"Steven Spielberg directs Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks in The Post, a
thrilling drama about the unlikely partnership between The Washington
Post’s Katharine Graham (Streep), the first female publisher of a major
American newspaper, and editor Ben Bradlee (Hanks), as they race to
catch up with The New York Times to expose a massive cover-up of
government secrets that spanned three decades and four U.S. Presidents.
The two must overcome their differences as they risk their careers – and
their very freedom – to help bring long-buried truths to light."
One wonders what impact the current Paradise Papers revelation will have compared to the Pentagon Papers.
The Equifax credit reporting agency, with the aid of thousands of
human resource departments around the country, has assembled what may be
the most powerful and thorough private database of Americans’ personal
information ever created, containing 190 million employment and salary
records covering more than one-third of U.S. adults.
Some of the information in the little-known
database, created through an Equifax-owned company called The Work
Number, is sold to debt collectors, financial service companies and
other entities...
But salary information is also for sale by Equifax through The Work
Number. Its database is so detailed that it contains week-by-week
paystub information dating back years for many individuals, as well as
other kinds of human resources-related information, such as health care
provider, whether someone has dental insurance and if they’ve ever filed
an unemployment claim...
How does Equifax obtain this sensitive and secret information? With the
willing aid of thousands of U.S. businesses, including many of the
Fortune 500. Government agencies -- representing 85 percent of the
federal civilian population, including workers at the Department of
Defense, according to Equifax -- and schools also work with The Work
Number..
"But it's not in the interest of lenders to stop sharing information with the credit rating agencies, Horn said. It could hurt the accuracy of the credit reports they buy back."
Developed in the 1970s as a tranquilizer for large animals such as elephants and bears, the synthetic opioid has also been studied
as a potential chemical weapon by countries including the US, China and
Israel. It is thought to have been deployed with disastrous effects
when Russian special forces attempted to rescue hundreds of hostages
from a Moscow theatre in 2002.
But it only burst into public view last year after officials across
North America began to warn that it was being cut with heroin and other
illicit drugs, leaving a rash of overdoses and deaths in its wake.
“An amount as small as a grain of sand can kill you,” Dr Karen
Grimsrud, Alberta’s chief medical officer, told reporters after traces
of carfentanil were found in the bodies of two men who had overdosed.
“Carfentanil is about 100 times more toxic than fentanyl and about 10,000 times more toxic than morphine.”..
The remarks came after Canadian police – protected by hazmat suits
and oxygen containers – seized one kilogram of carfentanil hidden inside
cartridges labelled as printer ink and which had been shipped to
Vancouver from China.
Given the purity of the substance seized, police estimated that the package could contain as many as 50m lethal doses – enough to wipe out the entire population of the country.
Scary. And I bet it's not hard to synthesize. Could be aerosolized via drones in a city or at a stadium.
Reports of this have been appearing for several years, but The Guardian has just compiled a longread with excellent illustrations:
Dozens of warships believed to contain the remains of thousands of
British, American, Australian, Dutch and Japanese servicemen from the
second world war have been illegally ripped apart by salvage divers, the
Guardian can reveal.
An analysis of ships discovered by wreck divers and naval historians
has found that up to 40 second world war-era vessels have already been
partially or completely destroyed. Their hulls might have contained the
corpses of 4,500 crew...
The rusted 70-year-old wrecks are usually sold as scrap but the ships
also contain valuable metals such as copper cables and phosphor bronze
propellors.
Large “crane barges” have been photographed above wreck sites, often
with huge amounts of rusted steel on their decks. At the seabed, divers
have found ships cut in half. Many have been removed completely, leaving
a ship-shaped indent.
Cambodian, Chinese and Malaysian-registered vessels have been spotted
above shipwrecks. In some cases, their crews have been arrested. In one
case, the looters had acquired a letter from a Malaysian university which said the work was authorised as “research”...
Archeologists believe the criminals might be turning a profit because
the hulls are one of the world’s few remaining deposits of
“low-background” metals. Having been made before atomic bomb explosions
in 1945 and subsequent nuclear tests, the steel is free of radiation.
This makes even small quantities that have survived the saltwater
extremely useful for finely calibrated instruments such as Geiger
counters, space sensors and medical imaging.
Some ancient ships, often centuries-old Roman vessels in European
waters, have also been salvaged for their lead, which is also
low-radiation and is used in nuclear power stations.
With a population of around 2.8 million, Buenos Aires has at least
734 bookstores – roughly 25 bookshops for every 100,000 inhabitants.
Worldwide, only Hong Kong comes close, with 22 bookshops per 100,000,
followed by Madrid in a distant third with just 16 and compared to a
mere 10 bookshops for every 100,000 for London...
...opened as a theatre in 1919 and converted into a giant bookstore 15
years ago, the Grand Splendid still boasts the beautiful ceiling
frescoes painted by an Italian artist almost a century ago. Around 1
million customers visit it each year to browse through its gargantuan
21,000 square feet showroom, or withdraw into one of the old theatre
boxes perched for a leisurely read."
"The history of art has been rewritten after archeologists
unearthed an astonishing 3,500 year old carving of an ancient Greek
battle, depicting human bodies in anatomical detail which was thought
way beyond the skill of Bronze Age artisans.
In 2015, the tomb of the so-called ‘Griffin Warrior’ was
discovered near the ancient city of Pylos, southwest Greece, containing
the remains of a powerful Myceneaen warrior and a treasure trove of
burial riches...
The
seal, named the ‘Pylos Combat Agate’ has been hailed as one of the
finest works of prehistoric Greek art ever discovered and may depict the
mythological war between the Trojans and Mycenaeans, which was told in
Homer’s Iliad hundreds of years later.
“What is fascinating is that the representation of the human
body is at a level of detail and musculature that one doesn’t find
again until the classical period of Greek art 1,000 years later."..
Researchers are baffled as to how ancient craftsmen were able to create the minute scene without microscopes.
“Some of the details on this are only a half-millimeter big,” added Prof Davis. “They’re incomprehensibly small.
Actor Harrison Ford took a swipe at Washington on Thursday night, blasting lawmakers and leaders who deny climate change.
During
a speech to the environmental group Conservation International in
Culver City, Calif., where he was receiving an award, Ford said the
biggest threat to the United States is leaders that don't understand or
accept evidence that human activity is driving rapid climate change.
"We
face an unprecedented moment in this country. Today’s greatest threat
is not climate change, not pollution, not flood or fire," Ford said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. "It’s that we’ve got people in charge of important shit who don’t believe in science."
Ford,
an outspoken and longtime advocate for environmental causes, cast the
threat posed by climate change as a dire one in his speech, arguing that
unless it is addressed quickly, "nothing else will matter."
"Knowing a book’s relationship to other books often means you know more about it than you do on actually reading it... we also forget a very large percentage of the books we have actually
read, and indeed we build a sort of virtual picture of them that
consists not so much of what they say but what they have conjured up in
our mind. So that if someone who hasn’t read a book cites nonexistent
passages or situations from it, we are ready to believe that they are in
the book..."
Excerpted from an essay by Umberto Eco at The Paris Review (in turn excerpted from Chronicles of a Liquid Society).
Photo: The Oberlausitzische Library Of Science (Gorlitz, Germany).
Related:
"You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and
the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you
menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread
books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary."
