Trump campaign emails

What these two interviewers had in common is that they were white men. If you have sat in as many White House briefings as I have, you know the president does not react favourably to being challenged like this by women. He very quickly gets hot under the collar. He was so “triggered” by a twentysomething female CNN reporter, Kaitlan Collins, that just before one press conference, White House staff tried to move a male reporter into her allocated front-row seat so she would be pushed to the back of the room and not be in Trump’s eyeline. There are endless more examples. … [Read more...] about Why Donald Trump failed his TV interviews

Under election-year pressure from the US president, Donald Trump, for a deal allowing him to bring American troops home, the war-torn country’s grand assembly, or Loya Jirga, on Sunday approved the release, a controversial condition raised by the Taliban militants to join peace talks. … [Read more...] about Afghanistan agrees to free 400 ‘hardcore’ Taliban prisoners

Zuckerberg is not Kim Jong-un. He’s much, much more powerful. “My guess is that all these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough,” he is reported to have told employees last week. And although 500 companies have now joined the boycott, the Wall Street Journal reports this represents only a 5% dip in profits. It may turn out that Facebook isn’t just bigger than China. It’s bigger than capitalism. … [Read more...] about Facebook is out of control. If it were a country it would be North Korea

Yet that pride can be corrosive. Along with the general rise of online bigotry and incivility, we have seen uglier extremes of geek culture entering the mainstream in recent years. There was Gamergate, for example, in which female game developers and critics of video game sexism were subjected to abuse, death threats, rape threats and doxxing (discovery and revelation of personal information such as home address, phone numbers and bank details) by a vengeful, anonymous online community. A similar hate campaign – Comicsgate – was directed at comic book creators deemed to have embraced progressive, feminist or leftwing values, on the part of what could be seen as afar-right geek fringe. One comic’s artist claimed they were “standing up against what they see as a hard push by social justice warriors into their hobby”. The hatred has also been directed at movies, such as 2017’s The Last Jedi and Black Panther, whose foregrounding of women and people of … [Read more...] about The new nerds: how Avengers and Game of Thrones made everyone geek out

Bolsonaro’s actions are part of a trend of frightening attacks against press freedom in Brazil. Defamation campaigns and political persecution are the lifeblood of the Bolsonaro administration. They are often led by the so-called “Office of Hate”, an illicit network of bloggers, prominent businessmen and lawmakers close to Bolsonaro, who spread fake news and attack our democratic institutions. The group is currently is under investigation by Brazil’s supreme court. … [Read more...] about Jair Bolsonaro accused me of spreading ‘fake news’. I know why he targeted me