TRUE DETECTIVE - Where is Melania Trump?

"Is Melania Trump boycotting her husband?" by Hunter, Daily KOS 2/7/2017

Back in the waning days of the election, Melania Trump vowed that as first lady she would dedicate herself to combating cyberbullying.  You know, of the sort popularized by her husband.  Whatever happened to that?

Three months later, Melania Trump is indeed first lady.  But what of her pledge to take up cyberbullying?  Mother Jones contacted a wide range of organizations and individuals who work on cyberbullying, and not a single one of them reported being contacted by Trump or anyone in the Donald Trump administration.

Wow, go figure.  But wait: in fairness to Melania Trump, she also hasn't moved into the White House.  Or done anything else as first lady.  Or made any substantive statements about anything.  Or, apparently, appeared with her husband in public since the inauguration.  (No, Mar-a-Lago does not count.)

And you know what?  That's to be respected, right there.  No joke—there's a lot of powerful people in this country who wish they didn't have to appear with Donald Trump in public, so we should probably be giving Melania a big thumbs-up for being one of the few who has had the courage to pull it off.

In the meantime, Donald Trump continues to cyberbully American companies, individual media figures, specific American judges, and just to mix things up, an American university.  Nobody else in America has been able to figure out how to get him to shut up.  There's no reason for anyone to think Melania could, so let's cut her some slack on this one.

ELECTIONS - Hoaxes and Fake News

"How online hoaxes and fake news played a role in the election" PBS NewsHour 11/17/2016

COMMENT:  Why do you think gossip news magazines are so popular?  It's titillating even if not true.

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Tech giants like Google and Facebook face mounting criticism over whether they used insufficient discretion in weeding out fake news.  A Buzzfeed analysis found that false stories generated more engagement than content from real news sites in the three months before the election.  Hari Sreenivasan speaks with Craig Silverman, founding editor of BuzzFeed Canada, for more.

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  In the week or so since the election, there has been mounting criticism of whether Web giants like Facebook and Google used enough discretion and editorial responsibility in screening out fake news sites.

A new analysis by BuzzFeed found that false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated more engagement than content from real news sites during the last three months of the election.  Users shared false stories like this one about Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump, or Hillary Clinton selling weapons to ISIS hundreds of thousands of times, even more than real stories.

President Obama weighed in today during his trip to Germany.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:  If we are not serious about facts and what's true and what's not, and particularly in an age of social media, where so many people are getting their information in sound bites and snippets off their phones, if we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  Craig Silverman worked on the analysis done by BuzzFeed, and he joins me now.

Craig, how do we know Facebook's impact on the electorate?  How did you research this?

CRAIG SILVERMAN, Founding Editor, BuzzFeed Canada:  Well, what we did is looked for the biggest 20 hits in the last three months before the election from sites that published fake news or sites that had published something false that also went viral, and then we looked at the total number of Facebook engagements for those.

And that's a number that encompasses, the comments, reactions and the shares.  And we decided to compare those to the top 20 real election news hits from 19 major news organizations.  And what we ended up seeing, which was quite surprising, was, in those last three months of the election, compared to the six months before that, the engagement on the top 20 fake stories was actually higher than what you saw for the real news.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  And you found that some of these sites were really news sites, but still they had as much power, if not more, than, say, The New York Times or The Washington Post?

CRAIG SILVERMAN:  That was one of the really surprising things to me.

I didn't expect fake news to get more engagement than real news overall, but to see that the leading fake news site getting the most engagement had only been registered months before, and its top four fake stories got more Facebook engagement than the top four election stories from The Washington Post, I mean, that was really surprising.

TOO MUCH INFO - WikiLeaks Becomes a Danger to Personal Privacy

"Why is WikiLeaks publishing private individuals' personal information?" PBS NewsHour 8/23/2016

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  WikiLeaks has revealed classified information to the public for over a decade.  A new Associated Press report found that the website has also published personal details about private citizens, including the names of two teenage rape victims and a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay.  Some of the leaks have the potential to endanger lives.  William Brangham speaks with AP's Raphael Satter for more.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  For a decade, the anti-secrecy Web site WikiLeaks has published online millions of original documents and other material — leaks that have exposed the inner workings of the National Security Agency, the U.S. military and State Department, the Saudi government and, most recently, the Democratic National Committee.

But a new report by the Associated Press says that many private individuals are caught up in the disclosures.

William Brangham has more.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour):  The AP went through a sampling of the tens of thousands of documents WikiLeaks released in the last year, and found many personal details about private citizens, Social Security numbers, medical files, sensitive family and financial information.

In what the AP calls particularly egregious, WikiLeaks published the names of two teenage rape victims, as well as the name of a Saudi citizen who'd been arrested for being gay.  That revelation could endanger the man's life because, in Saudi Arabia, being gay is punishable by death.

Joining me now from Paris is Raphael Satter, one of the AP reporters who wrote this story.

Raphael, thanks for being here.

I wonder if you could tell us, what made you, first off, want to do this deep dive into WikiLeaks in the first place?

RAPHAEL SATTER, Associated Press:  I covered the Saudi files released back in 2015, and there was an enormous amount of newsworthy information in there.

But as we were going through the files with my colleague Maggie, who co-wrote today's story, we noticed that there was a lot of irrelevant information in there, too, including a few medical files.  Now, at the time, we sort of shrugged it off.  We thought, well, maybe there are a couple of stray files in there.

But we flagged it for further research.  And, finally, this year, we have gone back and done some digging.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM:  We mentioned that there was the mention of the Saudi man who had been arrested for homosexuality.  What sorts of other things did you find in this — in these documents?

RAPHAEL SATTER:  We found all kinds of things.

If it's personal or sensitive or family-related, we found it.  So, we found details of custody battles.  We found parents writing to authorities about missing children.  We found details of elopements, of divorces, of partners who had sexually transmitted diseases, partners who had AIDS, people who were in debt, in distress, in all kinds of financial difficulty, and, of course, some of the cases that you mentioned earlier, that is to say, people who were raped, including children who were raped.

LAW - From the Gossip Column

"Sex, Drugs, And Violence Are At The Heart Of Divorce Case Against Siegelman Judge Mark Fuller" by Roger Shuler, The Public Record 5/22/2012

Excerpt

A request for admissions can be one of the most entertaining documents in a lawsuit. The requesting party, in so many words, is saying, “We all know the following statements are true, so why don’t you admit to them so we can haggle about something else?”

It can be a rare moment of clarity in a legal action, where one party is trying to cut through the many layers of BS and establish facts. That doesn’t mean the receiving party is going to admit to everything–or anything–in the request. But the effort to get at what one party considers to be the clear truth can be most enlightening.

From that standpoint, a request for admissions in a divorce case involving U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller certainly does not disappoint. Fuller is a George W. Bush appointee who is best known for presiding over the political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and codefendant Richard Scrushy, the former CEO of HealthSouth Corporation.

Lisa Boyd Fuller is suing the judge for divorce. If even half of the items in her request for admissions are true, it’s a wonder Judge Fuller could even pay attention during the Siegelman case–much less rule correctly on key matters of law, with the freedom of two men at stake. (You can read the Fuller request for admissions at the end of this post.)

Lisa Fuller’s request is filled with sex, drugs, and violence–but no rock and roll (so far). The 18 items hint at a judge with a clouded mind, a nasty temperament, a lust for women other than his wife, and a monumental sense of entitlement.

The process for a request for admissions here in my state is governed by Rule 36 of the Alabama Rules of Civil Procedure. It’s one of my favorite rules because it essentially says, “Let’s dispense with all the posing and posturing and get on the record what we all know to be the case–that these statements are true.” A savvy defense lawyer, of course, can take steps to ensure that the truth is clouded–and Mark Fuller’s lawyer is likely to do just that. But you at least have to admire the thought behind Rule 36.

Here is how the committee comments to the Alabama rule sum things up:

The purpose of this rule is to expedite the trial and to relieve the parties of the cost of proving facts which will not be disputed at the trial and the truth of which can be ascertained by reasonable inquiry. The rule is self-sufficient, and clearly defines its purpose and limits its effect, and it should be liberally construed.