The five Uber bases in New York City that were suspended earlier this week have reopened, a source familiar with the matter tells Newsweek.
In October, the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) requested trip data from Uber for these five bases. Uber did not comply, and as a result, the bases were suspended on Monday evening by the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (OATH) until both the trip records had been provided and a $200 per base fine was paid.
However, by Wednesday morning, the bases were once again reopened. In a series of documents provided to Newsweek, each of the five shuttered bases (Weiter LLC, Hinter LLC, Schmecken LLC, Danach-NY LLC and Unter LLC) were labeled: “Office-Status: Current in Business” with today’s date.
It remains unclear if Uber provided the requested trip data. Uber and OATH did not return a request for comment on the matter. TLC spokesperson Allan Fromberg told Newsweek, “I've been informed that they filed an appeal of the OATH decision, which allows for them to operate with a temporary license until the appeal is decided.”
Trip data has been a major point of contention between the e-hailing service and the TLC. In October, the TLC held a public meeting attended by Uber, Lyft and medallion officials and drivers. Trip data was the primary focus of the meeting and Uber New York General Manager Josh Mohrer said he believed the TLC was seeking “data for data’s sake.” City officials were openly displeased with Mohrer’s comment. “I think your characterization of 'data for data’s sake’ is a gross miscategorization of why we want the data. It has been critical to us to analyze data,” one official retorted.
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These seven storytellers are from as far afield as Sierra Leone and Iceland. Each of them has learned the art of spoken storytelling according to their own cultural traditions, and all have made their homes in London. In the US, storytelling groups such as The Moth have attracted huge audiences in recent years, amounting to a revival of the art form, while in Europe and the UK storytellers young and old are starting to make waves. For Newsweek, photographer Caroline Irby meets some of the city’s most exciting voices.
MONI SHEEHAN, BULGARIA
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Caroline Irby
Moni Sheehan originally trained as a dancer. It was only after an injury in 1994, and a period “spent in the wilderness”, that she went along one night to The Crick Crack Club – a storytelling club in London – and stumbled upon a new way of life.
Half-Bulgarian, half-British, Sheehan grew up in a village in County Durham. But her Bulgarian mother never allowed her to forget her roots. “She sang to us, taught us to dance. She wasn’t a traditional storyteller, but she told us stories about her life and her ancestors’ lives: Bulgaria under Turkish rule; my great-great-grandfather disguising himself as a woman and carrying revolutionary messages in the heels of his boots.”
Sheehan translated her mother’s books of Bulgarian folklore, which had been handed down orally for generations and collected by folklorists from the villages. “People who’ve left their country particularly need to feel proud of their identity. We’re all supposed to be one now, all European, but we all need a sense of belonging, to know our roots.”
USIFU JALLOH, SIERRA LEONE
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Caroline Irby
“Life itself is a story. From the time you wake up to the time to the time you go to bed, it’s a story you’re living, telling or experiencing.” Usifu Jalloh, 47, was born in Kamakwie, Sierra Leone. He trained with a traditional theatre company in Sierra Leone, then studied drama in Detroit, before arriving in London in 1987.
Jalloh now gives performances combining storytelling and drumming in schools and universities, and has his own production, “Africa’s Cowfoot”, which uses storytelling, music and dance to promote Sierra Leonean and African cultures.
“The further we are removed from our culture,” says Jalloh, “the more lost we become.” He hopes to motivate young people to educate themselves within the context of their cultures: “When you understand your own context, it is easier to understand the culture you have moved into. Oral storytelling becomes a way of passing on, nurturing our experience. Any culture is able to maintain its identity through storytelling. It’s an incredibly powerful tool.”
“Sierra Leoneans here,” he explains, “realise that their children have this vacant space in their minds that has disconnected them from their roots. So they want them to learn the dances and the stories. I see myself as a cultural healer and social architect, assembling the pieces that have been scattered through colonialism.”
SEEMA ANAND, INDIA
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Caroline Irby
Seema Anand’s favourite story is a version of “Cinderella”. The fairy godmother character is a snake, she says, “and I always end the story saying, ‘I have no idea what happened to the snake. He might have changed into something else, he might have moved on, who knows?’ I have a problem with finding endings to stories, and one of the things I love about Indian stories is that there is often no happily ever after.”
Anand, 52, married and settled in England in 1985. Embarking on a doctorate in global mythologies, she looked at the flood story as told by different cultures. “I was interested in how the cultural details vary: the people’s names, the animals,” she explains. “But the fundamentals of the story always remain the same. Oral storytelling is an ancient tradition in every culture, and is the genesis of literature. Stories are really the only thing in this world that endure.”
She was inspired to become a storyteller after hearing visiting artists from India. “Because I am Indian, I was asked to tell Indian stories. To start with this annoyed me: I grew up on Shakespeare, English was my first language, and I did my Masters in English literature. But I soon discovered that this was what I was meant to be doing: it felt like a homecoming. I found in these stories a treasure trove of myth, rarely told and not easy to get hold of, because much of it is untranslated.”
Anand now performs at London museums and cultural festivals, always in traditional dress: “the story has to be acknowledged”, she says, “it is not something prosaic or mundane.”
THOMAS MCCARTHY, IRELAND
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Thomas McCarthy, Ireland Caroline Irby
“We were the storytellers, the history-tellers. Settled people in Ireland used to rely on travellers to let them know what was going on around the country. And they kept traditional stories alive.”
Thomas McCarthy was born in Birr, County Offaly, 1965. At the age of 10, he moved to London with his mother and his aunt, and lived in a travellers’ site under the A40 – the Westway. He would often return to Ireland to stay with his grandfather for months at a time. “My family were in the centre of Ireland, so thousands of travellers passed through the house as they travelled across the country, and they would bring thousands of stories and songs. My grandfather had an amazing gift for remembering stories – our ancestors didn’t read and write, so we had to remember.
“The house was always full of people, and he’d tell stories each night, from 7pm until 2am. Then he’d say, ‘Come back tomorrow, and I’ll tell you more.’ And he’d do this for a week.”
Small wonder, then, that McCarthy now has a repertoire of around 200 stories.
SIGRUN BJORK OLAFSDOTTIR, ICELAND
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Caroline Irby
“You need a fantastic imagination to live in Iceland, because it’s a hard place to live. When I was a child, you’d be locked in your house for days when it was snowing outside and you needed stories to entertain yourself.”
Sigrun Bjork Olafsdottir, 44, left Iceland to live in London with her two sons in 2002, when her marriage broke down. “I needed a change,” she says. “Vikings have always been nomads, exploring the lands . . . ” Olafsdottir wrote her first book when she was six. “I grew up with Norse mythology: stories about hidden people – trolls, elves, mountain gods – interacting with humans . . . Vikings didn’t have schools; much like the Native Americans, they taught their children about how life works through stories . . . that often means that stories don’t end well, because someone in the story behaves in a way that will lead to a bad ending. Norse mythology is very Nordic film noir.”
JAN BLAKE, JAMAICA
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Caroline Irby
Jan Blake was born in Manchester, of Jamaican parentage, in 1964. She tells stories that challenge a Eurocentric view of the world, and that recognise her as a black woman: “If I’m to be defined by what European folk tales have to offer, I’m finished: as a woman there’s no place for me. If it’s all about blonde-haired, blue- eyed princesses, I can never win – I’m not represented in those stories.
“I don’t tell these stories to keep them alive. I tell them to keep me alive. Through storytelling, and researching my heritage, my folklore, I turned my feeling of rage at the racism I had experienced into feelings of cultural fulfilment. Having access to your own culture and being a custodian was the way forward for me; not anger and anti-white feeling. It reconnected me with myself, my culture, my history.”
But Blake is concerned that barely any Caribbean storytellers are following in her footsteps. “When I’m dead, who is going to tell the stories I tell?”
RACHEL ROSE REID, ENGLAND
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Caroline Irby
Rachel Rose Reid, 30, is a London-born storyteller, poet and writer of Jewish heritage: her great-grandparents arrived in the East End of London a century ago, tailors and shoemakers from Russia, Romania and Poland, and the stories they brought with them have been passed down through three generations. Reid’s father set up National Storytelling Week, and Reid grew up going to folk festivals, which she says helped her to feel that her roots were “valid to the patchwork . . . I am the product of people who did bother to bring their stories with them, and I’m grateful for having received them.”
Alongside the oral stories she has inherited, Reid draws on the Talmud for inspiration. “Jewish culture is interesting to me,” says Reid, “because about 2,000 years ago, when the Israelites were kicked out of what is now Israel-Palestine by the Roman empire, a group of scholars developed a way of making what had been an indigenous, land-based culture portable: they created the Talmud. Most indigenous communities don’t get a chance to make their cultures portable, because conditions change too quickly. The Talmud is an obscure book, it’s not perfect, but the nice thing now is I can unpack it and do what I want with it. I’m interested in making things that are dusty undusty – taking ownership of what academics have collected and recorded.”
As well as performing at folk venues and festivals, Reid organises story circles for recent migrants, where they can share narratives from the places they have left. While acknowledging that not everyone comes to this country with knowledge of, or interest in, their own folk culture, Reid finds that often people do arrive “with their culture under their tongue . . . and when they have left their countries under traumatic circumstances, their folk stories may be less painful to tell than their own.”
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Training grenades were thrown into a mosque courtyard west of Paris early on Wednesday night according to French newspaper Ouest-France in one of a limited number of isolated incidents at mosques in following Wednesday’s attack at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris that killed 12.
One of four training grenades exploded on the site, with the remaining three being discovered by police on Thursday, who blocked off the area in the city of Le Mans. Gunshots were also allegedly fired at the mosque overnight Russia Today said, with no injuries reported and no arrests made.
A Muslim prayer room was also attacked by gunfire on Wednesday night in the Port-la-Nouvelle district near Narbonne in southern France. A local prosecutor told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that the room was empty at the time of the attack, although a window and door in the room showed signs of damage.
Perrut Bernard, Mayor of Villefranche-sur-Saone in eastern France was quoted by Le Progress as saying that he feared an explosion on Thursday morning in a kebab restaurant near a mosque in Villefranche was connected “to the dramatic event that occurred on Wednesday”. No casualties were reported.
France is on high alert following the attack in Paris on Wednesday that killed 10 journalists and 2 police officers at Charlie Hebdo’s offices. Mosques, synagogues, shopping centres, train stations and airports in France have increased security measures according to French prime minister Manuel Valls, who has also deployed 650 additional soldiers and 2,000 police officers to the streets of Paris Thursday.
Thousands of people attended peaceful vigils in public spaces around France last night with many holding signs saying “Je suis Charlie” in solidarity with the journalists killed in the attack. Muslim leaders roundly condemned the attack, with Imam Tareq Oubrou urging“Muslims to massively pour into the streets to express their disgust”.
Police are still searching for French national brothers in relation to Wednesday’s murders. The suspects have been identified as Said Kouachi, 34, Cherif Kouachi, 32. A third suspect, Hamyd Mourad, 18, surrendered to police Wednesday evening in Charleville Mezieres after seeing himself identified as a person of interest on social media.
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The female suicide bomber who blew herself up at an Istanbul police station Tuesday has been identified as a Russian citizen. Diana Ramazova has been named as the female assailant who carried a bomb into the touristic Sultanahmet area January 6, killing one officer and wounding another at a police station.
Reports that “foreign phone numbers” were found in Ramazova’s cell phone led police to believe Ramazova was of Chechen descent. The Hurriyet Daily News also reported that she spoke Russian in a taxi prior to the attack that killed police officer Kenan Kumaş.
Ramazova, who allegedly entered Turkey as a tourist in June 2014, was first identified by Turkish media. Reports by Russian news website Kavkazpress followed, claiming she was a Russian citizen from the Republic of Daghestan.
Kavkazpress claimed Ramazova was "radicalized by the Wahhabi ideology", an ideology that denounces non-Muslims and is adopted by Islamic State. Police in Turkey are looking into the possible connection she had with al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. An investigation is also underway in Daghestan.
Ramazova is said to have lived in Istanbul with her husband and children. An autopsy of her body revealed that she was also pregnant at the time of the attack.
Local media have speculated that Ramazova may have been a part of the “Black Widows” terrorist organization, a group of women whose husbands and brothers died at the hands of Russian forces in the 1990s conflict in Chechnya. The group has not claimed any responsibility for the attack, however reports say two “Black Widows” blew themselves up in Moscow in a similar attack that killed 39 in 2010.
The Turkish far-left group DHKP-C had initially claimed responsibility for the attack. In a statement on “The People’s Cry” website on the day of the attack, the group said that the bombing was against the ruling AK party in response to the killing of 15-year-old Berkin Elvan, who died at an anti-government protest in March of last year.
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Following a terrorist attack that killed 10 of their employees on Wednesday, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo will still go to print this week. In fact, the Paris-based publication will amp up circulation from 60,000 copies to 1 million for next week’s issue.
“We are all suffering, with grief, with fear,” said Charlie Hebdo columnist Patrick Pelloux in an interview with Agence France-Presse. “But we will do it anyway because stupidity will not win,”
Stephane “Charb” Charbonnier, a leading editor and cartoonist, was among the dead, as were cartoonists Georges Wolinski, Jean “Cabu” Cabut and Bernard “Tignous” Verlhac. But a handful of staff remain, including editor-in-chief Gerard Biard, and at least two members of the editorial team who were wounded in the attack.
Despite the increase in circulation, Richard Malka, the magazine’s attorney, said Charlie Hebdo’s issue this week will be shorter, just eight pages compared to the usual 16. Because the attack took place at the office of the magazine, the staff will put it together at a different location.
In the aftermath of Wednesday’s shooting, three French media companies offered both employees and support to keep the magazine afloat. But it remains unclear if Charlie Hebdo has taken anyone up on the offer.
“Charlie has to come out,” said Emmanuel Hoog, the head of Agence France-Presse. “To not do so would be an abdication.”
French officials have also shown support for future editions of the magazine. “We have a mission—we have to organize ourselves so the next edition of Charlie Hebdo comes out,” said Culture Minister Fleur Pellerin. The country’s justice minister, Christiane Taubira, determined public aid “would be justified” to ensure future printing.
As of Thursday afternoon, two of the alleged gunmen, Cherif and Said Kouach, were still on the loose, while a third, Hamyd Mourad, surrendered to French authorities Wednesday. During the attack, witnesses said the gunman announced their allegiance to Al-Qaeda. They also said the attackers carried out the assault because the magazine had lampooned the Prophet Muhammad in several cartoons, an act that Islam considers blasphemous.
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Late Wednesday night, 18-year-old Mourad Hamyd was reported to have turned himself in to French authorities, wanted by Parisian police in connection with a deadly terrorist attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which killed 12, including two police officers. Three gunmen escaped following the attack and a manhunt was launched to locate the suspects, named by French police as Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, with Mourad named as their suspected accomplice.
Cherif and Said Kouachi were still at large as of Thursday night local time. Hamyd surrendered to police after seeing his name appear on social media, according to the AFP. Police believe Hamyd was driving the getaway car, and his identification card was reportedly left in a vehicle abandoned by the terrorists.
Friends of the suspected terrorist, however, claim he has a solid alibi: He was in class at the time of the attack, which occurred around 11.30 a.m. local time. The Independent published tweets of people claiming to be classmates of Mourad’s; it is believed he goes to school in Charleville-Mézières in northern France.
Il est dans mon lycée je l'ai vu ce matin grave souriant comme d'hab , il ferait jamais sa lui .Soutenez le svp #MouradHamydInnocent c ouf
Vigils are being held in Paris for the second night to remember the twelve people shot dead in a terrorist attack at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Tens of thousands of people gathered at the Place de la Republique in the city’s center on Wednesday night, standing in solidarity and support of freedom of speech. Journalists held up press cards and the public thrusted pens into the air, while many held signs declaring “Je Suis Charlie,” “I am Charlie” in French, which has become the de facto slogan since the killings. The Independent describes the mood of last night’s vigil as “somber but defiant.”
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.A candle is held aloft by actress Lou Douillon at a vigil in Place de la Republic in Paris, Jan. 8, 2015Youssef Boudlal/Reuters
Ten journalists and two policemen were killed on Wednesday. In a separate incident, a policewoman was shot dead in Paris on Thursday, although it’s not yet clear if there’s a connection to the Charlie Hebdo shooting.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Pens and pencils are seen near candles at a vigil in Place de Republic in Paris, Jan. 8, 2015. Jacky Naegelen/Reuters
With the three gunmen still at large, French anti-terrorist police are focusing their efforts around a small town northeast of Paris. Two of the gunmen have been named as brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, 32 and 34, both French nationals. An 18-year-old man turned himself into police in Charleville-Mézières on Wednesday night.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.A man holds a copy of weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo to pay tribute during a gathering at the Place de la Republique in Paris, Jan. 7, 2015.Christian Hartmann/Reuters
French media companies Le Monde, Radio France and France Télévisions have offered to keep Charlie Hebdo running. On Thursday, the magazine’s publisher said one million copies will be printed next week, up from the regular run of 30,000 copies.
Elvis Presley was born 80 years ago today. A special Newsweekedition story traces the "King of Rock 'n Roll's" humble beginnings as a kid trying to make it big.
The kid from Memphis put “Elvis” on his guitar in stick-on letters and took his turn driving to gigs. Elvis seems most like our contemporary when he was most remote from us—in the early days, a kid just out of high school, with his first band and a little indie-label record, driving all night to nickel-and-dime gigs with a bass lashed to the roof of the car. The young Elvis Presley wouldn’t look out of place today in Seattle, or L.A., or Austin, with his cheap, flashy clothes and his ambivalent come-on: sullen sexiness meets hunted vulnerability. Don’t bet that it was all naive and uncalculated; he studied James Dean movies. On the other hand, he’d wanted to be a gospel singer—in addition to everything else he wanted.
In the summer of 1953, the boy nerved himself up to come into Sam Phillips’s Memphis Recording Service and pay $3.98 (plus tax) to cut a two-song vanity record—a surprise for his mother, he claimed. Except the Presleys didn’t own a record player. It seems hard to reconcile this Elvis, mumbling “yes, sir” and “no, ma’am” and staring at his feet, with the master showman of 1956, who was ordered by a Florida judge to tone down his infamous “gyrations,” but instead whipped the crowd into a frenzy by wiggling his little finger. “That soft exterior,” said Phillips, “covered a mighty bone.”
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Elvis Presley performs for an audience of teenagers in the late 1950s. “Most of these places, you just had one microphone,” Scotty Moore told Newsweek of early gigs. “When we’d hit a place with two, so Bill could put one on his bass—man, we thought we was uptown.” Everett
His musical tastes were virtually indiscriminate and wholly passionate. “He just thought Dean Martin was out of this damn world,” Phillips said. Memphis, Tennessee, where the Presleys moved from Tupelo, Mississippi, when Elvis was 13, must have seemed like an all-you-can-eat buffet. Black blues singers, white hillbilly singers and gospel singers of both races all rubbed elbows, sometimes in the flesh, often over the airwaves. A white disc jockey, Dewey Phillips (no relation to Sam), ran the best R&B show in town. Years afterward, B. B. King recalled seeing young Elvis in blues hangouts on Beale Street. He would’ve been hard to miss: He wore loud clothes from Lansky Brothers on Beale, which catered to a black clientele, and he had a slicked-down duck’s-ass haircut and sideburns, hoping (as he later explained) to look like a long-haul trucker.
If Elvis had consciously sought to synthesize and alchemize blues, gospel, R&B and white country music, he couldn’t have chosen a better mentor. Sam Phillips was the first to record B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf; in 1951 he cut singer Jackie Brenston with Ike Turner’s band, doing “Rocket ‘88’.” Yet it was a small-time enterprise: Sam recalls erasing what would now be priceless Howlin’ Wolf outtakes so he could reuse the tape. He was both a purist documentarian of working-class Southern music and an entrepreneur hungry for a hit record.
To work with the green young Elvis, said Phillips, he deputized an ambitious, phlegmatic guitarist named Scotty Moore, who’d organized a country band called the Starlite Wranglers. Scotty remembered it a little differently. He was scouting for new musicians, he said, and Sam’s secretary and right hand, Marion Keisker, thought of Elvis. “She said, ‘What about that boy that was in here a year ago?’ And Sam said, ‘Yeah, best I remember, he had a pretty good voice.’ ”
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Elvis Presley sits cheek to cheek with his bride, the former Priscilla Ann Beaulieu, following their wedding May 1, 1967 is Las Vegas, Nevada. Reuters
The next afternoon the kid showed up at Scotty’s house with his greasy hair, his Lansky Brothers finery and his guitar, on which he’d spelled his name in little silver stick-on letters. “I thought he was gonna be pretty wild, but he called me Mr. Moore.” Scotty got ahold of the Starlite Wranglers bass player, Bill Black, who lived down the street, and Elvis sat down to sing. Bill wasn’t much impressed, but Scotty reported to Sam that “he knows a lot of songs, and his timing is good.” Phillips suggested that the three of them come to the studio—the next night, as Scotty recalled.
They mostly did without drums—that rhythmic clacking is Bill slapping the strings of his bass against the neck—until they played the “Louisiana Hayride” radio show in Shreveport, Louisiana, and met the underutilized house drummer D. J. Fontana. “Most of the stars didn’t like drums,” D.J. recalls. “I’d just stand backstage until somebody asked. Scotty came over and said, ‘Hey, you want to work with us?’”
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Presley performs in concert during his "Aloha From Hawaii" 1972 television special.Reuters
Soon Elvis bought a modest two-bedroom brick house in Memphis for himself and his parents, at 2414 Lamar, and a Cadillac sedan with jump seats. The four-piece band drove six or seven hundred miles a night, taking turns at the wheel, with a carton of their records in the trunk in case they saw a radio tower in the distance. “Nowadays they’d run you out,” says D.J. “But back then the jocks would be happy, because they were way out in the country somewhere and nobody ever stopped to see ’em.” The band performed on flatbed trucks and in high school gyms—tickets: 50 cents—and played country package shows headlined by Webb Pierce and Hank Snow. Before long, the crowds were following the warm-up act outside. “Hank and those guys would say, ‘We ain’t got nobody to sing to. We’re gonna have to let him close the show.’ Elvis hated it. Those guys were like heroes to him.”
The bigger Elvis got, the fewer people heard him—they were screaming too loud. Scotty, six feet away from Elvis, could hear only D.J.’s drums; D.J., who’d played behind strippers in Shreveport dives, took cues from Elvis’s body movements. Still, the band was slow to realize that something uncanny was going on; even their now-historic network TV appearances in ’55 and ’56 were just gigs like all the rest. “We’d work going up, Richmond, Norfolk, the Carolinas,” says D.J., “shoot in and do what we had to do in New York, and we was gone down the road somewhere.” Traveling again late at night on two-lane highways, through Alabama or Texas or Mississippi, with the bass fiddle on the roof. The guys would listen to the radio until Bill, curled up in the back seat with his coat over his head as usual, complained about all the racket. Elvis was wide awake. “He was like a young bull,” says Scotty Moore. “Never seen the like of energy in one human being. We’d do a show, then get out of town a ways before we’d stop to eat. One of us would tell Elvis, ‘Come on, let’s walk.’ We’d start walkin’ with him down the road and the car would catch up with us later. Just tryin’ to get him where he’d pass out. He’d stay up all night talkin’ and drivin’—he was a good driver, too. But somebody had to stay up with him ’cause he had no sense of direction. He wouldn’t read a road sign or nothin’. Just drive.”
Elvis: His Life in Photos, a Newsweek Special Edition celebrating 80 years of the King of Rock & Roll is available wherever magazines are sold, as well as Amazon.com.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.January 8 marks what would have been Elvis's 60th birthday and fans are expected to gather in his home-town of Memphis for the occasion. Newsweek
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An independent investigation of the National Football League determined that no one at the NFL saw the complete video of the Ray Rice elevator incident before TMZ made it public in September. The investigation, led by former FBI Director Robert Mueller, began after Rice was indefinitely suspended from the NFL.
There was a fair amount of debate as to whether the NFL had seen the complete tape, which shows Rice knocking out fiancée, now wife, Janay Palmer and her head hitting a metal railing. The first half of the tape, which reveals a passed out Palmer being dragged out of the elevator by Rice, was made public by TMZ last February. When the first tape was made public, Rice was suspended from the Baltimore Ravens for two games. The Ravens went on to cut him from the team after the full tape emerged.
Rice’s lawyer claimed he offered to make the tape available to the NFL before the initial two-game suspension was handed down. NFL officials claimed they had contacted police officials to find the tape but were not given access to it (several police departments noted they did not receive formal requests from the NFL for the tape).
Rice's suspension was later overturned after it was determined Rice had told the full truth of what happened inside the elevator to NFL officials before the complete tape was ever made public. During the appeal hearing, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell continued to claim Rice never fully explained what happened inside the elevator and avoided questions as to how exactly the NFL requested the full tape from authorities, though other NFL officials stood by Rice's account. As the appeal was granted, Rice is a free agent and remains unsigned to any NFL team.
“We concluded there was substantial information about the incident—even without the in-elevator video—indicating the need for a more thorough investigation. The NFL should have done more with the information it had, and should have taken additional steps to obtain all available information about the February 15 incident,” Mueller said in a statement.
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It’s a lighter media story amidst a week of despair: A Maryland newspaper has stolen the last laugh after a local councilman threatened to sue the paper merely for printing his name without permission.
Frederick County Council member Kirby Delauter is now apologizing after The Frederick News-Post published a follow-up editorial that printed his name again—29 times in total.
“Of course, as I am an elected official, The Frederick News-Post has the right to use my name in any article related to the running of the county—that comes with the job,” Delauter conceded in a statement to the newspaper. “So yes, my statement to The Frederick News-Post regarding the use of my name was wrong and inappropriate. I'm not afraid to admit when I’m wrong.”
“If it’s not a joke, how should we now refer to Kirby Delauter if we can't use his name (Kirby Delauter)?” the editors questioned in the piece, which has racked up tens of thousands of Facebook likes. “Could we get away with an entire editorial of nothing but ‘Kirby Delauter’ repeated over and over again—Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter?”
In fact, they got away with precisely that.
Kirby Delauter, whose name recognition must be at an all-time high, did not respond to a Newsweek request for an interview.
After 227 years of history, how should we judge the U.S. Supreme Court? All of my years of studying, teaching and practicing constitutional law have convinced me that the court has rarely lived up to lofty expectations and far more often has upheld discrimination and even egregious violations of basic liberties.
My disappointment in the court is historical and contemporary. Its preeminent task is to enforce the Constitution in the face of majorities that would violate it. The court is thus especially important in protecting minorities and in safeguarding rights in times of crisis when passions cause society to lose sight of its long-term values.
For the first 78 years of American history until the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865, the court enforced the institution of slavery. For 58 years, from 1896 until 1954, the court embraced the noxious doctrine of separate but equal and approved Jim Crow laws that segregated every aspect of Southern life.
Nor are egregious mistakes by the Supreme Court on race a thing of the past. The Roberts Court has furthered racial inequality by striking down efforts by school boards to desegregate schools and by declaringunconstitutional crucial provisions of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The court also has continually failed to stand up to majoritarian pressures in times of crisis. During World War I, individuals were imprisoned for speech that criticized the draft and the war without the slightest evidence that the expression had any adverse effect on military recruitment or the war effort. During World War II, 110,000 Japanese-Americans were uprooted from their lifelong homes and placed in what President Franklin Roosevelt referred to as “concentration camps.”
During the McCarthy era, people were imprisoned simply for teaching works by Marx and Engels, and Lenin. In all of these instances, the court failed to enforce the Constitution. Most recently, the Roberts Court held that individuals could be criminally punished for advising foreign organizations, designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations, as to how to use the United Nations for peaceful resolution of their disputes or how to receive humanitarian assistance.
For almost 40 years, from the 1890s until 1937, the court declared unconstitutional more than 200 federal, state and local laws that were designed to protect workers and consumers. The court even declared unconstitutional the first federal law designed to prevent child labor, by prohibiting the shipment in interstate commerce of goods made by child labor. Minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws were frequently invalidated.
Even the areas of the Supreme Court’s triumphs, like Brown v. Board of Education and Gideon v. Wainwright, accomplished less than it might seem. American public schools remain racially separate and terribly unequal. Criminal defendants in so many parts of the country, including in death penalty cases, have grossly inadequate lawyers.
The court’s decisions from the past few years—preventing employment discrimination suits and class actions against large corporations, keeping those injured by the misconduct of generic drugmakers from getting any recovery, denying remedies to those unjustly convicted and detained—illustrate what has historically been true: The court is far more likely to rule in favor of corporations than workers or consumers; it is far more likely to uphold abuses of government power than to stop them.
What should we do about it?
Some scholars urge the abandonment of judicial review, but I reject that conclusion. The limits of the Constitution are meaningful only if there are courts to enforce them. For those I have represented over my career—prisoners, criminal defendants, homeless individuals, a Guantánamo detainee—it is the courts or nothing.
But I believe that there are many reforms that can make the court better and, taken together, make it less likely that it will so badly fail in the future. I propose a host of changes, including instituting merit selection of court justices, creating a more meaningful confirmation process, establishing term limits for court justices, changing the court’s communications (that is, televising its proceedings) and applying ethics rules to the court justices.
The Supreme Court’s decisions affect each of us, often in the most important and intimate aspects of our lives. I think that we need to focus on the court’s long-term and historical performance. If we do, it is a disturbing picture, and there is only one possible verdict: The court is guilty of failing to adequately enforce the Constitution.
But it can and must get better in the years and decades ahead.
Erwin Chemerinsky is dean and Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California-Irvine School of Law and author, most recently, of The Case Against the Supreme Court. This article first appeared on the Washington Spectator website.
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An unexpected and rare snowstorm that hit Lebanon Tuesday has killed four Syrian refugees and forced hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrians across the region to endure freezing winter conditions.
Storm Zina began on Tuesday and dumped heavy snowfall over Lebanon, including the Bekaa Valley, where more than 408,000 Syrian refugees are registered with the United Nations and live in camps in shelters ranging from tents to abandoned buildings. In The Washington Post, Eric Holthaus said the storm was caused by a funnel of cold air that swept down from southern Scandinavia and Russia into the Middle East.
The United Nations’s refugee agency provided 80,000 refugee families fuel coupons and cash before the storm hit, but gaps in provisions remain, The Guardianreports.
Among the dead was a 3-month-old baby girl who died at the Masnaa border crossing between Lebanon and Syria, and two men and a 6-year-old boy who were part of a group crossing into southern Lebanon from Syria, Al-Jazeera reports. Many children in the country’s refugee camps are reportedly suffering from hypothermia.
“People are scared if it keeps snowing” Syrian refugee Hany, 20, told us, here’s his photo from Bekaa pic.twitter.com/IqFsjjSymP
Lebanon has the world’s highest number of Syrian refugees, with 1.1 million; 1 in every 5 people is a Syrian refugee in a country of roughly 4.5 million. Overwhelmed by the number of fleeing people, and with the country’s essential services stretched to their limit, Lebanon on Monday began restricting the number of Syrians entering the country, requiring them to obtain a visa at the border. Ninety-five percent of Syrian refugees live in five countries, Syria’s neighbors Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and Turkey.
More than 12 million Syrians are in need of humanitarian assistance, with 7.6 million internally displaced by Syria’s ongoing civil war and 3.2 million refugees fleeing the violence, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The late and great “King of Rock and Roll,” Elvis Presley, would have celebrated his 80th birthday today. To commemorate the occasion, Legacy Recordings has released Elvis’s Complete '60s Albums Collection Vol. 1 on iTunes, reports Rolling Stone. A brand-new site entitled ElvisTheMusic.com, with the King’s extensive discography and upcoming news, went live today. Superfans with chunks of change can also bid on one of his former private planes in an auction starting in February, but you can’t fly them anywhere.
The rockabilly renegade died at his Graceland estate in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1977, reportedly from a drug-induced cardiac arrhythmia, but many believe this isn’t the whole story. The autopsy report was sealed by the King’s father, Vernon Presley, until 2027 (on the 50-year anniversary of his death). In 2010, his friend and former personal physician, Dr. George Nichopoulous, said he believed chronic constipation, not a cardiac arrhythmia, is what dethroned the King.
The secrecy surrounding the autopsy has led conspiracy theorists to proclaim that the King is still alive, citing the curious different spelling of his middle name on his gravestone, him reportedly cutting family members out of his will shortly before his death, and photos of Elvis lying in his casket that the National Enquirer ran after they cut a deal with Elvis’s cousin as reasons to doubt his death.
Some say he faked his death and now goes by the name Jon Burrows, a fellow who resembled the King and supposedly purchased a plane ticket from Memphis to Buenos Aires, Argentina, the day after Elvis was proclaimed dead. Or, he went by the name Jimmy Ellis and actually died in the 1990s .
Others claimed to have even seen him in the flesh. In 1988, a Missouri woman named Louise Welling insisted that she and her daughter had seen Presley at two separate places, once at a Burger King in downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan, and again at the Felpausch supermarket in Vicksburg, Mississippi. This triggered a slew of people claiming they had seen Elvis in a Las Vegas parking lot, sweeping up floors in Stockholm and even hocking unofficial T-shirts outside a London Oasis show in 2002.
The Elvis Sighting Society is a group of people who convened in Canada in 1989 when “the number of Elvis sightings in and around the city of Ottawa became too great to ignore.” The society’s website has only one anecdote, however, in which a fan describes a late-night encounter with Presley at a Tim Horton’s. So great are the Elvis sighting claims there that in 1991, the city of Ottawa named an unnamed a thoroughfare “Elvis Lives Lane.”
Books galore have been published about the Elvis conspiracy too, including one to be published later next month entitled Elvis Is Alive. TV actor and Presley pal Bill Bixby hosted two television programs dedicated to unpacking the myth of Elvis, The Elvis Files (1990) and The Elvis Conspiracy (1992), which suggest that Presley went into the federal Witness Protection Program after he took part in a sting operation and feared fatal backlash from the Mafia, or that he faked his own death to rake in post-mortem cash. Bixby, who died a year after the program aired, may have been on to something: the Presley estate is making far more money in wake of the King’s death than in life, an estimated $55 million in 2011.
Whether you believe the conspiracy theories or not, the myth of Elvis lives on. So raise your fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches high today, put on “Blue Suede Shoes,” and keep an eye out for any coifed fellows with characteristic Mississippi drawls and gold lamé suits on. You never know.
The crash of AirAsia Flight 8501, though tragic, was not an enormous surprise to anyone who follows aviation in Indonesia, or who has flown repeatedly in Indonesia.
This is not to say that AirAsia has a poor safety record; the airline had never had a fatal accident prior to this one, and AirAsia management has responded admirably to the crash. Senior management, including AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes, have reached out to families of the survivors, trying to keep them updated about information on the search and rescue operations and personally consoling relatives of people who were on Flight 8501.
But anyone who knows aviation in Indonesia knows that the country has a horrific record for airplane accidents and that Indonesia has weaker safety protocols regarding aviation than other middle-income countries.
Indonesia’s air safety record is more analogous to that of desperately poor and war-torn countries like Yemen, Somalia or Afghanistan than to air safety in neighboring nations like Thailand, Singapore or the Philippines. Multiple Indonesian airlines, like the terrible Adam Air, have closed their doors in recent years after suffering numerous accidents.
The European Union and the United States have banned many Indonesian airlines from flying into their home markets, while the International Air Transport Association has refused to allow Lion Air, Indonesia’s fastest-growing low-cost carrier, to join, because of Lion Air’s safety record. The International Civil Aviation Organization, a U.N. agency, ranks Indonesia as one of the least safe air markets in the world.
Indonesia is one of the fastest-growing aviation markets in Asia, due to its expanding middle class, the result of more than a decade of solid growth and its vast territory. Flying in Indonesia, though not safe enough, is still safer than taking one of the rickety inter-island ferries, which have some of the worst marine safety records in the world.
Still, just being safer than Indonesia’s horrendous ferries is not a high bar. The Indonesian government needs to take concrete steps to improve aviation safety if it hopes to reassure Indonesians to continue flying within the country, to boost tourism arrivals and to attract a significant increase in foreign investment. (After all, foreign investors need to travel around the country, and they aren’t going to be taking ferries.)
For one, Jakarta needs to implement legislation that will help boost pay for airport managers, air traffic controllers and aircraft safety inspectors. Low pay attracts mediocre talent, and increases the possibility that airlines could bribe managers, controllers and inspectors.
Recent reports on CNN suggest that AirAsia did not have a license to fly the Surabaya-Singapore route on Sunday, the day of the week that Flight 8501 crashed. According to CNN, “[Indonesian] Transport Minister Ignatious Jonan described the airline’s breach [flying on Sunday] as a ‘serious violation.’ ‘How could they fly? Who would they have to approach to be able to make that flight. It would have to be the airport management or lobby air traffic control,’” CNN reported the transport minister as saying.
In addition, Jakarta should take steps to ensure that pilots operating in Indonesia are better-informed, better-trained and working on adequate rest. Indonesia this week already took a positive first step by mandating that all pilots attend briefings before takeoff with flight operating officers—the briefings will discuss the weather, the route and other issues.
But the government can take many other steps to improve the quality of pilots operating in Indonesia. Low-cost carriers in Indonesia have become notorious for overworking their pilots, which may be one reason why several of Lion Air’s pilots have been caught with methamphetamines the past three years. (Methamphetamines help you stay awake.)
Jakarta needs to implement and enforce stricter regulations on the amount of hours pilots can work per week, and to increase enforcement of random drug and alcohol testing for pilots. In addition, Jakarta needs to make pilot licensing more rigorous and more standardized.
According to numerous estimates, within two decades Indonesia will be one of the 10 largest aviation markets in the world, in terms of flights flown per day. These estimates, however, assume that Indonesian aviation will be safe enough that growing numbers of travelers will feel comfortable aboard Indonesian domestic airlines.
As first reported byBusiness Insider, entrepreneur Peter Thiel intends to become one of the first institutional investors to hitch his wagon to the legal weed industry, through his venture capital firm Founders Fund.
Thiel co-founded PayPal in 1998, before selling the startup to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion, and was Facebook’s first outside investor. He is presumed to have made a hefty return on his Facebook investment alone, and he has a net worth of around $2.2 billion, according to Forbes.
According to Business Insider, Thiel is “likely participating in a large round of financing in a cannabis startup” called Privateer Holdings. According to its website, Privateer is a private equity firm that invests in legal cannabis industry. Founders Fund’s participation in its $75 million funding round is the “first known time institutional investors have put money into a weed startup,” according to tech website Re/Code.
According to its website, Privateer Holdings has invested in three other companies: Tilray, a Canadian company that helps patients receive prescribed medical marijuana through the mail; Leafly, a Seattle-based startup Re/Code called the “Yelp for cannabis;” and Marley Natural, a New York–based company founded by members of Bob Marley’s family that says it will grow strains of cannabis strains and offer cannabis products and accessories.
Founder’s Fund tweeted Thursday afternoon:
Legal cannabis is an entirely new industry. It can't be stopped, it shouldn't be stopped, and yes, of course we're investing.
Silicon Valley has so far been cautious about going to pot, but with recent gains made by marijuana legalization advocates in the states of Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and Alaska, investors’ fears seem to have evaporated. The industry is expected to be worth $10 billion in the next few years. “I do not expect to be ‘the cannabis VC,’ although I’m sure I’ll get branded that way,” Founders Fund partner Geoff Lewis told Re/Code.
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Across the world, news outlets are standing with Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical publication victimized in a terrorist attack that killed 10 of their journalists on Wednesday. Some publications have run front-page stories dedicated to the cartoons that Charlie Hebdo is famous for printing, while others ran variations of "Je Suis Charlie"—I am Charlie—which has become a rallying cry against the attack and its implications for freedom of expression.
Here's how publications around the world are showing their support.
Aujourd'hui, France:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.An illustration photo shows the front page of daily paper Aujourd'hui en France displayed in an office in Bordeaux, January 8, 2015. The slogan reads "They will not kill freedom of the press". Regis Duvignau/Reuters
Sud Ouest, France:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.An illustration photo shows the front pages of daily paper Sud Ouest displayed in an office in Bordeaux, January 8, 2015. The slogan reads "No".Regis Duvignau/Reuters
Liberation, France:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.An illustration photo shows the front page of daily paper Liberation displayed in an office in Bordeaux, January 8, 2015. The slogan reads "We are all Charlie". Regis Duvignau/Reuters
L'Equipe, International New York Times, France:
L'Équipe's front page for tomorrow, with a double-page spread devoted to paying homage to Charlie Hebdo's work: pic.twitter.com/zEj1R8yHNu
Single-use Styrofoam cups and food containers, the kind that are ubiquitous at food carts and takeout restaurants all over New York, will be banned in the city beginning July 1 of this year, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration announced Thursday.
Expanded polystyrene foam, or Styrofoam, is not biodegradable and cannot be recycled by the city, so the containers pile up in landfills. The city estimates that the ban will prevent 30,000 tons of landfilled waste annually.
“These products cause real environmental harm and have no place in New York City. We have better options, better alternatives, and if more cities across the country follow our lead and institute similar bans, those alternatives will soon become more plentiful and will cost less,” de Blasio said in a statement.
In addition to its waste challenges, Styrofoam may be bad for human health. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services added styrene, a synthetic compound in Styrofoam, to its list of known or possible carcinogens.
Hot foods, oily foods, acids and alcohol cause Styrofoam food containers to partially break down, leaching styrene into whatever food the container is holding, according to a fact sheet on Styrofoam compiled by Northern Illinois University.
“Avoid drinking tea with lemon, coffee with dairy cream, fruit juices, alcoholic beverages and wine from Styrofoam cups. Red wine will instantly dissolve the styrene monomer. Do not eat oily foods from Styrofoam containers,” the university says. It also advises against microwaving the containers.
A 2007 study published in the Journal of Environmental Sciences came to a similar conclusion: that Styrofoam cups leached styrene when in contact with warm liquid.
The Guardian recently looked at the impact the ban will have on food vendors in New York, who rely on the cheap takeout material. A halal cart owner named Shamim told The Guardian that packs of 100 Styrofoam containers sell for just $12, and that he uses between 120 and 150 containers every day. He is open to the ban as a means to make the city more environmentally sound, but he told the paper that he would have to raise the prices on his menu if he is forced to use more expensive packaging.
“I will agree with them, but they have to give us the alternative,” he said.
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Updated | While initial reports following Wednesday's attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris described the gunmen as lone wolves, authorities now believe that at least one of the three suspects, Cherif Kouachi, was tied to a Parisian radical cell that has been around for a decade. Cherif and his brother, Said, were named as the primary suspects in the deadly attack on the magazine's Paris headquarters, which left 12 people dead.
Late Thursday, a U.S. official was cited by The New York Times as saying that Said Kouachi recieved terrorist training by an Al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen in 2011 before returning to France. News of the suspects' backgrounds comes as French police continue searching for the two brothers, and as people around the world hold vigils mourning those deaths. (A third suspect turned himself over to police.)
Cherif Kouachi is believed by authorities to have been associated with a radical cell comprised in the mid-2000s of seven men from France, Morocco and Algeria and based in the city’s 19th arrondissement, one of three in Paris popular with Muslim immigrants.
Back then, the group was part of what historian Jean-Pierre Filiu has called the third wave of “Middle Eastern–inspired terror” in France.
Authorities believe Farid Benyettou was the leader of the “Nineteenth Arrondissement Iraqi Networks,” as Filiu writes in The Evolution of the Global Terrorist Threat: From 9/11 to Osama Bin Laden’s Death. The group was given that name because certain members traveled from France to fight American forces in Iraq. Benyettou, whose family is of Algerian origin, was born in Paris in 1981. Reports on him from over the years cite that he was turned to radical Islam and militant tendencies by a brother-in-law, with whom he lived when he was around 16. That man, an Algerian, was arrested and deported in 1998 for planning to attack France during the World Cup there.
By the time Benyettou was 22, Filiu writes, he was spending his time perusing jihadi websites and dressing in garb that primarily only Muslim preachers wore. When the mosque he belonged to expelled him, he joined another; it was there, The Washington Post says, that he worked as a janitor and met Cherif Kouachi, now 32, whom French authorities suspect participated in the Charlie Hebdo attack along with his brother, Said, 34.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Images of the suspects released by police.Paris Police
“Benyettou operated in the margins of the religious community, defying the older imams and scorning their speeches,” Filiu writes. Benyettou, whom followers called Abu Abdallah, Filiu adds, “built up his own brand of Salafi-esque preaching, far from any established guidance, with a strong emphasis on jihad.”
Benyettou became outspoken against the American presence in Iraq and the French government’s banning of the veil in public schools, but his rhetoric at the time was nonviolent: “We have to fight in France,” he said, according to Filiu, “but we should not fight with weapons nor throw bombs. France has not declared war on us.”
Still, the 19th arrondissement group continued to radicalize through training in the nearby Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, as documented in a France 3 video from 2005 that Channel 4 resurfaced today, and by traveling to Iraq to fight. There, having limited arms training and knowledge of Arabic, several of Benyettou’s followers are believed to have died in combat.
In 2005, Benyettou and Cherif Kouachi planned to go to Iraq through Damascus, but police arrested them for “criminal association in relation to a terrorist enterprise.” “Farid told me that the scriptures offered proof of the goodness of suicide attacks. It is written in the scriptures that it’s good to die as a martyr,” Kouachi said at the time, according to Channel 4. “Thanks to Farid's advice, my doubts evaporated,” he continued. “He provided a justification for my coming death."
“I think in Mr. Benyettou he found someone who could tell him what to do, like an older brother,” an attorney for Kouachi told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review at the time.
The two men were sentenced in 2008; Cherif Kouachi, then 26, received a three-year sentence. (He was soon released, having already served that amount while awaiting trial.) Benyettou, then 27, admitted to having convinced 10 people to go to Iraq and said he taught others about jihad and suicide attacks. He received a six-year sentence. Filiu notes that their story became so well-known that it served as the unofficial inspiration for a French made-for-TV movie, Jihad. “There has been no mention in the Paris trial of any plan to attack French sites, but officials say they remain worried about the possibility,” the AP wrote at the time. Other members of the ring were sentenced to jail as well.
It is unclear what became of Benyettou following his release and whether or not he and Kouachi reconnected. Filiu tells Newsweek that Benyettou “has been off the radar” since then. He would have been released around 2011.
“This is one of the problems; people swept up a decade ago, who served at least some time in prison…were further radicalized upon release,” Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor and one of the editors of The Evolution of the Global Terrorist Threat, published last October, tells Newsweek. Hoffman says that because of Kouachi’s decade-old connections, the suspects in the Charlie Hebdo attack were more “wolf pack” than “lone wolf.”
“There is a default always to deny there is some terrorist organization or organizational entity behind it,” Hoffman says, “that it’s one lone, deranged individual that is not part of a sustained campaign…This is something that is part of a sustained radicalization process.”
Here in Paris, night has fallen and the national day of mourning has come to a close. The country is trying to recover from Wednesday’s horrific attack on Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine, after gunmen stormed its offices, killing 12 and injuring others.
Early Thursday morning, still shaken, and trying to hustle my son to school, I heard that a 27-year-old policewoman was shot in south Paris. She died later in the afternoon. While her death has not been linked to the Charlie Hebdo shooting, French prosecutors are calling it a terrorist related incident. Now, there’s an urgent manhunt on the street for the killers, and all day, the sound of sirens have blared across Paris, where nearly everyone feels raw and vulnerable. There hasn’t been an attack like this here in decades. But what made the assault so chilling is that the killers were focused and well-trained. They had a plan, both to attack and to escape. It was calculated, and the victims were called out by name.
At noon on Thursday, the nation continued to mourn. There was a moment of silence and the bells rang out at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. They echoed throughout the city, and you could hear them across the Seine. After the last bell tolled, people—many standing beneath umbrellas—clapped and sang "La Marseillaise." Some held journalists’ pencils in the air, while others carried signs that read, JE SUIS CHARLIE. ("I am Charlie"). François Hollande, the French president, who addressed the nation earlier, solemnly stood in the rain at police headquarters, his face hardened into a grimace. Tonight, some people returned to the Place de la Republique and the Charlie Hebdo offices. Others are still placing candles in their windows, a tribute to the victims and a sign of solidarity.
Paris is a sturdy place. It endured the Nazi occupation, and in my neighborhood, nearly every corner has plaque for someone who fought and died in the Resistance. In the 1990s, there were a series of terrorist attacks, and people learned to live with them. Nevertheless, people are shaken. As French the security forces searched for the suspected killers, Said and Chérif Kouachi, many people I know stayed at home on Thursday. The metros were empty. And tourists seemed to be the only ones getting their bags checked at the entrance of Le Bon Marché, the chic Left Bank department store—even though Wednesday was the first day of the massive January sales.
While France is still in shock, there is also a great sense of unity and resolve. Now more than ever, the ideas that drove the creation of the French Republic—liberty, fraternity and equality—are needed to repair the trauma created by the Charlie Hebdo assault. As former President Nicolas Sarkozy put it on Thursday, after setting aside his rivalry with Hollande to come to the Èlysèe Palace: “It was a declaration of war on civilization.”
The extremists will likely twist that statement to reinforce their false narrative: That there is a war between Europe and the Muslim world. What makes this more terrifying is the prospect of a backlash by nativists on the far right. As France’s security forces comb the country’s north for the killers, everyone knows how easy it is to cross European borders. To travel from France to Belgium is like going from New York to Connecticut. The right uses this fact as an excuse to close the country off from immigration. But with Syria exploding and the refugee situation growing increasingly dire this winter, shuttering the borders would be cruel and reinforce the wrong message.
With more young Europeans leaving the continent for holy war abroad, we are undoubtedly vulnerable to further attacks. The wars in Iraq and Syria and the rise of the Islamic State, ISIS, have contributed to the surge, but we shouldn’t forget the underlying roots of the problem. Even before the shooting, France was a fragile society in flux. The dollar is getting strong; the euro is not. Unemployment is high. Job prospects are grim. And there is an entire generation of disenfranchised French-born Muslim youth who feel they have no opportunities or future.
Life in the banlieues—the grim high rises that house many Muslim immigrants on the outskirts of French cities—is hopeless and hard. Unless you’re extremely lucky or motivated, getting out is unlikely. Chérif Kouachi, the younger of the two brothers, is a prime example. Now 32, he was reportedly raised in foster homes, and later held menial jobs delivering pizza, among other things, before seeking solace in radical Islam. He also reportedly smoked pot and listened to rap—two activities, which on some level, offer a glimpse of normality, a sense that their paths did not have to lead to gunfire and bloodshed.
Nothing excuses the brutal crimes of the Charlie Hebdo shooters, who killed in cold blood. But as we seek justice for their terrible acts, we shouldn’t forget where they came from. Unfortunately, my fear is that the Charlie Hebdo murders will do the opposite. That it will feed the extremists on both the left and the right. That it will activate the nationalists who see Islam as the root of all evil in this country, and it will radicalize Muslims still unsure of their place in French society. Already, there are early signs of the repercussions. Several mosques have been set on fire, and some Muslims claim they’re being eyed suspiciously wherever they go. Marine Le Pen, the angel of the extreme right, grows more powerful and more frightening every day. As the manhunt for the suspected killers continues, somehow, France needs to also find a way to defeat radical Islam, to allow disenfranchised Muslims to feel at home in this country and mollify the fears among many here that their neighbors could someday become their assassins.
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(Reuters) - Record-breaking cold that gripped the U.S. East and Midwest on Thursday snarled travel, shut schools, filled homeless shelters and even led to zoo penguins being ordered inside.
Snow expected to accumulate to 3 feet (1 meter) deep was falling in upstate New York near Watertown, and snow already blanketing South Dakota was whipped by winds into a "ground blizzard" that made driving treacherous, said meteorologist Dan Petersen of the National Weather Service.
The coldest place in the country on Thursday was Estcourt Station, the northernmost point in Maine, with temperatures of minus 38 degrees F (minus 39 C), he said.
Records were broken from Montpelier, Vermont, at minus 20 F (minus 29 C), to Jackson, Kentucky, with minus 1 F (minus 18 C), he said. Snow flurries were reported as far south as Jacksonville, Florida.
"It's the face, it's like being hit with a sheet of ice," Bart Adlam, 40, president of U.S. yogurt supplier siggi's, said as he rode a bike through Times Square on his way to work at 8 a.m. in New York. The wind chill there made 9 degrees F (minus 12 C) feel like 2 below (minus 18 C), according to Weather.com.
Cold bitter enough to freeze fuel lines on school buses forced schools to close from Portland, Maine, to Chicago. Train rails cracked by the cold caused delays for commuters in Washington, D.C. Weather also hung up U.S. air travel with 1,937 delays and 515 cancellations by mid-afternoon, according to FlightAware.com.
In Pittsburgh, two baby African penguins were moved indoors at the National Aviary, where the endangered animals that are native to South Africa will remain until temperatures rise.
Frostbite could set in with just 15 minutes' exposure to the frigid air, the weather service said, advising people to keep pets indoors.
'THREE PAIRS OF SOCKS'
In Boston, incoming Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker shortened the outdoor portion of his inauguration ceremony out of concern it was too cold for spectators, a spokesman said.
"It's cold but I'm bundled up," said Willie Council, 65, a homeless man rocking back and forth to stay warm on K Street, Washington's corridor for lobbyists and lawyers. "I’ve got on three pairs of socks but I don’t have any boots.”
Chicago's biggest homeless shelter filled its beds to capacity, putting some of the overflow crowd on mattresses on the floor while others spent the night on the streets.
A man was found dead in a portable toilet on the Northwest Side of Chicago on Wednesday, according to police. The cause of 51-year-old Marek Bobak's death was cold exposure and coronary artery atherosclerosis, the Cook County Medical Examiner determined on Thursday.
Even sledding hills around Chicago and ice-skating rinks in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, were shut down because of risk of wind chill, while Maine's Sugarloaf Mountain closed ski trails because of "Arctic conditions."
Temperatures also plummeted to an uncharacteristic 10 to 15 degrees F (minus 12 C to minus 9 C) overnight across the Gulf Coast. In South Carolina, the odd snowflake on the beach drew excited observers outside to watch in wonder.
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