RUSSIA - The Problem With Russia

"Russian opposition leader’s arrest sparks wave of national protests" PBS NewsHour 1/26/2021

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SUMMARY:  Part of the conversation between President Biden and Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Tuesday centered on Russia's top opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, whose recent arrest is sparking a wave of national protests.  Masha Gessen, staff writer for The New Yorker, joins Nick Schifrin to discuss.

 

 

"Assessing the damage from the recent U.S. cyberattack" PBS NewsHour 1/26/2021

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SUMMARY:  The Russian government is believed to be behind the recent cyberattack in the United States.  Since it was revealed in December, the number of federal agencies and companies that were victimized by the attack continues to grow.  Christopher Krebs, the former top cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security, joins William Brangham to discuss.

PROPAGANDA - Fox in the White House

"Inside the unprecedented partnership between Fox News and the Trump White House" PBS NewsHour 3/5/2019

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SUMMARY:  President Trump has long acknowledged top-rated Fox News as his favorite media outlet, and the network relishes its role as a conservative voice.  But its increasingly close relationship with the administration is drawing criticism.  William Brangham talks to the New Yorker's Jane Mayer about an unprecedented “feedback loop” and whether the President has made policy decisions to help Fox succeed.

"The Making of the Fox News White House" The New Yorker

TRUMP AGENDA - Focus MS-13

"Why Trump’s focus on MS-13 might be making them stronger" PBS NewsHour 2/6/2018

NOTE:  Jonathan Blitzer mentions that MS-13 started in the U.S.

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SUMMARY:  President Trump calls members of MS-13 “monsters” and “animals,” a common talking point for his administration’s crackdown on immigration.  What do we know about the brutally violent gang, its origins and ties to the politics of immigration?  PBS’s Frontline shares a clip from their upcoming film, “The Gang Crackdown,” and William Brangham talks with Jonathan Blitzer of The New Yorker.

WTF REPORT - His Majesty Trump

"TRUMP SAYS HE HAS BEEN TREATED VERY UNFAIRLY BY PEOPLE WHO WROTE CONSTITUTION" by Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker, 2/10/2017

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) — Hinting darkly that “there's something going on,” Donald J. Trump complained on Friday that he has been treated “very unfairly” by the people who wrote the United States Constitution.

“If the Constitution prevented me from doing one or two things, I'd chalk that up to bad luck,” he said.  “But when literally everything I want to do is magically a violation of the Constitution, that's very unfair and bad treatment.”

Lashing out at the document's authors, Trump said that “America is a great country, but we have maybe the worst Constitution writers in the world.”

“Russia has much better constitution writers than we do,” he said.  “I talked to Putin, and he said their constitution never gives him problems.”

“The situation is very unfair!” he added. 

In an ominous warning, Trump said that, as of Friday, he was putting the writers of the U.S. Constitution “on notice.”

“I don't have their names yet, but that's something I'm looking into,” he said.  “These jokers are not going to get away with this.”

See.  Trump actually thinks he's an Emperor or King.  Also, does NOT recognize the Putin is an autocrat and Russia does NOT have a real 'Constitution.'

Also demonstrates his very poor education, “I don't have their names yet, but that's something I'm looking into.”  The means he has NEVER read our Constitution because our founding-fathers signatures/names APPEAR as part of 'Article VII.'

HEALTH CARE - Doctor's Orders

"Reassessing the value of care for chronic health conditions" PBS NewsHour 1/18/2017

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SUMMARY:  Surgeon Atul Gawande says we need to reconsider healthcare's focus on generously rewarding physicians who practice heroic interventions, rather than those who practice incremental medicine for chronic conditions.  Gawande talks with William Brangham about the value of that kind of care, and the potential effects of a Republican repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

DR. ATUL GAWANDE, The New Yorker:  When you think about the future of health care and where we're going at this moment of debate, there's a transformation going on that involves a recognition that our focus in medicine has been on heroic interventions, like the kind that I do now as a surgeon.

But the biggest gains are coming right now from incremental medicine, from a commitment to the kind of steady, overtime management of complex problems like chronic illnesses that can add years to people's lives.  But that's work done by some of the people with the least resources in our health care system.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour):  So, who practices incremental medicine in our health care system today?

DR. ATUL GAWANDE:  Well, good examples, just look at the list of who the lowest-paid people are.

Pediatricians are at the bottom.  You would also look at internists.  You would look at psychiatrists.  You would look at family physicians, HIV specialists.  People who take care of chronic illnesses by seeing people carefully over time, those are the people who get the least money.

The people who have the most [pay] are people like orthopedic surgeons, interventional cardiologists.  And my point isn't that — you know, that we're — that there is something wrong with heroism.

My own son has a congenital heart condition, where his life was saved by a cardiac surgeon stepping in at 11 days of life to save his life.  But he is now 21 years old because of constant monitoring and working with him with a primary care physician and people who controlled his blood pressure, recognized problems before they arose, dealt with learning issues that were related to his condition.

And that's the only reason now that he's getting to live a long and healthy life.  That's what we're not rewarding.  They don't have the kind of resources and commitment that we are giving to people like me.  I have millions of dollars of equipment available to me when I go to work every day in an operating room.

The clinicians who keep my son going are lucky if they can have a nurse.

SYRIA - The Assad Files

"Gathering evidence of Syria war crimes in ‘The Assad Files’" PBS NewsHour 4/11/2016

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SUMMARY:  Five years of brutal civil war in Syria have killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions more.  Now, a new journalistic project aims to document President Bashar al-Assad's principal role in the systematic campaign of detention, torture and murder that has left his nation in the throes of chaos.  Hari Sreenivasan sits down with Ben Taub of The New Yorker to discuss “The Assad Files.”

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  Five years of war have killed hundreds of thousands of people in Syria in this many-sided and brutal conflict.  But there’s now a project under way that’s trying to document the principal role of the Bashar al-Assad regime in the killing and its systematic campaign of detention, torture and murder.

The story of this remarkable forensic effort and the appalling acts it catalogs is told in this week’s “New Yorker” by reporter Ben Taub in his piece called “The Assad Files.”

Ben Taub joins me now.

So, what is this organization?  It’s not the United Nations.  It’s not the International Criminal Court.  But it seems almost more effective in the amount of evidence that it’s gathered on what’s happening in Syria.

BEN TAUB, Contributing Writer, The New Yorker:  Right.

So, it’s an independent agency called the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA).  And because they’re independent, they don’t — they have a — they can operate with a very high risk tolerance and outside of the geopolitics that usually govern permissions for such AN investigation.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  But what’s the type of evidence that they have now and how do we know that Assad is responsible for some of these acts?

BEN TAUB:  So, they have collected documentation evidence from all over the country.  They have smuggled about 600,000 pages out of Syria at very high risk.  They have had — one courier was killed, two have been wounded, and — but in recent years, they have gotten much better with operational security.

And they have also…

HARI SREENIVASAN:  These are basically people who are deciding to leak documents and somehow get it in the hands of the CIJA.

BEN TAUB:  So there is a leaker from Damascus.  He was — he worked within Assad’s innermost security committee as a — as a mole essentially.  He was hired basically to process all of the paperwork for Assad’s innermost security committee.

And he was a member of the opposition from the beginning.  And so it’s from his testimony that we know a lot of how that committee worked.  And he basically saw that, every single night, Assad’s Crisis Cell which he formed in response to the Syrian crisis in 2011, and they would demand security reports from all over the country.

And this young man named Abdelmajid Barakat would collect all of the reports, read them and draft a summary for them to look at as they had the meeting.  Now, after their meetings, when they have decided how to handle each security issue, they would send a list of recommendations to Assad through a courier, and he would then review them, sometimes cross things out, sometimes add…

MEDIA - Cartoonist Personal Book on Aging Parents

"Readers relate to New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast’s personal book on aging parents" PBS NewsHour 12/26/2014

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SUMMARY:  Known for her dry wit, cartoonist Roz Chast finds humor in caring for aging parents in her first graphic memoir, "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?"  Jeffrey Brown speaks with the New Yorker artist about taking on more personal subject matter and how cartooning became a tool in remembering her late parents.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  The absurdities, horrors, comedies, most of all perhaps the anxieties of everyday life, these “New Yorker” covers could only have been drawn by longtime staff cartoonist Roz Chast.

She grew up in Brooklyn in Flatbush.  Her dad was an assistant school principal and her mom a high school teacher.  Author of several books, this year, Chast tackled an uncomfortable subject, but one shared by many.  “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?:  A Memoir” is about the last few years of her parents’ lives.

It was a finalist for the National Book Awards, the first time a cartoonist has been nominated in the nonfiction category.

I talked with Chast recently at the Miami Book Fair and asked how this book came to be.

ROZ CHAST, Author, “Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?”:  I think I have a habit of, in my head, taking notes on whatever, you know, whether they’re verbal or pictorial or just making a note of things as they’re happening.

And, at some point, I think it started to dawn on me that there was actually a story here that I wanted to put on paper.