Gizmodo’s Ashley Feinberg has found the private Instagram and Twitter accounts belonging to James Comey, director of the FBI.
US president Donald Trump’s signature campaign promise, the complete repeal and replacement of Obamacare, is now dead, at least for the foreseeable future, after it didn’t get enough votes in the US House of Representatives, despite a Republican majority.
For some three decades, Warren Buffett, the CEO of investing giant Berkshire Hathaway, has paid himself the exact same salary: a modest $100,000. (Of course, his personal wealth, at some $77 billion, comes from his stake in the company.) But since 2008 his total compensation has jumped, sometimes breaching $500,000.
What’s Donald Trump’s stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Your guess is as good as ours.
When US president Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu held a press conference on Feb. 15, they made news.
Today is the day we switch the system on.
2016? As the sign guy said, “Geez.”
Colombia’s congress today passed an amnesty law for FARC rebels and Colombian soldiers who committed crimes during the country’s half-century-long civil war. It’s the first, and perhaps most crucial, of several laws entailed by the peace accord that the government and the FARC signed last month.
Que América vuelva a ser grande
What a difference a week makes. On Nov. 10 Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, called it “a pretty crazy idea” that fake news on Facebook might have helped swing the US election towards Donald Trump. In a Facebook post three days later, he was more measured, calling it “extremely unlikely” and insisting that only “a very small amount” of the information on Facebook was fake news and hoaxes. By yesterday (Nov. 18), that amount had become “relatively small” and the dismissive attitude was gone, as he outlined several steps Facebook is taking to weed the stuff out.
Donald Trump’s election victory has not only terrified liberals, minorities, and much of the planet, but has shaken some people’s faith in democracy itself. That this bigoted, lying, self-contradicting, autocratic, anti-science, tantrum-throwing man-child could become the world’s most powerful leader surely shows the very system for choosing leaders is fatally flawed. That far-right parties, emboldened, may now win several upcoming European elections surely shows voters cannot be trusted. Perhaps democracy has become too democratic. Perhaps we need epistocracy, where only the most knowledgeable can vote.
A press release from the Kremlin says that president Vladimir Putin sent Donald Trump a congratulatory telegram after he won the US presidency. We’ve annotated it with some commentary of our own.
There is, by the least favorable estimate (Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight), a 70% chance that Hillary Clinton will become the next president of the US. If you’re reading this and that has now happened, we have something to help you celebrate.
There is, by the most favorable estimate (Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight), a 30% chance that Donald Trump will become the next president of the US. If you’re reading this and that has now happened, we have something to help you celebrate—or drown your sorrows.
Britain’s government took a sharply xenophobic turn this week. Prime minister Theresa May poured scorn on “citizens of the world,” while her home secretary, Amber Rudd, warned that companies might be forced to publish how many foreigners they employ, causing dismay both in Britain and outside it (paywall).
The 2016 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos for “his resolute efforts to bring the country’s more than 50-year-long civil war to an end, a war that has cost the lives of at least 220,000 Colombians and displaced close to 6 million people.”
A referendum on a peace deal to end Colombia’s civil war has been rejected by the narrowest of margins. Just a few days before the vote on Sunday (Oct. 2), polls had predicted that the deal, which took the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) four years of negotiations and brinkmanship to reach, would pass by as much as a two-to-one majority. Instead it failed by a margin of less than 0.5%.
They eulogized him as a “warrior for peace,” but Shimon Peres spent much of his career as one of Israel’s chief hawks. He built up the country’s defense industry, created its nuclear program, and for years championed the settlements in the occupied territories—the settlements that, ironically, are now one of the biggest obstacles to the peace process for which he shared the Nobel prize.
I average about one Twitter @-mention per day. (Yes, I don’t tweet much.) Yesterday, I got more than 100.
The City of London has posted the job of “Night Czar” on its website (job reference: CZAR001). No, this is not a draconian overlord responsible for making sure drinkers pick up their litter; it is someone who “will champion the value of London’s night time culture whilst developing and diversifying London’s night time economy.”
Good morning, Quartz readers.
It is five minutes walk from the corner of Lamar and Main streets in Dallas, where a sniper killed five police officers this week, to Dealey Plaza, where another sniper killed president John F. Kennedy in 1963. What connects these events, other than guns and geography, is the raw, grainy footage that captured each.
Did you know that hanner amser means “half-time” in Welsh? We didn’t either—until we followed a link from a colleague and saw this:
It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment in the last eight days at which Britain’s politics became officially more absurd than America’s. Last week’s Brexit vote, shocking as it was, was just the starting gun. Since then both the Labour and the Conservative party leaderships have collapsed. The “Leave” campaign has swiftly backtracked (paywall) on its promises. Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, after enduring a stunning no-confidence vote, appeared to compare Israel with the Islamic State. The Conservatives’ Boris Johnson, the cheerleader of Leave and presumed next prime minister, bowed out after being stabbed in the back by his own sidekick, Michael Gove. And a leaked letter from Gove’s wife exposed the Tory party’s leading figures as little more than the puppets of media barons.
