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• The New York Times’ Andrew Kramer and Andrew Higgins broke the news that a Ukrainian man thought to have unknowingly created malware used in alleged Russian hacking against the United States is now a witness for the FBI. As the Times notes, this new detail in the investigation seems to show that much of the harder work in the hack was outsourced to “private and often crime-tainted vendors.” “It is the first known instance of a living witness emerging from the arid mass of technical detail that has so far shaped the investigation into the election hacking and the heated debate it has stirred,” the Times notes. And while the man, who goes by the alias “Profexer,” did not apparently work directly with Russia, the information he’s providing is giving U.S. officials critical new insight into how Russian hacking groups operate and develop their tools. • Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday morning to claim that North Korea’s Kim Jong Un had made a “very wise and well reasoned decision” by backing down from his threats against Guam and not escalating military tensions any further. Vox’s Alex Ward explains why that is worrying, noting that “Trump may interpret Kim’s decision to back down as proof that his own belligerent rhetoric is what produced this current moment of calm.” Spoiler: It wasn’t. • A small detail in Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker article on Steve Bannon’s future at the White House has Canadian politicos confused: According to Lizza, Bannon is in regular contact with Gerald Butts, a longtime political advisor for Justin Trudeau, Canada’s liberal heartthrob of a prime minister. The pair are apparently so close that Butts has been pushing Bannon to raise taxes on the rich, as Trudeau did last year. • There’s been a lot of talk about “antifa” groups — the word is a shortening of “anti-fascist” — in the aftermath of Charlottesville. The sudden rise of the term might suggest to some people that the groups are a new, American-born phenomena, but that’s far from the case, as Dartmouth historian Mark Bray writes for The Post: “The first antifascists fought Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts in the Italian countryside, exchanged fire with Adolf Hitler’s Brownshirts in the taverns and alleyways of Munich and defended Madrid from Francisco Franco’s insurgent nationalist army. Beyond Europe, anti-fascism became a model of resistance for the Chinese against Japanese imperialism during World War II and resistance to Latin American dictatorships. Modern antifa politics can be traced to resistance to waves of xenophobia and the emergence of white power skinhead culture in Britain in the 1970s and ’80s. It also has its roots in self-defense groups organized by revolutionaries and migrants in Germany, as the fall of the Berlin Wall unleashed a violent neo-Nazi backlash.” Today, you can often see antifa imagery in the terraces of world’s soccer stadiums — clubs in many countries are often linked to right- or left-wing politics and use chants and signs to back their agendas, even in the U.S. |
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Iranian women sit on street bench in Tehran on Aug. 2. (Nazanin Tabatabaee Yazdi/TIMA via Reuters) ‘Footloose’ in Farsi If it weren’t so sad, it would be funny. Six people — four male and two female — were recently arrested in Iran for teaching Zumba, a Colombian fitness routine that’s a hit in the U.S., and other “Western” dance moves. The six filmed themselves and posted the clips on social media apps such as Telegram and Instagram. “The members of a network teaching and filming Western dances have been identified and arrested,” said Hamid Damghani, a Revolutionary Guard Corps commander in northeast Iran, to Jamejam Online. Their crime, he said, was seeking to “change lifestyles and promote a lack of hijab.” In Iran, women are required to wear headscarves and modest clothing in public. Women are also banned from dancing in front of men who are not from their immediate families. Authorities have forbidden the teaching of Zumba and other dances, even in women-only gyms. “The promotion and teaching of dancing in the name of sport in women’s gyms is a serious issue,” Damghani said. This isn’t the first time authorities have cracked down in this manner. In 2014, six Iranians were arrested for making a video that showed them dancing to Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.” The young men and women were sentenced to a year in prison and 91 lashes, though both punishments were ultimately suspended. The video caught the attention of authorities after it became something of an online sensation, garnering 1 million views in six months. The participants later said on state-run television that they were actors and were tricked into making the video for an audition. Their arrests sparked a backlash on social media. Even Williams chimed in, writing on Facebookthat “it is beyond sad that these kids were arrested for trying to spread happiness.” As is so often the case when it comes to policing how women act, part of the concern stems from how men will respond. According to the Times, religious leaders worried that Zumba could corrupt Iranian men. They’ve even deemed online videos teaching the dance pornographic. But while such moves may sometimes seem amusing abroad, they’re only the tip of much more sinister crackdowns. This year, for example, at least 22 journalists and activists were imprisoned as part of a crackdown by hard-liners on Western influences and activists ahead of the May presidential election, according to the Center for Human Rights in Iran. — Amanda Erickson |
A US-based BBC correspondent recently returned to the country and penned a devastating review of how much stature the U.S. has lost abroad, both among leaders and ordinary citizens. Meanwhile, The Post describes this week’s chaos using foreign correspondent tropes, to hilarious but sobering effect. Elsewhere in the world, Der Spiegel rails against EU plans to house migrants in dangerous Libyan camps, while South Africa’s Mail and Guardian calls the end of Nelson Mandela’s party as we knew it.
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On Tuesday, President Trump once again morally equated the violence on “both sides” of the events in Charlottesville during a press conference in New York. The Atlantic takes a look at the rise of the violence from the left to see if the president has a point. Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports on an effort to map out what lies beneath New York City, while the New York Times shows what the fight for abortion rights looks like from both sides in Texas.
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At least you can’t say the residents of Guam aren’t having a little fun with the long-running threat from North Korea. Thankfully for them and the rest of the world, tensions with North Korea are
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