#at one point they had over half a million EMPTY housing units before 2008

[kittykatinabag]

See, the problem isn't that I'm having trouble focusing. Its that I do not feel like its necessary to do things that I don't find useful for me.

[bigyack-com]

Coronavirus Live Updates: As Virus Spreads Swiftly Worldwide, China Reports Zero New Infections

As the virus spreads, the human toll grows.

China reported its first day with no new locally transmitted coronavirus infections, three months after the first case was detected. But the march of the affliction gathered pace while nations throughout the world braced for a surge of infections and, ultimately, deaths. For the Fusco family in Freehold, N.J., the dangers of the virus and its pernicious exploitation of human connection were laid bare when Grace Fusco, 73, died Wednesday night, hours after her son and five days after her daughter. Four other family members are hospitalized, three of them in critical condition, from an infection traced to a routine family gathering. No one is safe. Two members of Congress tested positive and were in isolation on Thursday. While older people remain at gravest risk worldwide, a C.D.C. report found that 38 percent of those who required hospitalization in the U.S. were aged 20 to 54. Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, warned that as testing becomes more widespread, people would see the numbers soar. President Trump signed a relief package to provide sick leave, unemployment benefits and free coronavirus testing, and lawmakers were drafting an even more sweeping $1 trillion economic stabilization package. But even as the federal government invoked wartime powers to speed the production of essential medical equipment, such as surgical masks, protective body suits, testing kits and, especially, ventilators remained in short supply. World leaders escalated pleas to the only ones who can ultimately help buy time: everyone. “It’s down to each and every one of us,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said in a televised address. “We are not doomed to helplessly watch the spread of the virus. We have a means to fight it: we must practice social distancing.” Failure to do so could result in even more stringent lockdowns that Germany has so far avoided, she said. “We are a democracy. We don’t live by force, but by shared knowledge and cooperation.” In California, more than nine million people have been told not to leave their homes. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York resisted taking such a drastic step, even as he ordered businesses to compel employees to work from home. In Spain, violations of isolation orders are enforced with fines. Russia is using facial-recognition technology to track down and fine people who violate mandatory quarantines. Beaches in Barcelona are closed, but many Americans were heading to sandy shores for Spring Break. Even as nations wrestled with a public health emergency, the economic crisis grew darker, deepening the anxiety felt by people increasingly cut off from their support networks. But, as Ms. Merkel said, even as a society in isolation, “we will show that we are there for one another.”

China reports zero local infections, a major turning point.

For the first time since the coronavirus crisis began, China on Thursday reported no new local infections for the previous day, a milestone in its costly battle with the outbreak that has since spread around the world. Officials said 34 new coronavirus cases had been confirmed, all of them involving people who had come to China from elsewhere. In signaling that an end to China’s epidemic might be in sight, the announcement could pave the way for officials to focus on reviving the country’s economy, which nearly ground to a halt after the government imposed travel restrictions and quarantine measures. In recent days, economic life has been resuming in fits and starts. But China is not out of danger yet. Experts have said that it will need to see at least 14 consecutive days without new infections for the outbreak to be considered truly over. It remains to be seen whether the virus will re-emerge once daily life restarts and travel restrictions are lifted around the country. “It’s very clear that the actions taken in China have almost brought to an end their first wave of infections,” said Ben Cowling, a professor and head of the division of epidemiology and biostatistics at Hong Kong University’s School of Public Health. “The question is what will happen if there’s a second wave, because the kind of measures that China has implemented are not necessarily sustainable in the long term.” To contain the outbreak, the authorities shut schools and workplaces and imposed travel and quarantine restrictions on broad swaths of the population and many visitors from abroad. Since January, more than 50 million people in the central province of Hubei, including its capital, Wuhan, where the outbreak began, have been subjected to a strict lockdown.

Many hospitalized in the U.S. are younger adults.

American adults of all ages — not just those in their 70s, 80s and 90s — are being seriously sickened by the coronavirus, according to a report on nearly 2,500 cases in the United States. The report, issued Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that — as in other countries — the oldest patients were at greatest risk of becoming seriously ill or dying. But of the 508 coronavirus patients known to have been hospitalized in the United States, 38 percent were between 20 and 54. And nearly half of the 121 sickest patients studied — those admitted to intensive care units — were adults under 65. “I think everyone should be paying attention to this,” said Stephen S. Morse, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University. “It’s not just going to be the elderly.” Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force, appealed on Wednesday for younger people to stop socializing in groups and to take care to protect themselves and others. “You have the potential then to spread it to someone who does have a condition that none of us knew about, and cause them to have a disastrous outcome,” Dr. Birx said. In the C.D.C. report, 20 percent of the hospitalized patients and 12 percent of the intensive care patients were between the ages of 20 and 44, basically spanning the millennial generation.

First details of Trump’s economic package includes $500 billion for taxpayers.

The Trump administration on Wednesday broadened the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and spelled out the first details of a $1 trillion economic package, asking Congress for an infusion of $500 billion for direct payments to taxpayers and $500 billion in loans for businesses. President Trump invoked a seldom-used wartime law that allows the government to press American industry into service to ramp up production of medical supplies. He said he would send two military hospital ships to New York and California. He also directed federal agencies to suspend all foreclosures and evictions until the end of April as the full economic toll of the crisis began to set in around the world. And he agreed with Canada to stop all nonessential traffic across the northern border. After weeks of playing down the outbreak, Mr. Trump appeared on Wednesday to fully embrace the scope of the calamity, saying he saw himself as a wartime president and invoking memories of the efforts made by Americans during World War II. “Now it’s our time,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference at the White House. “We must sacrifice together because we are all in this together, and we will come through together. It’s the invisible enemy.” Entire sectors of the American economy are shutting down, threatening to crush businesses, put millions of people out of work and forcing lawmakers to consider a vast financial bailout that would dwarf the federal government’s response to the 2008 crisis. The scale of the problem is unlike anything Washington has faced before: The financial crisis, which sent unemployment skyrocketing to 10 percent, centered on foreclosures and the banking sector while this crisis is springing from dozens of place at once, as restaurants and movie theaters shut down, factories close and airplanes, public trains and buses run nearly empty of passengers. Economists fear that by the time the coronavirus pandemic subsides and economic activity resumes, entire industries could be wiped out, proprietors across the country could lose their businesses and millions of workers could find themselves jobless.

Testing in New York gathers speed as health officials rush to stem the spread in Hasidic communities.

New York City officials, already grappling with one of the largest outbreaks in the country, expressed growing alarm that the coronavirus is spreading quickly in tightly knit Hasidic Jewish communities in Brooklyn, saying that they are investigating a recent spike in confirmed cases. More than 100 people have recently tested positive for the coronavirus in Borough Park and Williamsburg, two Brooklyn neighborhoods with sizable Hasidic-American populations. Across the state, the number of new cases continued to grow exponentially, something health officials said to expect across the nation as testing is stepped up. Of the 14,597 people to be tested so far, nearly 5,000 were tested on Tuesday, helping explain why the number of new cases jumped for 1,000 in just 24 hours to 2,382 people. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said he expects the true number to be many times greater than that. Mr. Cuomo has resisted issuing the kind of “shelter in place” orders being put in place on the West Coast, but he issued new rules meant to decrease density, including ordering businesses to compel half their employees to work from home. The public health fight has wreaked havoc on the city’s economy, with the hospitality industry an early casualty. The restaurateur Danny Meyer laid off 2,000 employees from his Union Square Hospitality Group, one of the nation’s leading restaurant companies. Hilton Hotels said it would close the huge New York Hilton Midtown indefinitely starting Friday. President Trump agreed to dispatch a 1,000-bed hospital ship, the U.S.N.S. Comfort to New York Harbor, but it will not arrive for weeks.

Queen Elizabeth heads to country home as Britain’s restrictions expand.

At 93 years old, Queen Elizabeth II has lived through the Great Depression and World War II. But the spread of the coronavirus has presented a challenge unlike any other that she or her nation have faced during her 66 years on the throne. The queen’s age puts her squarely in the high-risk category, and the palace is moving to ensure she is isolated. A planned visit by the emperor and empress of Japan was postponed “in the current circumstances,” Buckingham Palace said on Thursday. The palace announced this week that, “as a sensible precaution,” several changes would be made to the queen’s schedule, and that she and her husband, Prince Philip, would move to Windsor Castle. Initially reluctant to impose widespread restrictions on Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that schools would close beginning Friday. He has also ordered 20,000 members of the military be put on standby to assist in the days ahead. London has been the center of the outbreak in Britain, with more than one-third of the country’s 2,626 confirmed cases. By Wednesday, at least 103 coronavirus patientsn had died. Train services will also be curtailed this week, with some 40 tube stations across the city closing to limit the number of people moving around the city. The country’s national health service, already strained, is bracing for an influx of patients. With new cases mounting daily, many have criticized Mr. Johnson for being slow to implement the stringent measures seen across much of Europe.

What does ‘social distancing’ actually mean?

Trump doubles down on labeling the coronavirus ‘Chinese.’

President Trump has defended his increasingly frequent practice of calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus,” ignoring a growing chorus of criticism that the term is racist and anti-Chinese. Experts have said that labeling the virus as Chinese will ratchet up tensions between the two countries and result in the kind of xenophobia that American leaders should discourage. “The use of this term is not only corrosive vis-à-vis a global audience, including here at home, it is also fueling a narrative in China about a broader American hatred and fear of not just the Chinese Communist Party but of China and Chinese people in general,” said Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. At a White House briefing on Tuesday, Mr. Trump told reporters that he was attaching “China” to the name of the virus to combat a disinformation campaign promoted by Beijing officials that the American military was the source of the outbreak. “I didn’t appreciate the fact that China was saying that our military gave it to them,” Mr. Trump said. “I think saying that our military gave it to them creates a stigma.” Then in two tweets on Wednesday morning, he pointedly referred to the “Chinese virus.” Asked about the term later in the day, he insisted that he was simply pointing out a fact: that the illness was first detected in China. Public health officials have tried to avoid names that might result in discriminatory behavior against places or ethnic groups since releasing more stringent guidelines for naming viruses in 2015. On Twitter, the White House has criticized what it called “the media’s fake outrage,” pointing to past illnesses that had been named after places, including the Ebola virus and the West Nile virus.

Australia joins growing list of nations to ban all foreign visitors.

In an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia on Thursday barred all foreign citizens and nonresidents from entering the country, becoming the latest world leader to enact a wide-sweeping travel ban since the pandemic was declared. The ban will take effect beginning on Friday and follows similar orders in Canada and New Zealand. Mr. Morrison said he had consulted with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand about the ban said it was “essential to take that further step in order to limit the spread of the coronavirus.” “We have already seen a very significant reduction in the travel to Australia by noncitizens and residents,” he added, citing the fact that 80 percent of cases in the country have been linked to overseas travel. Australia has recorded 568 cases and six deaths, a figure that reflects the country’s still-limited testing protocols, experts said. Australian citizens and residents are still able to enter the country from abroad, but must quarantine themselves for 14 days upon returning. Earlier this week, the island state of Tasmania issued an order that Australians from other parts of the country would have to self-isolate upon entering. Mr. Morrison also issued a rare travel notice for Australians seeking to go overseas, advising them not to travel at all anywhere in the world.

Some countries are just better prepared for a pandemic.

This could be Estonia’s moment. As Europe is battered by the coronavirus, the tiny Baltic nation should be relatively resilient: Estonia is known as one of the most tech-savvy countries in the world, potentially a big advantage as the outbreak forces economic activity online. And then there’s Southern Europe, which bore the brunt of the last big economic crisis and will suffer the most. Countries like Greece and Italy depend heavily on tourism and are still suffering the lingering effects of the eurozone debt meltdown over the last decade, including austerity programs that left their health care systems ill prepared for a pandemic. But even countries regarded as paragons of competitiveness, like Germany and the Netherlands, may turn out to have weaknesses that, until a few weeks ago, were regarded as strengths. Germany’s automakers, for example, have dominated the luxury car business. But the virus exposed their dependence on sales in China, and now they are closing factories all over the region.

Rich and famous patients are getting tested while other Americans are being denied.

Politicians, celebrities, social media influencers and even N.B.A. players have been tested for the new coronavirus. But as that list of rich, famous and powerful people grows by the day, so do questions about whether they are getting access to testing that is denied to other Americans. Some of these high-profile people say they are feeling ill and had good reason to be tested. Others argue that those who were found to be infected and then isolated themselves provided a good example to the public. But with testing still in short supply in areas of the country, leaving health care workers and many sick people unable to get diagnoses, some prominent personalities have obtained tests without exhibiting symptoms or having known contact with someone who has the virus, as required by some testing guidelines. Others have refused to specify how they were tested. Such cases have provoked accusations of elitism and preferential treatment about a testing system that has already been plagued with delays and confusion, and now stirred a new national debate that has reached the White House — with President Trump being asked at a Wednesday news conference whether “the well-connected go to the front of the line.” “You’d have to ask them that question,” he replied, suggesting that should not be the case. “Perhaps that’s been the story of life. That does happen on occasion, and I’ve noticed where some people have been tested fairly quickly.” The question burst into public view this week after the Brooklyn Nets announced Tuesday that four of their players — including Kevin Durant, one of the biggest stars in the N.B.A. — had tested positive. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York criticized the dynamic, writing on Twitter that while he wished the athletes “a speedy recovery,” he did not think the N.B.A. should be getting tests for its athletes while critically ill patients were kept waiting. “Tests should not be for the wealthy, but for the sick,” he wrote.

Keeping yourself and your things germ free.

Getting rid of germs is at the top of your mind, and washing your hands properly is the first step in that process. But what about your phone, which you likely handle all day? Here are some tips to help. Reporting and research was contributed by Javier C. Hernández, Marc Santora, Megan Specia, Melissa Eddy, Katie Rogers, Lara Jakes, Ana Swanson, Nicholas Fandos, Emily Cochrane, Megan Twohey, Steve Eder and Marc Stein. Read the full article

[newstfionline]

Headlines

NOAA’s new hurricane outlook shows so many storms, we may have to turn to the Greek alphabet (Washington Post) The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season has already set records for being so active, with Hurricane Isaias being the earliest ninth named storm on record. Now, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting that many more records may fall in the coming months, as the Atlantic hurricane season cranks out at least 10 more named storms. The updated outlook released Thursday calls for a total of 19 to 25 named storms (winds of 39 mph or greater), of which 7 to 11 are expected to become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or greater), including three to six that could become major hurricanes (winds of 111 mph or greater). In more than two decades of issuing these forecasts, NOAA has never predicted that as many as 25 named storms would form in a single season. It would take only 21 named storms before all the names on the Atlantic list, determined ahead of time by the World Meteorological Organization, are exhausted and forecasters would turn to the Greek alphabet. This happened only once before, in 2005, a devastating season that was the most active on record.

The Workforce Is About to Change Dramatically (The Atlantic) In march, tens of millions of American workers—mostly in white-collar industries such as tech, finance, and media—were thrust into a sudden, chaotic experiment in working from home. Four months later, the experiment isn’t close to ending. For many, the test run is looking more like the long run. Google announced in July that its roughly 200,000 employees will continue to work from home until at least next summer. Mark Zuckerberg has said he expects half of Facebook’s workforce to be remote within the decade. Twitter has told staff they can stay home permanently. With corporate giants welcoming far-flung workforces, real-estate markets in the superstar cities that combine high-paid work and high-cost housing are in turmoil. In the San Francisco Bay Area, rents are tumbling. In New York City, offices are still empty; so many well-heeled families with second homes have abandoned Manhattan that it’s causing headaches for the census. When the pandemic is over, one in six workers is projected to continue working from home or co-working at least two days a week, according to a recent survey by economists at Harvard Business School.

Virus talks on brink of collapse, sides still ‘far apart’ (AP) Washington talks on vital COVID-19 rescue money are teetering on the brink of collapse after a marathon meeting in the Capitol generated lots of recriminations but little progress on the top issues confronting negotiators. Both sides said the future of the talks is uncertain. President Donald Trump is considering executive orders to address evictions and on unemployment insurance, but they appear unlikely to have much impact. A breakdown in the talks would put at risk more than $100 billion to help reopen schools, a fresh round of $1,200 direct payments to most people, and hundreds of billions of dollars for state and local governments to help them avoid furloughing workers and cutting services as tax revenues shrivel.

Portland protesters cause mayhem again, police officer hurt (AP) Portland’s nightly protests turned violent again even after the city’s mayor pleaded for demonstrators to stay off the streets and a police officer hit by a rock early Friday suffered what was described as a serious injury. The protesters who came out Thursday night clashed with officers near a police precinct station and also used metal bars to disable police vehicles, police said in a statement. The nightly clashes this week have ratcheted up tensions in the city after an agreement was reached last week between state and federal officials for federal agents to pull back from their defense of a federal courthouse that was previously the focus of the protesters’ rage. The strategy initially appeared to calm down the protesters, but violent demonstrations re-emerged on the streets this week, miles away from the courthouse—marking a new phase in the nightly protests for Portland that have happened since May 25, following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

U.S. pandemic worse than Mexico, Lopez Obrador says after travel warning (Reuters) Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Friday the United States had greater problems from the coronavirus than his country, a day after the U.S. State Department urged citizens not to travel south of the border, citing high contagion rates. “We have many fewer problems with the pandemic than the problems that, unfortunately, they are facing,” Lopez Obrador said during a Friday morning press conference. “Our situation is better,” he said. The United States on Thursday lifted a global health advisory imposed in March that advised U.S. citizens to avoid all international travel because of the coronavirus pandemic. But the stringent Level 4 advisory, usually reserved for countries at war, remained in place for Mexico, with U.S. ambassador to Mexico Christopher Landau citing the spread of COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus. In Mexico, 40 people per every 100,000 have died from COVID-19 - a lower number than the United States, which is at 49 deaths per 100,000 - according to Johns Hopkins. It also has fewer per capita deaths than Latin American peers Chile, Peru, Brazil and several European nations.

Brits quietly emigrating (The Guardian) The number of British nationals emigrating to other EU countries has risen by 30% since the Brexit referendum, with half making their decision to leave in the first three months after the vote, research has found. Analysis of data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Eurostat shows that migration from Britain to EU states averaged 56,832 people a year in 2008-15, growing to 73,642 a year in 2016-18. The study also shows a 500% increase in those who made the move and then took up citizenship in an EU state. Germany saw a 2,000% rise, with 31,600 Britons naturalizing there since the referendum. “These increases in numbers are of a magnitude that you would expect when a country is hit by a major economic or political crisis,” said Daniel Auer, co-author of the study by Oxford University in Berlin and the Berlin Social Science Center.

The future of Belarus is at stake (Foreign Policy) Belarusians will head to the polls on Sunday in an election that could dramatically change the country’s political landscape. President Aleksandr Lukashenko is trying to extend his 16-year presidency, a term that stretches back to the early post-Cold War days. But he’s fighting an uphill battle. Facing his stiffest opposition in years and massive protests against his rule, Lukashenko’s behavior has become increasingly paranoid and erratic. The one-time Moscow favorite recently defended the arrest of 33 Russian mercenaries in the country, claiming they were quietly staging a revolution to overthrow him. Lukashenko’s shift away from Russia is reflective of the fact that even he doesn’t know whether Belarus should tilt east or west. If he loses and the election is followed by a prolonged period of political instability, it may entice Russia to make that decision itself.

India surges past 2 million coronavirus cases, angry health workers launch a strike (Reuters) India, the country hardest hit in Asia by the coronavirus pandemic, reported on Friday a record daily jump in infections, taking its total number of cases over two million, as government struggled to contain the spread amid striking health workers. More than 3.5 million health workers, who have been the foot-soldiers in the Covid-19 detection efforts across India, embarked on a two-day strike from Friday to secure better wages and proper protective equipment. Accredited Social Health Activists or ASHA workers, are the government’s recognised health workers who are usually the first point of contact in economically deprived sections, where there is limited or no direct access to health-care facilities. A total of 10 unions representing the workers, who also include ambulance drivers and cooks at community centers, joined the strike. A majority of them work on contracts with state governments at a monthly salary of about 3,000 Indian rupees ($40.02).

Plane skids off runway in India; 16 killed, dozens hurt (AP) A special evacuation flight bringing people home to India who had been trapped abroad because of the coronavirus skidded off a runway and split in two while landing Friday in heavy rain in the southern state of Kerala, killing at least 16 passengers and injuring 123 more, police said. Abdul Karim, a senior Kerala state police officer, said the dead included one of the pilots of the two-year-old Boeing 737-800 flying for Air India Express airline. He said at least 15 of the injured were in critical condition, and that rescue operations were over. The NDTV news channel said the plane flew from Dubai to Kozhikode, also called Calicut, in Kerala, India’s southernmost state.

Sri Lanka president, brother tighten grip with big election win (Reuters) Sri Lanka’s parliamentary elections handed President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his older brother an overwhelming majority, results showed on Friday, giving the family power to enact sweeping changes to the constitution of the island nation. Rajapaksa had sought, and achieved, a two-thirds majority for his Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna party and its allies to be able to restore full executive powers to the presidency, a move analysts say could push the country toward authoritarianism.

Rescuers in Lebanon recover more bodies days after blast (AP/Foreign Policy) Rescue teams were still searching the rubble of Beirut’s port for bodies on Friday, nearly three days after a massive explosion sent a wave of destruction through Lebanon’s capital, killing nearly 150 people and wounding thousands. At least four more bodies have been recovered in the last 24 hours, and authorities say the death toll has risen to 149. The blast shredded a large grain silo, devastated neighborhoods near the port and left several city blocks littered with glass and rubble. French President Emmanuel Macron paid a visit to the city on Thursday and delivered a speech in which he announced aid to support relief efforts and assured citizens that he would propose a new political pact to the country’s leaders. During the speech, protesters chanted “revolution, revolution!,” echoing a growing chorus of opposition to the government. Information showing that high-level officials not only knew about a massive supply of ammonium nitrate in the city, but that they were aware of the immense danger it posed is emerging. The resulting backlash against the government is part of a much wider feeling of discontent that has been evident in the country since late last year. Protests against government corruption erupted in October and were further inflamed more recently after the pandemic hit and a severe financial crisis set in.

Former Saudi intelligence officer accuses crown prince of ordering his assassination in Canada (Washington Post) A former top Saudi intelligence officer and close U.S. intelligence ally has accused Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of targeting him for assassination and taking his children hostage because he has knowledge of damaging secrets about the prince’s rise to power. In a federal lawsuit filed in Washington on Thursday, Saad­Aljabri alleged “there is virtually no one Defendant bin Salman wants dead” more than him because of his relationship with the American government as “a longtime trusted partner of senior U.S. intelligence officials.” In a detailed complaint running more than 100 pages, Aljabri alleges that the Saudi leader orchestrated a conspiracy to kill him in Canada that parallels one that resulted in the death and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident Saudi columnist and Washington Post contributor. The CIA has assessed that Mohammed probably ordered Khashoggi’s killing himself, The Post previously reported. Aljabri asserts the prince and his allies pressured him to return to Saudi Arabia, with Mohammed sending agents to the United States to locate him and having malware implanted on his phone. When Aljabri was ultimately located, Mohammed sent a “hit squad” to kill him, the lawsuit asserts. The team was stopped by Canadian customs officials, who, in a grisly echo of the Khashoggi case, were found carrying forensic tools that could have been used to dismember a corpse, Aljabri alleges.

[mikemortgage]

How a Quebec factory town transformed itself after a GM closure in 2002

BOISBRIAND, Que. — On a suburban tract where a General Motors assembly plant once churned out Chevrolet Camaros and Pontiac Firebirds, Sami Bizri steams up another low-foam latte.

Earlier this year, the 24-year-old became co-owner of a Presse Cafe franchise, which sits in an outlet mall in Boisbriand on a one-square-kilometre stretch north of Montreal. The site also hosts hundreds of new housing units and a gleaming industrial park.

“People have more money here, from what I see, from the cars coming in, coming out,” Bizri says, as a pair of customers stroll toward the Golf Town across the parking lot.

His franchise provides catering up to three times a day for neighbouring manufacturers such as Abipa, a Quebec aeronautics maker founded two years after the GM plant closed in 2002. Workers from the Elopak milk-carton maker drop by for croque monsieurs and macchiatos.

Bizri doesn’t remember the shutdown and the 1,300 layoffs, or the concerns it triggered over jeopardized livelihoods and regional economic health. But he says the community seems to have weathered the storm.

“Everybody talks together here,” he says, surveying the bustling coffee shop. “It’s business meetings, it’s students studying, it’s communities coming together.”

In the wake of GM’s announcement that it will shutter its assembly plant in Oshawa, Ont. as part of a massive restructuring effort, experts point to Boisbriand’s transformation from industrial outpost to mixed-use development as both a model of regeneration and a cautionary tale.

“Closing assembly plants is not unusual. And the economy manages quite well,” said Dennis DesRosiers, an auto industry consultant.

“Are there any negative remnants from GM closing its their plant in Quebec? I’d say no. It may have been good, in fact.”

Prolonging the life of a factory despite lower efficiency and declining demand comes at a cost to both workers and corporations, he said.

“For decades, they kept plants open they should have closed — the one in Montreal being one of the best examples — and ended up going bankrupt,” DesRosiers said.

“Now they’re making tough-ass decisions about what plants need to stay open and what plants need to close,” he said, pointing to Oshawa and four other GM plants in the U.S. slated for closure as part of a shift toward electric and self-driving vehicles.

The Boisbriand plant, also called the Sainte-Therese plant, sat 500 kilometres from the web of assembly operations and parts makers that stretches from Windsor to Oshawa, adding to its transportation costs and placing it outside the southern Ontario auto supply chain.

“The writing was on the wall.”

Not everyone sees Boisbriand’s evolution as a success story — at least not an easy one.

“I think it was a critical loss for the region and for the workers,” said Christian Levesque, professor of employment relations at the Universite de Montreal business school. “After that, many of the parts suppliers disappeared in the region.”

Beyond pocketbook problems, some workers faced the challenge of trading a multi-generational identity rooted in steel and smokestacks for one lodged in glass-and-stucco shopping centres.

“For these workers, this is not a GM plant; it’s their plant,” Levesque said of the Boisbriand and Oshawa employees. “They’re losing a sense of what they are.”

The restaurants and home decor stores that supplanted the 36-year-old factory yielded numerous retail jobs, but they typically lacked the robust wages and benefits enjoyed by unionized auto workers.

Boisbriand, like Oshawa, sits next to a large city, which may mute the impact of a closure. But governments should do more to foster an ecosystem through tax breaks, educational programs and partnerships between companies and institutions to attract auto sector players and “make our locations sticky,” Levesque said.

“We do a lot of assembly, but we don’t do research and development. That’s one of the dangers in Canada’s auto industry.”

In 2002, Quebec’s aeronautics, truck and train manufacturers took on some of the Boisbriand workers, said Unifor research director Bill Murnighan. Others were near retirement age and received full pensions, while more than a handful took up jobs at the GM plant in Oshawa.

“That meant pulling up all their families and leaving the city they’d lived in for so many years,” Boisbriand Mayor Marlene Cordato said.

Worker resentment was all the keener due to a $220-million no-interest loan by the provincial and federal governments to revamp the plant in 1987, she recalled.

Cordato, a city councillor when GM made the announcement, remembers struggling to find a viable path to revive the plant site. A provincially backed economic mission to Europe to recruit car makers for the facility came back empty-handed.

“They didn’t find anyone. It was a hard time for car builders. So we had to change our view,” she said.

The city changed the zoning and courted developers to help produce a vast outlet mall, the city’s eighth industrial park and more than 800 homes composed largely of townhouses and low-rise apartments — with 500 more units in the works, the mayor said.

The process wasn’t quick or smooth.

Construction — still ongoing 16 years after the plant shutdown – halted for a year and a half following the 2008-09 financial crisis. But the site now generates taxes worth 16 per cent of the municipality’s $64.5 million budget, roughly the same percentage as GM before it closed, Cordato said.

“GM was part of our history, so it was very hard when it closed down. But I think we’ve made a good change with what was given to us,” she said.

from Financial Post https://ift.tt/2DRn13I via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

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How foreign investors are transforming a long-forgotten D.C. neighborhood

New Post has been published on http://usnewsaggregator.com/how-foreign-investors-are-transforming-a-long-forgotten-d-c-neighborhood/

How foreign investors are transforming a long-forgotten D.C. neighborhood

Angelique Brunner is founder and president of EB5 Capital, a firm that connects foreign investors with developers. (Jared Soares/For The Washington Post)

On the site of a shuttered Burger King in a long-neglected Northeast neighborhood, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser donned a hard hat and dug a shiny shovel into a pile of dirt. It was a groundbreaking for a luxury apartment — made possible by $27 million in foreign investment.

Bowser, bundled in a black overcoat, touted her trade mission to China, where city officials and developers had invited wealthy Chinese to invest half a million dollars each in D.C. building projects in exchange for U.S. residency.

“That mission has resulted in the type of investment that will allow this project to go forward,” Bowser said that February day at the Highline, a 12-story apartment and retail complex going up in a rapidly gentrifying slice of NoMa where cranes now crowd the skyline.

The development is among the latest in D.C. funded by foreign investors through the controversial EB-5 visa, which some lawmakers have derided as “citizenship for sale.” Congress is expected to weigh the fate of the three-decade-old federal program by year’s end.

Its defenders say the program helps economically depressed neighborhoods attract capital — and jobs. But critics note instances where developers have used the low-cost financing to build luxury skyscrapers and high-end hotels in affluent areas, as President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has done.

NoMa — adjacent to Union Market — has the highest concentration of EB-5 financed projects in the city, said an official with an EB-5 lobbying group. (Jared Soares/For The Washington Post)

Bowser and other proponents of the program cite a half dozen blocks near Washington’s Union Market where foreign investment is helping to spur rapid transformation.

[Congress soon could make it harder for rich people to move to the U.S.]

A longtime budget motel was redeveloped into two Hilton-branded hotels in 2015. A trash-sorting depot became an REI flagship in 2016 — not far from a homeless encampment beneath a railroad overpass. In addition to the Highline apartments going up on Florida Avenue, two parking lots across the street are slated for new housing and retail by late 2019.

All were partially financed — between 15 and 64 percent — by foreign investors after banks declined to fully back the projects, which are on the other side of the tracks from where most development was occurring, said Angelique Brunner, founder and president of EB5 Capital, a firm that connects foreign investors with developers.

“It would be very scary for a financial institution to step into this neighborhood the same way they might step into downtown Washington,” Brunner said, a forerunner in bringing EB-5 investments to Washington. “What we do in this neighborhood is really the heart and soul of what EB-5 was intended to be used for.”

The NoMa neighborhood seen from the top of Uline Arena in Northeast Washington. With the hotels, restaurants and amenity-rich apartments comes the specter of gentrification to a historically African American neighborhood of modest row homes. (Jared Soares/For The Washington Post)

Changes in the old neighborhood

The foreign investor visa program has funded projects in other transitioning D.C. neighborhoods such as Shaw and Anacostia, and more recently, the Navy Yard and Southwest Waterfront. NoMa, though, has the highest concentration of EB-5 financed projects in the city thanks to Brunner, said Peter Joseph, executive director of Invest in the USA, an EB-5 lobbying group. Brunner said she expects EB5 Capital to finance at least two more NoMa developments by 2018, bringing total foreign investment in the neighborhood to more than $150 million.

With the hotels, restaurants and amenity-rich apartments, though, comes the specter of gentrification to a historically African American neighborhood of modest row homes. Some residents say they appreciate that the area is now being revived with conveniences they have long sought, after being decimated by the 1968 riots following the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But they also lament feeling like tourists in their own neighborhood, with parking getting more difficult as hipsters and empty nesters move in.

“I’m all for change, but it’s so evident what they do for white folks,” said Moyer Fowler, 67, who has lived in the neighborhood for more than three decades, long before it was branded as NoMa. “We’re not going to know this city after awhile.”

The changes started around 2004 with the opening of the NoMa-Gallaudet U Metro station. Within a few years, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives headquarters opened, with its influx of federal workers. Back then, Fowler’s block was mostly black families; about 10 are left out of roughly 60 homes. Now there’s a dog park. And bike lanes. A Trader Joe’s grocery store is slated to open in 2018.

“You’ve got Airbnbs now, and people walking with strollers and kids in the neighborhood. Before if somebody came out, it’s like, ‘Yo, you’re lost,’ ” said Eric Markham, a 46-year-old maintenance mechanic who is white and has rented in the area for a decade. “Back in the day people couldn’t give their houses away, and now you could come offering what they’re asking and still not get the house.”

Construction on Florida Avenue in Northeast Washington. (Jared Soares/For The Washington Post)

End of an era for one business

Some longtime business owners say they can no longer afford to stay, because redevelopment has pushed up property taxes. Central Armature Works, an electrical installation and construction firm that has been a fixture in the area since 1992, plans to relocate to Prince George’s County, said Robert Dorr, president and general manager of the 102-year-old family business. Dorr said his property taxes have climbed from $55,000 to about $700,000 over 25 years in the neighborhood.

“We thought we had a home here for at least another 50 years,” Dorr said. “But the city thinks the best use of this property is not industrial, so we will be forced to move. We can’t afford the taxes.”

The Dorr family has entered into a joint venture with Trammell Crow to develop apartments, condos, a hotel and retail space at the site. It’s become more profitable for business owners to develop the land on which their companies sit than to continue operating there.

Brunner said the NoMa developments perfectly fit what Congress had envisioned when it created the EB-5 program in 1990, and that her projects have created thousands of jobs. Hotels often provide the highest income jobs for an undereducated local workforce, she said.

“We struggle with the issue of gentrification,” Brunner said. “When you redevelop an area, you really have to be very sensitive to what you provide and how you provide it.”

She said the redevelopment has spurred amenities that will benefit the entire neighborhood, new and longtime residents alike.

“No one was going to build a new grocery store for the rowhouse residents,” she said. “You needed to improve the density in the neighborhood to attract the grocery stores and other services.”

The luxury apartment complex at the old Burger King site also has a plan to include affordable housing, she said, with 13 units available to people making 80 percent of the local median income of $110,300 for a family of four. In addition, the developer is partnering with Habitat for Humanity to provide 13 townhouses for sale to families earning up to 50 percent of the local median income. Those homes will be located a mile up the road in Ivy City, on the other side of Union Market.

The Uline Arena in Northeast Washington, which is now home to a flagship REI store. (Jared Soares/For The Washington Post)

‘It was a tale of two cities’

Brunner, who as a black woman stands out in a field dominated by white men, has been primed for this particular slice of development financing since she was a young adult. As a full scholarship student at Brown University, Brunner held an AmeriCorps job renovating abandoned properties in South Providence, R.I., and conducting credit counseling for recent immigrants to become homeowners.

“One of the most painful points we could not address was there were no services there — no grocery stores and no banks, even though people lived in these neighborhoods,” Brunner said.

When she moved to Washington after receiving a master’s degree in public affairs from Princeton University, she saw the same problems, a daily reminder of the riots.

“Really it was a tale of two cities,” she said. “It was a federal city, which everyone saw on TV. And then it was the local city, which had apparently been forgotten.”

That is where foreign investors enter the picture — to bridge the funding gap for commercial development when institutional investors feel there is too much risk. The EB-5 program became especially popular among developers after the 2008 financial crisis made bank loans harder to secure.

[‘Everyone in China has the American Dream’ — and a popular path to it may disappear]

Seats from the old Uline Arena in REI. (Jared Soares/For The Washington Post)

Beau Athia, who grew up on New York Avenue NE in a Super 8 motel that his parents owned after immigrating from India, said his family relied heavily on foreign investors to fund the construction of a pair of Hilton-branded hotels when they wanted to redevelop the site after the economic downturn.

“At the time when lenders weren’t willing to originate debt for new construction, EB5 Capital was more than willing to partner with us,” Athia said. “We were an immigrant family that basically spent most of our livelihood building up the asset and trying to help an underserved community improve.”

[In a Beijing ballroom, Kushner family pushes $500,000 ‘investor visa’ to wealthy Chinese]

But now legislators as well as the Trump administration are considering changes, including raising the investment threshold from $500,000 to $925,000. Lawmakers say they hope new rules will help prevent abuses, such as money going to build say, the Beverly Hills Waldorf Astoria, instead of helping rural or distressed urban communities.

Foreign investors have an opportunity to recoup their money, with low interest, and become eligible for permanent residency once authorities confirm that the money has created at least 10 American jobs.

With congressional authorization for the EB-5 visa set to expire next month, Brunner is hoping lawmakers will hash out permanent legislation for the program.

As she toured NoMa recently, Brunner said she thinks it would likely take another decade to fully develop the neighborhood — with more housing, retail and full-service hotels.

An iconic barrel-shaped building where the Beatles played their first U.S. concert in 1964 had become an eyesore as a trash-transfer station and then a parking lot. Today it is revived as REI’s fifth flagship store.

Walking out of the store, Brunner pointed down Third Street NE toward Florida Avenue, where she had stood alongside Bowser during February’s groundbreaking for the Highline. Construction is now in full swing.

“This block will be one of the strongest retail corridors in the entire city, connecting NoMa to Union Market,” Brunner said. “We will continue to invest in this neighborhood until it’s complete — or until Congress outlaws our investment.”

Construction seen from the roof of the Homewood Suites in Northeast Washington. (Jared Soares/For The Washington Post)

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[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: After Another Artists’ Enclave in Williamsburg Is Sold, Tenants Live in Uncertainty

Tenant values on display at 475 Kent in 2008 (photo by Jami/Flickr)

David Alan Harvey was out of the country when he learned he was being evicted from his South Williamsburg apartment.

Harvey, 73, has lived and worked in his loft at 475 Kent Avenue for more than a decade. A member of venerable photo agency Magnum Photos, Harvey constantly travels the world shooting for magazines such as National Geographic, and has had his work shown in the Corcoran Gallery, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, while lecturing budding shutterbugs about the trade.

When Harvey came back in May from Mexico, where he had been shooting for his next photo book about rustic beach settings, he found a notice taped to his door. The note indicated he had to leave the premises in the coming months because he spent less than half the year living there.

Harvey was not surprised about his eviction, since deep-pocketed developers bought the building for $56 million in February. “As soon as the building was sold I figured this was over,” he said. “The time was just up. They want to raise the rent.”

Tenants protesting being removed from the building in 2008 (photo by iheart475kent/Flickr)

Artist lofts often take the moniker of the business that occupied their space before them, but most are simply known by their addresses. For example, there is the Pencil Factory in Greenpoint, Industry City in Sunset Park, 1717 Troutman in Bushwick, 56 Bogart in Williamsburg, and 66 West in Greenpoint.

Some of these lofts take on mythic qualities.

Andy Warhol’s iconic studio, The Factory, which was at one point located on East 16th Street and Union Square West, doubled as a hangout for fellow artists and celebrities. The Gretsch Building, once a 10-story factory that made guitars and drums, housed scores of artists before developers Martin and Edward Wydra bought it in late 2001 and converted it to condos. The complex has become one of the most desirable locations in Williamsburg.

Four blocks away from the Gretsch, on the edge of a Hasidic Orthodox enclave sits an 11-story former pasta factory known as 475 Kent. The building’s cast concrete and rebar components were typical of many industrial warehouses built in the early 20th century. The first wave of artists priced out of Manhattan moved into the building in 1998, knocking cinderblocks out of the wall and installing casement windows themselves.

The building’s charmingly ramshackle conditions fostered a close-knit community of visual artists, photographers, musicians, authors, and other creative professionals.

475 Kent tenants moving back in 2008 (photo by Alison Dell/Flickr)

Sculptor Deborah Masters once used a crane to lift her work that would be installed at JFK’s Terminal 4 through an open window in her studio.

Author Jami Attenberg, who wrote the best-selling novel The Middlesteins set her latest book All Grown Up in the loft, as a love letter to the building.

War photojournalist Tim Hetherington, whose documentary Restrepo was nominated for an Academy Award, lived there before he was killed while working in Libya in 2011.

Even Bill Murray rented a summer sublet in 2013 while he was shooting the film St. Vincent.

475 Kent (photo by David Gallagher/Flickr)

Life in a former factory meant regular visits from building inspectors to determine whether conditions were up to code. The city made tenants leave 475 Kent for four months in 2008 when the fire department found two silos of grain used to make matzoh in the basement.

But the rising property values of nearby lots attracted investors. The building’s Kent Avenue neighbors, which had been the Schaefer Brewery, the Domino Sugar Factory, and a bevy of smaller warehouses were converted one by one to luxury condo complexes with names like “The Oosten” and designed by renowned architects like ODA’s Eran Chen. And so investors Shlomo Meichor and Assi Arev of the Israel-based firm Gaia Investment Group purchased 475 Kent from Nachman Brach for $56 million in February.

Gaia, which has ties to Israeli billionaires Raz and Beny Steinmetz, has invested heavily in Kushner Companies, the real estate firm owned by President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, but their footprint in the city remains small. In this case, Gaia partnered with developer Copperline Partners run by the wealthy Miami-based Schlesinger family, to manage the property.

Moving sale (photo by Aaron Short)

Tenants began receiving certified letters in March notifying them that the building had been sold. Termination letters went out to some tenants on Memorial Day weekend while others received notices that their privileges were being revoked. “They were sending out notices to scare people and offer them some buyout number, around two years of rent equivalent for the rights to their apartment,” said Andrew Ohanesian, an artist who received a letter claiming that he could no longer park his truck in a parking space near the freight elevator.

However, many longtime residents should be safe from harassment.

Tenants applied and received coverage three years ago under the 2010 expansion of the loft law, which extended rental protections to residents living in warehouses for any consecutive twelve month period from January 1, 2008 through December 31, 2009. Their rent would remain stabilized regardless of who purchased the building in the future.

But the state law has several loopholes.

Subtenants do not have the same rights as those on the unit’s lease, even if they live in the premises for several years. Tenants must be physically present in their apartment for more than half the year in order for it to be considered their primary residence. And those who rented out their units on Airbnb found themselves in hot water with their new landlord.

The new owners have already cleared out about 25 percent of the 475 Kent’s residents —  mostly subtenants — and are trying to remove others. About half the building is preparing to defend their rights to stay, tenants say. “What we have here is a vertical village that grew organically and that’s something worth holding onto,” said video artist Eve Sussman, one of the building’s earliest tenants. “This is about whether we care that artists stay in New York, and how hard we are going to fight about it.” Her husband, artist and fellow longtime tenant Simon Lee summarized the issues this way: “The cultural life of the city is being eroded and that is what is at stake here.”

Eve Sussman (r.) and an unnamed friend while Eve was working on installing windows at 475 Kent in 1998 (courtesy Eve Sussman)

Other longtime residents worry the character of their loft and the neighborhood will change for the worse as the new owners refurbish empty units for affluent inhabitants. “What’s happened here is when artists moved out of 475 they were replaced by other artists moving in, and now when artists move out investment bankers will be moving in,” said writer and longtime tenant Guy Lesser.

Harvey wanted to remain at 475 Kent and contest the eviction but found he had little ground. “The loft law doesn’t protect me in this particular case, and I’ve looked at it from every legal standpoint,” he said. “I talked with different attorneys who said you have to prove you were there with credit card records, plane tickets, and restaurant receipts.”

Harvey will miss the building. He’s planning to move out by October. “It was always kind of a renegade building that doesn’t exist in New York anymore,” he said. “It was a really good atmosphere. If you’re there, it had a good vibe going.”

Future generations of photographers, painters, and video artists would be so lucky to find these kinds of places in New York. Harvey’s advice: set up shop elsewhere.

475 Kent at night (photo by Aaron Short)

“Where do the struggling young photographers go? Don’t go to New York. The minute it becomes a rich person’s town it’s all over anyway,” he said. “People are going to LA; Atlanta; Marfa, Texas; Richmond, Virginia; Sicily. You have to go out and shoot your pictures in other places anyway.”

The post After Another Artists’ Enclave in Williamsburg Is Sold, Tenants Live in Uncertainty appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[caveartfair]

Jeff Koons Convicted of Plagiarism—and the 9 Other Biggest News Stories This Week

Catch up on the latest art news with our rundown of the 10 stories you need to know this week.

01  A French court convicted Jeff Koons of plagiarism, concluding that his sculpture of naked children copied a French photographer’s work.

(via The Guardian)

The court ruled that Koons’s Naked (1988), a porcelain work depicting two nude children standing atop a heart sprinkled with flowers, plagiarized a black-and-white photograph by the late Jean-François Bauret. Bauret’s work, titled Enfants, was taken in 1970 and turned into a postcard five years later. The photographer’s widow saw the Koons sculpture and noticed the similarities, alerting both Koons and the Centre Pompidou ahead of his 2014 exhibition at the Paris museum. She received no response and sued both Koons and the Pompidou, which never exhibited the work after it was damaged in transit. On Thursday, the court ruled that, while Koons deviated somewhat from the original image, the changes “do not prevent one from recognising and identifying the models and the pose.” As a result, Koon’s company Jeff Koons LLC and the Centre Pompidou, which included the work in the exhibition catalogue, will have to pay €40,000 to the photographer’s family, roughly half of which will go towards legal fees. Koons’s company will have to pay an additional €4,000 for posting an image of the sculpture on the artist’s website.

02  In an indication of a strengthening art market, London auction totals over the last two weeks of sales are up 61.3% from 2016.

(Artsy)

That figure comes from two weeks of evening sales across Impressionist, Surrealist, Modern, post-war, and contemporary art at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Phillips, and Bonhams. Together they brought in £573.2 million, up from the £351.4 million achieved in 2016. This week’s sales of primarily contemporary work also saw solid returns. Overall, Sotheby’s made £118 million with fees, against an upper estimate of £112.6 million. This represents a 70% increase from last year’s sale. Fifteen of the 61 lots on offer were guaranteed either by Sotheby’s or by a third party. Sales of those works made up 46.6% of the evening’s value, or £55 million. Last year just four lots were guaranteed, with a combined low value of £3.8 million. Christie’s was more sparing with its guarantees in its contemporary sale, which made a total of £96.4 million with fees (the estimate ranged from £67.6 million to £101.6 million)—up 65% from last year’s total. Guarantees represented £14.6 million or 21.6% of the overall value of the sale, compared with £15 million or just under 30% in February 2016. Phillips guaranteed four out of 30 lots in its March 8th sale, down from 11 in 2016. Phillips made £14.7 million with fees against an estimate of £13.3–£19.2 million.

03  Howard Hodgkin, a highly admired post-war British painter, died on Thursday at the age of 84.

(via the New York Times)

Known for his deep, emotional, and richly hued semi-abstract paintings, Hodgkin rocketed to fame after his appearance at the British pavilion in the 1984 Venice Biennale. The artist won the Turner Prize a year later and was knighted in 1992. Although he was considered one of the most important contemporary painters in Britain, Hodgkin told the New York Times in 1990 that “I never expected anyone to be interested in my pictures, and there were years when I couldn’t even get my friends to look at them.” Born in London in 1932, Hodkin dreamed of being an artist since the age of five and grew up attending a series of prestigious schools and art institutions. In the late 1960s, Hodgkin began producing strongly geometric work, before moving on to create images that hover between the abstract and the representational. “I am a representational painter but not a painter of appearances,” he said to the critic David Sylvester in 1976. Towards the end of his life, the artist said the prospect of death had imbued him with something of an artistic drive. “I don’t care a damn about what happens when I’m dead, but I do have a sense of increased urgency,” he told The Guardian in 2001. “And I think it’s made me more courageous.”

04  Iraqi troops stumbled upon ancient Assyrian artifacts in a labyrinth of escape tunnels dug by ISIS.

(via The Guardian)

The stone carvings were uncovered last week beneath the streets of war-torn Mosul. According to Iraqi and English archaeologists, these reliefs appear to date back to the 5th or 6th century B.C. and feature inscriptions carved by Assyrian rulers. Sebastien Rey, the lead archaeologist at the British Museum’s Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Programme, said these reliefs differ significantly from the traditional Assyrian hunting and banqueting scenes in the museum’s collection. “So far we have only seen poor quality photographs—but they are extremely exciting,” Rey said. He described the carvings as “unique” and noted that “they have features which we have not seen anywhere else.” This discovery is a rare positive development amidst ISIS’s path of destruction. According to deputy Iraqi culture minister Qais Rashid, the terrorist organization has leveled no fewer than 66 archeological sites in the Mosul region alone. Ironically, Iraqi troops discovered the artifacts beneath a site where a 12th-century mosque, said to contain the prophet Jonah’s remains, stood until it was demolished by ISIS in 2014.

05  The TEFAF Report’s new methodology has cut the art market’s value by a third.

(Artsy)

When it comes to industry reports, methodology can make all the difference. In her first year as the author of the TEFAF Global Art Market Report, Rachel Pownall single-handedly sliced off a third of the value of the global art market. Pownall’s new methodology reduced the market to $45 billion in 2016 from a previously estimated $63.8 billion in 2015. However, when her methodology is applied to 2015, the market actually grew by 1.7% in 2016. Another major finding of the report is that private transactions through dealers now account for 62.5% of global sales, a 20% increase over 2015. The previous report estimated the art market was about half private sales and half sales at auction. Pownall, TEFAF Chair in Art Markets at Maastricht University, arrived at her estimate using a new methodology based on official data from government statistics offices and the United Nations, auction data from Artnet, sales data from the Orbis registry of private businesses, and survey responses from roughly 350 dealers (that figure comes from the 5% response rate she received after sending out 7,000 surveys). She received data on private sales at auction houses directly from the auction houses. She said she hoped the new methodology could be used as the starting point for a discussion, “not ‘this is right’ or ‘this is wrong.’”

06  Fernando Donis has sued Dubai after the city allegedly stole the architect’s design.

(via the New York Times)

Mexican-born Donis bested 900 other entrants in a 2008 competition to design the building with his “Dubai Frame”—two towers connected at the top by an observation deck to resemble a monumental, literal frame for the city view. But, according to a lawsuit Donis filed last December, he was neither compensated for his ideas nor included in the project’s realization. Although the original competition rules stated he would keep his copyright, Donis was repeatedly pressured by city officials to surrender it to the municipality. When he continued to refuse, the architect was cut out of the project. His suit seeks unspecified compensation for damages. Donis’s experience is not unique—in Dubai, foreign professionals often struggle with the reality that personal relationships carry more weight than the letter of the law. And the gleaming surfaces of tourist attractions like the Frame erase the labor of migrant workers, who flock to the United Arab Emirates by the millions and are often subjected to employment terms resembling indentured servitude.

07  Attendants at the Louvre went on strike Thursday, protesting the museum’s botched handling of huge crowds during the first week of its Vermeer exhibition.

(via the New York Times)

Since opening on Feb. 22nd, “Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting” has attracted some 9,400 visitors—double the museum’s projected attendance. As the exhibition can only accommodate 250 people at any given time, some visitors have been subjected to hours-long waits. Even after imposing a timed ticketing system, the small rooms showcasing 12 of the artist’s works continue to jam up the flow of visitors through the exhibition. To protest what they see as poor planning and signage on the part of the museum, 70 to 80 members of the museum workers union went on a day-long strike Thursday. Since that figure represents only 2% of the Louvre’s workforce, the museum hired temporary workers to fill empty slots and has continued to operate as normal. This swell of attendance to the Louvre follows a decrease in visitor numbers between 2015 and 2016 of 1.3 million—a trend attributed to terror attacks in France.

08  A judge ordered art advisor Lisa Jacobs to pay back $1 million in profits from the sale of a Basquiat work.

(via the New York Law Journal)

Justice Charles Ramos found that Jacobs illicitly profited from the 2011 sale of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Future Sciences Versus the Man (1983). The original owner of the work, Michael Schulhof, asked Jacobs to find a buyer offering no less than $6 million. Schulhof agreed to pay her $50,000 and stipulated that she not accept additional funds from the buyer. According to the complaint, Jacobs found a buyer at $6.5 million, but told Schulhof they would only pay $5.5 million. Schulhof sold the piece at that price and Jacobs pocketed the difference. When Schulhof found out a year later, he sued Jacobs, who claimed she had entered into a different agreement with Schulhof’s mother that allowed her to take a “buyer’s premium.” Judge Ramos’s ruling against Jacobs, which she plans to appeal, leaves the art advisor on the hook for $1 million in “secret profits.” This case offers an example of how, as Laura Gilbert noted for Artsy in 2015, both “buyers and sellers would do well to contract with their art advisors to disclose all documents related to a transaction” in a market notorious for its opacity.

09  A Jewish family has partnered with the German Lost Art Foundation to locate some 4,000 Nazi-looted artworks.

(via the New York Times)

The descendants of German newspaper publisher Rudolf Mosse are receiving new support in their quest to recover Mosse’s sizeable art collection. The German-Jewish Mosse fled to France in 1933 as the Nazis rose to power, leaving behind thousands of artworks that were seized by the new regime—including important Egyptian artifacts, Benin sculptures, and 20th-century paintings. Mosse’s heirs began a formal effort to find the works in 2012 through the Mosse Art Restitution Project. But their search has recently been bolstered by funding from the German Lost Art Foundation, an organization established by the national government in 2015 to locate cultural property confiscated by the Nazis. To locate the missing artworks, university researchers will reference correspondence between Mosse and art dealers, auction catalogs from the 1920s and ’30s, and the archives of a Nazi-era art dealer. While some works from the collection, like a marble Egyptian sarcophagus and a drawing by Adolph Menzel, have been recovered, there is still significant work to be done. Of the 4,000 missing artworks, only about 1,000 have been identified by name. Of those, only a handful have actually been located.

10  A Qatari arts patron announced plans to open an institute of Islamic and Arab art in New York.

(via The Art Newspaper)

Just shortly before the release of President Trump’s revised executive order now barring citizens of six predominantly Muslim countries from entering U.S., the New York-based Qatari national Sheikh Mohammed Al-Thani formalized plans for a 2,500 square-meter space dedicated to art of the Arab world, to be located in downtown New York. With intentions to engage and educate the community on Arab culture, Al-Thani incorporated the forthcoming institute as a nonprofit last April. “It made absolute sense to build an institute that would not only showcase the breadth of art and culture from the Arab and Islamic worlds, but also challenge certain stereotypes and misconceptions that hinder cross-cultural understanding,” Al-Thani told The Art Newspaper. In addition to quarterly exhibitions, the institute will produce publications and host a residency program. It follows multiple proposals for an Arab cultural institute in the city’s Financial District over the past decade, including the abandoned proposal for the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.”

—Artsy Editors

Cover image via Wikimedia Commons.

from Artsy News

[scribe-not]

Fact Checker;  Obama’s biggest whoppers

The Fact Checker started during the 2008 campaign and then went on hiatus for the first two years of President Obama’s presidency before becoming a permanent Washington Post feature in 2011. All told, we’ve fact-checked more than 250 statements by Obama.

With his presidency coming to a close, here’s a look at 10 of Obama’s biggest whoppers, listed in chronological order. All of these earned Four Pinocchios, of course, but they also landed on our annual list of the biggest Pinocchios of the year.

To keep it simple, we have shortened the quotes in the headlines. To read the full column, click on the link embedded in the quote.

“More young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities across America”

This was a 2007 campaign claim by Obama, then a senator, that was wildly off the mark. In reality, there are five times more black men enrolled in colleges and universities than young black men in federal and state prisons — and two and half times the total number incarcerated (including local jails). Even if you expanded the age group to include African American males up to 30 or 35, the college attendees would still outnumber the prisoners.

“We signed into law the biggest middle-class tax cut in history”

This 2011 claim was not based on a dollar figure but on dubious math — that supposedly 95 percent of working families received some kind of tax cut under the Making Work Pay provision in Obama’s stimulus bill. John F. Kennedy actually wins the prize for biggest tax cut, at least in the last half-century. By the same measure, the income tax provisions of George W. Bush tax cuts were more than twice as large as Obama’s tax cut over the same three-year time span. (While a large portion of Bush’s tax cut went to the wealthy, it also benefited the working poor.)

“90 percent of the budget deficit is due to George W. Bush’s policies”

During the 2012 campaign, Obama repeatedly reminded voters that he became president during a grim economic crisis. But he went too far when he claimed that only 10 percent of the federal deficit was due to his own policies. About half of the deficit stemmed from the recession and forecasting errors, but a large chunk (44 percent in 2011) were the result of Obama’s actions. At another point, Obama also falsely suggested that the Bush tax cuts led to the Great Recession.

“If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it”

This memorable promise by Obama backfired on him in 2013 when the Affordable Care Act went into effect and at least 2 million Americans started receiving cancellation notices. As we explained, part of the reason for so many cancellations is because of an unusually early (March 23, 2010) cutoff date for grandfathering plans — and because of tight regulations written by the administration. So the uproar could be pinned directly on the administration’s own actions.

“The Capitol Hill janitors just got a pay cut”

President Obama offered an evocative image at a 2013 news conference when the sequester spending cuts struck the federal budget — janitors sweeping the empty halls of the Capitol, laboring for less pay. But it turned out that he was completely wrong. Janitorial staff did not face a pay cut — and Capitol Hill administrative officials even issued a statement saying the president’s remarks were “not true.” Then the White House tried to argue that janitors at least faced a loss of overtime. That was not correct either. The episode was emblematic of the administration’s overheated rhetoric during the sequester debate.

“The day after Benghazi happened, I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism”

Obama did refer to an “act of terror” in the immediate aftermath of the 2012 Benghazi attacks, but in vague terms, wrapped in a patriotic fervor. He never affirmatively stated that the American ambassador died because of an “act of terror.” Then, over a period of two weeks, given three opportunities in interviews to affirmatively agree that the Benghazi attack was a terrorist attack, the president obfuscated or ducked the question. So this was a case of taking revisionist history too far for political reasons.

“I didn’t call the Islamic State a ‘JV’ team”

In 2014, Obama repeated a claim, crafted by the White House communications team, that he was not “specifically” referring to the Islamic State terror group when he dismissed the militants who had taken over Fallujah as a “JV squad.” But The Fact Checker obtained the previously unreleased transcript of the president’s interview with the New Yorker, and it’s clear that’s who the president was referencing.

“Republicans have filibustered 500 pieces of legislation”

Obama, a former senator, got quite a few things wrong in this 2014 claim. He spoke of legislation that would help the middle class, but he was counting cloture votes that mostly involved judicial and executive branch nominations. Moreover, he counted all the way back to 2007, meaning he even included votes in which he, as senator, voted against ending debate — the very thing he decried in his remarks. At best, he could claim the Republicans had blocked about 50 bills, meaning he was off by a factor of 10.

“The Keystone pipeline is for oil that bypasses the United States”

Long before Obama killed the Keystone pipeline project in 2015, he made a number of dubious claims about it, including that the pipeline would have no benefit for American producers at all. But the crude oil would have traveled to the Gulf Coast, where it would be refined into products such as motor gasoline and diesel fuel; the State Department said odds were low that all would be exported. Also, about 12 percent of the pipeline’s capacity had been set aside for crude from North Dakota and Montana.

“We have fired a whole bunch of people who are in charge of these [VA] facilities”

Fact Checker newsletter What's true, what's false or in-between. Sign up Obama in 2016 misled the public about the number of people held accountable for the 2014 scandal over manipulated wait-time data at the Department of Veterans Affairs, which contributed to patient deaths. Congress responded by passing a law that sped up disciplinary actions for senior executive service employees. But when Obama made his statement in September, only one senior executive had been removed for a case involving wait time (though the actual firing was for an ethics violation).

[bigyack-com]

Fed Cuts Interest Rates in Bid to Protect Economy: Live Updates

The Fed unveils an emergency program to keep credit flowing.

The Federal Reserve cut interest rates to near-zero on Sunday, in its second emergency measure this month amid increasingly dire predictions about the economic impact of the coronavirus.The central bank also said it would buy up huge amounts of government and mortgage-backed debt.“The coronavirus outbreak has harmed communities and disrupted economic activity in many countries, including the United States,” the central bank said in a statement on Sunday. “The Federal Reserve is prepared to use its full range of tools to support the flow of credit to households and businesses.”The Fed cut its benchmark interest rate by a full percentage point, to a range of 0 to 0.25 percent, and said it would increase its holdings of Treasury securities by at least $500 billion and its holdings of government mortgage-backed securities by at least $200 billion “over coming months.”The moves, reminiscent of steps the central bank took during the 2008 financial crisis, are aimed at making it easier for banks to lend money to businesses facing a steep and sudden drop in revenue as the virus forces them to curtail their activity or shut down.In a sign of how urgent the Fed considered Sunday’s moves, the central bank’s chairman, Jerome H. Powell, said the Federal Open Market Committee would no longer hold its previously planned meeting scheduled for this week, saying this decision was “in lieu” of that.Despite the Fed’s intervention, stock futures in the United States declined steeply on Sunday evening.Economists have been cutting forecasts for economic growth for weeks, as they consider how store closings, falling consumer spending and decreased travel will affect the United States. On Sunday, economists at Goldman Sachs said they now expected the American economy, the world’s largest, would record zero growth in the first quarter, and would shrink in the second quarter.Even with monetary and fiscal stimulus measures, “these shutdowns and rising public anxiety about the virus are likely to lead to a sharp deterioration in economic activity in the rest of March and throughout April,” Goldman’s economists wrote in a research note.Financial markets have plunged in recent weeks as investors fixated on potential costs of the coronavirus outbreak. Stocks are down some 20 percent from their Feb. 19 high.On March 3, the Fed cut interest rates by a half percentage point in an emergency announcement. The U.S. stock market managed to rally only for roughly 15 minutes before falling sharply once again and finishing the day down nearly 3 percent.The volatility has only grown since then, with the S&P 500 posting its worst-single day loss since the Black Monday crash of 1987 on Thursday, before posting an extraordinary 9.3 percent gain to close the week on Friday. The wild swings in prices extend well beyond stocks. At times last week, the market for Treasuries showed signs of trouble — a worrisome indicator because U.S. government bonds are considered the safest spot for investors to park their cash in times of stress.

An economic hit from ‘all sides.’

For weeks, forecasters have warned of the coronavirus’s potential to disrupt the American economy just as it has done elsewhere. But there was little hard evidence beyond delayed shipments of goods from China and stomach-churning volatility in financial markets.Now the effects are showing up in downtown nightspots and suburban shopping centers from coast to coast.Not since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has a crisis enveloped so much of the economy so quickly. Broadway is dark. The college basketball tournaments are canceled and professional sports are on indefinite hold. Conferences, concerts and St. Patrick’s Day parades have been called off or postponed. Even Disneyland — which stayed open through a recession a decade ago that wiped out millions of American jobs and trillions of dollars in wealth — is shuttered.“This hits the heart of the economy, and it hits the economy on all sides,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton. “It’s not just that we’re slowing down things. We’re actually hitting the pause button, and there is no precedent, there is no mold for that.”

Starbucks will eliminate seating and close some stores.

Starbucks will eliminate seating at all of its company-owned stores in the United States for at least the next two weeks to encourage social distancing, the company announced on Sunday.It will also temporarily close some stores in “high-social gathering locations,” like malls and college campuses. A Starbucks spokeswoman, Jaime Riley, said the company was still determining how many stores will be closed.At the stores that do remain open, customers will be able to walk up to the counter to order, place delivery or pickup orders online or use drive-throughs where available.For the next two weeks, Starbucks employees who are unable to work or whose hours are reduced because of the store closures will be compensated for the shifts they would normally have worked.At the end of that period, Starbucks will “reassess to make sure that our parents continue to be financially supported,” Ms. Riley said.

Hollywood may have just had a historically bad weekend.

Seemingly every aspect of American life has been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, and the weekend ritual of watching a movie in the dark sitting with strangers has been no exception. Most cinemas in the United States remain open, with the two biggest chains, AMC and Regal, reducing seating capacity in auditoriums by 50 percent so that people could leave at least one empty seat between them. But fears about the coronavirus kept the masses at home: Domestic ticket sales totaled about $55.3 million, a 44 percent drop from last weekend, despite three new films — “Bloodshot,” “The Hunt” and “I Still Believe” — arriving in wide release.It was the worst period for movie theaters in two decades, according to Comscore, which compiles box office data. The next lowest weekend was Sept. 15 to 17 in 2000, when ticket sales totaled $54.5 million and the primary draws were holdovers like “The Watcher,” a serial-killer movie, and “Nurse Betty,” a dark comedy starring Renée Zellweger. In today’s money, however, the 2000 weekend generated roughly $83 million in ticket sales.

Why stock prices surged on Friday.

Just 30 minutes before trading on Wall Street came to a close on Friday, President Trump declared a national emergency and said he’d speed up testing for the coronavirus in the United States with the help of private companies.Speaking outside the White House — surrounded by chief executives from a number of companies — Mr. Trump said Google would help create a website to screen coronavirus cases, and Walmart, Target and others would help with testing. (The president oversold that Google site.)Investors had been waiting all week to see Washington take action, so they didn’t wait to hear the finer details: Stocks surged some 6 percent as the president spoke about the plans, to end the day up 9 percent.

Catch up: Here’s what else is happening.

Retailers started closing stores: Apple said it would shutter more than 450 stores across 21 countries for two weeks. Nike said it would shut all of its stores in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, New Zealand and Australia for the same period.Spain and France announced drastic restrictions: On Saturday, Spain ordered all citizens to confine themselves to their homes — and to leave only to buy food, go to work, seek medical care or assist the elderly and others in need. France announced the closing of all “non-indispensable” businesses as of midnight, including restaurants, bars and movie theaters.Saudi Aramco’s profit fell. The world’s largest oil company said on Sunday that its profit last year fell more than 20 percent, primarily because of lower oil prices.Volkswagen will temporarily close a factory in Chattanooga, Tenn. The factory will close for the day on Monday as managers assess how to handle a shortage of workers who have child care problems.Jeanna Smialek, Ben Casselman, Jack Ewing, Stanley Reed, Jack Nicas, Liz Alderman, Brooks Barnes, David Yaffe-Bellany and Matt Phillips contributed reporting. Read the full article

[newstfionline]

‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America

By Eli Saslow, Washington Post, November 17, 2018

NORTH WATERBORO, Maine--The only light in the house came from the glow of three computer monitors, and Christopher Blair, 46, sat down at a keyboard and started to type. His wife had left for work and his children were on their way to school, but waiting online was his other community, an unreality where nothing was exactly as it seemed. He logged onto his website and began to invent his first news story of the day.

“BREAKING,” he wrote, pecking out each letter with his index fingers as he considered the possibilities. Maybe he would announce that Hillary Clinton had died during a secret overseas mission to smuggle more refugees into America. Maybe he would award President Trump the Nobel Peace Prize for his courage in denying climate change.

A new message popped onto Blair’s screen from a friend who helped with his website. “What viral insanity should we spread this morning?” the friend asked.

“The more extreme we become, the more people believe it,” Blair replied.

He had launched his new website on Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign as a practical joke among friends--a political satire site started by Blair and a few other liberal bloggers who wanted to make fun of what they considered to be extremist ideas spreading throughout the far right. In the last two years on his page, America’s Last Line of Defense, Blair had made up stories about California instituting sharia, former president Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer, undocumented immigrants defacing Mount Rushmore, and former president Barack Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9. “Share if you’re outraged!” his posts often read, and thousands of people on Facebook had clicked “like” and then “share,” most of whom did not recognize his posts as satire. Instead, Blair’s page had become one of the most popular on Facebook among Trump-supporting conservatives over 55.

“Nothing on this page is real,” read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, reinforcing people’s biases, spreading onto Macedonian and Russian fake news sites, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual. What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker. “No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”

Blair’s own reality was out beyond the shuttered curtains of his office: a three-bedroom home in the forest of Maine where the paved road turned to gravel; not his house but a rental; not on the lake but near it. Over the past decade his family had moved around the country a half-dozen times as he looked for steady work, bouncing between construction and restaurant jobs while sometimes living on food stamps. During the economic crash of 2008, his wife had taken a job at Wendy’s to help pay down their credit-card debt, and Blair, a lifelong Democrat, had begun venting his political frustration online, arguing with strangers in an Internet forum called Brawl Hall. He sometimes masqueraded as a tea party conservative on Facebook so he could gain administrative access into their private groups and then flood their pages with liberal ideas before using his administrative status to shut their pages down.

He had created more than a dozen online profiles over the last years, sometimes disguising himself in accompanying photographs as a beautiful Southern blond woman or as a bandana-wearing conservative named Flagg Eagleton, baiting people into making racist or sexist comments and then publicly eviscerating them for it. In his writing Blair was blunt, witty and prolific, and gradually he’d built a liberal following on the Internet and earned a full-time job as a political blogger. On the screen, like nowhere else, he could say exactly how he felt and become whomever he wanted.

Now he hunched over a desk wedged between an overturned treadmill and two turtle tanks, scanning through conservative forums on Facebook for something that might inspire his next post. He was 6-foot-6 and 325 pounds, and he typed several thousand words each day in all capital letters. He noticed a photo online of Trump standing at attention for the national anthem during a White House ceremony. Behind the president were several dozen dignitaries, including a white woman standing next to a black woman, and Blair copied the picture, circled the two women in red and wrote the first thing that came into his mind.

“President Trump extended an olive branch and invited Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton,” Blair wrote. “They thanked him by giving him ‘the finger’ during the national anthem. Lock them up for treason!”

Blair finished typing and looked again at the picture. The white woman was not in fact Chelsea Clinton but former White House strategist Hope Hicks. The black woman was not Michelle Obama but former Trump aide Omarosa Newman. Neither Obama nor Clinton had been invited to the ceremony. Nobody had flipped off the president. The entire premise was utterly ridiculous, which was exactly Blair’s point.

“We live in an Idiocracy,” read a small note on Blair’s desk, and he was taking full advantage. In a good month, the advertising revenue from his website earned him as much as $15,000, and it had also won him a loyal army of online fans. Hundreds of liberals now visited America’s Last Line of Defense to humiliate conservatives who shared Blair’s fake stories as fact. In Blair’s private Facebook messages with his liberal supporters, his conservative audience was made up of “sheep,” “hillbillies,” “maw-maw and paw-paw,” “TrumpTards,” “potatoes” and “taters.”

“How could any thinking person believe this nonsense?” he said. He hit the publish button and watched as his lie began to spread.

It was barely dawn in Pahrump, Nev., when Shirley Chapian, 76, logged onto Facebook.

“Good morning, Shirley! Thanks for being here,” read an automated note at the top of her page. She put her finger on the mouse and began scrolling down.

“Click LIKE if you believe we must stop Sharia Law from coming to America before it’s too late,” read the first item, and she clicked “like.”

“Share to help END the ongoing migrant invasion!” read another, and she clicked “share.”

The house was empty and quiet except for the clicking of her computer mouse. She lived alone, and on many days her only personal interaction occurred here, on Facebook. Mixed into her morning news feed were photos and updates from some of her 300 friends, but most items came directly from political groups Chapian had chosen to follow: “Free Speech Patriots,” “Taking Back America,” “Ban Islam,” “Trump 2020” and “Rebel Life.” Each political page published several posts each day directly into Chapian’s feed, many of which claimed to be “BREAKING NEWS.”

On her computer the attack against America was urgent and unrelenting. Liberals were restricting free speech. Immigrants were storming the border and casting illegal votes. Politicians were scheming to take away everyone’s guns. “The second you stop paying attention, there’s another travesty underway in this country,” Chapian once wrote, in her own Facebook post, so she had decided to always pay attention, sometimes scrolling and sharing for hours at a time.

For years she had watched network TV news, but increasingly Chapian wondered about the widening gap between what she read online and what she heard on the networks. “What else aren’t they telling us?” she wrote once, on Facebook, and if she believed the mainstream media was becoming insufficient or biased, it was her responsibility to seek out alternatives. She signed up for a dozen conservative newsletters and began to watch Alex Jones on Infowars. One far right Facebook group eventually led her to the next with targeted advertising, and soon Chapian was following more than 2,500 conservative pages, an ideological echo chamber that often trafficked in skepticism. Climate change was a hoax. The mainstream media was censored or scripted. Political Washington was under control of a “deep state.”

Chapian didn’t believe everything she read online, but she was also distrustful of mainstream fact-checkers and reported news. It sometimes felt to her like real facts had become indiscernible--that the truth was often somewhere in between. What she trusted most was her own ability to think critically and discern the truth, and increasingly her instincts aligned with the online community where she spent most of her time. She felt as if she was being let in on a series of dark revelations about the United States, and it was her responsibility to see and to share them.

Now another post arrived in her news feed, from a page called America’s Last Line of Defense, which Chapian had been following for more than a year. It showed a picture of Trump standing at a White House ceremony. Circled in the background were two women, one black and one white.

“President Trump extended an olive branch and invited Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton,” the post read. “They thanked him by giving him ‘the finger’ during the national anthem.”

Chapian looked at the photo and nothing about it surprised her. Of course Trump had invited Clinton and Obama to the White House in a generous act of patriotism. Of course the Democrats--or “Demonrats,” as Chapian sometimes called them--had acted badly and disrespected America. It was the exact same narrative she saw playing out on her screen hundreds of times each day.

Blair had invented thousands of stories in the past two years, always trafficking in the same stereotypes to fool the same people, but he never tired of watching a post take off: Eight shares in the first minute, 160 within 15 minutes, more than 1,000 by the end of the hour.

“Aaaaand, we’re viral,” he wrote, in a message to his liberal supporters on his private Facebook page. “It’s getting to the point where I can no longer control the absolute absurdity of the things I post. No matter how ridiculous, how obviously fake, or how many times you tell the same taters ... they will still click that ‘like’ and hit that share button.”

By the standards of America’s Last Line of Defense, the item about Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton was only a moderate success. It included no advertisements, so it wouldn’t earn Blair any money. It wasn’t even the most popular of the 11 items he’d published that day. But, just an hour earlier, Blair had come up with an idea at his computer in Maine, and now hundreds or maybe thousands of people across the country believed Obama and Clinton had flipped off the president.

Blair had fooled them. Now came his favorite part, the gotcha, when he could let his victims in on the joke.

“OK, taters. Here’s your reality check,” he wrote on America’s Last Line of Defense, placing his comment prominently alongside the original post. “That is Omarosa and Hope Hicks, not Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton.”

Beyond the money he earned, this was what Blair had conceived of as the purpose for his website: to engage directly with people who spread false or extremist stories and prove those stories were wrong. Maybe, after people had been publicly embarrassed, they would think more critically about what they shared online. Maybe they would begin to question the root of some of their ideas.

Blair didn’t have time to personally confront each of the several hundred thousand conservatives who followed his Facebook page, so he’d built a community of more than 100 liberals to police the page with him. Together they patrolled the comments, venting their own political anger, shaming conservatives who had been fooled, taunting them, baiting them into making racist comments that could then be reported to Facebook. Blair said he and his followers had gotten hundreds of people banned from Facebook and several others fired or demoted in their jobs for offensive behavior online. He had also forced Facebook to shut down 22 fake news sites for plagiarizing his content, many of which were Macedonian sites that reran his stories without labeling them as satire.

What Blair wasn’t sure he had ever done was change a single person’s mind. The people he fooled often came back to the page, and he continued to feed them the kind of viral content that boosted his readership and his bank account.

[newstfionline]

Mexico’s Crisis Of Justice

By Joshua Partlow, Washington Post, Dec. 29, 2017

OCOTLAN, MEXICO--One morning in this grim farming town, a Mexican judge who carries a rubber-bullet gun for protection strode into his courtroom to consider the matter of the 11-inch knife.

Slumped at the defendant’s table was David Ramos, a day laborer charged with attempted homicide for participating in a drunken knife fight. Ramos had already spent 16 days in jail. But Judge Juan Antonio Rubio Gutiérrez had discovered a glaring irregularity.

In the initial paperwork, no one mentioned where police found the plastic-handled blade. When the point had been raised, the missing information suddenly appeared in a new shade of blue ink. Rubio Gutiérrez decided that the information was dubious and that the defendant could walk.

“Procedurally speaking, a knife no longer exists,” the judge told Ramos in the courtroom earlier this month. “Today, you have recovered your freedom.”

The scene playing out in this new one-room courthouse represents a radical departure from the old Mexican traditions of law and order.

Mexico is completing its first full year of a new accusatory justice system, following the most profound overhaul of its legal structure in a century. The most visible sign of the transformation is public trials instead of a secretive process involving written arguments. But the changes go far deeper. Both Mexican and U.S. officials have described the system as crucial to restoring order to a country torn apart by drug violence.

So far, the results have been chaos.

Bickering and confusion reign at each link in the legal chain. Police complain of hours lost on laborious forms; prosecutors blame judges for setting criminals free; judges accuse poorly trained police of botching crime scenes. Powerful drug cartels, meanwhile, are exploiting the weaknesses in the new system and strong-arming authorities with death threats and bribes.

The upheaval has come during the deadliest year in Mexico’s modern history. Politicians here increasingly blame the judicial changes for emptying jails and fanning crime. Even those who embrace the new legal system worry about its first-year fiascos.

“The reform is going badly,” José Ramón Cossío, a justice on Mexico’s Supreme Court, said in an interview. “There are many small problems that, taken together, are causing what I believe to be an important crisis.”

It is hard to overstate the significance of the restructuring. It seeks to turn the notoriously ineffective police into professional investigators. It strengthens the independence of judges. It provides more rights to defendants in a country where authorities have been known to demand bribes, extract confessions under torture and doctor evidence.

The U.S. government is deeply invested in the project, contributing more than $300 million since 2008 to equip courthouses and train police and legal personnel.

Even in rural outposts such as Ocotlan, the system has ushered in many trappings of high-tech justice: courthouses with surveillance cameras and fingerprint sensors; forensic investigators at crime scenes in latex gloves and protective footwear.

But the exacting new procedures have been grafted onto feeble, corruption-plagued institutions created decades ago by an authoritarian state.

Judges are demanding the kind of legal precision found in Washington or London, from police who sometimes can barely read and live in places that can feel like war zones.

“This is a baby that has just been born,” Rubio Gutiérrez said in an interview. “We are asking the system to run, and it is not possible.”

The western state of Jalisco is home to the most dangerous drug cartel in Mexico, a network of traffickers and assassins who have shot down an army helicopter, ambushed federal police and sent a pig’s head to the former attorney general’s home. Cartel Jalisco New Generation represents the ultimate test of the fledgling legal system.

This year, crime has been winning. The state has recorded 1,218 homicides through November, putting it on pace for its deadliest year in the past two decades of available statistics. In Ocotlan, home to many cartel gunmen, traffickers and police have clashed. Not far away, bodies have been discovered in mass graves.

It was in this unnerving atmosphere that Rubio Gutiérrez began his job last year in the state’s fourth judicial district.

A youthful jurist with a quick stride and confident air, Rubio Gutiérrez, 37, was quick to embrace the new system. He wrote a 385-page book about it. He has opened an institute to teach lawyers about the big legal shift underway: from written proceedings to oral trials, with an explicit presumption of innocence.

The first person in his family to graduate from college, Rubio Gutiérrez began as an unpaid courthouse aide. As he rose through the judicial ranks, he witnessed a system in meltdown. Crime was soaring, judicial backlogs were massive and only a tiny fraction of crimes ever resulted in convictions.

At the same time, penitentiaries were flooded with people caught carrying guns or small amounts of drugs. Their cases could drag on for years before they were sentenced.

“There were many injustices,” Rubio Gutiérrez said.

Now judges have far more leeway to release suspects pending trial. The new system provides alternatives such as mediation or plea bargaining to ease the congestion in the court system.

The result has been fewer people behind bars. Mexico has about 202,700 prisoners, down from nearly 235,900 when the changes went into effect in June 2016, according to prison authorities. Mexico City Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera said last month that there are 11,000 fewer inmates in the capital than in the year before the judicial revisions started--a decline of nearly 30 percent--a situation he called “very dangerous.”

Judges now have greater power to toss out charges when a suspect’s rights have been violated. Rubio Gutiérrez and many other judges blame the high number of suspects released on errors by poorly trained police and prosecutors. Often these are paperwork mistakes by police unaccustomed to the new 22-page incident report that is required for every arrest or crime scene. The chain of custody for evidence is regularly violated.

One recent afternoon, Rubio Gutiérrez drove to Ocotlan’s neighboring town, Jamay, to lecture the local police force about how to avoid errors and document their cases.

“I’m not a mind reader. I’m a judge,” he told them. “Help yourselves out.”

The police listened respectfully. But a few days later, their police chief, Fidel Moreno Robledo, sat in his cramped office and laid out the reality of a small rural force.

Of the 16 officers theoretically available on any shift, several are detailed to guard government buildings, while others are often injured or on vacation, leaving fewer than five able to patrol a municipality of 25,000 people, he said. His men get paid $400 per month and receive no life insurance or social security. All this, in a town where last year police recovered 20 bodies floating down the Lerma River, one of the many drug-war front lines in Mexico.

“We are weak,” Moreno said.

And the new system, he said, has made them weaker.

About 20 policemen have been fired for failing the national background tests intended to weed out corruption. Now, police can’t enter houses as easily without a warrant, which are often hard to get. Suspects have the right to remain silent; police must justify stops and searches. If there is the “smallest error” in paperwork or a delay getting a detainee before a judge, Moreno said, a “criminal, a kidnapper, a killer, gets set free.”

The push to overhaul Mexico’s legal system began a decade ago as violence flared across the country. Former Mexican president Felipe Calderón had declared war on drug cartels in 2006, and the death toll began to mount.

The old legal structure couldn’t cope with the bloodshed. It was based on the inquisitorial system, also used in other parts of Latin America, but it was shaped by the authoritarian, one-party system that defined Mexico for most of the 20th century. Police were often seen as an instrument of control--not investigation. Judicial appointees, meanwhile, were expected to be loyal to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. Judges rarely disagreed with the written cases put together by prosecutors.

The deadline to adopt the accusatory system was June 2016. Many states waited until just months out to start the shift. Federal and state governments spent a fraction of what was required, according to Héctor Díaz Santana, the former head of the organization in charge of implementing the changes.

“We have poorly trained, unprofessional police, poorly paid prosecutors accustomed to the old ways, judges that were very comfortable before because you never saw them,” he said. “They created a very demanding system when we practically don’t have the tools.”

When Salvador Caro Cabrera took over as Guadalajara police chief in October 2015, only 80 of his 2,600 policemen had received any training on the new protocols for collecting evidence, writing up crime scenes or interacting with prosecutors.

“We have had a period of great confusion,” he said.

In the latter half of this year, the Guadalajara crime rate has more than doubled over the rate in the first half of 2016, before the new judicial system began, Caro Cabrera said. Under the old system, he said, more than 100 people arrested each month went to prison; now only 10 to 15 end up in jail.

The chief said only 50 arrest warrants have been issued in Guadalajara, the state capital, in the past year and a half--while there are 1,300 crimes per month.

“The judges are a disaster,” Caro Cabrera said.

The judges have their own concerns. The accusatory system is far more transparent, with prosecutors and defense attorneys arguing in public hearings, as in the United States. But that can be unsettling, even to defenders of the changes, like Rubio Gutiérrez.

Unlike the old system, in which judges signed off on mountains of paperwork behind closed doors, Rubio Gutiérerez sits behind a blond-wood bench at hearings and looks the suspects--and the public--in the face.

“It’s much more dangerous. You are in front of the criminals,” he said.

One day last month in Guadalajara, a cooler containing body parts was placed outside a courthouse. A note warned a judge: “You’re next.”

Because it’s difficult to get a weapons permit, Rubio Gutiérrez bought an “Angel Guardian” rubber bullet pistol. Earlier this year, someone hurled from the street a wrapped-up knife that bounced off his office window.

“We don’t have protection, guns, nothing,” he said.

Under the old system, most Mexican police had little role in investigations and were supposed to focus on preventing crime. The new protocols require them to rigorously process crime scenes.

But follow-up remains a glaring weakness as the system takes hold. And impunity remains high.

“The problem is not that people are getting out of prison,” said Guillermo Zepeda Lecuona, a law professor at the University of Guadalajara who is an expert on the judicial revisions. “It’s that they are not going in.”

The case of Luz Margarita Ramirez Gallardo, a 35-year-old woman found dead in her van, shows how the new system still isn’t stopping crime.

Early on Nov. 2, just over a month before Ramirez was killed, two gunmen approached her as she was backing her van out of the garage in the working-class Olimpica neighborhood of Guadalajara. They told her to hand over the keys and then “they shot her,” according to her 18-year-old son, Jonatan Ramirez.

Ramirez was hit twice in the face and lost her right eye but somehow survived.

The police appeared to handle the crime scene professionally. But Ramirez’s family says that after the first day, police and prosecutors never asked them for more information about the shooting. No arrests were made.

Aldo Monjardín, a police commander in southern Guadalajara, questioned Ramirez in the hospital. He found her story of a robbery suspicious, he recalled; nothing had been stolen, including the van.

Monjardín noticed what he believed were breast implants, as Ramirez lay supine in the hospital bed. He assumed she was the girlfriend of some cartel figure and had crossed the wrong narco.

“Women love to go out with these guys,” he said.

Authorities denied they had shrugged off the investigation. An official from the attorney general’s office in Jalisco said the Ramirez family had not been forthcoming. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, refused to answer further questions about the case. Prosecutors say witnesses are often too afraid to talk, even more so now that proceedings are in open court.

Many prosecutors are also not used to assembling complex cases. In the past, they often relied on confessions from suspects--sometimes criminals caught in the act, sometimes people who admitted to a crime under torture.

“The new system is totally opposite” to the old, said Alejandro Torres Ramirez, 32, a prosecutor in Jalisco. “First you have to investigate and get proof together to be able to arrest someone, something that we’re not used to, culturally.”

Within a couple weeks, Ramirez was back home and working again. On the afternoon of Dec. 5, a man got out of a gray BMW, walked up to the passenger window of her van and shot her dead.

A neighbor, who identified himself only as Hugo, said he had called the city’s emergency number at least four times about suspicious vehicles on the street in the two weeks leading up to the murder. “The police never arrived,” he said. The police said a patrol passed by the scene about 10 minutes before the killing but saw nothing suspicious.

The chaos in the new judicial system and rising crime rates in Mexico have prompted politicians to call for major revisions in the protocols; some even openly yearn for the old procedures.

Many judicial officials insist regressing would be disaster. They say the changes will eventually encourage more rigorous investigations and make Mexico’s legal system more transparent and effective.

Those future benefits are of little consolation to the Ramirez family.

Some of her relatives assume the police who investigated her case were bought off by criminals, but Enrique Ramirez Gallardo, her eldest brother, doesn’t agree.

“I think they are just overwhelmed by all they have to do,” he said. “Unfortunately, what happened to my sister happens every day.”