France's Marine Le Pen's flat form - Financial Times

MARCH 6, 2015 by: Anne-Sylvaine Chassany and Roula Khalaf in Paris
She calls for the collapse of the EU and talks about nationalising banks. She sees the US as a purveyor of dangerous policies and Russia as a more suitable friend. She wants to bring an end to immigration and believes the republic is under Islamist assault.
Radical as Marine Le Pen’s vision for France may be, the prospect of her National Front (FN) policies becoming reality is no longer pure fantasy.
“It’s the Front’s moment,” Ms Le Pen declares in an interview with the Financial Times.
Two months after the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine and a Jewish supermarket in Paris, the far-right party has cemented its standing as the most dynamic political force in a frightened and frustrated country; its 46-year-old leader now regarded as a possible winner of the presidency in 2017. Polls place the FN ahead of the centre-right UMP and ruling Socialist parties in the first round of this month’s local elections, with one giving it about 33 per cent of the vote.
The soaring popularity of a party that for decades seemed consigned to the fringes has raised alarm bells across the political spectrum. President François Hollande spoke this week of the need to “snatch” voters back from the FN, calling its rise, in an interview with Le Parisien, “a collective failure”.
Much of the credit for the FN’s political momentum goes to Ms Le Pen’s deliberate efforts to enlarge her base since taking over the party in 2011, but also to the malaise afflicting a France in which the economy has stagnated for the past three years while unemployment has risen above 10 per cent.
Ultimately, quitting the euro is the only solution, she says. “We are told it’s going to be catastrophic, that it will rain frogs, that the Seine will turn into a river of blood,” she says. “There aren’t that many practical problems.”
Marine Le Pen lays out radical vision to govern France
National Front leader is the biggest political force ahead of a presidential election in 2017

National Front leader Marine Le Pen has cemented her position as the biggest political force in France
MARCH 6, 2015 by: Anne-Sylvaine Chassany and Roula Khalaf in Paris
She calls for the collapse of the EU and talks about nationalising banks. She sees the US as a purveyor of dangerous policies and Russia as a more suitable friend. She wants to bring an end to immigration and believes the republic is under Islamist assault.
Radical as Marine Le Pen’s vision for France may be, the prospect of her National Front (FN) policies becoming reality is no longer pure fantasy.
“It’s the Front’s moment." Miss Le Pen declared in an interview with the Financial Times.
Two months after the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine and a Jewish supermarket in Paris, the far-right party has cemented its standing as the most dynamic political force in a frightened and frustrated country; its 46-year-old leader now regarded as a possible winner of the presidency in 2017. Polls place the FN ahead of the centre-right UMP and ruling Socialist parties in the first round of this month’s local elections, with one giving it about 33 per cent of the vote.
The soaring popularity of a party that for decades seemed consigned to the fringes has raised alarm bells across the political spectrum. President François Hollande spoke this week of the need to “snatch” voters back from the FN, calling its rise, in an interview with Le Parisien, “a collective failure”.
Much of the credit for the FN’s political momentum goes to Ms Le Pen’s deliberate efforts to enlarge her base since taking over the party in 2011, but also to the malaise afflicting a France in which the economy has stagnated for the past three years while unemployment has risen above 10 per cent.
Ultimately, quitting the euro is the only solution, she says. “We are told it’s going to be catastrophic, that it will rain frogs, that the Seine will turn into a river of blood,” she says. “There aren’t that many practical problems.”

To detoxify the FN’s brand, she has distanced herself from anti-semitic comments made by her father and party founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has described the gas chambers as “a detail” of the second world war. There are times, she says, when she and her father disagree. “But I am the president of the National Front and he’s the honorary president. I determine the . . . line.”
In a small office in a nondescript modern building in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, the fast-talking Ms Le Pen comes across as a single-minded politician, at ease with every subject while glossing over challenges or contradictions in her policies. “I’m not here to run a boutique. I’m here to reach power and to return it to the French people,” she says. “That’s my role.” Constantly in motion, and seemingly in a rush, she tends to sit on the edge of her seat, fiddles with her pen, combs her fingers through her blond hair or inhales on her electronic cigarette.


    * Much of the political class still considers the FN a xenophobic party that spreads the politics of fear and has sanitised its façade but not its substance. A new book, Marine Le Pen Prise Aux Mots (Marine Le Pen taken at her word), questions whether the updating of her vocabulary amounts to real change at the FN.
What is clear is that Ms Le Pen’s promise of simple solutions to seemingly intractable social and economic problems is striking a chord with a disenchanted public.

Le Pen, French farmers and the euro
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She sneers when asked to judge the government’s plan to tackle homegrown jihadism, rattling off her own list of hardline measures, including a zero-tolerance policy towards attacks on French secularism, enforcement of French-speaking preachers in mosques and stripping dual-nationality jihadis who fight abroad of their French citizenship. Going further, Ms Le Pen also wants a radical overhaul of French foreign policy in which relations with the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad would be restored and those with the likes of Qatar and Turkey, which she alleges support terrorism, reviewed.
She calls the US “the most discredited power in the [Middle East] region” and says it cannot be seen as a partner in the global struggle against jihadis. Instead, defeating the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the group known as Isis, will only be achieved by involving Russia.

With her father, former FN president Jean-Marie Le Pen
On Ukraine, too, the French government has largely followed the wrong policies, she argues, blaming the EU for provoking the crisis and the US for encouraging a rupture with Moscow. “Rejecting Russia, as we are stupidly doing, it . . . is throwing Russia into the arms of China and we will have reason to kick ourselves for it,” she says.
That Moscow is looking to build ties with political parties in Europe, a source of anxiety in EU capitals, is perfectly legitimate, she insists, defending a €9m loan to her party by a Russian bank said to be close to president Vladimir Putin. Not one bank in France or across Europe was willing to lend to the FN, she says: “If tomorrow an American bank wants to buy the loan, I would immediately accept, if it is at a more favourable rate.”
To expand her base among the working class, this supposedly far-right politician has not hesitated to borrow themes from the left. She has, for example, championed public services and presented herself as the protector of workers and farmers in the face of “wild and anarchic globalisation”.

Leaving the euro would mean the end of the eurozone, she says, but it would allow France to boost exports with a weaker Franc. Because nearly all public debt would be converted into the Franc, the overall burden would remain unchanged, she insists. When asked about the risk that foreign investors, who hold about two-thirds of French sovereign debt, might refuse to roll over loans or demand higher interest rates, she replies: “Of course there are issues but the benefits are much greater.”
Ms Le Pen’s economic programme will face increasing scrutiny as the 2017 campaign draws closer. In the meantime, her focus is on building the FN’s local government expertise: for all its rapid growth, the party boasts only two MPs and 15 local mayors, a few of whom have already courted controversy.
Is the FN ready to rule? Ms Le Pen shrugs. It’s not experience that France needs, she says: “We need to get out of the system. We’re in a system that is a little rotten. We need a fresh pair of eyes.”
Marine Le Pen in her own words
On immigration and jihadism:

Anarchic mass immigration over the past 25 years has created places where the [French] Republic has retrenched at the benefit of religious laws imposed by a few . . . There’s a link between immigration and radicalisation.”
Anti-Muslim sentiment:

There is no Islamophobia in France. There aren’t any anti-Muslim acts — or no more than acts against women . . . or short people. But there is a rise in anti-Semitism.”
France leaving the euro:

We are told it is going to be catastrophic — that it will rain frogs, that the Seine will turn into a river of blood. It is the apocalypse, according to Barroso, Juncker and Co. There aren’t that many practical problems.”
Vladimir Putin:

Putin is most probably an authoritarian leader, but is it possible to govern Russia without being authoritarian? To reject Russia the way we do . . . is pushing Russia into the arms of China. And we will kick ourselves.”
Her father and party founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen:

“It is like the weather in Brittany: it’s sunny several times a day . . . it rains several times a day. He’s a character. We talk. We sometimes disagree.”
The National Front:

Globalisation has brought more pain than happiness . . . the pendulum is swinging back. It is the nations’ time. It is the Front’s moment.”
Germany:

I am not against Germany. I think Germany defends its interests. What I see is that France does not defend its interests.”
Her political inexperience:

The French need new people who break free from bad habits. We are in a system that is a little rotten. We need a fresh pair of eyes.”
What they say about her...
François Hollande, president of France:

It is a collective failure when an extreme-right party is the first party of France. It does not mean that those who vote for the FN are convinced by its theses. Because this temptation is anger in the face of crisis [and] an expression of rejection and fear.”
Manuel Valls, French prime minister:

“In France, the extreme right and Marine Le Pen are at the gates of power. And as a man of the left, I will never resign myself to it. Because the weakest would be the first to suffer. And it would be a major blow, fatal perhaps, against Europe.”
Timeline of the Front National
1972: National Front is created in a move to unify French far-right groups that challenged the independence of Algeria. Jean-Marie Le Pen becomes president.
1974: FN wins 0.7 per cent of votes in presidential elections.
1976: Mr Le Pen’s family apartment in Paris is dynamited. Marine, eight at the time, is present. The case is never solved.
1986: Thirty-five FN candidates are elected to parliament.
1988: Mr Le Pen secures 14.4 per cent of votes in the first round of presidential elections.
1998: Split in the FN after a power struggle led by Bruno Mégret
1999: FN attracts 5.7 per cent of votes in European elections.
2002: Mr Le Pen makes it to the second round of presidential elections with 16.86 per cent of votes before losing to Jacques Chirac.
2011: Marine Le Pen succeeds her father as FN president; Mr Le Pen becomes the party’s honorary chairman.
2014: FN wins 25 per cent of votes in European elections and makes big gains in local elections.

Why so many Koreans are fed up with their president- Economist

Why so many South Koreans are fed up with their president
SINCE the country’s democratic transition in the late 1980s, every former South Korean president has been ensnared by corruption scandals. But in their unpopularity none has plumbed the depths of Park Geun-hye: for the past fortnight her approval rating has stood at 4%, down from a high of over 63% in mid-2013, six months into her term. Her reliance on an erstwhile confidante and friend, Choi Soon-sil, who used her connections to obtain funds and favours, has been the president's undoing. Ms Choi has been indicted for coercing South Korea’s biggest business groups to funnel 80bn won ($70m) into two foundations that she controlled. Ms Park has become the first sitting president to be accused as a criminal accomplice. A parliamentary vote on a motion to impeach the president is set for December 9th. The scale of these allegations is the most evident explanation for the popular outrage over the scandal, which touches on sensitive themes in South Korea, including the fiddling of highly competitive university admissions (for Ms Choi's daughter); the power of cults; and the collusion of elites in business and government. But none of these are new to South Koreans. Yet a broad cross-section of South Korean society has poured out onto the streets in massive rallies. Four-fifths want to impeach the president. What makes this scandal different?
Part of the reason is that the allegations have fed into, and for some confirmed, longheld concerns about the influence of the Choi family over Ms Park. Ms Choi’s father, Choi Tae-min, a six-times-married shaman cult leader, befriended Ms Park after her mother died during a failed assassination attempt on her father, Park Chung-hee, a former dictator. In one of her three recent mealy-mouthed apologies, Ms Park specifically denied one rumour: that shamanistic rituals had been held at the Blue House, the presidential office. Local media have portrayed Ms Choi as a puppeteer controlling Ms Park, managing everything from her wardrobe choices to policy on North Korea. South Koreans have been taken aback by such incompetence. But to Ms Park’s critics it is all of a piece with her leadership style: imperial, aloof and out of touch with her people. Her press conferences have been scripted and rare. Despite enormous popular resentment, she has not explained her whereabouts during seven hours on the day that a South Korean ferry sank in 2014, when 300 drowned, many of them schoolchildren. Many had long worried that the “Queen of Elections”, as she was nicknamed in her early political years, had surrounded herself with courtiers: mainly yes-men who had advised her father.
If she was greeted by foreign observers as South Korea’s first female leader, many at home find parallels to the peninsula’s last (Queen Min of the late 19th century regularly sought the advice of shamans, two of which she employed in her court). For many, Ms Park’s political legitimacy was inherited from her parents; she took over official duties as first lady after her mother was shot. In 2012 a former aide, Jeon Yeo-ok, wrote in a memoir that to Ms Park “South Korea was her country, built by her father; the Blue House was her home; and the presidency was her family job”. And, in imperial tradition, Korean presidents have kept a lot of power: they appoint and fire ministers, including the prime minister. So when things go wrong, they tend to be blamed. The botched government response to the ferry accident in 2014 uncovered corruption in the coast guard and regulatory bodies; but it was Ms Park who was the primary target of people’s anger.
Her parentage has always sat uncomfortably with younger voters, many put off by the idea of a dictator's daughter governing democratic South Korea. But most striking has been the turning away of her longstanding fans and voter base: conservatives in their 50s and 60s, nostalgic for Park, who credit him with having made South Korea prosper. They feel she has betrayed them, as well as her father’s legacy. Some memorials to Park have been defaced recently, including a hall at his birthplace that was set on fire last week (indicating how closely the two are linked in popular minds). In a visitors’ book at the hall, one entry said that Ms Park had “tarnished her father’s reputation”. Her political opponents, including the mayor of Seoul and liberal MPs, have said that she is damaging the national pride by holding on to power. In presidential elections after Ms Park’s expected early departure, South Koreans will be looking for a candidate who might restore it.
Economist

Trump only craves for applause nothing else - Economist

The impresario-elect
Washington is becoming more comfortable with Donald Trump
THE elites of Washington are starting to feel better about Donald Trump. A sense of relief is creeping over them after the president-elect ditched several impossible campaign promises and named conventional conservatives, including a former Goldman Sachs banker, for some big jobs, offsetting the hard-right nationalists and populists given posts in his inner circle. For a moment they thought America might have elected a true demagogue, beholden to a pitchfork-wielding mob. They wondered if the businessman meant it when he roared “Drain the swamp in Washington!” at pre-election rallies, and vowed to ban lobbyists from his government. Now they think they see a cynic like so many others in politics, who ran as an outsider but will govern as an insider. He seems more manageable than they had feared.
Mr Trump is not an ideologue, the lobbying, business, diplomatic and political classes murmur approvingly. Just you wait, they predict, he will ditch his most crazily populist ideas, from starting a trade war with China to mass deportations, while allowing Republicans in Congress to cut taxes and slash business regulations. True, if he increases spending on infrastructure or defence then deficits might explode. But with luck the economy will boom, keeping Mr Trump’s fieriest supporters happy.
They draw comfort from the array of conservative bigwigs, pillars of Congress and retired generals he has summoned for job interviews. Take foreign policy. Candidate Trump alarmed grandees from both parties with his cooing praise for President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Their fears ebbed once his search for a secretary of state led him to interview figures with more orthodox views, including Mitt Romney, who as the Republican nominee in 2012 called Russia America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe”, and a former general, David Petraeus, who in 2015 claimed Mr Putin wanted to “resurrect the Russian empire”. The Mr Trump of TV debates appalled conservatives by praising government-run universal health care in places like Scotland. President-elect Trump soothed Republicans by naming as his health secretary Representative Tom Price of Georgia, a surgeon-congressman who seems to view government-run medicine as something like gangrene. Pondering so many mixed signals, Trump apologists cross their fingers, squint a bit, and declare that they see a political pragmatist who may yet preside over a rather normal administration.
These folks are probably deluding themselves. All candidates worry about pleasing their supporters or building coalitions, even as they craft policies that reflect their core beliefs. But it is striking how often public acclaim is Mr Trump’s first and last concern. Explaining in an interview with the New York Times why it would be “nice” for America and Russia to fight Islamic State together, he imagined how, if his plan succeeded: “The people will stand up and give me a massive hand.” Over Thanksgiving weekend aides publicly questioned giving the State Department to Mr Romney—who had, after all, called Mr Trump a “fraud” during the election. The president-elect reportedly argued that Mr Romney “looks the part” of a world statesman—sounding more like a casting agent than a man assembling a government.
Those parsing Mr Trump’s “Drain the Swamp” slogan for clues to his opinions about government reform should have been with Lexington at a rally in Kinston, North Carolina, on October 26th. Freshly disembarked from his Boeing 757, Mr Trump had just begun a thunderous attack on Hillary Clinton’s health policies when he was distracted by a “Drain the Swamp” sign. “Look at that,” he marvelled. When his team had coined the phrase three days earlier he had disliked it, he confided. But then he used it and “the place went crazy.” Now, he beamed, “It’s the hottest, it’s like, trending all over the world…So we like that expression.”
Many note how Mr Trump was helped by reality television, which made him an icon of success. But his rise recalls an older American tradition: vaudeville shows. In their heyday, just over a century ago, chains of vaudeville theatres spanned the continent, with big impresarios claiming to entertain 5m patrons a year. Shows of a dozen or more acts would make audiences gasp, weep and laugh in rapid succession—speed was a vaudeville obsession, as it is with Mr Trump, who promises to bring change “so fast”. A history of the genre, “Vaudeville Wars” by Arthur Frank Wertheim, records how working men in cheap seats were wooed with turns like the “Two Skull-Crackers”, whose mock combat ended with an axe-blow to a performer’s head (beneath a cork- and steel-lined wig), or the “Diving Venus”, a beauty in a tight bathing-suit who plunged into a glass tank. Respectable matrons were lured with such “dignity acts” as opera singers from Europe. Theatre-managers were told to ignore their expert tastes when judging performers: what counted was audience reactions.
The skull-crackers
America has elected an impresario-president. Imagine him peering past theatre footlights through clouds of cigar smoke, checking that every row is full and each face rapt. There is no guarantee that will make him a pragmatist: indeed, perhaps because he has so few fixed beliefs (beyond protectionism), he has appointed ideologues to key positions, like a vaudeville boss crafting a playbill to sell every last seat. His team so far includes hardline nationalists alongside conservative technocrats like his chosen transport secretary, Elaine Chao, the wife of the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Nor are grassroots supporters forgotten. He has claimed credit for strong-arming Carrier, a maker of air-conditioners, into keeping 1,000 jobs in Indiana, rather than sending them to Mexico. He has fired off tweets proposing, in breach of the constitution, that those who burn American flags should lose citizenship. If Washington grandees are shocked, they misunderstand Mr Trump. He has a knack for sensation. Applause is his drug. Elites are naive to imagine that this will make him more manageable. It is his show now.

Economist

Trump is tweeter-in-chief and ignores the press - Financial Times

Tweeter-in-chief rewrites the media’s rule book
Trump continues to set the news agenda without the need to hold a press conference
DECEMBER 3, 2016 by: Barney Jopson in Washington and Anna Nicolaou in New York
Politicians should campaign in poetry and govern in prose, goes the adage. But Donald Trump has changed little in his shift from campaigner to president-in-waiting. He remains more polemic than poetic and is holding tight to his favourite tool for spreading bombast: Twitter.
This week, it was as if the tweeter-in-chief was back on the campaign trail, the master communicator with smartphone in hand, setting the news agenda for a frustrated press forced into soul-searching over how to cover him.
He used the messaging app to suggest that flag burners be thrown in jail; to moot scrapping the US-Cuba detente; to complain of fraud in an election he won; and to promote a gloating campaign-style rally where he mocked his vanquished
“It’s genius and it’s frightening. It’s communications without the advantage of the frontal lobe. There’s no inhibition,” says Richard Levick, chairman of Levick, a veteran Washington communications guru who has advised multiple governments.
“It’s the 21st century version of the sound bite presidency. He’s the tweetbite presidency. Twitter is by definition not the location where you would spend time to provide thoughtful analysis.”
Had he not nominated James “Mad Dog” Mattis as defence secretary or lured aspiring secretary of state Mitt Romney to a dinner of frog’s legs, one could have forgotten he would soon be president. He did not offer any new policy details as a reminder.
Reporters hungering for something substantive to cover were treated to a mix of teaser tweets — Mr Trump announced a news conference on December 15 about “leaving” his business interests — and pistol whipping.
The president-elect tweeted that CNN was adrift after its “total (100%) support of Hillary Clinton” and slammed the “nasty, dishonest press” at his Ohio rally, pointing a finger at the media pen and prompting jeers from the crowd. “Shall I go on with this a little longer? I love it,” he said.
It’s communications without the advantage of the frontal lobe. There’s no inhibition
Richard Levick, veteran Washington communications guru
Mr Trump has not spoken to reporters or held a press conference since his victory, making the media wait longer than any other president-elect since at least Jimmy Carter. Nor has he accepted the tradition of a “pool” of reporters travelling with him.
His condemnation of the media has succeeded in undermining trust in institutions fact-checking his false claims. On the campaign trail, he even mused openly about rolling back the freedom of the press.
Last week CNN’s Christiane Amanpour called on journalists to “accept that we’ve had our lunch handed to us by the very same social media that we’ve so slavishly been devoted to”. She said: “We face an existential crisis. A threat to the very relevance and usefulness of our profession.”
Susan Glasser, editor of the Politico news service during the 2016 campaign, said: “Trump as well as his Democratic adversaries have the same tools to create, produce, distribute, amplify, or distort news as the news industry itself — and are increasingly figuring out how to use them.
“The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news,” she wrote on Friday.

Trump's phone call with Taiwan destroyed 37 years of US-China relations - Economist

Donald Trump’s phone call with Taiwan’s president spreads alarm

AT SOME point, almost all American administrations hit a crisis with China, usually early on. A mid-air collision involving an American spy plane in 2001 sent George W. Bush’s then-new White House into full crisis-management mode. Donald Trump faces his first China crisis before even taking office.
The trigger for the flap was a phone call on December 2nd between Mr Trump and Tsai Ing-wen, the elected president of Taiwan. She offered her congratulations, said Mr Trump, and the two talked about strengthening Taiwan’s defence and economy. It sounds routine.  But it overturned four decades of diplomatic practice. Neither American presidents nor presidents-elect have spoken officially to the leaders of Taiwan since 1979, when the United States broke off diplomatic ties with the island and switched to the People’s Republic. China holds Taiwan to be a renegade province and regards communications with Taiwanese leaders as interference in its internal affairs. As leaders who have talked with the Dalai Lama have discovered, foreign meetings with someone of whom China disapproves can infuriate the Chinese government.
Most American foreign-policy experts were also appalled at what looked like careless trampling over decades of finely tuned diplomacy (see article). In response, Mr Trump took to Twitter to declare that “The president of Taiwan CALLED ME today,” as if that made any difference (in this context, even using the word president offends China). It is almost impossible to imagine Ms Tsai telephoning America’s president-elect on her own initiative. Her spokesman, Alex Huang, said the call had been pre-arranged, though he would not say by whom.
By far the most likely candidate is one of Mr Trump’s team of advisers. Taiwan’s semi-official Central News Agency, quoting unnamed sources, said the contact man was Edwin Feulner, a former president of the Heritage Foundation, a think-tank in Washington. Others named Stephen Yates, a deputy national-security adviser under the Bush administration, and still others, John Bolton, Mr Bush’s ambassador to the UN, who has said America ought one day to restore full diplomatic recognition to Taiwan. All three are conservative anti-communists who want to tilt American policy further away from the government in Beijing. Mr Trump’s phone call seems to suggest their influence is strong at the moment.
The reaction in Taiwan was celebratory. “People from different political camps all agree that this has brought Taiwan back to the table,” said Hsu Yung-ming, a lawmaker with the New Power Party, which is aligned with Ms Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party. The opposition Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, offered grudging support. Many ordinary Taiwanese say the call gave Taiwan some of the international recognition it craved and deserved.
China reacted cautiously. Wang Yi, the foreign minister, lodged a formal diplomatic protest, said nothing would change the world’s recognition of China, and then turned to the congenial task of blaming Taiwan for everything (he described the call as a “petty trick”). His caution is understandable. Chinese leaders are used to hearing their country bashed on America’s campaign trail and have learned to be wary of political rhetoric. Mr Trump is only president-in-waiting, so the call could be construed as unofficial.
China reacted cautiously. Wang Yi, the foreign minister, lodged a formal diplomatic protest, said nothing would change the world’s recognition of China, and then turned to the congenial task of blaming Taiwan for everything (he described the call as a “petty trick”). His caution is understandable. Chinese leaders are used to hearing their country bashed on America’s campaign trail and have learned to be wary of political rhetoric. Mr Trump is only president-in-waiting, so the call could be construed as unofficial.
Anyway, it is not clear whether a policy shift is in the making, or how much of one. Mr Trump spent much of the campaign trampling on the norms of domestic political debate. It is possible he has decided to do the same thing with diplomatic niceties, too. In the words of Bonnie Glaser of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, another think-tank in Washington, “President-elect Trump is just shooting from the hip, trying to take phone calls of congratulatory messages from leaders around the world without consideration for the implications.”
Some newspapers in Taiwan and America offered a different explanation, suggesting Mr Trump’s family business was behind it all. The Trump empire has shown interest in buying a hotel development near Taipei’s international airport. Although the appearance of a conflict exists, it is a doubtful explanation. Taiwanese tourism is in precipitous decline. Its government is falling over backwards to attract foreign investors. And the development in question, the Taoyuan Aerotropolis Project, has been canvassing hotel chains all over the world for years. Mr Trump would not need to offer the Taiwanese government anything in return for buying hotel space.
But if one of his advisers really were responsible for setting up the phone call, then that would suggest that the call was neither brash nor corrupt, but substantive. How much so is another matter. It could be anything from a small upgrade in ties with Taiwan within the framework of existing American policy to a more thorough-going rethink. Either way, China has cause for circumspection. As Shi Yinhong of Renmin University in Beijing puts it, concern about Mr Trump is growing.

You’re not just imagining it: the Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump vote totals do look rigged - Bill Palmer Report

You’re not just imagining it: the Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump vote totals do look rigged

By Bill Palmer | November 17, 2016 |

As a political journalist, I hate empty conspiracy theories. I like to go where the bulk of the evidence is pointing. So even though I’m as shocked at Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton as anyone else, I have been unwilling to preemptively accuse the vote totals of having been rigged or altered. It’s taken me nine days of looking at the numbers and trends and patterns, but I’ve come to the conclusion that for once, the conspiracy theorists appear to have been right: this election looks rigged.

There is no single smoking gun in the voting results which led me to this conclusion of its own accord. Rather it’s the totality of all of what I’m about to lay out which has led me to the conclusion that there was indeed something fishy with the numbers, the sheer number of highly unlikely red flags. So bear with me as I lay out a mountain of evidence.

What first made me suspicious was the notably low general election voter turnout. Pundits have explained that away by pointing out that Clinton’s favorability rating was fairly low and Trump’s was even lower. But throughout the primary season, the American voters made clear that they very much wanted to turn out for or against these two candidates. And despite all the talk about favorability, these two candidates each got millions more primary votes than any of their challengers. So the notion that the 2016 election would receive two and a half million fewer votes than the 2012 election, which most Americans considered to be a far less consequential election, is odd. But the demographic breakdowns are what truly raise eyebrows.

Some have pointed to voter suppression in certain swing states as the supposed reason for lower voter turnout. But the 2012 election was subject to the same kinds of suppression. And for that matter, so were the 2016 primary contests. Despite the voter purging and long lines, we saw African-Americans in southern states come out of the woodwork to vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 democratic primary, even though they didn’t necessarily dislike Bernie Sanders. But according to the official tallies, those same African-Americans in North Carolina suddenly decided they no longer cared if Hillary Clinton won the 2016 general election, even though she was now facing an opponent in Donald Trump whom they viewed as an abhorrent racist.

Other states and other demographics raise other red flags. For instance, somewhere around seventy percent of all the votes cast in the 2016 general election in Florida were cast early. Various exit polls pointed to Hillary Clinton receiving as somewhere between 54% and 59% of the Florida early vote, much of it from Hispanic-Americans. That meant Trump would have had to have received somewhere between 59% and 71% of the election day voting in Florida in order to have caught up and tied the state. He would have needed between 62% and 74% of the election day vote to have won it by the one percent overall margin he supposedly won it by.

Although democrats tend to do somewhat better in early voting and republicans tend to do somewhat better on election day, it’s virtually impossible for Trump to have come back and won Florida after it was already basically in the bag for Clinton before election day even arrived. See my full mathematical breakdown for Florida voting in the middle of this article for why he simply couldn’t have come back to even tie up Florida, let alone win it.

There has also been much made of how the polls ended up being so wrong. Having spent the past year and a half observing the polls in this election, I fully agree that it’s easy for one or two polls to end up being very wrong. We saw it all the time in the primary season. But historically speaking, going back through the eighty years in which presidential polling has been conducted, it’s virtually impossible for the polling averages to have been this thoroughly wrong. In fact the last time they got a Presidential general election wrong outside the margin of error was in 1948 – and polling was unsophisticated crap back then.

But nevermind the overwhelmingly unlikely odds of the 2016 polling averages having been wrong. The more immediate trend is one which we saw during the primary season. In any given hotly contested primary state, Donald Trump tended to perform the same as, or worse than, his polling averages. We saw it in his very first contest in Iowa, where he shockingly lost despite being favored. We saw it again in Wisconsin and other states. In contrast, Hillary Clinton tended to perform about the same as, or better than, her polling averages in most states. For instance she was favored to win South Carolina by around twenty points and she won it by more than forty points.

In a general election matchup between one candidate who had spent the past year underperforming his poll numbers, and one candidate who had spent the year outperforming her polls numbers, the logically expected outcome is that Hillary Clinton would have won by the same amount she was ahead in the polling averages or more. Now she did win the popular vote in the general election by around one percent. But logically, based on the final polling averages and the existing pattern observed in the primaries, she should have won it by four points or more.

Finally, there were four swing states in which Hillary Clinton was definitively favored to win, but she ended up losing: Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvnia, and Michigan. In the final tallies she lost each of them by right around one percent of the vote. That’s not how numbers work. If Trump had won those four states legitimately due to pockets of voters that pollsters didn’t know about, we would have seen a more random dispersion of the results. Trump might have won one of those states by four percent, won another of them by two percent, lost another one percent, and so on.

It is statistically suspicious that in every state where Donald Trump pulled off an upset, he won it by right around one percent, just what he needed to win it, no more and no less. Results don’t naturally play out that way. The final tallies in Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvnia, and Michigan read like someone went through and nudged each of them just over the mark so Trump would win them, but didn’t want to arouse too much suspicion by giving him any larger of a victory in those states than he needed.

So where does all of the above get us? It’s a mountain of statistical and mathematical and logical and demographic discrepancy and suspicion and nothing more. I can’t definitively prove that the vote tallies were rigged. And as a practical matter it would be so tricky for a hacker to rig the results in various states, without any of the local precinct overseers catching on, that no one has even been able to posit a plausible method for pulling it off. But still, these things can’t all have legitimately happened.

In order to believe that the official vote tallies are legitimate, you have to accept that all of the above legitimately happened: African-Americans in the south went from turning out in droves for Hillary Clinton in the primary to not caring if she won the general election. Donald Trump got sixty-something percent of the same-day voting in Florida. The polling averages were wrong for the first time in modern history. Trump beat his poll numbers despite having spent the primary season tending to fall below them. Clinton fell below her poll numbers despite having spent the primary season tending to beat them. In every state where Trump pulled off a shocking upset victory, he just happened to do it with one percent of the vote. And in an election that everyone cared particularly deeply about, no one really turned out to vote at all. I can accept any one of the above things happening as an isolated fluke. I cannot accept all the above happening. And so for once in my evidence-driven career, I’m left to believe that the conspiracy theorists are right: the vote tallies are rigged.

3 Key Lessons to Starting a Successful NGO, According to an Effective Poverty Fighter - Fortune

3 Key Lessons to Starting a Successful NGO, According to an Effective Poverty Fighter Posted: 02 Dec 2016 09:47 AM PST A cyclone in 1970 that killed hundreds of thousands of people in Bangladesh changed the course of Sir Fazle Hasan Abed’s life and the lives of the 150 million his organization has since pulled out of poverty. At the time of the disaster, he saw bodies of men, women, and children floating in the shallow waters of a bay. “That shocked me,” he said at the Fortune – Time Global Forum in Rome on Friday. “Suddenly, I thought the life I was leading had no meaning at all. I was so disconnected from the poor like this.” The revelation prompted Abed to leave his job at Shell Oil and eventually start BRAC, now the largest non-governmental organization on the planet with over 110,000 employees and an institution that’s considered the world’s most effective at eradicating poverty. BRAC started as a relief operation called the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee in 1972 to help the nation recover from the cyclone and its war of independence from Pakistan. It soon morphed into a larger effort to eliminate poverty and empower women through social and economic channels. Today, it has commercial enterprises like a printing press, retail outlets, and the private BRAC University that help fund its development programs. Last year, Abed won the 2015 World Food prize for his “unparalleled” work on reducing poverty in Bangladesh and 10 other nations. On the Global Forum stage, Abed reflected on his life’s work and shared what he says are the keys to a successful anti-poverty program. They boil down to: Be ruthless in your targeting  Perfect the process  Scale  Most anti-poverty programs are “not designed well,” Abed said. “They don’t reach the poorest of the poor; they are not targeted properly. I think what is needed are small pilot projects to make it effective.” Then, he said, a leader must make the project efficient by converging essential tasks and cutting non-essential ones. The final step is to scale. Abed also emphasized the importance of a program’s sustainability. (Eighty percent of BRAC’s $1 billion budget in Bangladesh is self-funded through its commercial enterprises; the rest comes from donors.) He cited research by a historian who examined 500 16th century institutions in Europe—only 33 of them survive today. Of those, 29 are universities. “Why universities?” Abed asked, “All societies obviously needed leaders, and those leaders were trained by universities. Plus, [universities] have always changed with the evolving needs of society.” This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

What Starbucks’ New CEO Means For Your Daily Coffee Fix - TIME Business

What Starbucks’ New CEO Means For Your Daily Coffee Fix Posted: 02 Dec 2016 07:41 AM PST It’s the end of an era for the global corner coffeeshop: Howard Schultz is stepping down as Starbucks’ CEO. And investors are uneasy about it. Shultz announced the move Thursday in a statement released right after the stock market’s official trading session ended. He will take on the title of executive chairman, while Starbucks President and COO Kevin Johnson will assume the CEO role. Both men held a conference call to reassure investors that, far from disrupting Starbucks’ long history of success, the moves will pave the way for future growth. Shultz will remain at Starbucks, but will focus on building out new categories of stores, such as the high-end, 15,000 square-foot Roastery it opened in Seattle. Johnson will focus on running the 25,000 stores Starbucks has in 75 countries, drawing on his experience at Microsoft and Juniper Networks to employ technology aimed at keeping customers coming to its coffeeshops. So iconic is Shultz as a retail CEO, however, that Starbucks shares dropped 4% on the announcement. Nor did the stock recover much after repeated assurances from both executives that this was “an evolutionary process” that has been in the works for several months as Starbucks charted out a five-year strategic plan. Evolutionary or not, it came as a surprise to investors. “I’m here every single day,” Shultz said. “And I’m going contribute to what I think is a significant growth opportunity of a new franchise within Starbucks.” For his part, Johnson underscored he won’t be running Starbucks alone. “Over the last two years, we’ve worked much more closely together,” he said. “Our offices are connected. We talk several times a day. We brainstorm.” Read more: TIME’s 2015 cover story about outgoing Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz Shultz joined Starbucks in 1982 after working for a Swedish housewares company and noticing the a small Seattle store was buying more cone filters than anyone. He bought Starbucks in 1987, expanded into other cities and took the company public in 1992. In 2000, having brought the company to $2.2 billion in annual revenue, Schultz stepped down. Eight years later, Schultz returned as CEO after the stock entered a prolonged slump that saw its value decline 80% over a two-and-a-half year period. Once Schultz returned, Starbucks’ stock went on a tear that pushed it to new heights, rising more than 500%. FindTheCompany | Graphiq Over the past year, however, that rally has stalled, with the stock down 9% from its record high of $64 a share. Schultz says retailers in general are undergoing a “seismic shift away from bricks and mortar toward online retailing.” Starbucks isn’t immune to the loss of foot traffic, which is why he’s embarking on a new kind of coffeeshop designed to become what he calls “relevant consumer destinations.” Starbucks plans to open as many as 30 Roastery stores in coming years, including one in New York and another in Shanghai, which feature on-site roasting and $12 cups of coffee. Schultz said the Roastery stores will feature baked goods from the Italian restaurant Princi as well as “a broader category” that Starbucks will unveil at its investor day on Dec. 7. The company will also build as many as 1,000 smaller stores under the Starbucks Reserve brand, which will offer high-end coffee without the on-site roasting, while remodeling many older stores to include Reserve espresso bars. Johnson, meanwhile, will work to improve customer engagement with initiatives like loyalty programs, app-driven orders and digital payments. Given Schultz’ lifelong entrepreneurial bent, the plan the company has outlined for growth into high-end stores makes sense. The chief concerns are that the new stores could cannibalize business from its traditional stores and that pulling Schultz away from a $21 billion enterprise could lead the stock lower. One analyst on today’s call called Schultz a “master merchant” and asked whether “that merchant gene and level of entrepreneurial spirit” would remain in the managerial team. Another asked why this changing of the guard would be different from the last time Schultz stepped down 16 years ago. “The differences between then and now couldn’t be greater,” Schultz said. “I don’t think there’s ever been a time in the company’s history with a pipeline of product innovation.” For now, investors don’t seem so sure. The new roles for Johnson and Schultz may prove to be just what Starbucks needs for its next chapter. But don’t change the fact that there is a difference between a capable CEO and an iconic one.

Trump's Taiwan phone call concerns China - The Age

Trump's Taiwan call concerns China

China resolutely opposes any form of official exchanges between the US and Taiwan, says a Chinese official after US President-elect Donald Trump spoke directly with the Taiwanese leader.

As well as being the first president or president-elect to have spoken to a Taiwanese leader since at least 1979, when the US severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan as part of its recognition of the People's Republic of China, Trump is likely to have infuriated China by referring directly to Tsai as "President of Taiwan".

The telephone conversation, hailed by Taiwan's Central News Agency as "historic", will prove a test for the flexibility of Beijing's foreign policy calculations. It may deem it more prudent to privately remind Trump's transition team of the sensitivity of straying from the delicate diplomatic dance practised by previous US presidents.

Hardliners will hope it fuels further strategic mistrust and prevents reaching common ground on economic and security conflict.

"This is a petty trick on the part of the Taiwan side, it absolutely has no possibility of altering the One-China consensus reached in the international community," Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told reporters on Saturday, according to Phoenix Television. "The One-China policy is the bedrock of the healthy development of Sino-American relations; we do not wish to see this political foundation meet with any disruption or damage."

Beijing may well take its time to ascertain whether the Trump transition team intended the call with Tsai to indicate sweeping changes in US policy toward Taiwan.

But under President Xi Jinping, more than his recent predecessors, China has taken a hardline approach to any perceived threat to its sovereignty. That, despite an environment where Taiwan is led by the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party, public attitudes in Hong Kong are increasingly toxic toward the mainland, and bitter territorial disputes fester in the South and East China Seas.

"Chinese leaders will believe that [Trump's] message will encourage Tsai Ing-wen to continue even further to resist pressure from the mainland so this is a very serious and negative development," Shi Yinhong, professor of international relations at Renmin University told Fairfax Media.

"This is a reminder that the Chinese media's and many scholars estimation about Trump's possible attitude toward China have proved somewhat too optimistic."

Here’s Why Thanksgiving Shoppers Spent Less This Year - Associated Press

Here’s Why Thanksgiving Shoppers Spent Less This Year

Posted: 27 Nov 2016 07:14 PM PST

NEW YORK — Thanksgiving weekend shoppers picked up hot toys, TVs and new Apple products, buying both online and in stores, but spent less per person because of rampant discounting that they’ve come to demand.
Once all the receipts are in, customers look to have spent an average of $289.19 over the four-day weekend, down nearly 3.5 percent from a year ago, based on a survey by the National Retail Federation. The pressure on prices was especially strong on products like TVs.
More than 154 million customers said they had shopped or planned to this Thanksgiving weekend, up from 151 million a year ago, according to the survey conducted Friday and Saturday by the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics. And more were doing it online, as about 99.1 million went to the stores and 108.5 million shopped online.

Carmen Cunnyngham of Kansas City, Kansas, was in Denver on Sunday and decided to stop at the mall to pick up a new pair of Ugg boots for her daughter. They were discounted at Nordstrom, which is one of her favorite places to shop. She said she got a bit of a late start this year because of the presidential election, so she’s been looking online for deals and jumping when she sees them.
“I’m trying to make sure I get the wish lists in and look at those and shop and do what I can before Christmas gets here,” she said.
The drop in spending underscores how even with an improving economy, many shoppers are still focused on habit developed during the Great Recession. They’re fixated on deals and more readily using technology to find them whenever they want to buy. More than a third of customers surveyed by the NRF said that all of their purchases were on sale, up 11 percent from a year ago.
The Thanksgiving weekend kicks off the holiday shopping season but stores have increasingly started their sales earlier. Stores had been wary about being left with a lot of inventory they would have to discount to get off the shelves, and so started the season with less on hand. That will help preserve profit margins, but they’ve still planned aggressive promotions to grab shoppers.
“People are much more deliberate about the purchases they make,” NRF CEO Matthew Shay said Sunday. “In a perfect world, everyone would sell at full price, but as consumers and as buyers all of us would like to get a deal on things we buy. The era of promotional sales is with us to stay.”
Even though shoppers are spending less per person, more shoppers could still translate into more spending. MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse, which tracks spending on all kinds of payments, estimated that spending over the four-day weekend will be up 3.8 percent, with online sales up by double-digit percentages and in-store sales up in the single digits. But MasterCard Advisors’ Sarah Quinlan also cited a slight decline in the average sale because of promotions.
Stores trying to snag customers first and compete with Amazon are shifting to a steady stream of online discounts and alerts instead of focusing on doorbuster sales on a few products. That meant that online shopping stole thunder away from sales at stores. And while areas like electronics and toys remained strong for the weekend, clothing, particularly basic sweaters, were still a tough sell.
Shoppers are visiting fewer stores and the rate at which browsers converted into buyers was slightly lower than last year, said William Taubman, chief operating officer at Taubman Centers Inc., which operates 24 malls around the country. But he said overall customer traffic was up. After a contentious presidential election, he believes people are ready to buy.
“Resolution is a good thing,” he said. “That makes people feel somewhat more comfortable.” And for wealthier customers, he said, the prospects of tax cuts will help.
Janice Allsop, 66, a retired secretary who worked in the trucking industry, said she’ll likely spend more this year because of the election.
“The stock markets have gone up. I’m just delighted with President Trump,” said Allsop, who was shopping at Water Tower Place mall in Chicago on Saturday. “I’m not afraid (to spend more). If Hillary Clinton would have gotten in, I would have been very scared, very reluctant.”
But shoppers may still be split. Joyce Hill, a 67-year-old retired auto worker from Inkster, Michigan, who was also shopping in Chicago. Hill said she will stay on the low end of her usual spending this year because she’s worried that Trump will start to cut back on Social Security.
“I’ll spend less because you don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t think he’ll (Trump) support us but I don’t know if he’s gonna let things stay status quo,” said Hill.
Even though the weekend brings many out shopping, Black Friday usually vies with the Saturday before Christmas as the busiest sales day. This year the calendar means Dec. 17 is the big contender, says Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners. The NRF survey found that fewer shoppers had finished their holiday buying and more hadn’t even started compared to a year ago.
“We’ve seen in recent years that most places will have good sales after Black Friday comes and goes, so we don’t have to do everything this weekend,” said William Junkin, who was at the Best Buy store in Howell, New Jersey, on Thursday night. “We’ll see how it all plays out.”
___
Associated Press writers Sadie Gurman in Denver, Don Babwin in Chicago, Bruce Shipkowski in Howell, New Jersey and Josh Boak in Washington, D.C. contributed to this report.

The reality behind Russian's fake news in 2016 election - CNN

(CNN) - The 2016 presidential race was rife with disinformation, none more blatant than fake news -- hoaxes, half-truths, outright lies -- that flashed through the internet at warp speed.
Take, for example, "Pizzagate," a made-up story of a pedophilia ring supposedly being run out of a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor by none other than Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman John Podesta.
Fueled by conspiracy theorists posting on social media sites like Reddit, Facebook and Twitter, the story picked up so much traction that The New York Times and the Washington Post were forced to track it down, finally debunking it.
Then there were the stories about Clinton's health. Not just her actual September bout with pneumonia, but other stories claiming she had a brain injury and was losing her mind.
Western media, for the most part, are blaming Moscow, accusing the Kremlin of exploiting fake news to damage Clinton, help elect Donald Trump, and undermine the American electorate's faith in their government.
The Kremlin has consistently denied it tried to interfere in the election.
Two new studies that were cited by media outlets, including the Washington Post, claim Russia used "thousands of botnets, teams of paid human 'trolls,' and networks of websites and social-media accounts" to "echo and amplify" false or misleading tweets, Facebook posts, videos and media reports.
The first study -- "Trolling for Trump: How Russia is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy" -- appeared in early November in War on the Rocks, an online magazine.
"Russia's propaganda mechanisms primarily aim for "alt-right and more traditional right-wing and fascist parties," Clint Watts, one of the co-authors of the paper, tells CNN, but they're also "hitting across any group in the United States that is anti-government, or fomenting dissent or conspiracies against the US government and its institutions."
Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and senior fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University co-authored the study alongside two other researchers, Andrew Weisburd and J.M. Berger.
"It's not exclusive to Trump," Watts explains. "They are huge in the white nationalist community. That's where we saw them before they went to Trump. And then they try on the left as well."

Who's behind the misinformation push?
Watts says that, during the election campaign, three main groups traded in fake news: passionate Trump supporters; people out to make money by driving followers to their websites with "click bait" stories; and the Russian propaganda apparatus.
Each group used social platforms differently and the research team used various social media metrics to distinguish the behavior among them. Content from "click bait profiteers," for example, is absorbed in a different way to propaganda content.
That doesn't mean Moscow would turn down an opportunity to exploit fake news created by someone else who supports the Russian line.
"They'll use it too," he says. "They see it as free propaganda."
But importantly, Watts says, Russia's goal wasn't just to elect Trump. "The goal is to erode trust in mainstream media, public figures, government institutions -- everything that holds the unity of the Republic together."

Trapped in social 'echo chamber'
The second study was conducted by an anonymous, self-described "non-partisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds" who call themselves PropOrNot.
The group says it, too, analyzed tweets and other social media messages ricocheting around the web and found many of the same phrases, which it interpreted as indicating that they came from the same single source.
In some cases, fake news was spread knowingly; in other cases, activists and others simply picked up and passed on tidbits they liked, in what the authors describe as an "online echo chamber."
Their conclusion: Russia has made "large-scale, long-term efforts to build online 'fake news' propaganda outlets with significant audiences in the US."
"We are not exaggerating Russia's influence," the group told CNN in an emailed statement. "Many different groups spew fake news but Russia is currently the industry leader."

A fake news blacklist
PropOrNot's report lists 200 websites that qualify, according to their criteria, as "Russian propaganda outlets" reaching, they claim, at least 15 million Americans. The effort, they say, is "at least semi-centralized."
"There are varying degrees of involvement in it, and awareness of involvement," their report says. "Some people involved seem genuinely unaware that they are being used by Russia to produce propaganda, but many others seem to know full well."
But other digital experts criticize that approach, saying it is too broad and includes sites that are legitimately expressing their own views, even if they happen to coincide with Russia's messaging.
As Ben Nimmo, information defense fellow with the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, puts it: "There's more to this than the Kremlin."
"To reduce this all to 'Oh, it's the Russians doing it' is to ignore the very real problem that there is the alt-right doing this in the US, and you've got convinced people in Germany and France who are doing this. You've got people in the UK as well, apparently as of their own conviction," he says.
"If they all hate America, and they all hate Clinton, and they all hate America having an active foreign policy, sure they're going to share stuff."
In a written statement emailed to CNN, PropOrNot defended both its methods and its mission.
"Our list was never intended to be 'black.' We highlight these outlets because we believe that the public should be able to know that very disparate kinds of online outlets frequently display a strong bias towards Russia in ways that echo, repeat, are used by, and redirect their audiences to Russian official and semi-official state media. We highlight. Unlike the Russian government, we do not censor."
Since the report's publication, the group says it has removed some websites -- ones that "have made a case for their independence" -- from its list. In other cases, it says, it has added new sites "especially ones which are directly owned and controlled by governments that suppress and restrict free media."

'Firehose of falsehood'
A third study by the Rand Corporation and George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs delves even further into what it labels Russia's "firehose of falsehood."
"The Russian propaganda model," the report says, "is high-volume and multichannel, and it disseminates messages without regard for the truth. It is also rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it lacks commitment to consistency."
All that makes it extremely difficult to counter, the report says. Facebook and Google have promised to crack down on fake news but it appears little has been done so far. After outlining measures to prevent the proliferation of more fake news on Facebook, the social platform's CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote: "We've made significant progress, but there is more work to be done."

What Russian media thinks
RT, the Russian media company, and the Russian news service Sputnik -- both state-financed -- feature prominently in most reports on Russian propaganda. The Washington Post article, quoting researchers, accuses the outlets of "sometimes" including "false and misleading stories in their reports."
RT dismisses the Washington Post story as a "hit piece."
"RT has never engaged in any such activity -- which is, perhaps, why WashPo failed to provide a single piece of evidence or reference," Editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, tells CNN.
"It is particularly troubling," she says, "that, prior to publishing the piece, the Washington Post did not even bother to seek a comment from RT, as a right of reply would be the minimum in standard journalistic practice when making such libelous claims ... It seems ironic that in its eagerness to comment on the 'fake news' phenomenon, the outlet would follow in a similar vein in its own editorial approach."
Asked for a response, the Washington Post tells CNN: "While we did quote the Kremlin denying any interference in the US election, we should also have obtained separate comment from RT, a network funded by the Russian government. Its comment was later included in the online version of the story."
Simonyan insists that RT is "most highly concerned about the 'fake news' phenomenon because ... it is perfectly acceptable for the mainstream media to promote fake news -- as long as it's about Russia or RT."

More leaks ahead?
During the US presidential campaigns, most fake news blasted Clinton and praised Trump but expert Clint Watts says the President-elect can't count on Moscow's benign approach continuing.
"I would assume that if Trump doesn't support Putin's policies then they're next," he cautions.
In spite of Russia's denials and Trump's doubts, cybersecurity experts say Russia likely hacked not only Democrats' emails but Republicans' as well.
"We think they have thousands of people's emails," Watts tells CNN. "As those people rise in prominence or become more important in a Russia context, [Moscow] will use more and more data dumps to undermine the integrity of people.
"That's just ammunition. They're going to hold it until they need it."

Apple Watchers Wonder: What’s the Next Big Thing? - TIME

Apple Watchers Wonder: What’s the Next Big Thing?

Posted: 23 Nov 2016 06:17 AM PST

Every time someone asks AppleCEO Tim Cook when the company’s next new products are coming, Cook assures them they’re just around the corner. It’s just that Apple, to maintain its competitive edge, refuses to tip its hand.
When Apple announced its quarterly earnings last month, one analyst asked whether the company was in “a gap period” in which new products aren’t quite ready. “We have the strongest pipeline that we’ve ever had, and we’re really confident about the things in it,” Cook replied. “But as usual, we’re not going to talk about what’s ahead.” Another asked why the Cupertino, Calif. firm’s research and development spending had more than doubledin three years, growing much more quickly than revenue. Cook would only say that some of that spending would go to products in development.

For some, Cook’s discreet act is starting to look old. Apple released the iPod in 2001, the iPhone six years later and the iPad three years after that. All three have defined or redefined their markets in ways that the Apple Watch or Apple TV haven’t. It’s coming up on seven years since the iPad was unveiled, and Apple doesn’t seem to have its next big hit ready for showtime.
For investors, this is leading to impatience — and worry. Apple recently posted its first annual revenue decline in 15 years. Its stock is down 6% over the past year, despite paying investors $12 billion in dividends and $29 billion in stock buybacks. By contrast, the Nasdaq Composite is up 5%. And Apple’s longtime rival Microsoft is up an even more impressive 13%.
Under Steve Jobs, Apple became the corporate equivalent of Hank Aaron, a champion slugger. Five years into the Tim Cook era, Apple has managed some decent base hits, but it’s coming up short on homers. The company is far from broken, posting quarterly revenue of $46.9 billion in the most recent period. But that figure, impressive in a vacuum, marked a nearly 10% drop year-over year. And the iPhone, which makes up nearly two thirds of Apple’s revenue, saw revenue decline by 12% last fiscal year. The company synonymous with Silicon Valley innovation is now in need of a major hit.

FindTheCompany | Graphiq

“The cracks are showing in the Apple wall of invulnerability,” Oppenheimer & Co. analyst Andrew Uerkwitz wrote in a research note this week. He predicts the iPhone’s next release will offer “one last ‘growth’ hurrah.” And then? “Apple is about to embark on a decade-long malaise,” Uerkwitz said, arguing that Apple lacks the courage to lead in growth areas like artificial intelligence (AI) and the cloud.
Other analysts have expressed similar worries, though few of them so bluntly. Still others jumped to Apple’s defense. “I think they’re making a big mistake,” CNBC’s Jim Cramer said of Apple’s doubters. Technology analyst Horace Dediu, speaking at an investment conference, said that Apple has been de-emphasizing the notion it’s a hit-driven business, an expectation that has overshadowed its success in other areas.
Apple’s defenders can make a strong case. Revenue from services such as music streaming and Apple’s mobile app store grew by 22% in its last fiscal year, more than doubling the growth rate of fiscal 2015. Apple’s Other Products category, which includes the Apple Watch, Apple TV and Beats audio products, grew by 11%. Products that saw revenue decline, like the iPhone and MacBooks, recently received significant upgrades that will likely boost revenue in coming quarters.

There are also signs that Apple could unveil new products over the next year or so that could bring in new sources of revenue, if not replicate the iPhone’s smashing success. Apple is reportedly working on digital glasses that connect to an iPhone and display images through augmented reality. Some technology leaders, including Apple’s Cook, believe augmented reality will be bigger than virtual reality.
Health care is another area of potential growth for Apple. By building on its health apps and devices like the Apple Watch and iPhone, “Apple is on the cusp of playing a larger role in the healthcare industry,” Merrill Lynch analyst Wamsi Mohan wrote in a research note. That would put Apple in a unique position “to better monitor their health and interact with medical professionals in a seamless way relative to current methods.”
But there are also recent moves that support the Apple skeptics. The first MacBook Pro redesign in four years received lukewarm reviews, with some calling it “a step forward and a step back” and others concluding Apple was “shooting for a future it can’t quite reach.” Apple is also delaying shipments of its wireless AirPods and backing out of making products like routers and monitors. And it’s scaled back its automotive ambitions, too.
Cook has told investors Apple’s innovation pipeline is as healthy as its ever been. If so, the bigger questions are when new products will arrive, and how impressive they’ll be. The spirit of skepticism embraced by many on Wall Street is lowering the bar of expectations. If and when Cook does deliver a home run, it will catch many by surprise.

Donald Trump’s Phone Conversation With the Leader of Pakistan Was Reckless and Bizarre - TIME

Donald Trump’s Phone Conversation With the Leader of Pakistan Was Reckless and Bizarre
The U.S. President-elect's ill-considered words could have serious regional and global consequences
There are few foreign policy topics quite as complicated as the relationship between India and Pakistan, South Asia’s nuclear-armed nemeses. Any world leader approaching the issue even obliquely must surely see the “Handle With Care” label from miles away, given the possibility of nuclear conflict.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, however, doesn’t seem to have read the memo, injecting a pronounced element of uncertainty about the position of the world’s only remaining superpower on this most complex of subjects in a call with the Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
According to a readout of the conversation from the Pakistani authorities, he apparently agreed to visit the country and said he was “ready and willing to play any role that you want me to play to address and find solutions to the outstanding problems.” He reportedly added: “You are a terrific guy. You are doing amazing work which is visible in every way.”

Trump’s Economic Cabinet Picks Signal Embrace of Wall St. Elite - New York Times

In a campaign commercial that ran just before the election, Donald J. Trump’s voice boomed over a series of Wall Street images. He described “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations.”

The New York Stock Exchange, the hedge fund billionaire George Soros and the chief executive of the investment bank Goldman Sachs flashed across the screen.

Now Mr. Trump has named a former Goldman executive and co-investor with Mr. Soros to spearhead his economic policy.

With Wednesday’s nomination of Steven Mnuchin, a Goldman trader turned hedge fund manager and Hollywood financier, to be Treasury secretary, a new economic leadership is taking shape in Washington.

The Trump White House

Stories on the presidential transition and the forthcoming Trump administration.

Trump Heads to Indiana to Bask, as Democrats Take Aim at Nominees

DEC 1

Gary Cohn, a Potential Successor at Goldman, Could End Up With Trump

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DEALBOOK

Steven Mnuchin, Expected Treasury Pick, Is an Outsider to Public Policy NOV. 30, 2016

Mr. Mnuchin will join Wilbur L. Ross Jr., a billionaire investor in distressed assets, who has been chosen to run the Commerce Department, and Todd Ricketts, owner of the Chicago Cubs, who has been picked to be deputy commerce secretary. All are superwealthy and to be overseen by the first billionaire president in United States history.

That two investors — Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Ross — will occupy two major economic positions in the new administration is the most powerful signal yet that Mr. Trump plans to emphasize policies friendly to Wall Street, like tax cuts and a relaxation of regulation, in the early days of his administration.

While that approach has been cheered by investors (the stocks of Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have been on a tear since the election), it stands in stark contrast to the populist campaign that Mr. Trump ran and the support he received from working-class voters across the country.

Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge fund executive and member of the Trump transition team, insisted on Wednesday that appointing wealthy investors did not contradict the campaign’s populist message.

“The working-class people of the United States, they need a break,” Mr. Scaramucci said. “And we need to switch them from going from the working class into the working poor into what I call the aspirational working class, which my dad was a member of.”

Still, Democrats were quick to attack the latest nomination.

“Steve Mnuchin is just another Wall Street insider,” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said in a joint statement. “That is not the type of change that Donald Trump promised to bring to Washington — that is hypocrisy at its worst.”

So far, none of the nominees who will be shaping economic policy have any significant experience in government.

Mr. Mnuchin, 53, and Mr. Ross, 79, are both familiar with buying distressed properties and selling for a profit. But they are political neophytes with scant experience in managing large organizations. They will oversee two government agencies that together employ about 130,000 people around the world.

In the case of Mr. Mnuchin at Treasury, his experience as a principal investor who made large sums of money through high-risk, high-return wagers suggests that he will look critically at the thicket of regulations that now constrain the risk-taking activities of investment banks.

That could mean a reassessment of what has come to be known as the Volcker Rule, part of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul that followed the 2008 financial crisis. The rule forbids banks to make certain speculative investments with their own capital.

“I would say the No. 1 problem with the Volcker Rule is it’s too complicated and people don’t know how to interpret it,” Mr. Mnuchin said in an interview with CNBC on Wednesday. “So we’re going to look at what to do with it as we are with all of Dodd-Frank. The No. 1 priority is going to be to make sure that banks lend.”

In the interview, Mr. Mnuchin also said he would look to cutting corporate tax rates as a way to increase economic growth. And he said the wealthy would not see a big tax cut.

“Any reductions we have in upper-income taxes will be offset by less deductions so that there will be no absolute tax cut for the upper class,” Mr. Mnuchin said in the interview. “There will be a big tax cut for the middle class, but any tax cuts we have for the upper class will be offset by less deductions that pay for it.”

There is a Washington tradition of presidents calling on a Goldman Sachs luminary to take the reins of the economy, including the Democrat Robert E. Rubin in 1995 and Henry M. Paulson Jr., a Republican, in 2006.

Mr. Mnuchin’s Goldman pedigree is as good as it gets, given that his father, Robert, was a pioneer in stock trading who spent 35 years at the firm.

While the Goldman brand may have initially attracted Mr. Trump, for the broader financial community it is Mr. Mnuchin’s track record at hedge and private equity funds, which is where the real money is made on Wall Street these days, that makes him appealing.

“Mnuchin as Treasury secretary is somebody who can speak to bankers — Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, James Gorman and Brian Moynihan. He can speak their language,” said Gary Kaminsky, a former vice chairman at Morgan Stanley, referring to the chief executives of JPMorgan Chase, Goldman, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America. “He comes from a trading desk, and that’s something that is very strong,” Mr. Kaminsky, who has attended fund-raisers for Mr. Trump, added.

While there is little doubt that Mr. Mnuchin can speak the language of Wall Street, he has had little experience running large, complex bureaucracies. Mr. Rubin and Mr. Paulson had ascended to the top at Goldman, and had many years of experience managing people and organizations under their belt.

Mr. Mnuchin did assume a leading role in the restructuring and reinventing of IndyMac, now known as OneWest, a California mortgage giant that collapsed in 2008. He and partners acquired the firm and later made billions.

After he moved from New York to the West Coast, Mr. Mnuchin was targeted by protesters who claimed that the bank was too quick to foreclose on struggling homeowners. Last year the bank was sold to the CIT Group, a small-business lender run at the time by another Goldman Sachs alumnus, John A. Thain.

In a statement announcing his economic appointments, Mr. Trump highlighted the deal. “He purchased IndyMac Bank for $1.6 billion and ran it very professionally, selling it for $3.4 billion plus a return of capital,” he said of Mr. Mnuchin. “That’s the kind of people I want in my administration representing our country.”

Mr. Mnuchin has faced other controversies. In 2010, he and his brother, Alan, were sued over their mother’s early investment with Bernard L. Madoff, an investor who was convicted of running a Ponzi scheme. The lawsuit, filed by a trustee for Madoff victims, alleged that $3.2 million of the money Mr. Mnuchin withdrew from his mother’s account shortly after she died belonged to other victims. The lawsuit was dropped last year because of a time limit.

Hollywood has been another reinvention for Mr. Mnuchin.

In 2006, he and a partner, Chip Seelig, struck a deal through their company Dune Entertainment to invest $325 million in 28 movies produced by 20th Century Fox. It was a successful partnership; Fox delivered hits (made in part with Dune’s money) like “Avatar,” which took in $2.8 billion worldwide in 2009.

After breaking with Mr. Seelig in 2012, Mr. Mnuchin teamed up with a company called RatPac, owned by the rowdy filmmaker Brett Ratner and the Australian billionaire James Packer. Mr. Ratner was then notorious in Hollywood; he resigned as a producer of the Academy Awards in 2011 after using an anti-gay slur at a public event and making frank remarks about his sex life on Howard Stern’s radio show. (He apologized.) But together the three men formed a vehicle to invest $450 million in an extensive array of Warner Bros. movies.

Some have been major hits, like “Gravity,” which took in $723.2 million. But there have also been money losers, including “Pan” and “In the Heart of the Sea.”

Still, Mr. Mnuchin has clearly enjoyed a Hollywood lifestyle, whether attending celebrity-filled parties at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc during the Cannes Film Festival or going in with a movie industry friend to buy a Dassault Falcon 50 jet (since sold). He can currently be seen in a cameo — playing a Merrill Lynch executive — in Warren Beatty’s new movie “Rules Don’t Apply.”

Beyond the entertainment industry, there other similarities between Mr. Trump and Mr. Mnuchin. They are both twice divorced, and their third partners are decidedly younger. (Mr. Mnuchin’s fiancée is Louise Linton, a 34-year-old actress from Scotland.) They also both have a taste for landmark Manhattan real estate: Trump Tower for the president-elect and 740 Park Avenue for Mr. Mnuchin.

But there are differences, too. Despite his Hollywood appetites, Mr. Mnuchin is described by people who know him as slightly awkward and not one to command a room. Friends of the two men describe them more as social and professional acquaintances than close friends.

The names of flashier prospects had been floated as possible candidates for Treasury, according to a fund manager close to the president-elect’s economic brain trust. Among them: Henry Kravis of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company, Jonathan Gray of Blackstone, Jamie Dimon, Mitt Romney, and Thomas J. Barrack Jr. of Colony Capital, a Los Angeles-based real estate investor who has been close to Mr. Trump for decades.

Brooks Barnes and Neil Irwin contributed reporting.