The story would be part “Citizen Kane.” Netanyahu rose to fame via CNN. His rise and survival are intertwined with changes in media, with the decline of old newspapers that are generally hostile, and the rise of new cable networks and outlets that are often his allies.
.. For all his soaring rhetoric and bellicosity, he has been a defensive leader. He seems to understand that, in his country’s situation, the lows are lower than the highs are high. The costs of a mistake are bigger than the benefits of an accomplishment.
Jon Stewart’s expiration date: Why liberalism needs to outgrow the snark
Sen. John McCain, for example, may support myriad policies that Stewart finds objectionable — most especially those involving the killing and maiming of other people — but because McCain is witty, personable and seemingly forthright, he’ll always have a spot in “The Daily Show’s” heart (albeit one that’s less luxurious than it used to be). Along the same lines, Stewart has a penchant forsneering at political activists who promote all the same causes as he might, but do so without his signature (and glib) ironic distance.
The News in Moscow
Over the last dozen years of good oil-funded living, middle-class Russians have developed the habit of travelling to warmer climes for the two weeks of idleness the law grants them at the start of the year, but even with tickets booked and paid for, many discovered that they could not afford hotels or food. One friend told me that she was considering cancelling her trip just to see what would happen in Moscow with so many Russians staying there involuntarily: “Maybe people will storm the Kremlin.”
.. But the most surprising thing about Black Tuesday was that it was a surprise to Russians at all. The economy had been shrinking for at least a year, and the slowdown had looked catastrophic for months, at least to the economists who were warning of looming stagflation. The American and European sanctions imposed over the war in Ukraine and the Russian counter-sanctions, especially the ban on many imported foods, made things worse. Layoffs had been common since spring. In July, food prices spiked by about ten per cent. The currency had been slipping for months, and the fall of oil prices in autumn dealt the economy a final blow. Against this backdrop, a drop in the exchange rate, even as much as eleven per cent in a single day, seems predictable. So why didn’t Russians see this coming?
.. After nearly fifteen years of systematic destruction of public space, engineered by Putin, the normal ways by which regular people absorb information about the state of their country are gone. Only a person who had lost his livelihood or half his savings would have been able to report that the economy was failing.
In Need of Xandau: 20 key findings about CIA interrogations
Washingtonpost.com does a lot of quoting of the senate documents. They could use a better way of quoting these collections in context.
Almost 13 years after the CIA established secret prisons to hold and interrogate detainees, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on the CIA’s programs listing 20 key findings. Click a statement below for a summary of the findings: