian buses emblazoned with the war emblem of Z, and taken to the territory where, according to Ukrainian officials, proxy governments have been installed and defensive positions erected as Moscow seeks to “Russify” sections of the 500-mile southern region it currently controls. After the nearly three-month defense of the steel plant against Russian tanks and air strikes, and with supplies of food and water dwindling, the greatly outnumbered Ukrainian fighters were heralded as heroes by Ukrainian leaders for prolonging the battle there and tying down significant Russian military resources, which allowed Ukrainian units to strengthen their positions in other territories, particularly in the northeast region, where forces aided by heavy artillery provided by Western allies have reclaimed some ground. The United States is one of the countries, along with Canada, that has provided Howitzers artillery guns to the Ukrainian government and nearly 190,000 155 mm rounds and training for Ukrainian soldiers on how to use the weapons system. Ukrainian officials said they expected the steel plant fighters now in Russian custody to be traded for Russian prisoners of war, but Moscow has not made public statements about the exchange, and some Russian authorities have described Azov Regiment, the Ukrainian unit defending the steel plant—which has well-documented, if also sometimes exaggerated, ties to neofascist politics—as a cohort of neo-Nazis who should be tried for terrorism. The once-vibrant port city of Mariupol has been laid to ruins by the intense fighting over the past several months, with the mayor estimating that as many as tens of thousands of civilians have been killed and 9 out of every 10 buildings damaged or entirely destroyed.
In The Back Pages: The Secrets of Ed KochThe Rest
The Rest
→ Years of quiet cooperation between Moscow and Jerusalem were broken Friday when Russia fired a surface-to-air missile at Israeli fighter jets carrying out raids inside Syria—a first-of-its-kind incident that shows how Ukraine has pushed the two countries toward open belligerence. The missile was launched from an advanced S-300 anti-aircraft system at a team of Israeli F-16s conducting air strikes in the northwestern Syrian city of Masyaf as the jets were departing the area and after a previous round of ineffective fire from outdated Syrian army air-defense batteries. Russia officially provided the S-300s to the Syrian government in 2018, a few years after Moscow entered the war as the primary backer, along with Iran, of the Assad regime, a move that put Moscow directly on Israel’s border backing one of its main regional enemies. Despite the presence of the S-300s and other Russian weaponry, Moscow and Jerusalem maintained a fragile truce after instituting a deconfliction process in 2015, which allowed Israel to strike at certain targets inside Syria without having to worry about reprisals from Russian forces inside the country. The terms of Israeli-Russian cooperation began to break down over the war in Ukraine. After initially attempting to avoid being pulled into the conflict, Israel, under pressure from the U.S. government and Kyiv, has recently come out more strongly against the Russian invasion. Now Russia is upping the stakes. Last Friday was the first time that the S-300 has ever been used against Israeli aircraft in Syria, and the system remains under Russian operational control, which means the order to fire came from Russian rather than Syrian authorities.
→ On second thought, maybe Elon Musk won’t be buying Twitter. It can’t be fun trying to do business with Musk, who seems to delight in blindsiding and humiliating his opponents by bringing the tactics of internet trolling to multibillion-dollar acquisitions and who recently announced he was putting his plan to buy Twitter “on hold” due to concerns that the social media platform’s subscriber numbers are artificially inflated by spam users and bot accounts. Legally, Musk seemingly doesn’t have a leg to stand on. As Matt Levine points out in Bloomberg, Musk has already entered into a binding contract to buy Twitter. “The merger agreement contains a provision that allows Musk to walk away if Twitter’s securities filings are wrong,” Levine writes, but “that is an incredibly high standard.” Musk may be threatening to break the law, but he’s done that before, betting on the fines he’ll have to pay being minor compared to the profits he’ll reap by ignoring regulations. In this case he may be using the threat of illegally walking away from the deal to drive down Twitter’s price. What options does that leave Twitter? Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal wrote a lengthy thread on the platform Monday, insisting the company is doing everything possible to eliminate fake accounts. Twitter is “strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can, every single day,” Agrawal tweeted. Musk responded by tweeting a graphic emoji depicting a pile of smiling feces.
Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-musk-trolls-twitter
→ Leading Democrats responded to the mass shooting in Buffalo Saturday by doubling down on calls to expand domestic counterterrorism programs and more stringently regulate posting on social media. Speaking on Sunday, shortly after the shooting, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–CA) said the House would soon pursue legislation to “strengthen efforts to combat domestic terrorism.” New York’s Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul blamed social media companies for the shooting. “It’s all induced by the internet,” Hochul told NBC News’ Chuck Todd in an interview Sunday. But as Robby Soave points out in Reason, blaming the internet alone for the shooting in Buffalo ignores the fact that suspected killer was already on authorities’ radar after threatening to commit a murder-suicide at his school. “These developments are eerily similar to the situation with Nikolas Cruz, who committed the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland,” writes Soave. “In the Parkland and Buffalo cases, civilians saw something and said something. Unfortunately, the feds didn’t pay enough attention.”
→ The attack in Buffalo on Saturday could have been even worse if not for the actions of Aaron Salter Jr., a retired police officer who worked as a security guard at the supermarket targeted by the 18-year-old white nationalist gunman who killed 10 people, including Salter, in the shooting. Salter, 55, fired several shots that hit the shooter after he entered the Tops Friendly Markets store. The shots failed to stop the suspect, who was wearing protective body armor at the time of the attack, but are believed to have bought critical time for other people at the scene to flee. “He’s a true hero, and we don’t know what he prevented. There could have been more victims if not for his actions … he went down fighting,” Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia told ABC’s “This Week.”
→ The quote of the day: “We realized that connection should be its own product. We are modern medicine for the loneliness epidemic,” said Julie Rice, the former SoulCycle executive who rolled over some of her $90 million SoulCycle payout into her new mental-health startup, Peoplehood, which she describes as the evolution from SoulCycle’s communal, sweaty bike workouts to a core product called “gathers”: 55-minute sessions during which a small group of people listen and talk to each other—or what otherwise might be called “paying to hang out with friends.”
→ An Australian medical researcher and sleep expert who lost her infant son in 1999 to SIDS, or sudden infant death syndrome, might have just discovered the root cause of this mysterious and tragic malady that kills thousands of babies every year. Dr. Carmel Harrington was working as a lawyer when her infant son died, suddenly and inexplicably, during his sleep. She quit her job and dedicated herself to understanding SIDS, and now, 23 years later, she and a team of doctors from the Westmead Children’s Hospital in South Wales have identified an enzyme involved in the brain’s arousal response to various stimuli, such as suddenly finding oneself short of breath. Babies who died of SIDS had far less of this enzyme. “Babies have a very powerful mechanism to let us know when they are not happy,” Dr. Harrington said. “Usually, if a baby is confronted with a life-threatening situation, such as difficulty breathing during sleep because they are on their tummies, they will arouse and cry out. What this research shows is that some babies don’t have this same robust arousal response.” Informed by this new research, doctors can begin testing infants for this enzyme and treating those who have low quantities of it so as to avoid these tragic deaths.
→ Citing an uptick on COVID-19 case numbers, Apple said its employees in its 100 or so retail locations will now need to wear masks in-store and that it would indefinitely delay the three-day-a-week return-to-office plan it gave its corporate employees, which was set to start later this month. The move by one of the biggest companies in the world will satisfy the Apple employees who penned an open letter to their management in April, demanding the choice to design their own workplace attendance policies and dismissing the significance of regular in-person collaboration that Apple executives said can’t be replicated outside the office. With many organizations calling in their employees to the workplace over the past several months, there’s a growing employee sentiment, backed by two years of evidence gathered during the pandemic, that workers are more productive and more satisfied when working from home. With some tech companies like Airbnb fully committed to allowing all employees the option of remote work, and even staid law firms like Cooley LLP giving its 3,000 staffers the same choice, many companies are fielding complaints from workers who commute into an office only to spend much of the day in conference rooms for Zoom calls. While some businesses that rely on strong in-person mentorship potentially suffer from distributed staffing, remote-work advocates have a strong body of evidence to back up their case: Harvard Business School published a new paper that said the highest productivity was found among offices with workers in the office once or twice a week, a type of hybrid schedule that a Stanford researcher, Nicholas Bloom, recently found reduces how often workers quit by 35% compared to those offices with full in-person schedules.
→ Some members of the fourth estate, it turns out, actually have estates of their own. A new report from the United Kingdom’s National Council for the Training of Journalists has found that 80% of journalists in England hail from “professional and upper-class backgrounds” and are almost twice as likely to come from advantaged backgrounds than the rest of the population. This marks an 8% increase from the previous data collected on the subject in 2016, which found that 72% of journalists came from privileged backgrounds. The report, which culled data from studies conducted by England’s Labour Force Survey, also noted that while the percentage of women and minorities working in journalism have both ticked up in recent years, these are predominantly the wealthiest women and minority members.
→ NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JLP) told fact-checking website Snopes that what looked like a doorway in the side of a rock ridge on Mars, captured in a photo taken by NASA’s Curiosity rover, was simply the resemblance of a door in a “very, very, very zoomed in shot of a tiny crevice in a rock.” Does that mean the 11-by-17-inch crevice doesn’t meet NASA’s Department of Building door code? Or maybe that it can’t be considered a doorway because the crevice lacks a fire escape? In either case, tin hat enthusiasts are eagerly tracking the Pentagon officials testifying today in front of a House subcommittee after a report released last year by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence documented dozens of instances of unknown flying objects observed over the past 18 years, with some of those aerial objects seemingly in possession of propulsion technology either unfamiliar to U.S. officials or previously observed in foreign adversaries. Pentagon officials said they had to be cautious about how much information these types of objects they released to the public on account of disclosing data-gathering techniques that could be exploited by unfriendly governments. While some lawmakers are worried that military intelligence has not yet positively identified airborne objects traveling through sensitive areas, other legislators emphasized the need to get to the bottom of the aerial objects’ origins regardless of what those conclusions imply about alien life. “We fear sometimes that DOD is focused more on emphasizing what it can explain, not investigating what it can’t,” said Rep. André Carson, the democrat from Indiana and chairman of the subcommittee. “I am looking for you to assure us today that all conclusions are on the table.”
Additional reporting provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
The Secrets of Ed Koch
A new film on gay life in postwar Germany prompts a reflection on New York's former mayor and the great burdens of freedom
After the war, the victorious Allied Powers essentially remade from scratch what would become the Federal Republic of Germany in the West and the German Democratic Republic in the East. Nazi statutes and laws were repealed, and new constitutions were written. One section of the legal code that remained largely untouched in both Germanies, alas, was Paragraph 175, the Prussian-era decree outlawing sexual acts between men. (Female homosexuality, the mechanics of which apparently eluded the nation’s lawgivers, was ignored.) And so it was that, upon liberation in 1945, gay men who had been incarcerated under the Third Reich were shipped directly to prisons administered by the postwar occupying powers.
This largely overlooked chapter of history provides the setting for the remarkable new Austrian film Great Freedom. The movie depicts 25 years in the life of a fictional gay West German man, Hans Hoffman. We first encounter Hans in 1968, when a camera hidden in a public toilet records him engaging in sex with a procession of men. Hans is sentenced to prison, but as we later discover through a series of flashbacks, this is far from his first visit to the slammer.
It turns out that Hans is a habitual homosexual. As is made evident by the tattoo visible on his arm upon his transfer to a postwar German prison by an African American GI in 1945, he was first arrested sometime during the Nazi era. His cellmate, a drug dealer who doesn’t know whether to take Hans for a Jew, a homosexual, a communist, or possibly all three, is instantly repelled. As portrayed by the remarkable German actor Franz Rogowski, whose scar and lisp from a childhood cleft-lip operation imbue him with authenticity and distinctiveness rare among leading men, Hans is unashamed of his nature. Whether in Nazi Germany or the postwar Federal Republic, being gay is like being a dissident, and Hans, who preternaturally understands that it is not he but society that is sick, slips easily into the role of dogged contrarian. “They have no right,” he plaintively declares to one of his fellow gay inmates, who fruitlessly pleads with him to just submit to their shared fate as sexual outlaws. Hans naively proposes that they escape from prison and flee to the communist East, where Paragraph 175 is less strictly enforced. Despondent, the other inmate takes his own life.
Between 1949, the year the Federal Republic of Germany was created, and 1969, when enforcement of the law was substantially reduced (and Hans is released), 100,000 men were arrested under Paragraph 175, which remained on the books until 1994.
The atmosphere of shame and terror invoked by Great Freedom stayed pungent in my mind when, just a few days later, I read The New York Times’ posthumous outing of former New York mayor Ed Koch. Koch’s homosexuality was one of the biggest open secrets in New York City politics.
Read the rest here: https://thedailyscroll.substack.com/p/the-secrets-of-ed-koch?s=w
James Kirchick is a Tablet columnist and the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington (Henry Holt, 2022). He tweets @jkirchick.