1650: Algo Juice

ITM Adam,

Monica Boyle here, millennial, recurring $5 producer.

Check out New Mexico Medicaid’s incentive program…

If I pump my 3 month old with vaccines, get my flu shot and refill my Prozac I can get a free crockpot.

***I don’t vaccinate or take prozac***

Ghostery’s new report, conducted by third-party research firm Censuswide, finds that individuals who have experience in advertising, programming and cybersecurity are significantly more likely to use adblockers than the average American

These industry insiders are more skeptical of their online safety, underscoring concerns about the current severity of user tracking

Americans are underestimating the dangers of health and political tracking

Lesser-known Big Tech players sow distrust among these experts

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Hello Adam

Did some simple maths about Al's claim about our heat trapping Hiroshima nuclear bomb numbers

I worked out using his figures that since 2015 the total is 1.88 billion Hiroshima nuclear bombs.

What a load of crap.

Thanks for your courage

Sir Capitan Morgan

Claims to be a 501(c)3 Non-profit, no evidence

Donations to an address in Alpharetta Georgia

YouTube Channel

Sound Investigations Website

Alex Jones

Nudges

J6 20 agents

CIA in Ukraine confirmations

Advisors

TikTok, we want to own it to use the intel

While Israel still benefits greatly from American assistance, security experts and political analysts say that the country has quietly cultivated, and may have achieved, effective autonomy from the United States.

“We’re seeing much more Israeli independence,” said Vipin Narang, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist who has studied Israeli strategy.

Israel no longer needs American security guarantees to protect it from neighboring states, with which it has mostly made peace. Nor does it see itself as needing American mediation in the Palestinian conflict, which Israelis largely find bearable and support maintaining as it is.

Once reliant on American arms transfers, Israel now produces many of its most essential weapons domestically. It has become more self-sufficient diplomatically as well, cultivating allies independent of Washington. Even culturally, Israelis are less sensitive to American approval — and put less pressure on their leaders to maintain good standing in Washington.

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The bill would create a new regulatory agency with the power to issue 24-hour takedown orders to companies for content deemed to be child sexual abuse or intimate photos and videos shared without consent, often referred to as revenge porn.

The agency could also initiate investigations of tech companies and impose hefty, multimillion dollar fines. Companies would have to submit digital safety plans, including design features to shield children from potentially harmful content.

The proposal by the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is meant to address “the anarchy and lawlessness” of the internet, said Arif Virani, the justice minister and attorney general.

“Right now, you can empower your kids until you’re blue in the face about the internet,” Mr. Virani said in an interview. “If there are no rules on the internet, about how things will happen, how platforms will behave, then we’ve got a problem. We’re here to solve that problem.”

But others say parts of the bill, particularly the targeting of hate speech, are so onerous that they would muzzle free expression. The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood called the bill “Orwellian.”

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Thu, 11 Apr 2024 14:10

CNN '--

The US transferred thousands of machine guns, sniper rifles, rocket launchers and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition seized from Iran to Ukraine last week, US Central Command announced on Tuesday.

Ukraine has been suffering from shortages of weapons and munitions on the battlefield in its war against Russia, with the US unable to send more equipment from its own stockpiles until more funding is approved by Congress.

CENTCOM said the materiel transferred to Ukraine is enough to equip one Ukrainian brigade '-- around 4,000 personnel '-- with small-arms rifles. ''These weapons will help Ukraine defend against Russia's invasion,'' CENTCOM said in a statement.

The munitions were originally seized by the US military and its partners ''from four separate transiting stateless vessels between 22 May 2021 to 15 Feb 2023,'' but the US government did not obtain ownership of the equipment via the Justice Department's civil forfeiture process until December of last year, CENTCOM said.

It is not the first time the US has transferred seized Iranian military equipment to the Ukrainians. The US transferred over one million rounds of seized Iranian ammunition to the Ukrainian armed forces in October, CNN previously reported.

Over the past year, the US Navy has seized thousands of Iranian assault rifles and more than one million rounds of ammunition from vessels used by Iran to ship weapons to the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. The seizures, frequently carried out with regional partner forces, target small stateless vessels on routes historically used to smuggle weapons to the Houthis.

For the last year, the Biden administration has been working to legally send the seized weapons, which are stored in CENTCOM facilities across the Middle East, to the Ukrainians.

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Thu, 11 Apr 2024 13:25

US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell attends a "Fed Listens" event in Washington, DC, on October 4, 2019.

Eric Baradat | AFP | Getty Images

A hotter-than-expected consumer price index report rattled Wall Street Wednesday, but markets are buzzing about an even more specific prices gauge contained within the data '-- the so-called supercore inflation reading.

Along with the overall inflation measure, economists also look at the core CPI, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, to find the true trend. The supercore gauge, which also excludes shelter and rent costs from its services reading, takes it even a step further. Fed officials say it is useful in the current climate as they see elevated housing inflation as a temporary problem and not as good a measure of underlying prices.

Supercore accelerated to a 4.8% pace year over year in March, the highest in 11 months.

Tom Fitzpatrick, managing director of global market insights at R.J. O'Brien & Associates, said if you take the readings of the last three months and annualize them, you're looking at a supercore inflation rate of more than 8%, far from the Federal Reserve's 2% goal.

"As we sit here today, I think they're probably pulling their hair out," Fitzpatrick said.

An ongoing problemCPI increased 3.5% year over year last month, above the Dow Jones estimate that called for 3.4%. The data pressured equities and sent Treasury yields higher on Wednesday, and pushed futures market traders to extend out expectations for the central bank's first rate cut to September from June, according to the CME Group's FedWatch tool.

"At the end of the day, they don't really care as long as they get to 2%, but the reality is you're not going to get to a sustained 2% if you don't get a key cooling in services prices, [and] at this point we're not seeing it," said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Santander U.S.

Wall Street has been keenly aware of the trend coming from supercore inflation from the beginning of the year. A move higher in the metric from January's CPI print was enough to hinder the market's "perception the Fed was winning the battle with inflation [and] this will remain an open question for months to come," according to BMO Capital Markets head of U.S. rates strategy Ian Lyngen.

Another problem for the Fed, Fitzpatrick says, lies in the differing macroeconomic backdrop of demand-driven inflation and robust stimulus payments that equipped consumers to beef up discretionary spending in 2021 and 2022 while also stoking record inflation levels.

Today, he added, the picture is more complicated because some of the most stubborn components of services inflation are household necessities like car and housing insurance as well as property taxes.

"They are so scared by what happened in 2021 and 2022 that we're not starting from the same point as we have on other occasions," Fitzpatrick added. "The problem is, if you look at all of this [together] these are not discretionary spending items, [and] it puts them between a rock and a hard place."

Sticky inflation problemFurther complicating the backdrop is a dwindling consumer savings rate and higher borrowing costs which make the central bank more likely to keep monetary policy restrictive "until something breaks," Fitzpatrick said.

The Fed will have a hard time bringing down inflation with more rate hikes because the current drivers are stickier and not as sensitive to tighter monetary policy, he cautioned. Fitzpatrick said the recent upward moves in inflation are more closely analogous to tax increases.

While Stanley opines that the Fed is still far removed from hiking interest rates further, doing so will remain a possibility so long as inflation remains elevated above the 2% target.

"I think by and large inflation will come down and they'll cut rates later than we thought," Stanley said. "The question becomes are we looking at something that's become entrenched here? At some point, I imagine the possibility of rate hikes comes back into focus."

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Thu, 11 Apr 2024 04:31

U.S. World Business Arts Lifestyle Opinion Audio Games Cooking Wirecutter The Athletic The WikiLeaks founder has been held in London as he has battled extradition to the United States on charges related to his publication of classified documents.

Julian Assange in London in 2011. He has been jailed for nearly five years after being indicted by the United States with 18 counts of violating the Espionage Act. Credit... Andrew Testa for The New York Times April 10, 2024, 3:51 p.m. ET

President Biden said on Wednesday that the United States was considering dropping its prosecution of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who has been jailed in London for years while fighting extradition to face U.S. charges related to his publication of classified documents.

Mr. Biden made the comment on the case of the embattled publisher, who is being detained in a high-security prison, in response to a question about a request from Mr. Assange's home country of Australia that he be allowed to return there.

''We're considering it,'' Mr. Biden said at the White House, where he was hosting Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan.

Mr. Assange has been jailed for nearly five years after being indicted by the United States with 18 counts of violating the Espionage Act for publishing thousands of documents detailing secret military operations and diplomatic intelligence, as well as revelations about the civilian death tolls in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His case has sustained international attention and condemnation from First Amendment rights groups.

Mr. Assange has fought off U.S. efforts to extradite him. The charges could amount to a sentence of up to 175 years in prison, although U.S. lawyers have said that he was more likely to be sentenced to four to six years.

In February, Australia's parliament passed a motion calling for Mr. Assange's release, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he had discussed the matter in a meeting last fall with Mr. Biden.

In backing the motion, Mr. Albanese told the Australian parliament ''it is appropriate for us to put our very strong view that those countries need to take into account the need for this to be concluded.''

Last month, the High Court in London ruled that Mr. Assange could not be immediately extradited to the United States until certain conditions were met.

The court gave the United States three weeks ''to give satisfactory assurances'' that Mr. Assange ''is permitted to rely on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution (which protects free speech), that he is not prejudiced at trial (including sentence) by reason of his nationality, that he is afforded the same First Amendment protections as a United States citizen and that the death penalty is not imposed.''

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Wed, 10 Apr 2024 20:11

Tesla owners reportedly waited hours to charge their vehicles after Monday's total solar eclipse. The long lines at charging stations are like salt in the wound of EV owners who are forced to wait as their cars charge enough to reach home '-- a major concern when major traffic days can cause long delays.

''(The eclipse) was spectacular, but I had to rush back because I noticed the battery on my Tesla was running low and all the charging stations at Jay Peak were taken,'' Monica Livesey told WCVB.

Livesey, who is from Wakefield, Massachusetts, and drove to Vermont in an EV on Monday to see the total solar eclipse, said her return home was made worse for her family '-- as well as other Tesla owners '-- when they all had to search for charging stations in rural areas.

Elon Musk watches SpaceX launch (Joe Raedle /Getty)

And when they eventually did find a charging station in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, there were met with long lines of electric vehicles, she said.

''I got there with one mile only to find out there were about 60 cars waiting to be charged,'' Livesey told the outlet.

The Livesey family reportedly helped a couple try to organize the lines by handing out numbers that made electric vehicle drivers wait their turn to charge.

''We were giving out paper tickets with a number on it,'' Livesey's 16-year-old son Niko said, adding that he was ''trying to keep the mood pleasant.''

''In my mind, I was thinking it's going to be a long night,'' he said.

The Livesey family ended up waiting more than four hours to charge their Tesla, and got home at 4:00 a.m. on Tuesday. They noted that the last ticket they handed out was number 189, and that they saw more people pulling up to the charging stations as they left.

''I don't know where all these people came from,'' Livesey's 13-year-old daughter Jessica said. ''I didn't know there were that many Tesla's.''

Monica Livesey insisted that the hassle was ''worth the trip.''

''It doesn't matter if we're waiting for four hours to charge. It was so worth it. It was beautiful,'' she said. ''I feel like everybody came together as a community. At the end, people were hugging. They were thanking us.''

The Livesey family are not the only ones to experience a difficult road trip in an electric vehicle.

As Breitbart News reported, a Business Insider reporter learned how ''brutal'' a road trip in an EV can be when he was forced to bundle up instead of using the heater in his car to try to maximize his range.

Last year, U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm even had the police called on her after embarking on a four-day road trip in an electric vehicle, which presented her with a few other issues, including trouble locating chargers and long downtimes as batteries slowly refilled.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.

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Wed, 10 Apr 2024 19:48

U.S. World Business Arts Lifestyle Opinion Audio Games Cooking Wirecutter The Athletic The whistle-blower, an engineer, says that sections of the plane's body are being assembled in a way that could weaken the aircraft over time. Boeing says there is no safety issue.

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is a twin-aisle jet that is more fuel efficient than many other aircraft used for long trips, in part because of its lightweight composite construction. Credit... Pool photo by Reuters The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating claims made by a Boeing engineer who says that sections of the fuselage of the 787 Dreamliner are improperly fastened together and could break apart mid-flight after thousands of trips.

The engineer, Sam Salehpour, who worked on the plane, detailed his allegations in interviews with The New York Times and in documents sent to the F.A.A. A spokesman for the agency confirmed that it was investigating the allegations but declined to comment on them.

Mr. Salehpour, who has worked at Boeing for more than a decade, said the problems stemmed from changes in how the enormous sections were fitted and fastened together in the assembly line. The plane's fuselage comes in several pieces, all from different manufacturers, and they are not exactly the same shape where they fit together, he said.

Boeing conceded those manufacturing changes were made, but a spokesman for the company, Paul Lewis, said there was ''no impact on durability or safe longevity of the airframe.''

Mr. Lewis said Boeing had done extensive testing on the Dreamliner and ''determined that this is not an immediate safety of flight issue.''

''Our engineers are completing complex analysis to determine if there may be a long-term fatigue concern for the fleet in any area of the airplane,'' Mr. Lewis said. ''This would not become an issue for the in-service fleet for many years to come, if ever, and we are not rushing the team so that we can ensure that analysis is comprehensive.''

In a subsequent statement, Boeing said it was ''fully confident in the 787 Dreamliner,'' adding that ''these claims about the structural integrity of the 787 are inaccurate and do not represent the comprehensive work Boeing has done to ensure the quality and long-term safety of the aircraft.''

Mr. Salehpour's allegations add another element to the intense scrutiny that Boeing has been facing since a door panel blew off a 737 Max jet during an Alaska Airlines flight in early January, raising questions about the company's manufacturing practices. Since then, the plane maker has announced a leadership overhaul, and the Justice Department has begun a criminal investigation.

Mr. Salehpour's concerns are set to receive an airing on Capitol Hill. Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut and the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's investigations subcommittee, is planning to hold a hearing with Mr. Salehpour on April 17. Mr. Blumenthal said he wanted the public to hear from the engineer firsthand.

''Repeated, shocking allegations about Boeing's manufacturing failings point to an appalling absence of safety culture and practices '-- where profit is prioritized over everything else,'' Mr. Blumenthal said in a statement.

The Dreamliner is a wide-body jet that is more fuel efficient than many other aircraft used for long trips, in part because of its lightweight composite construction. First delivered in 2011, the twin-aisle plane has both racked up orders for Boeing and created headaches for the company.

For years, the plane maker has dealt with a succession of issues involving the jet, including battery problems that led to the temporary grounding of 787s around the world and quality concerns that more recently caused an extended halt in deliveries.

Boeing has also confronted a slew of problems at its plant in South Carolina where the Dreamliner is built. A prominent Boeing whistle-blower who raised concerns about manufacturing practices at the plant, John Barnett, was found dead last month with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The Dreamliner was a pioneer in using large amounts of so-called composite materials rather than traditional metal to build the plane, including major sections like the fuselage, as the aircraft's body is known. Often made by combining materials like carbon and glass fibers, composites are lighter than metals but, as comparatively newer materials, less is known about how they hold up to the long-term stresses of flight. Those stresses create what engineers call fatigue, which can compromise safety if it causes the material to fail.

Mr. Salehpour said he was repeatedly retaliated against for raising concerns about shortcuts he believed that Boeing was taking in joining together the pieces of the Dreamliner's fuselage.

Debra S. Katz, a lawyer for Mr. Salehpour, said that her client raised his concerns with supervisors and tried to discuss them in safety meetings, but that company officials did not listen. Instead, she said that Mr. Salehpour was silenced and transferred to work on another wide-body aircraft, the 777. Mr. Salehpour said that after his transfer, he found additional problems with how Boeing was assembling the fuselage of the 777.

''This is the culture that Boeing has allowed to exist,'' Ms. Katz said. ''This is a culture that prioritizes production of planes and pushes them off the line even when there are serious concerns about the structural integrity of those planes and their production process.''

In its statement, Boeing said that it encouraged its workers ''to speak up when issues arise'' and that retaliation was ''strictly prohibited.''

The F.A.A. interviewed Mr. Salehpour on Friday, Ms. Katz said. In response to questions about the Dreamliner, Mike Whitaker, the agency's administrator, reiterated that the regulator was taking a hard line against the Boeing after the Alaska Airlines episode.

''This won't be back to business as usual for Boeing,'' Mr. Whitaker said in a statement. ''They must commit to real and profound improvements. Making foundational change will require a sustained effort from Boeing's leadership, and we are going to hold them accountable every step of the way.''

Mr. Salehpour said the shortcuts that he believed Boeing was taking resulted in excessive force being applied to narrow unwanted gaps in the assembly connecting pieces of the Dreamliner's fuselage. He said that force led to deformation in the composite material, which he said could increase the effects of fatigue and lead to premature failure of the composite.

John Cox, a former airline pilot who runs a safety consulting firm, said that while composites were more tolerant of excess force than metals, it was harder to see that composites had been stressed to the point that they would fail. ''They just snap,'' he said.

''The catastrophic in-flight breakup, yes, that's a theoretical possibility,'' Mr. Cox said. ''That's why you'd want to have the testing done to preclude that.''

Boeing's tests are an appropriate step, Mr. Cox said, because ''if the degradation goes far enough, that could potentially lead to a catastrophic failure.''

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

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Wed, 10 Apr 2024 19:48

Boeing CEO to step down amid ongoing safety issues

CNN '--

Federal authorities say they're investigating Boeing after a whistleblower repeatedly raised concerns with two widebody jet models, and claimed the company retaliated against him.

Whistleblower Sam Salehpour, a Boeing engineer, alleges that Boeing took shortcuts when manufacturing its 777 and 787 Dreamliner jets, and that the risks could become catastrophic as the airplanes age. The New York Times was first to report the whistleblower complaint.

His formal complaint to the Federal Aviation Administration, filed in January and made public on Tuesday, is not specific to the newer 737 Max jet that has been grounded twice by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Salehpour on Tuesday said his complaint raises ''two quality issues that may dramatically reduce the life of the planes.''

''I am doing this not because I want Boeing to fail, but because I want it to succeed and prevent crashes from happening,'' Salehpour told reporters on a conference call Tuesday. ''The truth is Boeing can't keep going the way it is. It needs to do a little bit better, I think.''

The FAA has interviewed Salehpour as part of its investigation, his attorney Lisa Banks said. The FAA said it investigates all whistleblower complaints.

''Voluntary reporting without fear of reprisal is a critical component in aviation safety,'' the FAA said. ''We strongly encourage everyone in the aviation industry to share information.''

A Senate subcommittee will also take up the concerns at a hearing next week.

''We are fully confident in the safety and durability of the 777 family,'' Boeing said in a statement Wednesday. ''These claims are inaccurate.''

It also disputed Salehpour's concerns about the 787.

''These claims about the structural integrity of the 787 are inaccurate and do not represent the comprehensive work Boeing has done to ensure the quality and long-term safety of the aircraft,'' the company said in a statement.

Boeing's 787 Dreamliner planes, which entered service in 2011, could have 50-year lifespans '' around 44,000 flights each, the company says.

But Salehpour's complaint alleges crews assembling the plane failed to properly fill tiny gaps when joining separately manufactured parts of the fuselage. That puts more wear on the plane, shortening its lifespan and risking ''catastrophic'' failure, Salehpour's attorneys alleged.

The allegations aren't entirely new: For nearly two years starting in 2021, the FAA and Boeing halted deliveries of the new Dreamliners while it looked into the gaps. Boeing said it made changes in its manufacturing process, and deliveries ultimately resumed.

''We incorporated the join inspection and verification activity into our production system so that airplanes coming off of the production line meet these specifications,'' Boeing said.

The 787 Dreamliners were not grounded, but the FAA twice investigated questions about quality control during the jet's assembly process. The company maintained that the planes were and are safe to fly.

Salehpour's attorneys said the FAA was surprised to discover through his complaint that the gaps were still an issue.

''I literally saw people jumping on the pieces of the airplane to get them to align,'' Salehpour said. ''By jumping up and down, you're deforming parts so that the holes align temporarily '... and that's not how you build an airplane.''

Salehpour said Boeing retaliated against him after he raised another concern about the 787 and a different plane model.

The whistleblower complaint said he pointed out to management the existence of drilling issues with the 787, and was then ''ignored and ultimately transferred out of the 787 program to the 777 program.''

In his new role, Salehpour said he discovered subpar work with aligning body pieces, and pressure on engineers to green-light work they have not yet inspected.

In all, Salehpour said the issues involve more than 400 777s and 1,000 787s.

Boeing (BA) shares fell 2% Tuesday.

This is a developing story. It will be updated.>>

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Wed, 10 Apr 2024 19:38

On Tuesday, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen wrote to notify the Alabama Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee that names submitted past the certification deadline will not appear on the general election ballot in November.

''It has recently come to my attention that the Democratic National Convention is currently scheduled to convene on August 19, 2024, which is after the State of Alabama's statutory deadline for political parties to provide a certificate of nomination for President and Vice President,'' Sec. Allen wrote.

''If this Office has not received a valid certificate of nomination from the Democratic Party following its convention by the statutory deadline, I will be unable to certify the names of the Democratic Party's candidates for President and Vice President for ballot preparation for the 2024 general election.''

RELATED: U.S. Supreme Court upholds Trump ballot eligibility

Allen's letter cites Alabama law stating that parties must certify their candidates ''no later than the 82nd day preceding the day fixed for the election.'' Because the general election for President and Vice President will be held nationwide on Tuesday, November 5, 2024, the 82nd preceding day would be August 15, 2024, four days before the National Democratic Convention is scheduled to begin.

Meanwhile, the Republican National Convention is being held on July 15, 2024, nearly a month before certifications are due to be submitted.

''If those certificates are not in my office on time, there will be no certification and no appearance on the Alabama general election ballot in accordance with sections 17-13-22 and 17-14-31(a) of the Code of Alabama. With this letter, we are providing ample notification to the leadership of the Democratic Party at the state and national level that the burden of providing those certifications by the statutorily set deadline is a requirement that they must meet,'' Allen said.

The general election will be held on November 5, 2024.

Grayson Everett is the state and political editor for Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on Twitter @Grayson270

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Wed, 10 Apr 2024 19:17

A former assistant principal at a Virginia elementary school has been charged with felony child neglect more than a year after a six-year-old boy brought a gun to class and shot his teacher.

A special grand jury in Newport News found that Ebony Parker showed a reckless disregard for the lives of Richneck Elementary School students on Jan. 6, 2023, according to indictments unsealed Tuesday.

Parker, 39, faces eight felony counts, each of which is punishable by up to five years in prison - meaning she could face a maximum of 40 years behind bars.

Along with other school officials, Parker also faces a separate $40 million negligence lawsuit from the teacher who was shot, Abby Zwerner.

She accuses them of ignoring multiple warnings the boy had a gun and was in a 'violent mood' the day of the shooting.

A special grand jury in Newport News found that Ebony Parker (right) showed a reckless disregard for the lives of Richneck Elementary School students on Jan. 6, 2023, according to indictments unsealed Tuesday. (Pictured: Parker, right, with principal Briana Newton, left)

Parker and other school officials already face a $40 million negligence lawsuit from the teacher who was shot, Abby Zwerner (pictured)

Pictured: the mom of the six-year-old boy Deja Taylor arriving to the United States Courthouse in Newport News, Va., on Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023

Court documents filed Tuesday reveal little about the criminal case against Parker, listing only the counts and a description of the felony charge.

It alleges that Parker 'did commit a willful act or omission in the care of such students, in a manner so gross, wanton and culpable as to show a reckless disregard for human life.'

Newport News police have said the student who shot Zwerner retrieved his mother's handgun from atop a dresser at home and brought the weapon to school concealed in a backpack.

Zwerner's lawsuit describes a series of warnings that school employees gave administrators before the shooting.

The lawsuit said those warnings began with Zwerner telling Parker that the boy 'was in a violent mood,' had threatened to beat up a kindergartener and stared down a security officer in the lunchroom.

It alleges that Parker 'had no response, refusing even to look up' when Zwerner expressed her concerns.

When concerns were raised that the child may have transferred the gun from his backpack to his pocket, Parker said his 'pockets were too small to hold a handgun and did nothing,' the lawsuit states.

Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia, where the shooting occurred

Parker and other school officials already face a $40 million negligence lawsuit from the teacher who was shot, Abby Zwerner (pictured) A guidance counselor also asked Parker for permission to search the boy, but Parker forbade him, 'and stated that John Doe´s mother would be arriving soon to pick him up,' the lawsuit stated.

Zwerner was sitting at a reading table in front of the class when the boy fired the gun, police said.

The bullet struck Zwerner's hand and then her chest, collapsing one of her lungs.

She spent nearly two weeks in the hospital and has endured multiple surgeries as well as ongoing emotional trauma, according to her lawsuit.

Despite her brush with death, Abby said she was excited to return to teaching

Parker and the lawsuit's other defendants, which include a former superintendent and the Newport News school board, have tried to block Zwerner's lawsuit.

They've argued that Zwerner's injuries fall under Virginia's workers' compensation law. Their arguments have been unsuccessful so far in blocking the litigation.

A trial date for Zwerner's lawsuit is slated for January.

The Associated Press left a message seeking comment Tuesday with Parker´s attorney, Curtis Rogers.

Criminal charges against school officials following a school shootings are quite rare, experts say.

Prosecutors had said a year ago that they were investigating whether the 'actions or omissions' of any school employees could lead to criminal charges.

Howard Gwynn, the commonwealth´s attorney in Newport News, said in April 2023 that he had petitioned a special grand jury to probe if any 'security failures' contributed to the shooting.

Gwynn wrote that an investigation could also lead to recommendations 'in the hopes that such a situation never occurs again.'

It is not the first school shooting to spark a criminal investigation into school officials.

For instance, a former school resource officer was acquitted of all charges last year after he was accused of hiding during the Parkland school massacre in 2018.

Chuck Vergon, a professor of educational law and policy at the University of Michigan-Flint, told The AP last year that it is rare for a teacher or school official to be charged in a school shooting because allegations of criminal negligence can be difficult to prove.

More often, he said, those impacted by school shootings seek to hold school officials liable in civil court.

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Wed, 10 Apr 2024 16:52

Mathematician and astronomer (1473''1543)

Nicolaus Copernicus[b] (19 February 1473 '' 24 May 1543) was a Renaissance polymath, active as a mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic canon, who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center. In all likelihood, Copernicus developed his model independently of Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek astronomer who had formulated such a model some eighteen centuries earlier.[6][c][d][e]

The publication of Copernicus's model in his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), just before his death in 1543, was a major event in the history of science, triggering the Copernican Revolution and making a pioneering contribution to the Scientific Revolution.[8]

Copernicus was born and died in Royal Prussia, a semiautonomous and multilingual region that had been part of the Kingdom of Poland since 1466. A polyglot and polymath, he obtained a doctorate in canon law and was a mathematician, astronomer, physician, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat, and economist. From 1497 he was a Warmian Cathedral chapter canon. In 1517 he derived a quantity theory of money'--a key concept in economics'--and in 1519 he formulated an economic principle that later came to be called Gresham's law.[f]

Life Copernicus's ToruŠbirthplace (ul. Kopernika 15, left). Together with no. 17 (right), it forms Muzeum Mikołaja Kopernika.Nicolaus Copernicus was born on 19 February 1473 in the city of ToruŠ(Thorn), in the province of Royal Prussia, in the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland[10][11] to German-speaking parents.[12]

His father was a merchant from Krak"w and his mother was the daughter of a wealthy ToruŠmerchant.[13] Nicolaus was the youngest of four children. His brother Andreas (Andrew) became an Augustinian canon at Frombork (Frauenburg).[13] His sister Barbara, named after her mother, became a Benedictine nun and, in her final years, prioress of a convent in Chełmno (Kulm); she died after 1517.[13] His sister Katharina married the businessman and ToruŠcity councilor Barthel Gertner and left five children, whom Copernicus looked after to the end of his life.[13] Copernicus never married and is not known to have had children, but from at least 1531 until 1539 his relations with Anna Schilling, a live-in housekeeper, were seen as scandalous by two bishops of Warmia who urged him over the years to break off relations with his "mistress".[14]

Father's family Copernicus's father's family can be traced to a village in Silesia between Nysa (NeiŸe) and Prudnik (Neustadt). The village's name has been variously spelled Kopernik,[g] Copernik, Copernic, Kopernic, Coprirnik, and today Koperniki.[16]

In the 14th century, members of the family began moving to various other Silesian cities, to the Polish capital, Krak"w (1367), and to ToruŠ(1400).[16] The father, Mikołaj the Elder, likely the son of Jan, came from the Krak"w line.[16]

Nicolaus was named after his father, who appears in records for the first time as a well-to-do merchant who dealt in copper, selling it mostly in Danzig (GdaÅsk).[17][18] He moved from Krak"w to ToruÅ around 1458.[19] ToruÅ, situated on the Vistula River, was at that time embroiled in the Thirteen Years' War, in which the Kingdom of Poland and the Prussian Confederation, an alliance of Prussian cities, gentry and clergy, fought the Teutonic Order over control of the region. In this war, Hanseatic cities like Danzig and ToruÅ, Nicolaus Copernicus's hometown, chose to support the Polish King, Casimir IV Jagiellon, who promised to respect the cities' traditional vast independence, which the Teutonic Order had challenged. Nicolaus's father was actively engaged in the politics of the day and supported Poland and the cities against the Teutonic Order.[20] In 1454 he mediated negotiations between Poland's Cardinal Zbigniew Oleśnicki and the Prussian cities for repayment of war loans.[16] In the Second Peace of Thorn (1466), the Teutonic Order formally relinquished all claims to its western province, which as Royal Prussia remained a region of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland until the First (1772) and Second (1793) Partitions of Poland.

Copernicus's father married Barbara Watzenrode, the astronomer's mother, between 1461 and 1464.[16] He died about 1483.[13]

Mother's family Nicolaus's mother, Barbara Watzenrode, was the daughter of a wealthy ToruÅ patrician and city councillor, Lucas Watzenrode the Elder (deceased 1462), and Katarzyna (widow of Jan Peckau), mentioned in other sources as Katarzyna R¼diger gente Modlib"g (deceased 1476).[13] The Modlib"gs were a prominent Polish family who had been well known in Poland's history since 1271.[21] The Watzenrode family, like the Kopernik family, had come from Silesia from near Schweidnitz (Świdnica), and after 1360 had settled in ToruÅ. They soon became one of the wealthiest and most influential patrician families.[13] Through the Watzenrodes' extensive family relationships by marriage, Copernicus was related to wealthy families of ToruÅ (Thorn), Danzig (Gdansk) and Elbing (Elbląg), and to prominent Polish noble families of Prussia: the Czapskis, DziałyÅskis, Konopackis and Kościeleckis.[13] Lucas and Katherine had three children: Lucas Watzenrode the Younger (1447''1512), who would become Bishop of Warmia and Copernicus's patron; Barbara, the astronomer's mother (deceased after 1495); and Christina (deceased before 1502), who in 1459 married the ToruÅ merchant and mayor, Tiedeman von Allen.[13]

Copernicus's maternal uncle, Lucas Watzenrode the YoungerLucas Watzenrode the Elder, a wealthy merchant and in 1439''62 president of the judicial bench, was a decided opponent of the Teutonic Knights.[13] In 1453 he was the delegate from ToruŠat the Grudziądz (Graudenz) conference that planned the uprising against them.[13] During the ensuing Thirteen Years' War, he actively supported the Prussian cities' war effort with substantial monetary subsidies (only part of which he later re-claimed), with political activity in ToruŠand Danzig, and by personally fighting in battles at Łasin (Lessen) and Malbork (Marienburg).[13] He died in 1462.[13]

Lucas Watzenrode the Younger, the astronomer's maternal uncle and patron, was educated at the University of Krak"w (now Jagiellonian University) and at the universities of Cologne and Bologna. He was a bitter opponent of the Teutonic Order,[h] and its Grand Master once referred to him as "the devil incarnate".[i] In 1489 Watzenrode was elected Bishop of Warmia (Ermeland, Ermland) against the preference of King Casimir IV, who had hoped to install his own son in that seat.[24] As a result, Watzenrode quarreled with the king until Casimir IV's death three years later.[25] Watzenrode was then able to form close relations with three successive Polish monarchs: John I Albert, Alexander Jagiellon, and Sigismund I the Old. He was a friend and key advisor to each ruler, and his influence greatly strengthened the ties between Warmia and Poland proper.[26] Watzenrode came to be considered the most powerful man in Warmia, and his wealth, connections and influence allowed him to secure Copernicus's education and career as a canon at Frombork Cathedral.[24][j]

Education Early education Copernicus' father died around 1483, when the boy was 10. His maternal uncle, Lucas Watzenrode the Younger (1447''1512), took Copernicus under his wing and saw to his education and career.[13] Six years later, Watzenrode was elected Bishop of Warmia. Watzenrode maintained contacts with leading intellectual figures in Poland and was a friend of the influential Italian-born humanist and Krak"w courtier Filippo Buonaccorsi.[28] There are no surviving primary documents on the early years of Copernicus's childhood and education.[13] Copernicus biographers assume that Watzenrode first sent young Copernicus to St. John's School, at ToruÅ, where he himself had been a master.[13] Later, according to Armitage,[k] the boy attended the Cathedral School at Włocławek, up the Vistula River from ToruÅ, which prepared pupils for entrance to the University of Krak"w.[29]

Collegium Maius at Krak"w University, Copernicus's Polish alma mater University of Krak"w 1491''1495 In the winter semester of 1491''92 Copernicus, as "Nicolaus Nicolai de Thuronia", matriculated together with his brother Andrew at the University of Krak"w (now Jagiellonian University).[13] Copernicus began his studies in the Department of Arts (from the fall of 1491, presumably until the summer or fall of 1495) in the heyday of the Krak"w astronomical-mathematical school, acquiring the foundations for his subsequent mathematical achievements.[13] According to a later but credible tradition (Jan Brożek), Copernicus was a pupil of Albert Brudzewski, who by then (from 1491) was a professor of Aristotelian philosophy but taught astronomy privately outside the university; Copernicus became familiar with Brudzewski's widely read commentary to Georg von Peuerbach's Theoric... nov... planetarum and almost certainly attended the lectures of Bernard of Biskupie and Wojciech Krypa of Szamotuły, and probably other astronomical lectures by Jan of Głog"w, Michał of Wrocław (Breslau), Wojciech of Pniewy, and Marcin Bylica of Olkusz.[30]

Mathematical astronomyCopernicus's Krak"w studies gave him a thorough grounding in the mathematical astronomy taught at the university (arithmetic, geometry, geometric optics, cosmography, theoretical and computational astronomy) and a good knowledge of the philosophical and natural-science writings of Aristotle (De coelo, Metaphysics) and Averroes, stimulating his interest in learning and making him conversant with humanistic culture.[24] Copernicus broadened the knowledge that he took from the university lecture halls with independent reading of books that he acquired during his Krak"w years (Euclid, Haly Abenragel, the Alfonsine Tables, Johannes Regiomontanus' Tabulae directionum); to this period, probably, also date his earliest scientific notes, now preserved partly at Uppsala University.[24] At Krak"w Copernicus began collecting a large library on astronomy; it would later be carried off as war booty by the Swedes during the Deluge in the 1650s and is now at the Uppsala University Library.[31]

Contradictions in the systems of Aristotle and PtolemyCopernicus's four years at Krak"w played an important role in the development of his critical faculties and initiated his analysis of logical contradictions in the two "official" systems of astronomy'--Aristotle's theory of homocentric spheres, and Ptolemy's mechanism of eccentrics and epicycles'--the surmounting and discarding of which would be the first step toward the creation of Copernicus's own doctrine of the structure of the universe.[24]

Warmia 1495''96 Without taking a degree, probably in the fall of 1495, Copernicus left Krak"w for the court of his uncle Watzenrode, who in 1489 had been elevated to Prince-Bishop of Warmia and soon (before November 1495) sought to place his nephew in the Warmia canonry vacated by 26 August 1495 death of its previous tenant, Jan Czanow. For unclear reasons'--probably due to opposition from part of the chapter, who appealed to Rome'--Copernicus's installation was delayed, inclining Watzenrode to send both his nephews to study canon law in Italy, seemingly with a view to furthering their ecclesiastic careers and thereby also strengthening his own influence in the Warmia chapter.[24]

Collegiate Church of the Holy Cross and St. Bartholomew in WrocławOn 20 October 1497, Copernicus, by proxy, formally succeeded to the Warmia canonry which had been granted to him two years earlier. To this, by a document dated 10 January 1503 at Padua, he would add a sinecure at the Collegiate Church of the Holy Cross and St. Bartholomew in Wrocław (at the time in the Crown of Bohemia). Despite having been granted a papal indult on 29 November 1508 to receive further benefices, through his ecclesiastic career Copernicus not only did not acquire further prebends and higher stations (prelacies) at the chapter, but in 1538 he relinquished the Wrocław sinecure. It is unclear whether he was ever ordained a priest.[32] Edward Rosen asserts that he was not.[33][34] Copernicus did take minor orders, which sufficed for assuming a chapter canonry.[24] The Catholic Encyclopedia proposes that his ordination was probable, as in 1537 he was one of four candidates for the episcopal seat of Warmia, a position that required ordination.[35]

Italy University of Bologna 1496''1501 Meanwhile, leaving Warmia in mid-1496'--possibly with the retinue of the chapter's chancellor, Jerzy Pranghe, who was going to Italy'--in the fall, possibly in October, Copernicus arrived in Bologna and a few months later (after 6 January 1497) signed himself into the register of the Bologna University of Jurists' "German nation", which included young Poles from Silesia, Prussia and Pomerania as well as students of other nationalities.[24]

During his three-year stay at Bologna, which occurred between fall 1496 and spring 1501, Copernicus seems to have devoted himself less keenly to studying canon law (he received his doctorate in canon law only after seven years, following a second return to Italy in 1503) than to studying the humanities'--probably attending lectures by Filippo Beroaldo, Antonio Urceo, called Codro, Giovanni Garzoni, and Alessandro Achillini'--and to studying astronomy. He met the famous astronomer Domenico Maria Novara da Ferrara and became his disciple and assistant.[24] Copernicus was developing new ideas inspired by reading the "Epitome of the Almagest" (Epitome in Almagestum Ptolemei) by George von Peuerbach and Johannes Regiomontanus (Venice, 1496). He verified its observations about certain peculiarities in Ptolemy's theory of the Moon's motion, by conducting on 9 March 1497 at Bologna a memorable observation of the occultation of Aldebaran, the brightest star in the Taurus constellation, by the Moon. Copernicus the humanist sought confirmation for his growing doubts through close reading of Greek and Latin authors (Pythagoras, Aristarchos of Samos, Cleomedes, Cicero, Pliny the Elder, Plutarch, Philolaus, Heraclides, Ecphantos, Plato), gathering, especially while at Padua, fragmentary historic information about ancient astronomical, cosmological and calendar systems.[36]

Rome 1500 Copernicus spent the jubilee year 1500 in Rome, where he arrived with his brother Andrew that spring, doubtless to perform an apprenticeship at the Papal Curia. Here, too, however, he continued his astronomical work begun at Bologna, observing, for example, a lunar eclipse on the night of 5''6 November 1500. According to a later account by Rheticus, Copernicus also'--probably privately, rather than at the Roman Sapienza'--as a "Professor Mathematum" (professor of astronomy) delivered, "to numerous... students and... leading masters of the science", public lectures devoted probably to a critique of the mathematical solutions of contemporary astronomy.[37]

University of Padua 1501''1503 On his return journey doubtless stopping briefly at Bologna, in mid-1501 Copernicus arrived back in Warmia. After on 28 July receiving from the chapter a two-year extension of leave in order to study medicine (since "he may in future be a useful medical advisor to our Reverend Superior [Bishop Lucas Watzenrode] and the gentlemen of the chapter"), in late summer or in the fall he returned again to Italy, probably accompanied by his brother Andrew[m] and by Canon Bernhard Sculteti. This time he studied at the University of Padua, famous as a seat of medical learning, and'--except for a brief visit to Ferrara in May''June 1503 to pass examinations for, and receive, his doctorate in canon law'--he remained at Padua from fall 1501 to summer 1503.[37]

Copernicus studied medicine probably under the direction of leading Padua professors'--Bartolomeo da Montagnana, Girolamo Fracastoro, Gabriele Zerbi, Alessandro Benedetti'--and read medical treatises that he acquired at this time, by Valescus de Taranta, Jan Mesue, Hugo Senensis, Jan Ketham, Arnold de Villa Nova, and Michele Savonarola, which would form the embryo of his later medical library.[37]

AstrologyOne of the subjects that Copernicus must have studied was astrology, since it was considered an important part of a medical education.[39] However, unlike most other prominent Renaissance astronomers, he appears never to have practiced or expressed any interest in astrology.[40]

Greek studiesAs at Bologna, Copernicus did not limit himself to his official studies. It was probably the Padua years that saw the beginning of his Hellenistic interests. He familiarized himself with Greek language and culture with the aid of Theodorus Gaza's grammar (1495) and Johannes Baptista Chrestonius's dictionary (1499), expanding his studies of antiquity, begun at Bologna, to the writings of Bessarion, Lorenzo Valla, and others. There also seems to be evidence that it was during his Padua stay that the idea finally crystallized, of basing a new system of the world on the movement of the Earth.[37]As the time approached for Copernicus to return home, in spring 1503 he journeyed to Ferrara where, on 31 May 1503, having passed the obligatory examinations, he was granted the degree of Doctor of Canon Law (Nicolaus Copernich de Prusia, Jure Canonico ... et doctoratus[41]). No doubt it was soon after (at latest, in fall 1503) that he left Italy for good to return to Warmia.[37]

Planetary observations Copernicus made three observations of Mercury, with errors of ''3, ''15 and ''1 minutes of arc. He made one of Venus, with an error of ''24 minutes. Four were made of Mars, with errors of 2, 20, 77, and 137 minutes. Four observations were made of Jupiter, with errors of 32, 51, ''11 and 25 minutes. He made four of Saturn, with errors of 31, 20, 23 and ''4 minutes.[42]

Other observations With Novara, Copernicus observed an occultation of Aldebaran by the Moon on 9 March 1497. Copernicus also observed a conjunction of Saturn and the Moon on 4 March 1500. He saw an eclipse of the Moon on 6 November 1500.[43][44]

Work Copernicus's translation of Theophylact Simocatta's Epistles. Cover shows coat of arms of (clockwise from top) Poland, Lithuania and Krak"w.Copernicus's tower at Frombork, where he lived and worked; reconstructed since World War IIOlsztyn Castle, where Copernicus resided from 1516 to 1521Having completed all his studies in Italy, 30-year-old Copernicus returned to Warmia, where he would live out the remaining 40 years of his life, apart from brief journeys to Krak"w and to nearby Prussian cities: ToruÅ (Thorn), GdaÅsk (Danzig), Elbląg (Elbing), Grudziądz (Graudenz), Malbork (Marienburg), K¶nigsberg (Kr"lewiec).[37]

The Prince-Bishopric of Warmia enjoyed substantial autonomy, with its own diet (parliament) and monetary unit (the same as in the other parts of Royal Prussia) and treasury.[45]

Copernicus was his uncle's secretary and physician from 1503 to 1510 (or perhaps till his uncle's death on 29 March 1512) and resided in the Bishop's castle at Lidzbark (Heilsberg), where he began work on his heliocentric theory. In his official capacity, he took part in nearly all his uncle's political, ecclesiastic and administrative-economic duties. From the beginning of 1504, Copernicus accompanied Watzenrode to sessions of the Royal Prussian diet held at Malbork and Elbląg and, write Dobrzycki and Hajdukiewicz, "participated... in all the more important events in the complex diplomatic game that ambitious politician and statesman played in defense of the particular interests of Prussia and Warmia, between hostility to the [Teutonic] Order and loyalty to the Polish Crown."[37]

In 1504''1512 Copernicus made numerous journeys as part of his uncle's retinue'--in 1504, to ToruÅ and GdaÅsk, to a session of the Royal Prussian Council in the presence of Poland's King Alexander Jagiellon; to sessions of the Prussian diet at Malbork (1506), Elbląg (1507) and Sztum (Stuhm) (1512); and he may have attended a PoznaÅ (Posen) session (1510) and the coronation of Poland's King Sigismund I the Old in Krak"w (1507). Watzenrode's itinerary suggests that in spring 1509 Copernicus may have attended the Krak"w sejm.[37]

It was probably on the latter occasion, in Krak"w, that Copernicus submitted for printing at Jan Haller's press his translation, from Greek to Latin, of a collection, by the 7th-century Byzantine historian Theophylact Simocatta, of 85 brief poems called Epistles, or letters, supposed to have passed between various characters in a Greek story. They are of three kinds'--"moral," offering advice on how people should live; "pastoral", giving little pictures of shepherd life; and "amorous", comprising love poems. They are arranged to follow one another in a regular rotation of subjects. Copernicus had translated the Greek verses into Latin prose, and he now published his version as Theophilacti scolastici Simocati epistolae morales, rurales et amatoriae interpretatione latina, which he dedicated to his uncle in gratitude for all the benefits he had received from him. With this translation, Copernicus declared himself on the side of the humanists in the struggle over the question of whether Greek literature should be revived.[46] Copernicus's first poetic work was a Greek epigram, composed probably during a visit to Krak"w, for Johannes Dantiscus' epithalamium for Barbara Zapolya's 1512 wedding to King Zygmunt I the Old.[47]

Some time before 1514, Copernicus wrote an initial outline of his heliocentric theory known only from later transcripts, by the title (perhaps given to it by a copyist), Nicolai Copernici de hypothesibus motuum coelestium a se constitutis commentariolus'--commonly referred to as the Commentariolus. It was a succinct theoretical description of the world's heliocentric mechanism, without mathematical apparatus, and differed in some important details of geometric construction from De revolutionibus; but it was already based on the same assumptions regarding Earth's triple motions. The Commentariolus, which Copernicus consciously saw as merely a first sketch for his planned book, was not intended for printed distribution. He made only a very few manuscript copies available to his closest acquaintances, including, it seems, several Krak"w astronomers with whom he collaborated in 1515''1530 in observing eclipses. Tycho Brahe would include a fragment from the Commentariolus in his own treatise, Astronomiae instauratae progymnasmata, published in Prague in 1602, based on a manuscript that he had received from the Bohemian physician and astronomer TadeÅ Hjek, a friend of Rheticus. The Commentariolus would appear complete in print for the first time only in 1878.[47]

Astronomical observations 1513''1516 In 1510 or 1512 Copernicus moved to Frombork, a town to the northwest at the Vistula Lagoon on the Baltic Sea coast. There, in April 1512, he participated in the election of Fabian of Lossainen as Prince-Bishop of Warmia. It was only in early June 1512 that the chapter gave Copernicus an "external curia"'--a house outside the defensive walls of the cathedral mount. In 1514 he purchased the northwestern tower within the walls of the Frombork stronghold. He would maintain both these residences to the end of his life, despite the devastation of the chapter's buildings by a raid against Frauenburg carried out by the Teutonic Order in January 1520, during which Copernicus's astronomical instruments were probably destroyed. Copernicus conducted astronomical observations in 1513''1516 presumably from his external curia; and in 1522''1543, from an unidentified "small tower" (turricula), using primitive instruments modeled on ancient ones'--the quadrant, triquetrum, armillary sphere. At Frombork Copernicus conducted over half of his more than 60 registered astronomical observations.[47]

Administrative duties in Warmia Having settled permanently at Frombork, where he would reside to the end of his life, with interruptions in 1516''1519 and 1520''21, Copernicus found himself at the Warmia chapter's economic and administrative center, which was also one of Warmia's two chief centers of political life. In the difficult, politically complex situation of Warmia, threatened externally by the Teutonic Order's aggressions (attacks by Teutonic bands; the Polish''Teutonic War of 1519''1521; Albert's plans to annex Warmia), internally subject to strong separatist pressures (the selection of the prince-bishops of Warmia; currency reform), he, together with part of the chapter, represented a program of strict cooperation with the Polish Crown and demonstrated in all his public activities (the defense of his country against the Order's plans of conquest; proposals to unify its monetary system with the Polish Crown's; support for Poland's interests in the Warmia dominion's ecclesiastic administration) that he was consciously a citizen of the Polish''Lithuanian Republic. Soon after the death of uncle Bishop Watzenrode, he participated in the signing of the Second Treaty of Piotrk"w Trybunalski (7 December 1512), governing the appointment of the Bishop of Warmia, declaring, despite opposition from part of the chapter, for loyal cooperation with the Polish Crown.[47]

That same year (before 8 November 1512) Copernicus assumed responsibility, as magister pistoriae, for administering the chapter's economic enterprises (he would hold this office again in 1530), having already since 1511 fulfilled the duties of chancellor and visitor of the chapter's estates.[47]

His administrative and economic duties did not distract Copernicus, in 1512''1515, from intensive observational activity. The results of his observations of Mars and Saturn in this period, and especially a series of four observations of the Sun made in 1515, led to the discovery of the variability of Earth's eccentricity and of the movement of the solar apogee in relation to the fixed stars, which in 1515''1519 prompted his first revisions of certain assumptions of his system. Some of the observations that he made in this period may have had a connection with a proposed reform of the Julian calendar made in the first half of 1513 at the request of the Bishop of Fossombrone, Paul of Middelburg. Their contacts in this matter in the period of the Fifth Lateran Council were later memorialized in a complimentary mention in Copernicus's dedicatory epistle in DÄ' revolutionibus orbium coelestium and in a treatise by Paul of Middelburg, Secundum compendium correctionis Calendarii (1516), which mentions Copernicus among the learned men who had sent the Council proposals for the calendar's emendation.[48]

During 1516''1521, Copernicus resided at Olsztyn (Allenstein) Castle as economic administrator of Warmia, including Olsztyn (Allenstein) and PieniÄżno (Mehlsack). While there, he wrote a manuscript, Locationes mansorum desertorum (Locations of Deserted Fiefs), with a view to populating those fiefs with industrious farmers and so bolstering the economy of Warmia. When Olsztyn was besieged by the Teutonic Knights during the Polish''Teutonic War, Copernicus directed the defense of Olsztyn and Warmia by Royal Polish forces. He also represented the Polish side in the ensuing peace negotiations.[49]

Copernicus holding lily-of-the-valley: portrait in Nicolaus Reusner's Icones (1587).[50][n]Advisor on monetary reform Copernicus for years advised the Royal Prussian sejmik on monetary reform, particularly in the 1520s when that was a major question in regional Prussian politics.[51] In 1526 he wrote a study on the value of money, "Monetae cudendae ratio". In it he formulated an early iteration of the theory, now called Gresham's law, that "bad" (debased) coinage drives "good" (un-debased) coinage out of circulation'--several decades before Thomas Gresham. He also, in 1517, set down a quantity theory of money, a principal concept in economics to the present day. Copernicus's recommendations on monetary reform were widely read by leaders of both Prussia and Poland in their attempts to stabilize currency.[52]

Copernican system presented to the Pope In 1533, Johann Widmanstetter, secretary to Pope Clement VII, explained Copernicus's heliocentric system to the Pope and two cardinals. The Pope was so pleased that he gave Widmanstetter a valuable gift.[53] In 1535 Bernard Wapowski wrote a letter to a gentleman in Vienna, urging him to publish an enclosed almanac, which he claimed had been written by Copernicus. This is the only mention of a Copernicus almanac in the historical records. The "almanac" was likely Copernicus's tables of planetary positions. Wapowski's letter mentions Copernicus's theory about the motions of the Earth. Nothing came of Wapowski's request, because he died a couple of weeks later.[53]

Following the death of Prince-Bishop of Warmia Mauritius Ferber (1 July 1537), Copernicus participated in the election of his successor, Johannes Dantiscus (20 September 1537). Copernicus was one of four candidates for the post, written in at the initiative of Tiedemann Giese; but his candidacy was actually pro forma, since Dantiscus had earlier been named coadjutor bishop to Ferber and since Dantiscus had the backing of Poland's King Sigismund I.[54] At first Copernicus maintained friendly relations with the new Prince-Bishop, assisting him medically in spring 1538 and accompanying him that summer on an inspection tour of Chapter holdings. But that autumn, their friendship was strained by suspicions over Copernicus's housekeeper, Anna Schilling, whom Dantiscus banished from Frombork in spring 1539.[54]

Medical work In his younger days, Copernicus the physician had treated his uncle, brother and other chapter members. In later years he was called upon to attend the elderly bishops who in turn occupied the see of Warmia'--Mauritius Ferber and Johannes Dantiscus'--and, in 1539, his old friend Tiedemann Giese, Bishop of Chełmno (Kulm). In treating such important patients, he sometimes sought consultations from other physicians, including the physician to Duke Albert and, by letter, the Polish Royal Physician.[55]

In the spring of 1541, Duke Albert'--former Grand Master of the Teutonic Order who had converted the Monastic State of the Teutonic Knights into a Lutheran and hereditary realm, the Duchy of Prussia, upon doing homage to his uncle, the King of Poland, Sigismund I'--summoned Copernicus to K¶nigsberg to attend the Duke's counselor, George von Kunheim, who had fallen seriously ill, and for whom the Prussian doctors seemed unable to do anything. Copernicus went willingly; he had met von Kunheim during negotiations over reform of the coinage. And Copernicus had come to feel that Albert himself was not such a bad person; the two had many intellectual interests in common. The Chapter readily gave Copernicus permission to go, as it wished to remain on good terms with the Duke, despite his Lutheran faith. In about a month the patient recovered, and Copernicus returned to Frombork. For a time, he continued to receive reports on von Kunheim's condition, and to send him medical advice by letter.[56]

Protestant attacks on the Copernican system Some of Copernicus's close friends turned Protestant, but Copernicus never showed a tendency in that direction. The first attacks on him came from Protestants. Wilhelm Gnapheus, a Dutch refugee settled in Elbląg, wrote a comedy in Latin, Morosophus (The Foolish Sage), and staged it at the Latin school that he had established there. In the play, Copernicus was caricatured as the eponymous Morosophus, a haughty, cold, aloof man who dabbled in astrology, considered himself inspired by God, and was rumored to have written a large work that was moldering in a chest.[28]

Elsewhere Protestants were the first to react to news of Copernicus's theory. Melanchthon wrote:

Some people believe that it is excellent and correct to work out a thing as absurd as did that Sarmatian [i.e., Polish] astronomer who moves the earth and stops the sun. Indeed, wise rulers should have curbed such light-mindedness.[28]

Nevertheless, in 1551, eight years after Copernicus's death, astronomer Erasmus Reinhold published, under the sponsorship of Copernicus's former military adversary, the Protestant Duke Albert, the Prussian Tables, a set of astronomical tables based on Copernicus's work. Astronomers and astrologers quickly adopted it in place of its predecessors.[57]

Heliocentrism "Nicolaus Copernicus Tornaeus Borussus Mathemat.", 1597Some time before 1514 Copernicus made available to friends his "Commentariolus" ("Little Commentary"), a manuscript describing his ideas about the heliocentric hypothesis.[o] It contained seven basic assumptions (detailed below).[58] Thereafter he continued gathering data for a more detailed work.

At about 1532 Copernicus had basically completed his work on the manuscript of DÄ' revolutionibus orbium coelestium; but despite urging by his closest friends, he resisted openly publishing his views, not wishing'--as he confessed'--to risk the scorn "to which he would expose himself on account of the novelty and incomprehensibility of his theses."[54]

Reception of the Copernican system in Rome In 1533, Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter delivered a series of lectures in Rome outlining Copernicus's theory. Pope Clement VII and several Catholic cardinals heard the lectures and were interested in the theory. On 1 November 1536, Cardinal Nikolaus von Sch¶nberg, Archbishop of Capua, wrote to Copernicus from Rome:

Some years ago word reached me concerning your proficiency, of which everybody constantly spoke. At that time I began to have a very high regard for you... For I had learned that you had not merely mastered the discoveries of the ancient astronomers uncommonly well but had also formulated a new cosmology. In it you maintain that the earth moves; that the sun occupies the lowest, and thus the central, place in the universe... Therefore with the utmost earnestness I entreat you, most learned sir, unless I inconvenience you, to communicate this discovery of yours to scholars, and at the earliest possible moment to send me your writings on the sphere of the universe together with the tables and whatever else you have that is relevant to this subject ...[59]

By then Copernicus's work was nearing its definitive form, and rumors about his theory had reached educated people all over Europe. Despite urgings from many quarters, Copernicus delayed publication of his book, perhaps from fear of criticism'--a fear delicately expressed in the subsequent dedication of his masterpiece to Pope Paul III. Scholars disagree on whether Copernicus's concern was limited to possible astronomical and philosophical objections, or whether he was also concerned about religious objections.[p]

De revolutionibus orbium coelestium Copernicus was still working on De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (even if not certain that he wanted to publish it) when in 1539 Georg Joachim Rheticus, a Wittenberg mathematician, arrived in Frombork. Philipp Melanchthon, a close theological ally of Martin Luther, had arranged for Rheticus to visit several astronomers and study with them. Rheticus became Copernicus's pupil, staying with him for two years and writing a book, Narratio prima (First Account), outlining the essence of Copernicus's theory. In 1542 Rheticus published a treatise on trigonometry by Copernicus (later included as chapters 13 and 14 of Book I of De revolutionibus).[60]Under strong pressure from Rheticus, and having seen the favorable first general reception of his work, Copernicus finally agreed to give De revolutionibus to his close friend, Tiedemann Giese, bishop of Chełmno (Kulm), to be delivered to Rheticus for printing by the German printer Johannes Petreius at Nuremberg (N¼rnberg), Germany. While Rheticus initially supervised the printing, he had to leave Nuremberg before it was completed, and he handed over the task of supervising the rest of the printing to a Lutheran theologian, Andreas Osiander.[61]

Osiander added an unauthorised and unsigned preface, defending Copernicus's work against those who might be offended by its novel hypotheses. He argued that "different hypotheses are sometimes offered for one and the same motion [and therefore] the astronomer will take as his first choice that hypothesis which is the easiest to grasp." According to Osiander, "these hypotheses need not be true nor even probable. [I]f they provide a calculus consistent with the observations, that alone is enough."[62]

Death 1735 epitaph, Frombork CathedralFrombork CathedralToward the close of 1542, Copernicus was seized with apoplexy and paralysis, and he died at age 70 on 24 May 1543. Legend has it that he was presented with the final printed pages of his DÄ' revolutionibus orbium coelestium on the very day that he died, allowing him to take farewell of his life's work.[q] He is reputed to have awoken from a stroke-induced coma, looked at his book, and then died peacefully.[r]

Copernicus was reportedly buried in Frombork Cathedral, where a 1580 epitaph stood until being defaced; it was replaced in 1735. For over two centuries, archaeologists searched the cathedral in vain for Copernicus's remains. Efforts to locate them in 1802, 1909, 1939 had come to nought. In 2004 a team led by Jerzy Gąssowski, head of an archaeology and anthropology institute in Pułtusk, began a new search, guided by the research of historian Jerzy Sikorski.[63][64] In August 2005, after scanning beneath the cathedral floor, they discovered what they believed to be Copernicus's remains.[65]

The discovery was announced only after further research, on 3 November 2008. Gąssowski said he was "almost 100 percent sure it is Copernicus".[66] Forensic expert Capt. Dariusz Zajdel of the Polish Police Central Forensic Laboratory used the skull to reconstruct a face that closely resembled the features'--including a broken nose and a scar above the left eye'--on a Copernicus self-portrait.[66] The expert also determined that the skull belonged to a man who had died around age 70'--Copernicus's age at the time of his death.[65]

The grave was in poor condition, and not all the remains of the skeleton were found; missing, among other things, was the lower jaw.[67] The DNA from the bones found in the grave matched hair samples taken from a book owned by Copernicus which was kept at the library of the University of Uppsala in Sweden.[64][68]

On 22 May 2010, Copernicus was given a second funeral in a Mass led by J"zef Kowalczyk, the former papal nuncio to Poland and newly named Primate of Poland. Copernicus's remains were reburied in the same spot in Frombork Cathedral where part of his skull and other bones had been found. A black granite tombstone now identifies him as the founder of the heliocentric theory and also a church canon. The tombstone bears a representation of Copernicus's model of the Solar System'--a golden Sun encircled by six of the planets.[69]

Copernican system Predecessors Philolaus (c. 470 '' c. 385 BCE) described an astronomical system in which a Central Fire (different from the Sun) occupied the centre of the universe, and a counter-Earth, the Earth, Moon, the Sun itself, planets, and stars all revolved around it, in that order outward from the centre.[70] Heraclides Ponticus (387''312 BCE) proposed that the Earth rotates on its axis.[71]Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310 BCE '' c. 230 BCE) was the first to advance a theory that the Earth orbited the Sun.[72] Further mathematical details of Aristarchus's heliocentric system were worked out around 150 BCE by the Hellenistic astronomer Seleucus of Seleucia. Though Aristarchus's original text has been lost, a reference in Archimedes' book The Sand Reckoner (Archimedis Syracusani Arenarius & Dimensio Circuli) describes a work by Aristarchus in which he advanced the heliocentric model. Thomas Heath gives the following English translation of Archimedes's text:[73]

You are now aware ['you' being King Gelon] that the "universe" is the name given by most astronomers to the sphere the centre of which is the centre of the earth, while its radius is equal to the straight line between the centre of the sun and the centre of the earth. This is the common account (Ïά Î"ραφόμενα) as you have heard from astronomers. But Aristarchus has brought out a book consisting of certain hypotheses, wherein it appears, as a consequence of the assumptions made, that the universe is many times greater than the "universe" just mentioned. His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved, that the earth revolves about the sun on the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the orbit, and that the sphere of the fixed stars, situated about the same centre as the sun, is so great that the circle in which he supposes the earth to revolve bears such a proportion to the distance of the fixed stars as the centre of the sphere bears to its surface.

In an early unpublished manuscript of De Revolutionibus (which still survives), Copernicus mentioned the (non-heliocentric) 'moving Earth' theory of Philolaus and the possibility that Aristarchus also had a 'moving Earth' theory (though it is unlikely that he was aware that it was a heliocentric theory). He removed both references from his final published manuscript.[c][e]

Copernicus was probably aware that Pythagoras's system involved a moving Earth. The Pythagorean system was mentioned by Aristotle.[75]

Copernicus owned a copy of Giorgio Valla's De expetendis et fugiendis rebus, which included a translation of Plutarch's reference to Aristarchus's heliostaticism.[76]

In Copernicus's dedication of On the Revolutions to Pope Paul III'--which Copernicus hoped would dampen criticism of his heliocentric theory by "babblers... completely ignorant of [astronomy]"'--the book's author wrote that, in rereading all of philosophy, in the pages of Cicero and Plutarch he had found references to those few thinkers who dared to move the Earth "against the traditional opinion of astronomers and almost against common sense."

The prevailing theory during Copernicus's lifetime was the one that Ptolemy published in his Almagest c. '‰150 CE ; the Earth was the stationary center of the universe. Stars were embedded in a large outer sphere that rotated rapidly, approximately daily, while each of the planets, the Sun, and the Moon were embedded in their own, smaller spheres. Ptolemy's system employed devices, including epicycles, deferents and equants, to account for observations that the paths of these bodies differed from simple, circular orbits centered on the Earth.[77]

Beginning in the 10th century, a tradition criticizing Ptolemy developed within Islamic astronomy, which climaxed with Ibn al-Haytham of Basra's Al-ShukÅk 'alā Baá¹­alamiyÅs ("Doubts Concerning Ptolemy").[78] Several Islamic astronomers questioned the Earth's apparent immobility,[79][80] and centrality within the universe.[81] Some accepted that the earth rotates around its axis, such as Abu Sa'id al-Sijzi (d. c. '‰1020 ).[82][83] According to al-Biruni, al-Sijzi invented an astrolabe based on a belief held by some of his contemporaries "that the motion we see is due to the Earth's movement and not to that of the sky."[83][84] That others besides al-Sijzi held this view is further confirmed by a reference from an Arabic work in the 13th century which states:

According to the geometers [or engineers] (muhandisÄn), the earth is in constant circular motion, and what appears to be the motion of the heavens is actually due to the motion of the earth and not the stars.[83]

In the 12th century, Nur ad-Din al-Bitruji proposed a complete alternative to the Ptolemaic system (although not heliocentric).[85][86] He declared the Ptolemaic system as an imaginary model, successful at predicting planetary positions, but not real or physical.[85][86] Al-Bitruji's alternative system spread through most of Europe during the 13th century, with debates and refutations of his ideas continued up to the 16th century.[86]

Tusi coupleMathematical techniques developed in the 13th to 14th centuries by Mo'ayyeduddin al-Urdi, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, and Ibn al-Shatir for geocentric models of planetary motions closely resemble some of those used later by Copernicus in his heliocentric models.[87] Copernicus used what is now known as the Urdi lemma and the Tusi couple in the same planetary models as found in Arabic sources.[88] Furthermore, the exact replacement of the equant by two epicycles used by Copernicus in the Commentariolus was found in an earlier work by Ibn al-Shatir (d. c. 1375) of Damascus.[89] Ibn al-Shatir's lunar and Mercury models are also identical to those of Copernicus.[90] This has led some scholars to argue that Copernicus must have had access to some yet to be identified work on the ideas of those earlier astronomers.[91] However, no likely candidate for this conjectured work has yet come to light, and other scholars have argued that Copernicus could well have developed these ideas independently of the late Islamic tradition.[92] Nevertheless, Copernicus cited some of the Islamic astronomers whose theories and observations he used in De Revolutionibus, namely al-Battani, Thabit ibn Qurra, al-Zarqali, Averroes, and al-Bitruji.[93] It has been suggested[94][95] that the idea of the Tusi couple may have arrived in Europe leaving few manuscript traces, since it could have occurred without the translation of any Arabic text into Latin. One possible route of transmission may have been through Byzantine science; Gregory Chioniades translated some of al-Tusi's works from Arabic into Byzantine Greek. Several Byzantine Greek manuscripts containing the Tusi-couple are still extant in Italy.[96]

Copernicus As it appears in the surviving autograph manuscript

As it appears in the first printed edition

Copernicus's major work on his heliocentric theory was DÄ' revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), published in the year of his death, 1543. He had formulated his theory by 1510. "He wrote out a short overview of his new heavenly arrangement [known as the Commentariolus, or Brief Sketch], also probably in 1510 [but no later than May 1514], and sent it off to at least one correspondent beyond Varmia [the Latin for "Warmia"]. That person in turn copied the document for further circulation, and presumably the new recipients did, too..."[98]

Copernicus's Commentariolus summarized his heliocentric theory. It listed the "assumptions" upon which the theory was based, as follows:[99]

There is no one center of all the celestial circles[100] or spheres.[101]The center of the earth is not the center of the universe, but only the center towards which heavy bodies move and the center of the lunar sphere.All the spheres surround the sun as if it were in the middle of them all, and therefore the center of the universe is near the sun.The ratio of the earth's distance from the sun to the height of the firmament (outermost celestial sphere containing the stars) is so much smaller than the ratio of the earth's radius to its distance from the sun that the distance from the earth to the sun is imperceptible in comparison with the height of the firmament.Whatever motion appears in the firmament arises not from any motion of the firmament, but from the earth's motion. The earth together with its circumjacent elements performs a complete rotation on its fixed poles in a daily motion, while the firmament and highest heaven abide unchanged.What appear to us as motions of the sun arise not from its motion but from the motion of the earth and our sphere, with which we revolve about the sun like any other planet. The earth has, then, more than one motion.The apparent retrograde and direct motion of the planets arises not from their motion but from the earth's. The motion of the earth alone, therefore, suffices to explain so many apparent inequalities in the heavens.De revolutionibus itself was divided into six sections or parts, called "books":[102]

General vision of the heliocentric theory, and a summarized exposition of his idea of the WorldMainly theoretical, presents the principles of spherical astronomy and a list of stars (as a basis for the arguments developed in the subsequent books)Mainly dedicated to the apparent motions of the Sun and to related phenomenaDescription of the Moon and its orbital motionsExposition of the motions in longitude of the non-terrestrial planetsExposition of the motions in latitude of the non-terrestrial planetsSuccessors Casket with Copernicus' remains on exhibit in OlsztynGeorg Joachim Rheticus could have been Copernicus's successor, but did not rise to the occasion.[53] Erasmus Reinhold could have been his successor, but died prematurely.[53] The first of the great successors was Tycho Brahe[53] (though he did not think the Earth orbited the Sun), followed by Johannes Kepler,[53] who had collaborated with Tycho in Prague and benefited from Tycho's decades' worth of detailed observational data.[103]

Despite the near universal acceptance later of the heliocentric idea (though not the epicycles or the circular orbits), Copernicus's theory was originally slow to catch on. Scholars hold that sixty years after the publication of The Revolutions there were only around 15 astronomers espousing Copernicanism in all of Europe: "Thomas Digges and Thomas Harriot in England; Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei in Italy; Diego Zuniga in Spain; Simon Stevin in the Low Countries; and in Germany, the largest group'--Georg Joachim Rheticus, Michael Maestlin, Christoph Rothmann (who may have later recanted),[104] and Johannes Kepler."[104] Additional possibilities are Englishman William Gilbert, along with Achilles Gasser, Georg Vogelin, Valentin Otto, and Tiedemann Giese.[104]

Arthur Koestler, in his popular book The Sleepwalkers, asserted that Copernicus's book had not been widely read on its first publication.[105] This claim was trenchantly criticised by Edward Rosen,[s] and has been decisively disproved by Owen Gingerich, who examined nearly every surviving copy of the first two editions and found copious marginal notes by their owners throughout many of them. Gingerich published his conclusions in 2004 in The Book Nobody Read.[106]

The intellectual climate of the time "remained dominated by Aristotelian philosophy and the corresponding Ptolemaic astronomy. At that time there was no reason to accept the Copernican theory, except for its mathematical simplicity [by avoiding using the equant in determining planetary positions]."[107] Tycho Brahe's system ("that the earth is stationary, the sun revolves about the earth, and the other planets revolve about the sun")[107] also directly competed with Copernicus's. It was only a half-century later with the work of Kepler and Galileo that any substantial evidence defending Copernicanism appeared, starting "from the time when Galileo formulated the principle of inertia...[which] helped to explain why everything would not fall off the earth if it were in motion."[107] "[Not until] after Isaac Newton formulated the universal law of gravitation and the laws of mechanics [in his 1687 Principia], which unified terrestrial and celestial mechanics, was the heliocentric view generally accepted."[107]

Controversy The immediate result of the 1543 publication of Copernicus's book was only mild controversy. At the Council of Trent (1545''1563) neither Copernicus's theory nor calendar reform (which would later use tables deduced from Copernicus's calculations) were discussed.[108] It has been much debated why it was not until six decades after the publication of De revolutionibus that the Catholic Church took any official action against it, even the efforts of Tolosani going unheeded. Catholic side opposition only commenced seventy-three years later, when it was occasioned by Galileo.[109]

Tolosani The first notable to move against Copernicanism was the Magister of the Holy Palace (i.e., the Catholic Church's chief censor), Dominican Bartolomeo Spina, who "expressed a desire to stamp out the Copernican doctrine".[110] But with Spina's death in 1546, his cause fell to his friend, the well-known theologian-astronomer, the Dominican Giovanni Maria Tolosani of the Convent of St. Mark in Florence. Tolosani had written a treatise on reforming the calendar (in which astronomy would play a large role) and had attended the Fifth Lateran Council (1512''1517) to discuss the matter. He had obtained a copy of De Revolutionibus in 1544. His denunciation of Copernicanism was written a year later, in 1545, in an appendix to his unpublished work, On the Truth of Sacred Scripture.[111]

Emulating the rationalistic style of Thomas Aquinas, Tolosani sought to refute Copernicanism by philosophical argument. Copernicanism was absurd, according to Tolosani, because it was scientifically unproven and unfounded. First, Copernicus had assumed the motion of the Earth but offered no physical theory whereby one would deduce this motion. (No one realized that the investigation into Copernicanism would result in a rethinking of the entire field of physics.) Second, Tolosani charged that Copernicus's thought process was backwards. He held that Copernicus had come up with his idea and then sought phenomena that would support it, rather than observing phenomena and deducing from them the idea of what caused them. In this, Tolosani was linking Copernicus's mathematical equations with the practices of the Pythagoreans (whom Aristotle had made arguments against, which were later picked up by Thomas Aquinas). It was argued that mathematical numbers were a mere product of the intellect without any physical reality, and as such could not provide physical causes in the investigation of nature.[112]

Some astronomical hypotheses at the time (such as epicycles and eccentrics) were seen as mere mathematical devices to adjust calculations of where the heavenly bodies would appear, rather than an explanation of the cause of those motions. (As Copernicus still maintained the idea of perfectly spherical orbits, he relied on epicycles.) This "saving the phenomena" was seen as proof that astronomy and mathematics could not be taken as serious means to determine physical causes. Tolosani invoked this view in his final critique of Copernicus, saying that his biggest error was that he had started with "inferior" fields of science to make pronouncements about "superior" fields. Copernicus had used mathematics and astronomy to postulate about physics and cosmology, rather than beginning with the accepted principles of physics and cosmology to determine things about astronomy and mathematics. Thus Copernicus seemed to be undermining the whole system of the philosophy of science at the time. Tolosani held that Copernicus had fallen into philosophical error because he had not been versed in physics and logic; anyone without such knowledge would make a poor astronomer and be unable to distinguish truth from falsehood. Because Copernicanism had not met the criteria for scientific truth set out by Thomas Aquinas, Tolosani held that it could only be viewed as a wild unproven theory.[113][114]

Tolosani recognized that the Ad Lectorem preface to Copernicus's book was not actually by him. Its thesis that astronomy as a whole would never be able to make truth claims was rejected by Tolosani (though he still held that Copernicus's attempt to describe physical reality had been faulty); he found it ridiculous that Ad Lectorem had been included in the book (unaware that Copernicus had not authorized its inclusion). Tolosani wrote: "By means of these words [of the Ad Lectorem], the foolishness of this book's author is rebuked. For by a foolish effort he [Copernicus] tried to revive the weak Pythagorean opinion [that the element of fire was at the center of the Universe], long ago deservedly destroyed, since it is expressly contrary to human reason and also opposes holy writ. From this situation, there could easily arise disagreements between Catholic expositors of holy scripture and those who might wish to adhere obstinately to this false opinion."[115] Tolosani declared: "Nicolaus Copernicus neither read nor understood the arguments of Aristotle the philosopher and Ptolemy the astronomer."[111] Tolosani wrote that Copernicus "is expert indeed in the sciences of mathematics and astronomy, but he is very deficient in the sciences of physics and logic. Moreover, it appears that he is unskilled with regard to [the interpretation of] holy scripture, since he contradicts several of its principles, not without danger of infidelity to himself and the readers of his book. ...his arguments have no force and can very easily be taken apart. For it is stupid to contradict an opinion accepted by everyone over a very long time for the strongest reasons, unless the impugner uses more powerful and insoluble demonstrations and completely dissolves the opposed reasons. But he does not do this in the least."[115]

Tolosani declared that he had written against Copernicus "for the purpose of preserving the truth to the common advantage of the Holy Church."[116] Despite this, his work remained unpublished and there is no evidence that it received serious consideration. Robert Westman describes it as becoming a "dormant" viewpoint with "no audience in the Catholic world" of the late sixteenth century, but also notes that there is some evidence that it did become known to Tommaso Caccini, who would criticize Galileo in a sermon in December 1613.[116]

Theology Photo of a mid-16th-century portrait[t]Tolosani may have criticized the Copernican theory as scientifically unproven and unfounded, but the theory also conflicted with the theology of the time, as can be seen in a sample of the works of John Calvin. In his Commentary on Genesis he said that "We indeed are not ignorant that the circuit of the heavens is finite, and that the earth, like a little globe, is placed in the centre."[117] In his commentary on Psalms 93:1 he states that "The heavens revolve daily, and, immense as is their fabric and inconceivable the rapidity of their revolutions, we experience no concussion.... How could the earth hang suspended in the air were it not upheld by God's hand? By what means could it maintain itself unmoved, while the heavens above are in constant rapid motion, did not its Divine Maker fix and establish it."[118] One sharp point of conflict between Copernicus's theory and the Bible concerned the story of the Battle of Gibeon in the Book of Joshua where the Hebrew forces were winning but whose opponents were likely to escape once night fell. This is averted by Joshua's prayers causing the Sun and the Moon to stand still. Martin Luther once made a remark about Copernicus, although without mentioning his name. According to Anthony Lauterbach, while eating with Martin Luther the topic of Copernicus arose during dinner on 4 June 1539 (in the same year as professor George Joachim Rheticus of the local University had been granted leave to visit him). Luther is said to have remarked "So it goes now. Whoever wants to be clever must agree with nothing others esteem. He must do something of his own. This is what that fellow does who wishes to turn the whole of astronomy upside down. Even in these things that are thrown into disorder I believe the Holy Scriptures, for Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and not the earth."[107] These remarks were made four years before the publication of On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres and a year before Rheticus's Narratio Prima. In John Aurifaber's account of the conversation Luther calls Copernicus "that fool" rather than "that fellow", this version is viewed by historians as less reliably sourced.[107]

Luther's collaborator Philipp Melanchthon also took issue with Copernicanism. After receiving the first pages of Narratio Prima from Rheticus himself, Melanchthon wrote to Mithobius (physician and mathematician Burkard Mithob of Feldkirch) on 16 October 1541 condemning the theory and calling for it to be repressed by governmental force, writing "certain people believe it is a marvelous achievement to extol so crazy a thing, like that Polish astronomer who makes the earth move and the sun stand still. Really, wise governments ought to repress impudence of mind."[119] It had appeared to Rheticus that Melanchton would understand the theory and would be open to it. This was because Melanchton had taught Ptolemaic astronomy and had even recommended his friend Rheticus to an appointment to the Deanship of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences at the University of Wittenberg after he had returned from studying with Copernicus.[120]

Rheticus's hopes were dashed when six years after the publication of De Revolutionibus Melanchthon published his Initia Doctrinae Physicae presenting three grounds to reject Copernicanism. These were "the evidence of the senses, the thousand-year consensus of men of science, and the authority of the Bible".[121] Blasting the new theory Melanchthon wrote, "Out of love for novelty or in order to make a show of their cleverness, some people have argued that the earth moves. They maintain that neither the eighth sphere nor the sun moves, whereas they attribute motion to the other celestial spheres, and also place the earth among the heavenly bodies. Nor were these jokes invented recently. There is still extant Archimedes's book on The Sand Reckoner; in which he reports that Aristarchus of Samos propounded the paradox that the sun stands still and the earth revolves around the sun. Even though subtle experts institute many investigations for the sake of exercising their ingenuity, nevertheless public proclamation of absurd opinions is indecent and sets a harmful example."[119] Melanchthon went on to cite Bible passages and then declare "Encouraged by this divine evidence, let us cherish the truth and let us not permit ourselves to be alienated from it by the tricks of those who deem it an intellectual honor to introduce confusion into the arts."[119] In the first edition of Initia Doctrinae Physicae, Melanchthon even questioned Copernicus's character claiming his motivation was "either from love of novelty or from desire to appear clever", these more personal attacks were largely removed by the second edition in 1550.[121]

Copernicus' 2010 gravestone in Frombork CathedralAnother Protestant theologian who disparaged heliocentrism on scriptural grounds was John Owen. In a passing remark in an essay on the origin of the sabbath, he characterised "the late hypothesis, fixing the sun as in the centre of the world" as being "built on fallible phenomena, and advanced by many arbitrary presumptions against evident testimonies of Scripture."[122]

In Roman Catholic circles, Copernicus's book was incorporated into scholarly curricula throughout the 16th century. For example, at the University of Salamanca in 1561 it became one of four text books that students of astronomy could choose from, and in 1594 it was made mandatory.[123] German Jesuit Nicolaus Serarius was one of the first Catholics to write against Copernicus's theory as heretical, citing the Joshua passage, in a work published in 1609''1610, and again in a book in 1612.[124] In his 12 April 1615 letter to a Catholic defender of Copernicus, Paolo Antonio Foscarini, Catholic Cardinal Robert Bellarmine condemned Copernican theory, writing "...not only the Holy Fathers, but also the modern commentaries on Genesis, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Joshua, you will find all agreeing in the literal interpretation that the sun is in heaven and turns around the earth with great speed, and that the earth is very far from heaven and sits motionless at the center of the world...Nor can one answer that this is not a matter of faith, since if it is not a matter of faith 'as regards the topic,' it is a matter of faith 'as regards the speaker': and so it would be heretical to say that Abraham did not have two children and Jacob twelve, as well as to say that Christ was not born of a virgin, because both are said by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of prophets and apostles."[125] One year later, the Roman Inquisition prohibited Copernicus's work. Nevertheless, the Spanish Inquisition never banned the De revolutionibus, which continued to be taught at Salamanca.[123]

Ingoli Perhaps the most influential opponent of the Copernican theory was Francesco Ingoli, a Catholic priest. Ingoli wrote a January 1616 essay to Galileo presenting more than twenty arguments against the Copernican theory.[126] Though "it is not certain, it is probable that he [Ingoli] was commissioned by the Inquisition to write an expert opinion on the controversy",[127] (after the Congregation of the Index's decree against Copernicanism on 5 March 1616, Ingoli was officially appointed its consultant).[127] Galileo himself was of the opinion that the essay played an important role in the rejection of the theory by church authorities, writing in a later letter to Ingoli that he was concerned that people thought the theory was rejected because Ingoli was right.[126] Ingoli presented five physical arguments against the theory, thirteen mathematical arguments (plus a separate discussion of the sizes of stars), and four theological arguments. The physical and mathematical arguments were of uneven quality, but many of them came directly from the writings of Tycho Brahe, and Ingoli repeatedly cited Brahe, the leading astronomer of the era. These included arguments about the effect of a moving Earth on the trajectory of projectiles, and about parallax and Brahe's argument that the Copernican theory required that stars be absurdly large.[128]

Two of Ingoli's theological issues with the Copernican theory were "common Catholic beliefs not directly traceable to Scripture: the doctrine that hell is located at the center of Earth and is most distant from heaven; and the explicit assertion that Earth is motionless in a hymn sung on Tuesdays as part of the Liturgy of the Hours of the Divine Office prayers regularly recited by priests."[129] Ingoli cited Robert Bellarmine in regards to both of these arguments, and may have been trying to convey to Galileo a sense of Bellarmine's opinion.[130] Ingoli also cited Genesis 1:14 where God places "lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night." Ingoli did not think the central location of the Sun in the Copernican theory was compatible with it being described as one of the lights placed in the firmament.[129] Like previous commentators Ingoli also pointed to the passages about the Battle of Gibeon. He dismissed arguments that they should be taken metaphorically, saying "Replies which assert that Scripture speaks according to our mode of understanding are not satisfactory: both because in explaining the Sacred Writings the rule is always to preserve the literal sense, when it is possible, as it is in this case; and also because all the [Church] Fathers unanimously take this passage to mean that the Sun which was truly moving stopped at Joshua's request. An interpretation that is contrary to the unanimous consent of the Fathers is condemned by the Council of Trent, Session IV, in the decree on the edition and use of the Sacred Books. Furthermore, although the Council speaks about matters of faith and morals, nevertheless it cannot be denied that the Holy Fathers would be displeased with an interpretation of Sacred Scriptures which is contrary to their common agreement."[129] However, Ingoli closed the essay by suggesting Galileo respond primarily to the better of his physical and mathematical arguments rather than to his theological arguments, writing "Let it be your choice to respond to this either entirely of in part'--clearly at least to the mathematical and physical arguments, and not to all even of these, but to the more weighty ones."[131] When Galileo wrote a letter in reply to Ingoli years later, he in fact only addressed the mathematical and physical arguments.[131]

In March 1616, in connection with the Galileo affair, the Roman Catholic Church's Congregation of the Index issued a decree suspending De revolutionibus until it could be "corrected," on the grounds of ensuring that Copernicanism, which it described as a "false Pythagorean doctrine, altogether contrary to the Holy Scripture," would not "creep any further to the prejudice of Catholic truth."[132] The corrections consisted largely of removing or altering wording that spoke of heliocentrism as a fact, rather than a hypothesis.[133] The corrections were made based largely on work by Ingoli.[127]

Galileo On the orders of Pope Paul V, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine gave Galileo prior notice that the decree was about to be issued, and warned him that he could not "hold or defend" the Copernican doctrine.[u] The corrections to De revolutionibus, which omitted or altered nine sentences, were issued four years later, in 1620.[134]

In 1633, Galileo Galilei was convicted of grave suspicion of heresy for "following the position of Copernicus, which is contrary to the true sense and authority of Holy Scripture",[135] and was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.[136][137]

At the instance of Roger Boscovich, the Catholic Church's 1758 Index of Prohibited Books omitted the general prohibition of works defending heliocentrism,[138] but retained the specific prohibitions of the original uncensored versions of De revolutionibus and Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Those prohibitions were finally dropped from the 1835 Index.[139]

Languages, name, nationality Languages 1541 German-language letter from Copernicus to Duke Albert of Prussia, giving medical advice for George von KunheimCopernicus is postulated to have spoken Latin, German, and Polish with equal fluency; he also spoke Greek and Italian, and had some knowledge of Hebrew.[v][w][x][y] The vast majority of Copernicus's extant writings are in Latin, the language of European academia in his lifetime.

Arguments for German being Copernicus's native tongue are that he was born into a predominantly German-speaking urban patrician class using German, next to Latin, as language of trade and commerce in written documents,[147] and that, while studying canon law at the University of Bologna in 1496, he signed into the German natio (Natio Germanorum)'--a student organization which, according to its 1497 by-laws, was open to students of all kingdoms and states whose mother-tongue was German.[148] However, according to French philosopher Alexandre Koyr(C), Copernicus's registration with the Natio Germanorum does not in itself imply that Copernicus considered himself German, since students from Prussia and Silesia were routinely so categorized, which carried certain privileges that made it a natural choice for German-speaking students, regardless of their ethnicity or self-identification.[148][z][aa][151]

Name The surname Kopernik, Copernik, Koppernigk, in various spellings, is recorded in Krak"w from c. 1350, apparently given to people from the village of Koperniki (prior to 1845 rendered Kopernik, Copernik, Copirnik, and Koppirnik) in the Duchy of Nysa, 10 km south of Nysa, and now 10 km north of the Polish-Czech border. Nicolaus Copernicus's great-grandfather is recorded as having received citizenship in Krak"w in 1386. The toponym Kopernik (modern Koperniki) has been variously tied to the Polish word for "dill" (koper) and the German word for "copper" (Kupfer).[ab] The suffix -nik (or plural, -niki) denotes a Slavic and Polish agent noun.

As was common in the period, the spellings of both the toponym and the surname vary greatly. Copernicus "was rather indifferent about orthography".[152] During his childhood, about 1480, the name of his father (and thus of the future astronomer) was recorded in Thorn as Niclas Koppernigk.[153]At Krak"w he signed himself, in Latin, Nicolaus Nicolai de Torunia (Nicolaus, son of Nicolaus, of ToruÅ).[ac] At Bologna, in 1496, he registered in the Matricula Nobilissimi Germanorum Collegii, resp. Annales Clarissimae Nacionis Germanorum, of the Natio Germanica Bononiae, as Dominus Nicolaus Kopperlingk de Thorn '' IX grosseti.[155][156] At Padua he signed himself "Nicolaus Copernik", later "Coppernicus".[152] The astronomer thus Latinized his name to Coppernicus, generally with two "p"s (in 23 of 31 documents studied),[157] but later in life he used a single "p". On the title page of De revolutionibus, Rheticus published the name (in the genitive, or possessive, case) as "Nicolai Copernici".

Nationality There has been discussion of Copernicus's nationality and of whether it is meaningful to ascribe to him a nationality in the modern sense.

Nicolaus Copernicus was born and raised in Royal Prussia, a semiautonomous and multilingual region of the Kingdom of Poland.[158][159] He was the child of German-speaking parents and grew up with German as his mother tongue.[12][160][161] His first alma mater was the University of Krak"w in Poland. When he later studied in Italy, at the University of Bologna, he joined the German Nation, a student organization for German-speakers of all allegiances (Germany would not become a nation-state until 1871).[162][163] His family stood against the Teutonic Order and actively supported the city of ToruÅ during the Thirteen Years' War. Copernicus's father lent money to Poland's King Casimir IV Jagiellon to finance the war against the Teutonic Knights,[164] but the inhabitants of Royal Prussia also resisted the Polish crown's efforts for greater control over the region.[158]

Encyclopedia Americana,[165] The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia,[166] The Oxford World Encyclopedia,[167] and World Book Encyclopedia[168] refer to Copernicus as a "Polish astronomer". Sheila Rabin, writing in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, describes Copernicus as a "child of a German family [who] was a subject of the Polish crown",[11] while Manfred Weissenbacher writes that Copernicus's father was a Germanized Pole.[169]

No Polish texts by Copernicus survive due to the rarity of Polish language in literature before the writings of the Polish Renaissance poets Mikołaj Rej and Jan Kochanowski (educated Poles had generally written in Latin); but it is known that Copernicus knew Polish on a par with German and Latin.[170]

Historian Michael Burleigh describes the nationality debate as a "totally insignificant battle" between German and Polish scholars during the interwar period.[171] Polish astronomer Konrad Rudnicki calls the discussion a "fierce scholarly quarrel in ... times of nationalism" and describes Copernicus as an inhabitant of a German-speaking territory that belonged to Poland, himself being of mixed Polish-German extraction.[172]

Czesław Miłosz describes the debate as an "absurd" projection of a modern understanding of nationality onto Renaissance people, who identified with their home territories rather than with a nation.[173] Similarly, historian Norman Davies writes that Copernicus, as was common in his era, was "largely indifferent" to nationality, being a local patriot who considered himself "Prussian".[174] Miłosz and Davies both write that Copernicus had a German-language cultural background, while his working language was Latin in accord with the usage of the time.[173][174] Additionally, according to Davies, "there is ample evidence that he knew the Polish language".[174] Davies concludes that, "Taking everything into consideration, there is good reason to regard him both as a German and as a Pole: and yet, in the sense that modern nationalists understand it, he was neither."[174]

Commemoration Orbiting Astronomical Observatory 3 The third in NASA's Orbiting Astronomical Observatory series of missions, launched on 21 August 1972, was named Copernicus after its successful launch. The satellite carried an X-ray detector and an ultraviolet telescope, and operated until February 1981.

Copernicia Nicolaus Copernicus Monument in Krak"wCopernicus statue before Frombork CathedralCopernicia, a genus of palm trees native to South America and the Greater Antilles, was named after Copernicus in 1837. In some of the species, the leaves are coated with a thin layer of wax, known as carnauba wax.

Copernicium On 14 July 2009, the discoverers, from the Gesellschaft f¼r Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, Germany, of chemical element 112 (temporarily named ununbium) proposed to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) that its permanent name be "copernicium" (symbol Cn). "After we had named elements after our city and our state, we wanted to make a statement with a name that was known to everyone," said Hofmann. "We didn't want to select someone who was a German. We were looking world-wide."[175] On the 537th anniversary of his birthday the name became official.[176]

55 Cancri A In July 2014 the International Astronomical Union launched NameExoWorlds, a process for giving proper names to certain exoplanets and their host stars.[177] The process involved public nomination and voting for the new names.[178] In December 2015, the IAU announced the winning name for 55 Cancri A was Copernicus.[179]

Poland Copernicus is commemorated by the Nicolaus Copernicus Monument in Warsaw, designed by Bertel Thorvaldsen (1822), completed in 1830; and by Jan Matejko's 1873 painting, Astronomer Copernicus, or Conversations with God.

Named for Copernicus are Nicolaus Copernicus University in ToruÅ; Warsaw's Copernicus Science Centre and Copernicus Hospital, in Poland's third largest city, Ł"dź. A Copernicus Award was established jointly by the Foundation for Polish Science and the German Research Foundation, to promote Polish-German scientific cooperation.

Influence Contemporary literary and artistic works inspired by Copernicus include:

Mover of the Earth, Stopper of the Sun, overture for symphony orchestra, by composer Svitlana Azarova, commissioned by ONDIF.[180][181]Doctor Copernicus, 1975 novel by John Banville, sketching the life of Copernicus and the 16th-century world in which he lived.See also Copernican principleCopernicus Science CentreHistory of philosophy in PolandList of multiple discoveriesList of Roman Catholic scientist-clericsNotes ^ The oldest known portrait of Copernicus is that on the Strasbourg astronomical clock, made by Tobias Stimmer c. 1571''74. According to the inscription next to that portrait, it was made from a self-portrait by Copernicus himself. This has led to speculation that the ToruÅ portrait, whose provenance is unknown, may be a copy based on the same self-portrait.[1] ^ koh- PUR -nik-És, kÉ-;[2][3][4] Polish: Mikołaj Kopernik[5] [miËkÉ--waj kÉ--Ëpɛrɲik] '' ; Middle Low German: Niklas Koppernigk; German: Nikolaus Kopernikus. ^ a b The Greek mathematician and astronomer Aristarchus of Samos proposed such a system during the third century BCE (Dreyer 1953, pp. 135''48).In an early unpublished manuscript of De Revolutionibus (which still survives today in the Jagiellonian Library in Krak"w), Copernicus wrote that "It is credible that ... Philolaus believed in the mobility of the Earth and some even say that Aristarchus was of that opinion", a passage that was removed from the published edition, a decision described by Owen Gingerich as "eminently sensible" "from an editorial viewpoint".[7] Philolaus was not a heliocentrist as he thought that both the Earth and the Sun moved around a central fire. Gingerich says that there is no evidence that Copernicus was aware of the few clear references to Aristarchus's heliocentrism in ancient texts (as distinct from one other unclear and confusing one), especially Archimedes's The Sand-Reckoner (which was not in print until the year after Copernicus died), and that it would have been in his interest to mention them had he known of them, before concluding that he developed his idea and its justification independently of Aristarchus.[7] ^ Dava Sobel (2011) writes: "Copernicus had no idea that Aristarchus of Samos had proposed much the same thing [as Copernicus was contemplating by 1510, when he wrote his Brief Sketch, otherwise also known as the Commentariolus] in the third century B.C. The only work by Aristarchus known to Copernicus'--a treatise called On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon'--made no mention of a heliocentric plan." Sobel (2011) pp. 18''19. Sobel further writes that in Copernicus's dedication of On the Revolutions to Pope Paul III'--which Copernicus hoped would dampen criticism of his heliocentric theory by "babblers... completely ignorant of [astronomy]"'--the book's author wrote that, in rereading all of philosophy, in the pages of Cicero and Plutarch he had found references to those few thinkers who dared to move the Earth "against the traditional opinion of astronomers and almost against common sense." Sobel comments: "He still knew nothing of the Earth-moving plan of Aristarchus, which had not yet been reported to Latin audiences" (pp. 179''82). ^ a b George Kish (1978) argues that Copernicus knew about Aristarchus's heliocentric theory, saying: "Copernicus himself admitted that the theory was attributed to Aristarchus, though this does not seem to be generally known. ... it is a curious fact that Copernicus did mention the theory of Aristarchus in a passage which he later suppressed."[74] ^ "Copernicus seems to have drawn up some notes [on the displacement of good coin from circulation by debased coin] while he was at Olsztyn in 1519. He made them the basis of a report on the matter, written in German, which he presented to the Prussian Diet held in 1522 at Grudziądz... He later drew up a revised and enlarged version of his little treatise, this time in Latin, and setting forth a general theory of money, for presentation to the Diet of 1528."[9] ^ "The name of the village, not unlike that of the astronomer's family, has been variously spelled. A large German atlas of Silesia, published by Wieland in Nuremberg in 1731, spells it Kopernik."[15] ^ "In 1512, Bishop Watzenrode died suddenly after attending King Sigismund's wedding feast in Krak"w. Rumors abounded that the bishop had been poisoned by agents of his long-time foe, the Teutonic Knights."[22] ^ "[Watzenrode] was also firm, and the Teutonic Knights, who remained a constant menace, did not like him at all; the Grand Master of the order once described him as 'the devil incarnate'. [Watzenrode] was the trusted friend and advisor of three [Polish] kings in succession: John Albert, Alexander (not to be confused with the poisoning pope), and Sigismund; and his influence greatly strengthened the ties between Warmia and Poland proper."[23] ^ "To obtain for his nephews [Nicolaus and Andreas] the necessary support [for their studies in Italy], the bishop [Lucas Watzenrode the Younger] procured their election as canons by the chapter of Frauenburg (1497''1498)."[27] ^ Dobrzycki and Hajdukiewicz (1969) describe Copernicus having attended school at Włocławek as unlikely.[13] ^ Translated to English, it reads: "Here, where stood the house of Domenico Maria Novara, professor of the ancient Studium of Bologna, NICOLAUS COPERNICUS, the Polish mathematician and astronomer who would revolutionize concepts of the universe, conducted brilliant celestial observations with his teacher in 1497''1500. Placed on the 5th centenary of [Copernicus's] birth by the City, the University, the Academy of Sciences of the Institute of Bologna, the Polish Academy of Sciences. 1473 [''] 1973." ^ Copernicus's brother Andreas would, before the end of 1512, develop leprosy and be forced to leave Warmia for Italy. In November 1518 Copernicus would learn that his brother had died.[38] ^ This was based on sketch by Tobias Stimmer (c. 1570), and allegedly based on a self-portrait by Copernicus. It inspired most later Copernicus depictions.[50] ^ A reference to the "Commentariolus" is contained in a library catalogue, dated 1 May 1514, of a 16th-century historian, Matthew of Miech"w, so it must have begun circulating before that date (Koyr(C), 1973, p. 85; Gingerich, 2004, p. 32). Thoren (1990 p. 99) gives the length of the manuscript as 40 pages. ^ Koyr(C) (1973, pp. 27, 90) and Rosen (1995, pp. 64, 184) take the view that Copernicus was indeed concerned about possible objections from theologians, while Lindberg and Numbers (1986) argue against it. Koestler (1963) also denies it. Indirect evidence that Copernicus was concerned about objections from theologians comes from a letter written to him by Andreas Osiander in 1541, in which Osiander advises Copernicus to adopt a proposal by which he says "you will be able to appease the Peripatetics and theologians whose opposition you fear". (Koyr(C), 1973, pp. 35, 90) ^ According to Bell 1992, p. 111,"... Copernicus, on his deathbed, received the printer's proofs of his epoch-breaking DÄ' revolutionibus orbium coelestium." ^ Koestler 1963, page 189, says the following about a letter from Canon Tiedemann Giese to Georg Joachim Rheticus: "['...] the end came only after several months, on 24 May. In a letter to Rheticus, written a few weeks later, Giese recorded the event in a single, tragic sentence: 'For many days he had been deprived of his memory and mental vigour; he only saw his completed book at the last moment, on the day he died.'" Koestler attributes this quotation to Leopold Prowe, Nicolaus Copernicus, Berlin 1883''1884, volume 1, part 2, p. 554. ^ Rosen (1995, pp. 187''92), originally published in 1967 in Saggi su Galileo Galilei . Rosen is particularly scathing about this and other statements in The Sleepwalkers, which he criticizes as inaccurate. ^ The original painting was looted, possibly destroyed, by the Germans in World War II during their occupation of Poland. ^ Fantoli (2005, pp. 118''19); Finocchiaro (1989, pp. 148, 153). On-line copies of Finocchiaro's translations of the relevant documents, Inquisition Minutes of 25 February 1616 and Cardinal Bellarmine's certificate of 26 May 1616, have been made available by Gagn(C) (2005). This notice of the decree would not have prevented Galileo from discussing heliocentrism solely as a mathematical hypothesis, but a stronger formal injunction (Finocchiaro, 1989, pp. 147''48) not to teach it "in any way whatever, either orally or in writing", allegedly issued to him by the Commissary of the Holy Office, Father Michelangelo Segizzi, would certainly have done so (Fantoli, 2005, pp. 119''20, 137). There has been much controversy over whether the copy of this injunction in the Vatican archives is authentic; if so, whether it was ever issued; and if so, whether it was legally valid (Fantoli, 2005, pp. 120''43). ^ "He spoke German, Polish and Latin with equal fluency as well as Italian."[140] ^ "He spoke Polish, Latin, and Greek."[141] ^ "He was a linguist with a command of Polish, German and Latin, and he possessed also a knowledge of Greek rare at that period in northeastern Europe and probably had some acquaintance with Italian and Hebrew."[142] ^ He used Latin and German, knew enough Greek to translate the 7th-century Byzantine poet Theophylact Simocatta's verses into Latin prose,[46] and "there is ample evidence that he knew the Polish language."[143] Edward Rosen mentions that Copernicus recorded Polish farm tenants' names inconsistently, gainsaying that he was fluent in the Polish language.[144] (But decades after Copernicus, each of William Shakespeare's extant autograph signatures showed a different spelling.[145]) During his several years' studies in Italy, Copernicus presumably learned some Italian; Professor Stefan Melkowski of Nicolaus Copernicus University in ToruÅ asserts that Copernicus also spoke both German and Polish.[146] ^ "Although great importance has frequently been ascribed to this fact, it does not imply that Copernicus considered himself to be a German. The 'nationes' of a medieval university had nothing in common with nations in the modern sense of the word. Students who were natives of Prussia and Silesia were automatically described as belonging to the Natio Germanorum. Furthmore, at Bologna, this was the 'privileged' nation; consequently, Copernicus had very good reason for inscribing himself on its register."[149] ^ "It is important to recognize, however, that the medieval Latin concept of natio, or "nation", referred to the community of feudal lords both in Germany and elsewhere, not to 'the people' in the nineteenth-century democratic or nationalistic sense of the word."[150] ^ These interpretations date to the dispute about Copernicus's (Polish vs. German) ethnicity, which had been open since the 1870s, and the "copper" vs. "dill" interpretations go back to the 19th century (Magazin f¼r die Literatur des Auslandes, 1875, 534 f), but the dispute became virulent again in the 1960s, culminating in a controversy between E. Mosko ("copper") and S. Rospond ("dill") in 1963''64, summarized by Zygmunt Brocki, "Wsr´d publikacji o etymologii nazwiska Mikotaja Kopernika ["Some Publications on the Etymology of the Surname of Nicholaus Copernicus"], Komunikaty mazur.-warm., 1970. ^ "In the [enrollment] documents still in existence we find the entry: Nicolaus Nicolai de Torunia."[154] References ^ Andr(C) Goddu, Copernicus and the Aristotelian Tradition (2010), p. 436 (note 125), citing Goddu, review of Jerzy Gassowski, "Poszukiwanie grobu Mikołaja Kopernika " ("Search for Grave of Nicolaus Copernicus"), in Journal for the History of Astronomy, 38.2 (May 2007), p. 255. ^ Jones, Daniel (2003) [1917], Roach, Peter; Hartmann, James; Setter, Jane (eds.), English Pronouncing Dictionary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-3-12-539683-8 ^ "Copernicus". Dictionary.com Unabridged (Online). n.d. ^ "Copernicus". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. ^ Stanisław Borawski ''Mikołaj Kopernik (Nicolaus Copernicus)'' ^ Linton 2004, pp. 39, 119. ^ a b Owen Gingerich, "Did Copernicus Owe a Debt to Aristarchus?", Journal for the History of Astronomy, vol. 16, no. 1 (February 1985), pp. 37''42. "There is no question but that Aristarchus had the priority of the heliocentric idea. Yet there is no evidence that Copernicus owed him anything.(!9) As far as we can tell both the idea and its justification were found independently by Copernicus." ^ Edward Rosen, "Copernicus, Nicolaus", Encyclopedia Americana, International Edition, volume 7, Danbury, Connecticut, Grolier Incorporated, 1986, ISBN 0-7172-0117-1, pp. 755''56. ^ Angus Armitage, The World of Copernicus, 1951, p. 91. ^ Iłowiecki, Maciej (1981). Dzieje nauki polskiej (in Polish). Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Interpress. p. 40. ISBN 978-83-223-1876-8. ^ a b Sheila Rabin. "Nicolaus Copernicus". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Retrieved 22 April 2007 . ^ a b Manfred Weissenbacher, Sources of Power: How Energy Forges Human History, Praeger, 2009, ISBN 978-0-313-35626-1, p. 170. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s Dobrzycki and Hajdukiewicz (1969), p. 4. ^ John Freely, Celestial Revolutionary, I.B. Tauris, 2014 pp. 103''04, 110''13 ISBN 978-1780763507 ^ Mizwa, p. 36. ^ a b c d e Dobrzycki and Hajdukiewicz (1969), p. 3. ^ BieÅkowska (1973), p. 15 ^ Rybka (1973), p. 23. ^ Sakolsky (2005), p. 8. ^ Biskup (1973), p. 16 ^ Mizwa, 1943, p. 38. ^ Hirshfeld, p. 38. ^ Moore (1994), pp. 52, 62. ^ a b c d e f g h i Dobrzycki and Hajdukiewicz (1969), p. 5. ^ Wojciech Iwanczak (1998). "Watzenrode, Lucas". In Bautz, Traugott (ed.). Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL) (in German). Vol. 13. Herzberg: Bautz. col. 389''93. ISBN 3-88309-072-7. ^ Moore (1994), p. 62. ^ "Nicolaus Copernicus", New Advent (online version of the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia). Retrieved 9 June 2013. ^ a b c Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, p. 38. ^ Angus Armitage, The World of Copernicus, p. 55. ^ Dobrzycki and Hajdukiewicz (1969), pp. 4''5. ^ Sobel (2011), pp. 7, 232. ^ Jerzy Dobrzycki and Leszek Hajdukiewicz, "Kopernik, Mikołaj", Polski słownik biograficzny (Polish Biographical Dictionary), vol. XIV, Wrocław, Polish Academy of Sciences, 1969, p. 5. ^ Rosen, Ed (December 1960). "Copernicus was not a priest" (PDF) . Proc. Am. Philos. Soc. 104 (6). Archived from the original (PDF) on 29 October 2013. ^ Rosen, Edward (1995). "Chapter 6: Copernicus' Alleged Priesthood". In Hilfstein, Erna (ed.). Copernicus and his successors. UK: The Hambledon Press. pp. 47''56. Bibcode:1995cops.book.....R. ISBN 978-1-85285-071-5 . Retrieved 17 December 2014 . ^ Hagen, J. (1908). "Nicolaus Copernicus". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company . Retrieved 6 November 2015 . ^ Dobrzycki and Hajdukiewicz (1969), pp. 5''6. ^ a b c d e f g h Dobrzycki and Hajdukiewicz (1969), p. 6. ^ Sobel (2011), pp. 26, 34, 40. ^ Rabin (2005). ^ Gingerich (2004, pp. 187''89, 201); Koyr(C) (1973, p. 94); Kuhn (1957, p. 93); Rosen (2004, p. 123); Rabin (2005). Robbins (1964, p. x), however, includes Copernicus among a list of Renaissance astronomers who "either practiced astrology themselves or countenanced its practice". ^ "Nicolaus Copernicus Gesamtausgabe Bd. VI: Urkunden, Akten und NachrichtenDocumenta Copernicana '' Urkunden, Akten und Nachrichten, alle erhaltenen Urkunden und Akten zur Familiengeschichte, zur Biographie und T¤tigkeitsfeldern von Copernicus, 1996, ISBN 978-3-05-003009-8 [5], pp. 62''63. ^ Studia Copernicana 16 ^ Sparavigna, Ameila Carolina (2017). "Stellarium software and the occultation of Aldebaran observed by Copernicus". HAL . 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An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines. SUNY Press. p. 135. ISBN 978-1-4384-1419-5. ^ a b Sams", Julio (2007). "Biá¹­rÅjÄ: NÅr al-DÄn AbÅ Isḥāq [AbÅ JaÊfar] IbrāhÄm ibn YÅsuf al-Biá¹­rÅjÄ". In Thomas Hockey; et al. (eds.). The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. New York: Springer. pp. 133''34. ISBN 978-0-387-31022-0. (PDF version) ^ a b c Sams", Julio (1970''1980). "Al-Bitruji Al-Ishbili, Abu Ishaq". Dictionary of Scientific Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 978-0-684-10114-9. ^ Esposito 1999, p. 289 ^ Saliba, George (1 July 1995). A History of Arabic Astronomy: Planetary Theories During the Golden Age of Islam. NYU Press. ISBN 978-0-8147-8023-7. ^ Swerdlow, Noel M. (31 December 1973). "The Derivation and First Draft of Copernicus's Planetary Theory: A Translation of the Commentariolus with Commentary". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 117 (6): 423''512. Bibcode:1973PAPhS.117..423S. ISSN 0003-049X. JSTOR 986461. ^ King, David A. (2007). "Ibn al-Shāṭir: ÊAlāʾ al-DÄn ÊAlÄ ibn IbrāhÄm". In Thomas Hockey; et al. (eds.). The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. New York: Springer. pp. 569''70. ISBN 978-0-387-31022-0. (PDF version) ^ Linton (2004, pp. 124, 137''38), Saliba (2009, pp. 160''65), Swerdlow & Neugebauer (1984, pp. 46''48). ^ Goddu (2010, pp. 261''69, 476''86), Huff (2010, pp. 263''64), di Bono (1995), Veselovsky (1973). ^ Freely, John (30 March 2015). Light from the East: How the Science of Medieval Islam Helped to Shape the Western World. I.B.Tauris. p. 179. ISBN 978-1-78453-138-6. ^ Claudia Kren, "The Rolling Device," p. 497. ^ George Saliba, "Whose Science is Arabic Science in Renaissance Europe?" [1] ^ George Saliba (27 April 2006). "Islamic Science and the Making of Renaissance Europe". Library of Congress . Retrieved 1 March 2008 . ^ Except for the circle labelled "V. 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ISBN 978-0-313-35626-1. Westman, Robert S. (2011). The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order. Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-25481-7. External links Latin

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Works by Nicolaus Copernicus at Project GutenbergWorks by or about Nicolaus Copernicus at Internet ArchiveWorks by Nicolaus Copernicus at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) De Revolutionibus, autograph manuscript '' Full digital facsimile, Jagiellonian University (in Polish) Polish translations of letters written by Copernicus in Latin or German Archived 18 October 2015 at the Wayback MachineOnline Galleries, History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries Archived 21 July 2013 at the Wayback Machine High resolution images of works by and/or portraits of Nicolaus Copernicus in .jpg and .tiff format.Works by Nicolaus Copernicus in digital library PolonaGeneral

O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Nicolaus Copernicus", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews Nicolaus Copernicus at the Mathematics Genealogy ProjectCopernicus in TorunCopernicus House, District Museum in ToruÅNicolaus Copernicus Thorunensis by the Copernican Academic PortalNicolaus Copernicus Museum in FromborkClerke, Agnes Mary (1911). "Copernicus, Nicolaus" . Encyclop...dia Britannica. Vol. 7 (11th ed.). pp. 100''101. Portraits of Copernicus: Copernicus's face reconstructed; Portrait Archived 27 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine; Nicolaus CopernicusCopernicus and Astrology Archived 21 January 2009 at the Wayback MachineStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry'Body of Copernicus' identified '' BBC article including image of Copernicus using facial reconstruction based on located skullNicolaus Copernicus on the 1000 Polish Zloty banknote.Copernicus's model for MarsRetrograde MotionCopernicus's explanation for retrograde motionGeometry of Maximum ElongationCopernican ModelPortraits of Nicolaus CopernicusAbout De Revolutionibus

The Copernican Universe from the De RevolutionibusDe Revolutionibus, 1543 first edition '' Full digital facsimile, Lehigh UniversityThe text of the De RevolutionibusDigitized edition of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (1543) with annotations of Michael Maestlin on e-raraPrizes

Nicolaus Copernicus Prize, founded by the City of Krak"w, awarded since 1995German-Polish cooperation

(in English, German, and Polish) German-Polish "Copernicus Prize" awarded to German and Polish scientists (DFG website) (in English, German, and Polish) B¼ro Kopernikus '' An initiative of German Federal Cultural Foundation (in German and Polish) German-Polish school project on Copernicus

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You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag''carrying coastal elite. It doesn't precisely describe me, but it's not far off. I'm Sarah Lawrence''educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.

I fit the NPR mold. I'll cop to that.

So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we've covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI.

It's true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.

If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it's always been this way.

But it hasn't.

For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own'--engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.

Back in 2011, although NPR's audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren't just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.

An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America.

That wouldn't be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it's devastating both for its journalism and its business model.

Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump's presidency.

Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump's most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.

Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR's guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR's coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.

It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you're emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It's bad to blow a big story.

What's worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don't practice those standards yourself. That's what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media.

Russiagate was not NPR's only miscue.

In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here's how NPR's managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: ''We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions.''

But it wasn't a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.

The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR's best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren't following the laptop story because it could help Trump.

When the essential facts of the Post's reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn't make the hard choice of transparency.

Politics also intruded into NPR's Covid coverage, most notably in reporting on the origin of the pandemic. One of the most dismal aspects of Covid journalism is how quickly it defaulted to ideological story lines. For example, there was Team Natural Origin'--supporting the hypothesis that the virus came from a wild animal market in Wuhan, China. And on the other side, Team Lab Leak, leaning into the idea that the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab.

The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost immediately, dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. Anthony Fauci and former NIH head Francis Collins, representing the public health establishment, were its most notable critics. And that was enough for NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists.

But that wasn't the case.

When word first broke of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, a number of leading virologists immediately suspected it could have leaked from a lab there conducting experiments on bat coronaviruses. This was in January 2020, during calmer moments before a global pandemic had been declared, and before fear spread and politics intruded.

Reporting on a possible lab leak soon became radioactive. Fauci and Collins apparently encouraged the March publication of an influential scientific paper known as ''The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.'' Its authors wrote they didn't believe ''any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.''

But the lab leak hypothesis wouldn't die. And understandably so. In private, even some of the scientists who penned the article dismissing it sounded a different tune. One of the authors, Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist from Edinburgh University, wrote to his colleagues, ''I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural.''

Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR, we weren't about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story. We didn't budge when the Energy Department'--the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research'--concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.

Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28, 2023, by asserting confidently that ''the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus.''

When a colleague on our science desk was asked why they were so dismissive of the lab leak theory, the response was odd. The colleague compared it to the Bush administration's unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won't get fooled again. But these two events were not even remotely related. Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.

Uri Berliner near his home in Washington, D.C., on April 5, 2024. (Photo by Pete Kiehart for The Free Press)I'm offering three examples of widely followed stories where I believe we faltered. Our coverage is out there in the public domain. Anyone can read or listen for themselves and make their own judgment. But to truly understand how independent journalism suffered at NPR, you need to step inside the organization.

You need to start with former CEO John Lansing. Lansing came to NPR in 2019 from the federally funded agency that oversees Voice of America. Like others who have served in the top job at NPR, he was hired primarily to raise money and to ensure good working relations with hundreds of member stations that acquire NPR's programming.

After working mostly behind the scenes, Lansing became a more visible and forceful figure after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. It was an anguished time in the newsroom, personally and professionally so for NPR staffers. Floyd's murder, captured on video, changed both the conversation and the daily operations at NPR.

Given the circumstances of Floyd's death, it would have been an ideal moment to tackle a difficult question: Is America, as progressive activists claim, beset by systemic racism in the 2020s'--in law enforcement, education, housing, and elsewhere? We happen to have a very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the way.

But the message from the top was very different. America's infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.

''When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism,'' Lansing wrote in a companywide article, ''we can be agents of change. Listening and deep reflection are necessary but not enough. They must be followed by constructive and meaningful steps forward. I will hold myself accountable for this.''

And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, ''starting with me'--must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves'--body and soul'--to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.''

He declared that diversity'--on our staff and in our audience'--was the overriding mission, the ''North Star'' of the organization. Phrases like ''that's part of the North Star'' became part of meetings and more casual conversation.

Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to ''start talking about race.'' Monthly dialogues were offered for ''women of color'' and ''men of color.'' Nonbinary people of color were included, too.

These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots'--among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.

They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).

All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth. If, as NPR's internal website suggested, the groups were simply a ''great way to meet like-minded colleagues'' and ''help new employees feel included,'' it would have been one thing.

But the role and standing of affinity groups, including those outside NPR, were more than that. They became a priority for NPR's union, SAG-AFTRA'--an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to ''keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups'' and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee.

In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.

Conflicts between workers and bosses, between labor and management, are common in workplaces. NPR has had its share. But what's notable is the extent to which people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.

And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity.

Today on Honestly Bari talks to Uri about this essay and his decision to publish it. Listen here:

There's an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It's frictionless'--one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It's almost like an assembly line.

The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance'--disseminated by news management'--we're asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories'--on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.

More recently, we have approached the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the ''intersectional'' lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus oppressed. That's meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world.

For nearly all my career, working at NPR has been a source of great pride. It's a privilege to work in the newsroom at a crown jewel of American journalism. My colleagues are congenial and hardworking.

I can't count the number of times I would meet someone, describe what I do, and they'd say, ''I love NPR!''

And they wouldn't stop there. They would mention their favorite host or one of those ''driveway moments'' where a story was so good you'd stay in your car until it finished.

It still happens, but often now the trajectory of the conversation is different. After the initial ''I love NPR,'' there's a pause and a person will acknowledge, ''I don't listen as much as I used to.'' Or, with some chagrin: ''What's happening there? Why is NPR telling me what to think?''

In recent years I've struggled to answer that question. Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.

So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn't hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the ''oh wow, that's weird'' variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star.

In a follow-up email exchange, a top NPR news executive told me that she had been ''skewered'' for bringing up diversity of thought when she arrived at NPR. So, she said, ''I want to be careful how we discuss this publicly.''

For years, I have been persistent. When I believe our coverage has gone off the rails, I have written regular emails to top news leaders, sometimes even having one-on-one sessions with them. On March 10, 2022, I wrote to a top news executive about the numerous times we described the controversial education bill in Florida as the ''Don't Say Gay'' bill when it didn't even use the word gay. I pushed to set the record straight, and wrote another time to ask why we keep using that word that many Hispanics hate'--Latinx. On March 31, 2022, I was invited to a managers' meeting to present my observations.

Throughout these exchanges, no one has ever trashed me. That's not the NPR way. People are polite. But nothing changes. So I've become a visible wrong-thinker at a place I love. It's uncomfortable, sometimes heartbreaking.

Even so, out of frustration, on November 6, 2022, I wrote to the captain of ship North Star'--CEO John Lansing'--about the lack of viewpoint diversity and asked if we could have a conversation about it. I got no response, so I followed up four days later. He said he would appreciate hearing my perspective and copied his assistant to set up a meeting. On December 15, the morning of the meeting, Lansing's assistant wrote back to cancel our conversation because he was under the weather. She said he was looking forward to chatting and a new meeting invitation would be sent. But it never came.

I won't speculate about why our meeting never happened. Being CEO of NPR is a demanding job with lots of constituents and headaches to deal with. But what's indisputable is that no one in a C-suite or upper management position has chosen to deal with the lack of viewpoint diversity at NPR and how that affects our journalism.

Which is a shame. Because for all the emphasis on our North Star, NPR's news audience in recent years has become less diverse, not more so. Back in 2011, our audience leaned a bit to the left but roughly reflected America politically; now, the audience is cramped into a smaller, progressive silo.

Despite all the resources we'd devoted to building up our news audience among blacks and Hispanics, the numbers have barely budged. In 2023, according to our demographic research, 6 percent of our news audience was black, far short of the overall U.S. adult population, which is 14.4 percent black. And Hispanics were only 7 percent, compared to the overall Hispanic adult population, around 19 percent. Our news audience doesn't come close to reflecting America. It's overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.

These are perilous times for news organizations. Last year, NPR laid off or bought out 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts following a slump in advertising revenue. Our radio audience is dwindling and our podcast downloads are down from 2020. The digital stories on our website rarely have national impact. They aren't conversation starters. Our competitive advantage in audio'--where for years NPR had no peer'--is vanishing. There are plenty of informative and entertaining podcasts to choose from.

Even within our diminished audience, there's evidence of trouble at the most basic level: trust.

In February, our audience insights team sent an email proudly announcing that we had a higher trustworthy score than CNN or The New York Times. But the research from Harris Poll is hardly reassuring. It found that ''3-in-10 audience members familiar with NPR said they associate NPR with the characteristic 'trustworthy.''‰'' Only in a world where media credibility has completely imploded would a 3-in-10 trustworthy score be something to boast about.

With declining ratings, sorry levels of trust, and an audience that has become less diverse over time, the trajectory for NPR is not promising. Two paths seem clear. We can keep doing what we're doing, hoping it will all work out. Or we could start over, with the basic building blocks of journalism. We could face up to where we've gone wrong. News organizations don't go in for that kind of reckoning. But there's a good reason for NPR to be the first: we're the ones with the word public in our name.

Despite our missteps at NPR, defunding isn't the answer. As the country becomes more fractured, there's still a need for a public institution where stories are told and viewpoints exchanged in good faith. Defunding, as a rebuke from Congress, wouldn't change the journalism at NPR. That needs to come from within.

A few weeks ago, NPR welcomed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who's been a leader in tech. She doesn't have a news background, which could be an asset given where things stand. I'll be rooting for her. It's a tough job. Her first rule could be simple enough: don't tell people how to think. It could even be the new North Star.

Uri Berliner is a senior business editor and reporter at NPR. His work has been recognized with a Peabody Award, a Loeb Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and a Society of Professional Journalists New America Award, among others. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @uberliner.

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Wed, 10 Apr 2024 16:41

Fears are growing that the H5N1 outbreak among cattle in the United States could have been caused by contaminated animal feed.

In contrast to Britain and Europe, American farmers are still allowed to feed cattle and other farm animals ground-up waste from other animals including birds.

Dairy cows across six US states '' and at least one farm worker '' have become infected with the highly pathogenic virus, which has already killed millions of animals across the globe since 2021.

The farm worker, who is thought to have been exposed via infected cattle in Texas, is only the second recorded human H5N1 case in the US. Since February, the US has investigated and discounted a further 8,000 possible exposures, according to Dr Joshua Mott, WHO senior advisor on influenza.

The development is of concern because it allows the virus, which has killed millions of birds and wild mammals around the world, more opportunities to mutate.

American farmers are still permitted to feed cattle ground-up waste from other animals, including birds Credit : Rodrigo Abd/AP/File photoExperts fear that H5N1, which was only first detected in cows a few weeks ago, may have been transmitted through a type of cattle feed called ''poultry litter'' '' a mix of poultry excreta, spilled feed, feathers, and other waste scraped from the floors of industrial chicken and turkey production plants.

In the UK and EU, feeding cows proteins from other animals has been tightly regulated since the outbreak of BSE '' or 'mad cow disease' '' 30 years ago.

Experts are unsure but fear it could be the poultry litter feed used in the US that has passed the virus to cattle.

''In the US, the feeding of poultry litter to beef cows is a known factor in the cause of botulism in cattle, and is a risk in the case of H5N1,'' said Dr Steve Van Winden, Associate Professor in Population Medicine at the Royal Veterinary College.

Dr Tom Peacock, a virologist and fellow at the Pirbright Institute agreed: ''This latest case wouldn't be the first time there have been concerns H5N1 could be moving through different mammals via contaminated feed,'' citing the outbreak of avian flu in cats in Poland last year, which experts suspected might have been transmitted through mink byproducts used in raw cat food.

The US cattle industry is worth over $100 billion and regulations covering animal standards there have long been controversial in Europe '' most famously over the use of hormones in the rearing of cattle for meat.

The US cattle industry is worth over $100 billion and regulations covering animal standards there have long been controversial Credit : ADAM DAVIS/EPA-EFE/ShutterstockAlthough the presence of H5N1 in US cattle herds increases the risk of the virus getting into humans via farm workers, it is the spread of the virus to pig farms that presents the bigger threat.

This is because pigs have receptors on some cells that are similar to humans, making it much more likely that the virus could mutate and jump to humans if pig farms become infected.

So far, the virus hasn't shown any signs of worrying mutation, however.

''Infection of H5N1 in pigs is of particular concern '' they are highly susceptible to human influenza virus strains so could act as mixing vessels for avian and human viruses to mix and generate viruses that can more efficiently infect humans,'' said Dr Tom Peacock.

Poultry litter is not only cheaper than other food sources like soy and grains but is also more calorie-dense, meaning farmers can bulk up their herds much more quickly.

According to the FDA, the practice is safe: ''With respect to pathogenic microorganisms, drug residues and contaminants in poultry litter, FDA is not aware of any data showing that the use of poultry litter in cattle feed is posing human or animal health risks that warrant restrictions on its use,'' a spokesperson said.

There are several other theories on how the H5N1-infected cattle '' so far identified in Texas, Idaho, Kansas, Ohio, New Mexico, and Michigan '' contracted the virus.

Many experts argue that the most likely route of infection is via wild birds '' which have been found dead on some farms.

''The spread of this around the world comes back to wild and wild bird populations and where they land and where their faeces goes,'' stressed the WHO's Dr Johsua Mott.

''At some point, the contact with wild birds in the environment produced virus that then the cows had exposure to, but how that exposure happened is what many people are trying to figure out,'' he added.

It is also unclear if the virus is spreading from animal to animal, said Dr Mott.

On each farm, multiple creatures have been infected but this could be because they are eating from a common source of infection '' feed or wild birds '' rather than passing it on to another.

The director of ruminant health for the United States Department of Agriculture, Mark Lyons, suggested at a meeting last week the virus could be potentially transmitted by contamination of workers' clothing, or the suction cups that are attached to cow udders during milking.

However, others argue that poultry litter as a potential source of contamination cannot be ruled out.

''The flu can be spread by faecal-oral routes, and so it's not an impossible scenario that chickens who are infected with H5N1 are shedding live virus through faces, which the cattle then consume, and so it is a potential mechanism of transmission, although there are other explanations,'' said Dr Brian Ferguson, Professor of Infectious Diseases at the University of Cambridge.

''The BSE scandal showed us the reality of what happens when biosecurity is not a priority, and showed us that it really does need to be prioritised '' which is not always the case, because of the economics involved,'' he added.

Despite large-scale culling in poultry flocks during outbreaks to limit spread, it seems a similar approach will not be taken for cattle.

The CDC has advised farmers with affected herds to dispose of milk produced by infected cattle, although it is thought that the pasteurisation process also destroys the virus '' meaning the risk to humans consuming animal products remains low.

At present, the WHO has said the risk to humans is considered low, but that surveillance efforts must be kept up.

''There were 12 of H5N1 cases globally in 2023, and a similar pace so far in 2024. Since it emerged in 1996, there have been over 800 cases globally.

''So you get a sense that there's nothing unprecedented about the number of human cases we're seeing '' but we have to watch the virus. We have to watch the epidemiology, to see if it's changing in some way,'' said Dr Mott.

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Tue, 09 Apr 2024 21:12

By Jason Hall

April 9, 2024

A virus said to be "100 times worse than COVID" is reportedly putting the world "dangerously close" to the next pandemic, an expert warned.

Cases of Avian flu are rising among humans, which includes one recently found in Texas, leading to concerns among medical professionals about the deadly H5N1 strain. Dr. Suresh Kuchipudi, a bird flu researcher based in Pittsburgh, claims the world is closer to another pandemic than any point since the coronavirus outbreak as the Avian flu appears to be fatal to half of its patients.

''This virus has been on the top of the pandemic list for many, many years and probably decades. And now we are getting dangerously close to this virus potentially causing a pandemic," Dr. Kuchipudi said during a White House briefing via the Daily Star. ''H5N1 viruses have already demonstrated several important features of a potential pandemic virus, the virus is already globally distributed, and this virus particularly that is often perceived as an avian virus can and it has shown the ability to infect a range of mammalian hosts including humans.''

Dr. Kuchipudi stressed that the virus isn't one to worry about in the future, rather is already "globally present" and "infecting a range of mammals and is circulating."

"So, therefore, in my view, I think this is a virus that has the greatest pandemic threat [that is] playing out in plain sight and is globally present. It is really high time that we are prepared,'' he said via the Daily Star.

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Tue, 09 Apr 2024 21:04

A teenager in Idaho was arrested over the weekend for allegedly planning to carry out a terrorist attack on Christian churches on behalf of ISIS.

Federal law enforcement officials arrested Alexander Scott Mercurio, 18, on Saturday after he pledged allegiance to ISIS and planned to attack Christian churches on April 7 using ''flame-covered weapons, explosives, knives, a machete, a pipe, and ultimately firearms,'' court documents say.

The FBI stumbled upon Mercurio in 2021 while conducting a criminal investigation into a fundraising network that uses cryptocurrency to fund Islamic terrorist groups.

In 2023, investigators found on his school-issued laptop numerous pieces of evidence that showed he was serious about his commitment to ISIS as well as his interest in ''socialism'' and ''communism,'' court documents say.

He told a confidential FBI informant that in his video pledging allegiance to ISIS, he would state that it was important to ''respond to the call to the caliphate by killing Jews and Christians.''

He indicated that he planned to ''walk to the church, pull out the pipe to light it on fire on one end, hit people in the elbows and kneecaps, force them to the ground, slit their throats with a knife or machete, start small fires, use gas cans to throw at the small fires to cause an explosion and when the police respond he will hide in a corner and attempt to grab the gun of an officer to use,'' court documents said, according to the Idaho Statesmen.

He allegedly believed that by murdering Christians, he was performing ''a good deed.''

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''As alleged in the complaint, the defendant swore an oath of loyalty to ISIS and planned to wage an attack in its name on churches in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho,'' said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. ''Thanks to the investigative efforts of the FBI, the defendant was taken into custody before he could act, and he is now charged with attempting to support ISIS's mission of terror and violence. The Justice Department will continue to relentlessly pursue, disrupt, and hold accountable those who would commit acts of terrorism against the people and interests of the United States.''

''The defendant allegedly pledged loyalty to ISIS and sought to attack people attending churches in Idaho, a truly horrific plan which was detected and thwarted by the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force,'' said FBI Director Christopher Wray. ''This investigation demonstrates the FBI's steadfast commitment to work with our law enforcement partners to stop those who wish to commit acts of violence on behalf of '' or inspired by '' foreign terrorist groups.''

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Tue, 09 Apr 2024 20:26

EU DisinfoLab, a non-profit officially operating independently but regularly making policy recommendations to the EU and member-states, is now pushing for a security structure created by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) to be utilized in the ''war on disinformation.''

EU DisinfoLab, which receives grants from George Soros' controversial Open Society Foundations, is now testing the water regarding ''repurposing'' of an ICANN security operation set up to combat malware, spam, phishing, etc., and turn it into a tool against ''disinformation sites.''

Attempting to directly enlist ICANN would be highly controversial, to put it mildly, at least at this stage. Given its importance in the internet infrastructure '' ICANN manages domain names globally '' and the fact content control is not among its tasks (DisinfoLab says ICANN ''refuses'' to do it) '' this would represent a huge departure from the organization's role as we understand it today.

But now DisinfoLab proposes to use ''the structure already created by ICANN'' against legitimate security threats, to police the internet for content that somebody decides to treat as ''disinformation.'' It would require ''minimal amount of diligence and cooperation'' from registries, a blog post said, to accept ICANN-style reports and revoke a site's domain name.

The justification for all this is that alleged ''disinformation doppelganger'' sites use domain names that are deceptively similar to ''trusted news sites.''

And, according to the group, who better to wipe out whatever domain name is deemed to belong to a ''disinformation site'' than a DNS registrar '' and ICANN is the top authority for them all.

During the pandemic, ICANN's Domain Name System Threat Information Collection and Reporting (DNSTICR) was used to identify domain names that contained terms related to Covid, but the goal was to find out if the sites abused the keyword(s) to mask phishing or malware proliferating operations, rather than to ''moderate'' any type of Covid-related content.

Now DisinfoLab wants to use a system based on DNSTICR to allow for reporting of ''genuinely open-and-shut (disinformation) cases'' to registrars for removal.

But, what authority would decide what's a ''genuinely open-and-shut case''?

DisinfoLab's idea: registries or registrars could ''grant media trade associations 'trusted notifier' status.''

No word on what methodology these ''trusted notifiers'' would use to perform their ''arbiter of truth'' role.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net.

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Tue, 09 Apr 2024 19:55

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A Russian disinformation network has made a series of false claims about the British royal family in its ongoing information war with Ukraine.

Among the incorrect allegations being made by pro-Kremlin campaigners is the suggestion circulating on fake news sites that King Charles has sold his royal residence Highgrove House to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for £20m.

The bizarre report was initially made in a YouTube video that featured someone who claimed to be the estate agent behind the made-up sale. However, security experts told The Times the character, named Sam Murphy, appeared to be AI-generated.

The news was then spread by a fake British outlet before it was circulated by a number of English, French, German and Italian bots on X, formerly Twitter.

A website called The London Crier published an article featuring a supposed interview with Charles' former butler Grant Harrold. In it, Mr Harrold is claimed to have confirmed the sale of Highgrove as having been completed through Mr Zelenskyy's wife Olena on 29 February, and that staff at the royal residence had been laid off.

Even an official Russian embassy account then tweeted the fake news to its thousands of followers.

However, Mr Harrold, who is now a royal commentator, told The Times that the story and the interview it claimed to be based on was entirely made up. His spokeswoman said: ''This story is completely false and Grant has made no comment on this. There was no interview that took place.''

Kyiv was even forced to publicly refute the Highgrove tale, which bears similarities with other attempts, ungrounded in any fact, to imply the Zelenskyys are financially benefiting from the Ukraine war.

Ukrainian state media reported: ''This is a fake. There is no information in the British media about Zelensky's purchase of the mansion, and there are no official statements on the matter.''

It is the latest in a series of attempts by Russian propaganda to target the British royal family, as stories about the monarchy dominate headlines.

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Tue, 09 Apr 2024 19:36

Writing as a man aged 66, you'd think I'd be concerned about prostate cancer, one of the current health hobby horses. In a way I am, but I also have an aversion to being told to worry about one thing after another, and my concerns also include the side-effects of treatment which are consistently overlooked in all sorts of contexts. I have seen what has happened to friends and relatives who have been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

When I watched a Hannah Fry Horizon documentary about her own cervical cancer experience, the side-effects of her treatment and the research she'd pursued, one of the most alarming points raised was that the risk of life-changing side effects from chemotherapy seemed to be somewhat higher than the risk from breast cancer. She asked ''are we over-medicalising'' cancer?

Now it seems that a major study running over 15 years has questioned the whole process of prostate cancer screening.

The Telegraph has the story:

Prostate cancer screening is likely to do more harm than good, experts have warned, after a 15-year trial showed one in six flagged cases was wrong.

The largest study to date investigating the PSA (Prostate-specific antigen) blood test, which is used as a screening tool in some European countries, found it had a small impact on reducing deaths, but also led to a worrying level of over-diagnosis.

In some cases, it missed early detection of some aggressive cancers.

Researchers from the universities of Bristol, Oxford and Cambridge, invited more than 400,000 men aged between 50-69 for screening, with just over half receiving a PSA test.

After following up for 15 years, nearly seven men out of every 1,000 in the group invited for screening had died from prostate cancer, compared to nearly eight men out of every 1,000 who had not been tested.

The results of the trial show that an estimated one in six cancers found by the single PSA screening were over-diagnosed leading to unnecessary treatment of tumours that would not have caused any harm in someone's lifetime

The treatment of prostate cancer may cause physical side-effects including the possibility of infection following a biopsy, erectile dysfunction and bladder and bowel problems.

The key problems seem to involve missing the more aggressive cancers while subjecting other men given a positive diagnosis to treatment that may be unnecessary and causes more harm.

Dr. Neil Smith, GP for Cancer Research U.K. and GP Lead for Lancashire and South Cumbria Cancer Alliance, said: ''With prostate cancer causing 12,000 deaths in the U.K. every year, we completely understand why men want to know if they have the disease, even when they don't have symptoms.

''However, this research highlights that a PSA test for early detection can do more harm than good '' it's simply not accurate enough and can lead to some men having tests and treatment that they don't need.''

Definitely worth reading in full.

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Tue, 09 Apr 2024 19:36

Prostate cancer screening is likely to do more harm than good, experts have warned, after a 15-year trial showed one in six flagged cases was wrong.

The largest study to date investigating the PSA (Prostate-specific antigen) blood test, which is used as a screening tool in some European countries, found it had a small impact on reducing deaths, but also led to a worrying level of overdiagnosis.

In some cases, it missed early detection of some aggressive cancers.

Researchers from the universities of Bristol, Oxford and Cambridge, invited more than 400,000 men aged between 50-69 for screening, with just over half receiving a PSA test.

After following up for 15 years, nearly seven men out of every 1,000 in the group invited for screening had died from prostate cancer, compared to nearly eight men out of every 1,000 who had not been tested.

The results of the trial show that an estimated one in six cancers found by the single PSA screening were overdiagnosed leading to unnecessary treatment of tumours that would not have caused any harm in someone's lifetime

The treatment of prostate cancer may cause physical side effects including the possibility of infection following a biopsy, erectile dysfunction, and bladder and bowel problems.

Professor Richard Martin, lead author and Cancer Research UK scientist at the University of Bristol, said: ''The key takeaway is that the small reduction in prostate cancer deaths by using the test to screen healthy men does not outweigh the potential harms.

'Some men have treatment they don't need'''This results in some men going on to have invasive treatment that they don't need, many years earlier than without screening, and the test is also failing to spot some cancers that do need to be treated.

''We need to find better ways to spot aggressive prostate cancers, so we can treat them early.''

Prostate cancer is the second-biggest cancer killer of men in the UK, causing 12,000 deaths a year.

It is the most common cancer in the UK without a screening programme, despite the fact that it usually has no symptoms until it has spread and become incurable.

The UK National Screening Committee (NSC), which reviews the evidence for screening programmes, does not currently recommend screening for prostate cancer because it is unclear that the benefits outweigh the harms.

Dr Neil Smith, GP for Cancer Research UK and GP Lead for Lancashire and South Cumbria Cancer Alliance, said: ''With prostate cancer causing 12,000 deaths in the UK every year, we completely understand why men want to know if they have the disease, even when they don't have symptoms.

''However, this research highlights that a PSA test for early detection can do more harm than good '' it's simply not accurate enough and can lead to some men having tests and treatment that they don't need.

''You know your body best '' so if you do notice any unusual changes, contact your GP. It probably won't be cancer, but if it is, then spotting it earlier means that treatment is more likely to be successful.''

Early prostate cancer usually has no symptoms so early detection is challenging.

Last year Prostate Cancer UK launched the £42m Transform trial, which will study hundreds of thousands of men, to see if MRI scans can do a better job at picking up disease early.

Other research, such as the Stampede trial, is aiming to find the best treatment for men with advanced prostate cancer to further improve survival and quality of life.

Dr Matthew Hobbs, Director of Research at Prostate Cancer UK, said: ''A previous trial showed that screening with PSA blood tests does reduce deaths from prostate cancer but that it also misses important cancers and harms men who are given treatments or biopsies they don't need.

''The results from the UK CaP trial are extremely significant, because they back up these findings.

''The number of men screened who still died of prostate cancer in both trials makes crystal clear that the imperative now is to develop, test, and prove new ways to diagnose prostate cancer that detect those aggressive cancers missed by PSA tests and reduce potential harm even further.''

In a separate study, researchers found that cutting the length of MRI scans for prostate cancer by a third would make them cheaper and more accessible without hindering accuracy.

Clinicians offer patients suspected of having prostate cancer an MRI scan, which is carried out in three stages.

The final step involves the patient being injected with contrast dye, which helps to enhance the images from the scan.

Removing this stage would lower costs and ensure MRIs are offered to more men, researchers from University College London (UCL) and University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said.

But they warned it is ''vital'' that the scans ''are of optimal diagnostic quality'' if this approach is to be taken.

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Tue, 09 Apr 2024 19:31

The Atlantic*Anti-Semitism on the right and the left threatens to bring to a close an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans'--and demolish the liberal order they helped establish.

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Updated at 1:35 p.m. ET on March 13, 2024. This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

1 Stacey Zolt Hara was in her office in downtown San Francisco when a text from her 16-year-old daughter arrived: ''I'm scared,'' she wrote. Her classmates at Berkeley High School were preparing to leave their desks and file into the halls, part of a planned ''walkout'' to protest Israel. Like many Jewish students, she didn't want to participate. It was October 18, 11 days after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel.

Zolt Hara told her daughter to wait in her classroom. She was trying to project calm. A public-relations executive, Zolt Hara had moved her family from Chicago to Berkeley six years earlier, hoping to find a community that shared her progressive values. Her family had developed a deep sense of belonging there.

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View MoreBut a moral fervor was sweeping over Berkeley High that morning. Around 10:30, the walkout began. Jewish parents traded panicked reports from their children. Zolt Hara heard that kids were chanting, ''From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,'' a slogan that suggests the elimination of Israel. Rumors spread about other, less coy phrases shouted in the hallways, carrying intimations of violence. Jewish students were said to be in tears. Parents were texting one another ideas about where in the school their children could hide. Zolt Hara placed a call to the dean of students. By her own admission, she was hysterical. She says the dean hung up on her.

By the early afternoon the walkout was over, but Zolt Hara and other Jewish parents worried that it was a prelude to something worse. They joined Google Groups and WhatsApp chains so they could share information. Zolt Hara organized a petition, pleading with the school district to take anti-Semitism more seriously. It quickly received more than 1,300 signatures.

Most worrying was what parents kept hearing about teachers, both in Berkeley and in the surrounding school districts. They seemed to be using their classrooms to mold students into advocates for a maximalist vision of Palestine. A group of activists within the Oakland Education Association, that city's teachers' union, sponsored a ''teach-in.'' A video trumpeting the event urged: ''Apply your labor power to show solidarity with the Palestinian people.'' An estimated 70 teachers set aside their normal curriculum to fix students' attention on Gaza.

Even classes with no discernible connection to international affairs joined the teach-in. Its centerpiece was a webinar titled ''From Gaza to Oakland: How Does the Issue Connect to Us?,'' in which local activists implored the kids to join them on the streets. They told the students'--in a predominantly Black and Latino school district'--that the Israeli military works hand in glove with American police forces, sharing tips and tactics. ''Repression there ends up cycling back to repression here,'' an activist named Anton explained. Elementary-school teachers, whose students were too young for the webinar, were given a list of books to use in their classes. One of them, Handala's Return, described how a ''group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people.''

The same zeal was gripping schools in Berkeley. Zolt Hara learned from another parent about an ethnic-studies class in which the teacher had described the slaughter of some Israelis on October 7 as the result of friendly fire. She saw a disturbing image that another teacher had presented in an art class, of a fist breaking through a Star of David. (Officials at Berkeley High School did not respond to requests for comment.) In her son's middle school, there were signs on classroom walls that read Teach Palestine .

Zolt Hara didn't need to imagine how kids might respond to these lessons. She heard about incidents at her children's schools. One kid walked up to a Jewish student playing what he called a ''Nazi salute song'' on his phone. Another said something in German and then added, ''I don't like your people.'' A Manichaean view of the conflict even filtered down to the lowest grades in Berkeley. According to one parent complaint to the principal of Washington Elementary School, a second grader suggested that students divide into Israeli and Palestinian ''teams,'' and another announced that Palestinians couldn't be friends with Jews.

On November 17, the middle school that Zolt Hara's son attends staged its own walkout. Zolt Hara was relieved that her son was traveling for a family event that day. But she heard about video of the protest, recorded on a parent's phone. I tracked down the footage and watched it myself. ''Are you Jewish?'' one mop-haired tween asks another, seemingly unaware of any adult presence. ''No way,'' the second kid replies. ''I fucking hate them.'' Another blurts, ''Kill Israel.'' A student laughingly attempts to start a chant of ''KKK.''

Graffiti in Oakland, January 2024 (Franklin Foer)On a damp morning this winter, I joined about 40 kids assembled in a classroom at a public high school in the East Bay for a meeting of the Jewish Student Union. I promised that I wouldn't identify their school in the hopes that they might speak freely, without fear of retribution from teachers or peers. The first boy to raise his hand proudly announced that he supported a cease-fire. But as the conversation progressed, students began to recall how painful their school's walkout had felt. Their classmates had left them alone with teachers, who they suspected would think less of them for having stayed put. At every stop in their education in this progressive community, they had learned about a world divided between oppressors and the oppressed'--and now they felt that they were being accused of being the bad guys, despite having nothing to do with events on the other side of the world, and despite the fact that Hamas had initiated the current war by invading Israeli communities and murdering an estimated 1,200 people.

At the end of the session a student in a kippah, puffer jacket, and T-shirt pulled me aside. He said he wanted to speak privately, because he didn't want to risk crying in front of his peers. After October 7, he said, his school life, as a visibly identifiable Jew, had become unbearable. Walking down the halls, kids would shout ''Free Palestine'' at him. They would make the sound of explosions, as if he were personally responsible for the bombardment of Gaza. They would tell him to pick up pennies. As he was walking into the gym to use one of its courts, a kid told him, ''There goes the Jew, taking everyone's land.'' I asked if he'd ever told any of this to an administrator. ''Nothing would change,'' he said. Based on how other local authorities had responded to anti-Semitism, I didn't doubt him.

2 Like many American Jews , I once considered anti-Semitism a threat largely emanating from the right. It was Donald Trump who attracted the allegiance of white supremacists and freely borrowed their tropes. A closing ad of his 2016 presidential campaign flashed images of prominent Jews'--Lloyd Blankfein, Janet Yellen, and George Soros'--as it decried global special interests bleeding the people dry.

Trump's victory inspired anti-Semitic hate groups, long consigned to the shadows, to strut with impunity. Less than two weeks after Trump's election, the white nationalist Richard Spencer came to Washington, D.C., and proclaimed, ''Hail Trump! Hail our people!'' as supporters responded with Nazi salutes. In August 2017, angry men carried tiki torches through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting, ''Jews will not replace us.'' In 2018, the consequences of violent anti-Semitic rhetoric became tangible: At the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 11 people were fatally shot. The following year, on the last day of Passover, at a synagogue in a San Diego suburb, a gunman killed one and wounded three others, including a rabbi.

After each incident, my anxiety about the safety of my own family and synagogue would spike, but I consoled myself with the thought that once Trump disappeared from the scene, the explosion of Jew hatred would recede. America would revert to its essential self: the most comfortable homeland in the Jewish diaspora.

From the May 2023 issue: Is Holocaust education making anti-Semitism worse?

That reassuring thought required downplaying the anti-Semitism that had begun to appear on the left well before October 7'--on college campuses, among progressive activists, even on the fringes of the Democratic Party. It required minimizing Representative Ilhan Omar's insinuation about Jewish control of politics'--''It's all about the Benjamins baby'''--as an ignorant gaffe. And it meant dismissing intense outbreaks of anti-Zionist harassment by pro-Palestinian demonstrators, which coincided with tensions in the Middle East, as a passing storm.

Part of the reason I failed to appreciate the extent of the anti-Semitism on the left is that I assumed its criticisms of the Israeli government were, at bottom, a harsher version of my own. I opposed the proliferation of settlements in the West Bank, the callousness that military occupation required, and the religious zealotry that had begun to infuse the country's right wing, including its current ruling coalition.

In October 2018, a gunman killed 11 people and wounded six at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Brendan Smialowski / AFP/ Getty)Such criticisms were not those of a dissident'--the majority of American Jews share them. The Palestinian leadership has a long record of abject obstructionism, historical denialism, and violent irredentism, but American Jews heap blame on recalcitrant right-wing Israeli governments, too. Polling by the Pew Research Center in 2020 found that only one in three American Jews said they felt that the Israeli government was ''sincere'' in its pursuit of peace. But whatever criticism American Jews leveled against Israel, the anger was born of love. Eight in 10 described Israel as either ''essential'' or ''important'' to their Jewish identity. And they still held out hope for peace. In that same poll, 63 percent of American Jews said they considered a two-state solution plausible. Jews were, in fact, more likely than the overall U.S. population to believe in the possibility of peaceful coexistence with an independent Palestine.

Among the brutal epiphanies of October 7 was this: A disconcertingly large number of Israel's critics on the left did not share that vision of peaceful coexistence, or believe Jews had a right to a nation of their own. After Hamas's rampage of rape, kidnapping, and murder, a history professor at Cornell named Russell Rickford said Palestinians were understandably ''exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence.'' He added, ''I was exhilarated.'' A student at the same university was arrested and charged with posting online threats about slitting the throats of Jewish males and strafing the kosher dining hall with gunfire. In Philadelphia, a mob descended on a falafel restaurant, chanting about the Israeli American co-owner's complicity in genocide. Over the three-month period following the Hamas attacks, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 56 episodes of physical violence targeting Jews and 1,347 incidents of harassment. That 13-week span contained more anti-Semitic incidents than the entirety of 2021'--at the time the worst year since the ADL had begun keeping count, in 1979.

I don't want to dismiss the anger that the left feels about the terrible human cost of the Israeli counterinvasion of Gaza, or denounce criticism of Israel as inherently anti-Semitic'--especially because I share some of those criticisms. Nor do I believe that anti-Zionist is a term that should be considered axiomatically interchangeable with anti-Semite. The elimination of Israel, in my opinion, would be a profound catastrophe for the Jewish people. But I have read idealistic critics of Israel, such as the late historian Tony Judt, who imagined that it could be replaced by a binational state, where Jews and Palestinians live side by side under one democratic government. That strikes me as naive in the extreme'--especially after the Hamas pogrom of October 7'--and very likely the end of Jewish existence in the Levant. But not everything that is terrible for the Jews is anti-Semitic.

Anti-Semitism is a mental habit, deeply embedded in Christian and Muslim thinking, stretching back at least as far as the accusation that the Jews murdered the son of God. It's a tendency to fixate on Jews, to place them at the center of the narrative, overstating their role in society and describing them as the root cause of any unwanted phenomena'--a centrality that seems strange, given that Jews constitute about 0.2 percent of the global population. Though it shape-shifts over time, anti-Semitism returns to the same essential complaint: that Jews are cunning, bloodthirsty, and mad for power. Anti-Zionism often takes a similar form: the dehumanization, the unilateral casting of blame, and the fetishizing of Jewish villainy.

Liberal Jews once celebrated Israel as the lone democracy in a distinctly undemocratic region. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition of theocrats and messianists seems bent on shredding the basis for that claim. But many governments in the world share these undesirable traits. Still, no one calls for the eradication of Hungary or El Salvador or India. No one defaces Chinese restaurants in San Francisco because Beijing imprisons Uyghurs in concentration camps and occupies Tibet.

The anti-Zionism that has flourished on the left in recent years doesn't stop with calls for an end to the occupation of the West Bank. It espouses a blithe desire to eliminate the world's only Jewish-majority nation, valorizes the homicidal campaign against its existence, and seeks to hold members of the Jewish diaspora to account for the sins of a country they don't live in and for a government they didn't elect. In so doing, this faction of the left places itself in the terrible lineage of attempts to erase Jewry'--and, in turn, stirs ancient and not-so-ancient existential fears.

Nowhere is this more fully on display than in the Bay Area. After October 7, protesters flooded city-council meetings, demanding cease-fire resolutions and rejecting any attempt to include clauses condemning Hamas for the rape and murder of Jews. One viral video compiled enraged citizen comments at an Oakland city-council meeting. These citizens weren't just showing solidarity for the people of Gaza, but angrily amplifying wild conspiracy theories. One woman declared, in the style of a 9/11 truther, that ''Israel murdered their own people on October 7.'' Another, in the manner of a Holocaust denier, described the events of that day as a ''fabricated narrative.''

For months, the Berkeley city council resisted the pressure to pass a cease-fire resolution; the mayor regarded foreign policy as far beyond its jurisdiction. But the pressure grew so intense that the council could hardly conduct any other business. Protesters disrupted official meetings, forcing the mayor to keep adjourning deliberations to another room where the public was not allowed. Police offered to escort council members to their cars after meetings. The mayor's unwillingness to condemn Israel was anomalous, even in his own city. On December 4, the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board voted to endorse a cease-fire.

Impassioned support for the Palestinian cause metastasized into the hatred of Jews. Anti-Semitism has become part of the landscape. In 2021, a community space in San Francisco's Mission neighborhood, owned by a progressive gay Jewish activist, was defaced with messages including Zionist pigz. After October 7, the windows of Smitten Ice Cream, owned by a Jewish woman, were smashed and spray-painted with the words Out the Mission .

In December 2023, a large menorah on public display in Oakland, California, was destroyed. (Jane Tyska / Digital First Media / East Bay Times / Getty)During Hanukkah, a menorah sponsored by Chabad Oakland and perched on the shore of Lake Merritt, in the center of the city, was torn apart by its branches and hurled into the water, replaced by graffiti reading your org is dying, we're gonna find you, you're on fucking alert . Oakland Public Works quickly painted over the message and other anti-Semitic graffiti. But when I walked the trail around the lake several weeks after Hanukkah, I found a weathered metal box, built to display a work of public art. On its side was a laminated message titled ''The World We Wish to See.'' What followed was a lyrical vision of liberation that imagined a future in which ''all beings are treated with dignity.'' But whatever display had once existed in the box had been removed. What was left were the etched words Zionist KILLER .

In the hatred that I witnessed in the Bay Area, and that has been evident on college campuses and in progressive activist circles nationwide, I've come to see left-wing anti-Semitism as characterized by many of the same violent delusions as the right-wing strain. This is not an accident of history. Though right- and left-wing anti-Semitism may have emerged in different ways, for different reasons, both are essentially attacks on an ideal that once dominated American politics, an ideal that American Jews championed and, in an important sense, co-authored. Over the course of the 20th century, Jews invested their faith in a distinct strain of liberalism that combined robust civil liberties, the protection of minority rights, and an ethos of cultural pluralism. They embraced this brand of liberalism because it was good for America'--and good for the Jews. It was their fervent hope that liberalism would inoculate America against the world's oldest hatred.

For several generations, it worked. Liberalism helped unleash a Golden Age of American Jewry, an unprecedented period of safety, prosperity, and political influence. Jews, who had once been excluded from the American establishment, became full-fledged members of it. And remarkably, they achieved power by and large without having to abandon their identity. In faculty lounges and television writers' rooms, in small magazines and big publishing houses, they infused the wider culture with that identity. Their anxieties became American anxieties. Their dreams became American dreams.

But that era is drawing to a close. America's ascendant political movements'--MAGA on one side, the illiberal left on the other'--would demolish the last pillars of the consensus that Jews helped establish. They regard concepts such as tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism as pernicious shams. The Golden Age of American Jewry has given way to a golden age of conspiracy, reckless hyperbole, and political violence, all tendencies inimical to the democratic temperament. Extremist thought and mob behavior have never been good for Jews. And what's bad for Jews, it can be argued, is bad for America.

3 I grew up at the apex of the Golden Age. The nation's sartorial aesthetic was the invention of Ralph Lifshitz, an alumnus of the Manhattan Talmudical Academy before he became the denim-clad Ralph Lauren. The national authority on sex was a diminutive bubbe, Dr. Ruth. Schoolkids in Indiana read Anne Frank's diary. The Holocaust memoirist Elie Wiesel appeared on the nightly news as an arbiter of public morality. The most-watched television show was Seinfeld. Even Gentiles knew the words to Adam Sandler's ''The Chanukah Song,'' which earned a place in the canon of festive music annually played on FM radio. Jews accounted for roughly 2 percent of the nation's population at the time, but I'd estimate that my undergraduate class at Columbia University was one-third Jewish; soon, a third of the justices on the Supreme Court would be Jewish as well. In 2000, Joe Lieberman, a Shabbat-observant Jew with a wife named Hadassah, fell 537 votes short of becoming vice president. None of these occurrences sparked a backlash worthy of note.

Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander film the Seinfeld pilot, 1989. (NBCU Photo Bank / NBCUniversal / Getty)By the mid-'90s, experts had declared the end of anti-Semitism. It persisted, of course, in the dark corners of American political culture'--in the wacky cosmology of the Nation of Islam and in the malevolent rantings of David Duke, the ubiquitous ex-Klansman'--but that proved the point. The only Jew haters to be found were hopelessly fringe; anti-Semitism disappeared from polite conversation. Leonard Dinnerstein, a historian who devoted his life's work to studying anti-Semitism, concluded his magnum opus, published in 1994, with the admission that his scholarly obsession was becoming a relic: ''It has declined in potency and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.''

That last sentence was an expression of triumphalism, rendered in the spirit of the times. Like the end of history, the end of anti-Semitism was a post''Cold War reverie, a naive declaration of a golden age without end. American Jews now worried that they might become too accepted. The great anxiety of the fin de si¨cle was intermarriage.

The threat of assimilation had frightened the Orthodox Jews who came to the United States during the great wave of immigration in the last decades of the 19th century. Fathers who had fled the Pale of Settlement feared that their sons would trade ancestral traditions for the allure of American culture. (A quite popular, very American musical is energized by these anxieties.) One of those sons, however, made it his intellectual project to find a way for Jews to enjoy the bounties of American society without having to fully abandon their Jewishness.

Born in Silesia in 1882, the eldest of eight, Horace Kallen had a preordained calling: to become a rabbi like his father. But a Boston truant officer forced him, against his parents' wishes, to attend a secular grammar school. This set him on the path to Harvard, where he paid his way by reading meters for the Dorchester Gaslight Company. Kallen never felt at ease with patrician classmates like Franklin D. Roosevelt, though the philosopher William James embraced him as a prot(C)g(C).

Kallen's breakthrough came in the course of an argument with another Jew. In 1908, the British-born playwright Israel Zangwill had a hit called The Melting-Pot, a melodrama about a pogrom survivor who sets out to marry a Christian woman in the hopes that he will no longer be haunted by his identity. This vision of assimilation was a warmed-over version of the devil's bargain that Western Europeans had offered Jews ever since Napoleon: In exchange for the rights of citizenship, Jews would have to give up their distinctive identity.

Yair Rosenberg: How to be anti-Semitic and get away with it

Kallen didn't want to surrender his identity. He wasn't religious, but he had read Spinoza and devoured the works of the early Zionist thinkers. At Harvard, he co-founded the Menorah Society, a Jewish affinity group. His rebuttal to Zangwill took the form of unabashed patriotism. In essays that were intellectual bombshells at the time, Kallen extolled the mongrel nature of American society, the phenomenon known as hyphenation. Harvard's Brahmin elite believed that newcomers must assimilate in full, commit to what they called ''100 percent Americanism.'' But to Kallen, the hyphen was the essence of democracy. He described America as a ''symphony of civilization,'' an intermingling of cultures that resulted in a society far more dynamic than most of the countries back in the Old World. The genius of America was that it didn't coerce any minority group into abandoning its marks of difference.

Horace Kallen, who encouraged American Jews to embrace their adopted country without sacrificing their Jewish identity (Courtesy of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio)That argument was idealistic, though also self-interested. Kallen's polemics implicitly targeted the Protestant monopoly controlling academia, politics, and every other corner of the establishment, which reverted to desperate measures to block the ascent of Jews, imposing quotas at universities and restrictive housing covenants in well-to-do neighborhoods. His ideas were emblematic of an emerging strain of Jewish political philosophy, a set of arguments that would define American Jewry for generations.

The sons and daughters of immigrants may have dabbled in socialism, but in the 1930s and '40s, liberalism became the house politics of the Jewish people. Walter Lippmann, a descendant of German Jews, first used the term liberal in the American context, to describe a new center-left vision of the state that was neither socialist nor laissez-faire. Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, conceptualized a new, expansive vision of civil liberties. Lillian Wald and Henry Moskowitz co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in the belief that all minorities deserved the same protections. Jews became enthusiastic supporters of the New Deal, which staved off radical movements on the left and the right that tended to hunt for Jewish scapegoats. As a Yiddish joke went, Jewish theology consisted of die velt (''this world''), yene velt (''the world to come''), and Roosevelt.

The historian Marc Dollinger titled his 2000 narrative of Jewish liberalism Quest for Inclusion. Jews set out to achieve that goal procedurally'--opposing prayer in public school, knocking down discriminatory housing laws, establishing new fair-employment rules. But it was also a project of mythmaking and dream-casting. Widely read mid-century intellectuals such as Louis Hartz, Daniel Boorstin, and Max Lerner wrote books reimagining America as the home of a benevolent centrism'--tolerant, cosmopolitan, unique in the history of nations.

Reality began to resemble the myth: In the years following World War II'--and especially as the world began to comprehend the extent of the Nazi genocide'--a liberal consensus took hold, and anti-Semitism receded. After Auschwitz, even three-martini Jewish jokes at the country club felt tinged by the horrors. In 1937, the American edition of Roget's Thesaurus had listed cunning, rich, extortioner, and heretic as synonyms for Jew. At that time, nearly half of Americans said Jews were less honest in business than others. By 1964, only 28 percent agreed with that assessment. It became clich(C) to refer to America as a ''Judeo-Christian nation.'' Quotas at universities fell to the side.

As anti-Semitism faded, American Jewish civilization exploded in a rush of creativity. For a time, the great Jewish novel'--books by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, and Bernard Malamud, inflected with Yiddish and references to pickled herring'--was the great American novel. Under the influence of Lenny Bruce, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Elaine May, Gilda Radner, Woody Allen, and many others, American comedy appropriated the Jewish joke, and the ironic sensibility contained within, as its own.

During the Golden Age, Jews created new genres of Americana, and in turn remade America's image of itself, through the idealized vision of the heartland found in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!; the folk revival popularized by Bob Dylan, Art Garfunkel, and Paul Simon; the movies mythologizing the decency of the American Everyman produced by David O. Selznick, Louis B. Mayer, and Jack Warner. (To say that ''the Jews'' run Hollywood is conspiratorial; to say that Jews founded it is factual.) Only in America could Jews'--Irving Berlin, George Wyle, Sammy Cahn'--write the Christmas songbook.

It wasn't just mass culture. The New York Intellectuals, a group with a name as euphemistic as it sounds, acquired a priestly authority in the realm of aesthetics and political ideas, and included the likes of Alfred Kazin, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, and Susan Sontag. Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg ushered second-wave feminism into the world. Jews became the prophetic face of American science (J. Robert Oppenheimer) and the salvific one of American medicine (Jonas Salk). The intellectual rewards of Jewish liberation could be measured in medals: Approximately 15 percent of all Nobel Prize winners are American Jews.

In the Golden Age, Jews in America embraced Israel. Enjoying their political and cultural ascendance, they looked to the new Jewish state not as a necessary refuge'--they were more than comfortable on the Upper West Side and in Squirrel Hill and Brentwood'--but as a powerful rebuttal to the old stereotypes about Jewish weakness, especially after the Israeli military's victory in the Six-Day War of 1967. As The New York Times' Thomas Friedman has put it, American Jews ''said to themselves, 'My God, look who we are! We have power! We do not fit the Shylock image, we are ace pilots; we are not the cowering timid Jews who get sand kicked in their faces, we are tank commanders.''Š''

A now-obscure cultural event captures, for me, this newfound sense of self and self-confidence. In 1978, ABC aired The Stars Salute Israel at 30, a kitschy prime-time variety show filmed in front of a full house at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, in Los Angeles, the same venue that hosted the Oscars. Like the Oscars, it featured an A-list slate: Barry Manilow in a white suit, surrounded by backup singers in sequins; Henry Winkler, the Fonz himself, playing a rough-hewn Israeli in a sketch; and, of course, Sammy Davis Jr. Near the conclusion, Barbra Streisand emerged in a white gown to talk via remote hookup with Golda Meir as a camera filmed the former prime minister in a book-filled room in Israel'--the two most celebrated Jewish women of the century kibitzing on American TV.

Barbra Streisand performs during The Stars Salute Israel at 30 in 1978. (Wally Fong / AP)In the early decades of Hollywood, Jewish stars had hidden behind stage names'--Emanuel Goldenberg performed as Edward G. Robinson; Issur Danielovitch transformed himself into Kirk Douglas. Streisand had also changed her name, dropping the a from Barbara, but that was an instance of a diva's bravado, not a sop to the goyim. What made her stardom so emblematic of the Golden Age was that she never allowed herself to be bullied into suppressing her Jewish identity. Her crowning achievement was Yentl, an adaptation of an Isaac Bashevis Singer short story. For the grand finale of the ABC telecast, Streisand sang ''Hatikvah,'' the Israeli national anthem, for 18.7 million viewers. ''The good feelings and the love will always remain,'' she told them.

4 The Jewish vacation from history ended on September 11, 2001. It didn't seem that way at the time. But the terror attacks opened an era of perpetual crisis, which became fertile soil where the hatred of Jews took root. Though Osama bin Laden claimed credit for the plot, that didn't stop some people from trying to shift the blame. One theory explained in exquisitely absurd detail how Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, had toppled the Twin Towers.

But there was also a more sophisticated version of this conspiracy theory, one that had a patina of academic respectability. On the left, it became commonplace to fulminate against the neoconservatives, warmongering intellectuals said to be whispering in the ear of the American establishment, urging the invasion of Iraq and war against Iran.

This wasn't fully untethered from reality: The neocons were a group of largely Jewish think-tank denizens and policy operatives, some of whom held top posts in President George W. Bush's administration. But the angry talk about neocons also trafficked in dangerous old tropes. It inflated their role in world events and ascribed the worst motives to them. Men like Paul Wolfowitz, the second-highest-ranking official in Bush's Pentagon, and William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, were portrayed by critics on the left as bamboozlers undermining the national interest in service of their stealth loyalty to Israel. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for one, took exception to the idea that Jews were pulling the strings of the United States government. ''I suppose the implication of that is that the president and the vice president and myself and Colin Powell just fell off a turnip truck to take these jobs,'' he said.

In 2007, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, professors at Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively, spelled out what others implied in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a book published by a venerable house, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, that soon arrived on the New York Times best-seller list. This was the opposite of the schmaltzy Streisand tribute'--the Jewish state as not a friend but a villain surreptitiously manipulating American power to further its own ends.

One year later, Lehman Brothers, a bank founded in 1850 by the son of a Jewish cattle merchant from Bavaria, collapsed. That news was followed by the revelation that Bernie Madoff had masterminded the largest-known Ponzi scheme in history. Although politicians, on the whole, refrained from casting Jews as the primary culprits of the 2008 financial crisis'--which was, in fact, systemic'--a sizable portion of the public harbored this thought. Stanford University professors conducted a survey that found that nearly a quarter of the country blamed Jews for crashing the global economy. Another 38.4 percent ascribed at least some fault to ''the Jews.''

In the era of perpetual crisis, a version of this narrative kept recurring: a small elite'--sometimes bankers, sometimes lobbyists'--maliciously exploiting the people. Such narratives helped propel Occupy Wall Street on the left and the Tea Party on the right. This brand of populist revolt had long been the stuff of Jewish nightmares. A fear of the mob suffused masterworks of the Golden Age'--Theodor Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality, Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, Richard Hofstadter's Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Haunted by the Holocaust and inherited memories of pogroms, these writers warned how a society might fall prey to a demagogue who tapped into prejudice.

After 2008, a version of their prophecy came to pass. The right settled on a Jewish billionaire as their villain of choice: George Soros. An idea took hold, and not just on extremist blogs. The mainstream of the Republican Party seeded the image of Soros as the ''shadow puppet master,'' in the words of the former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly. In elevating the figure of Soros and invoking him so frequently, Fox News and Republican politicians were also, intentionally or not, drawing on the deeply implanted imagery of the Jewish financier bankrolling the destruction of Christian civilization.

In 2018, Fox News began carrying images of migrant caravans headed from Central America toward Texas, a tide of humanity it described as an ''invasion.'' Though they had no evidence to bolster the charge, Republican politicians insinuated that the caravans were paid for by Soros. Representative Matt Gaetz tweeted a video of two men handing out cash to a line of Honduran migrants, accompanied by the question ''Soros?'' When President Trump was asked about Soros's role in funding a caravan, a week after a pipe bomb was found in Soros's mailbox, and days after the Tree of Life shooting, he told reporters, ''I wouldn't be surprised.''

Soros was a central character in a new master narrative, much of it adapted from European sources. The spine of the story was borrowed from a French author named Renaud Camus, a socialist turned far-right reactionary who wrote a 2011 book called The Great Replacement, warning that elites intended to diminish the white Christian presence in Europe by flooding the continent with migrants. The Jews weren't a central feature of Camus' theory. But when elements of the American right embraced it, they inserted Soros and his fellow Jews as the masterminds of the elite plot. This became the basis for the chant ''Jews will not replace us.''

Jews were the antagonists of the conspiracy theory because they occupied a special place in the bizarre racial hierarchy of American ethno-nationalism. Eric Ward, an activist who is among the most rigorous students of white supremacy, has put it this way: ''At the bedrock of the movement is an explicit claim that Jews are a race of their own, and that their ostensible position as White folks in the U.S. represents the greatest trick the devil ever played.'' That is, Jews were able to pass as white people, but they were really stealth agents working for the other side of the race war, using immigration to subvert white Christian hegemony.

This notion planted itself in the mind of Robert Bowers, a loner who lived in a suburb of Pittsburgh. He became obsessed with the work of HIAS, originally the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. It was formed in 1902 with the intention of easing the arrival of Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms. The group's evolution was emblematic of the trajectory of Jewish liberalism. As American Jews settled into a comfortable existence in their new land, HIAS's mission expanded. It has field offices in more than 20 countries, including a branch on a Greek island to tend to Syrian, Iraqi, and Afghan migrants. On October 19, 2018, the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh was participating in a National Refugee Shabbat, which was the brainchild of HIAS.

The event stoked Bowers's rage. ''HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,'' he wrote on Gab, the Christian-nationalist social-media site. Just before he entered the synagogue's sanctuary, armed with three semiautomatic pistols and an AR'‘15 rifle, he posted, ''Open you Eyes! It's the filthy EVIL jews Bringing the Filthy EVIL Muslims into the Country!!''

A citizenship class conducted by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, 1952 (Bettmann / Getty)A faith in immigration'--the idea of America as a sanctuary for the refugee, the belief that subsequent groups of arrivals would experience the same up-from-the-shtetl trajectory'--was a core tenet of Jewish liberalism. A Jewish poet had written the lines about huddled masses inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. If America was a nation of immigrants, that made Jews quintessential Americans. But now this ideal was the basis for Jews' vilification. At the Tree of Life synagogue, it was used to justify their slaughter.

5 In the old Jewish theory of American politics, the best defense against the anti-Semitism of the right was a united left: minorities and liberal activists locking arms. When I was young, rabbis and elders reverently told us about the earnest young Jews in chunky glasses who had jumped aboard the Freedom Rides; about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his unmissable kippah, marching right next to Martin Luther King Jr.; and about the martyrdom of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two Jews who had been murdered alongside James Chaney, a Black Mississippian, for their work registering Black Americans to vote. A coalition of the tolerant pressed the country to live up to its ideals.

Later, I would learn that those memories were a bit gauzy. In the late 1960s, former comrades began to quietly, then brusquely, discard this spirit of common cause. Younger activists in the civil-rights movement took a hard turn toward Black Power and dismissed the old liberal theory of change as a melioristic ruse. Anti-war protesters embraced the decolonization struggles of the developing world. After Israel captured the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1967, many came to view the Jewish state as a vile oppressor. (This was well before right-wing Israeli governments saturated the occupied territories with Jewish settlers.) Even as Israel's shocking victory in the Six-Day War, 22 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, filled American Jews with pride and confidence, a meaningful portion of America's left turned on Israel.

The turmoil of the late '60s presaged the rupture that has occurred over the past decade or so. A new ideology has taken hold on the left, with a reordered hierarchy of concerns and an even greater skepticism of the old liberal ideals.

This rupture was propelled by the menace of Donald Trump. His election jolted his opponents to take emergency measures. The left began describing itself as the Resistance, which implied a more confrontational style than that of Nancy Pelosi floor speeches or Center for American Progress white papers.

Even before Trump took office, the Resistance announced a mass protest set to defiantly descend on the capital, what organizers called the Women's March on Washington. In an early planning meeting, at a New York restaurant, an activist named Vanessa Wruble explained that her Judaism was the motivating force in her political engagement. But Wruble's autobiographical statement of intent earned her a rebuke. According to Wruble, two members of the inner circle planning the march told her that Jews needed to confront their own history of exploiting Black and brown people. Tablet magazine later reported that Wruble was told that Jews needed to repent for their leading role in the slave trade'--a fallacious charge long circulated by the Nation of Islam. (The two organizers denied making the reported statements.) That moment of tension never really subsided, either for Wruble or for the left.

When the march's organizers published their ''unity principles,'' they emphasized the importance of intersectionality, a theory first introduced by the law professor Kimberl(C) W. Crenshaw. It would be insufficient, she argued, for courts to focus their efforts on one narrow target of discrimination when it takes so many forms'--racism, sexism, homophobia'--that tend to reinforce one another. Her analysis, incisive in the context of the law, was never intended to guide social movements. Transposed by activists to the gritty work of coalition-building, it became the basis for a new orthodoxy'--one that was largely indifferent to Jews, and at times outwardly hostile.

When the Women's March listed the various injustices it hoped to conquer on its way to a better world, anti-Semitism was absent. It was a curious omission, given the central role that Jews played in the conspiracies promoted by the MAGA right, and a telling one. Soon after the march, organizers pushed Wruble out of leadership. She later said that anti-Semitism was the reason for her ouster. (The organizers denied this charge.)

The intersectional left self-consciously rebelled against the liberalism that had animated so much of institutional Judaism, which fought to install civil liberties and civil rights enforced by a disinterested state that would protect every minority equally. This new iteration of the left considered the idea of neutrality'--whether objectivity in journalism or color blindness in the courts'--as a guise for white supremacy. Tolerance, the old keyword of cultural pluralism, was a form of complicity. What the world actually needed was intolerance, a more active confrontation with hatred. In the historian Ibram X. Kendi's formulation, an individual could choose to be anti-racist or racist, an activist or a collaborator. Or as Linda Sarsour, an activist of Palestinian descent and a co-chair of the Women's March, put it, ''We are not here to be bystanders.'' To be a member of this new left in good moral standing, it was necessary to challenge oppression in all its incarnations. And Israel was now definitively an oppressor.

Martin Luther King Jr. holds the photos of three civil-rights workers murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia, Mississippi, during 1964's Freedom Summer. Two of them'--Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman'--were Jewish. (Bettmann / Getty)The American left hadn't always imposed such a litmus test. During the years of the Oslo peace process, groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine had no problem attending events with liberal Zionists. Back then, the debate was over the borders of Israel, not over the fact of its existence. But that peace process collapsed during the last days of the Clinton administration, and whatever good faith had existed in that brief era of summits and handshakes dissipated. Hamas unleashed a wave of suicide bombings in the Second Intifada. And in the aftermath of those deadly attacks, successive right-wing Israeli governments presided over repressive policies in the West Bank and an inhumane blockade of Gaza.

Palestinian activists and their allies began the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, pushing universities to divest from Israel. The new goal was no longer coexistence between Arabs and Jews. It was to turn Israel into an international pariah, to stop working with all Israeli institutions'--not just the military, but also symphonies, theater groups, and universities. In that spirit, it became fashionable for critics of Israel to identify as ''anti-Zionist.''

Within the Jewish establishment, there's a tendency to impute anti-Semitism to anyone who describes themselves that way. That has always struck me as intellectually imprecise and, occasionally, as a rhetorical gambit to close down debate. But there's a reason so many Jews bristle at the thought of anti-Zionism finding a home on the American left: Zionist can start to sound like a synonym for Jew. Zionists stand accused of the same crimes that anti-Semites have attached to Jews since the birth of Christianity; Jews are portrayed as omnipotent, bloodthirsty baby-killers. Knowing the historical echoes, it's hard not to worry that the anger might fixate on the Jewish target closest at hand'--which, indeed, it has.

In 2014, dorms at NYU where religiously observant Jews lived received mock eviction notices'--''We reserve the right to destroy all remaining belongings,'' read the flyer slipped under doors'--as if intimidating college kids with unknown politics somehow represented a justifiable reprisal for Israeli-government action in the West Bank. The same notices appeared at Emory University, in Atlanta, in 2019. At the University of Vermont and SUNY New Paltz, groups that helped sexual-assault survivors were accused of purging pro-Israel students from their ranks. ''If you don't support Palestinian liberation you don't support survivors,'' the Vermont group exclaimed. Years before October 7, students at Tufts University, outside Boston, and the University of Southern California moved to impeach elected Jews in student government over their support for Israel's existence. This wasn't normal politics. It was evidence of bigotry.

Among the primary targets of the activists were the Hillel centers present on most college campuses. These centers occasionally coordinate trips to Israel and, on some campuses, sponsor student groups supportive of Israel. Those facts led pro-Palestinian activists to describe Hillel as an arm of the ''Israeli war machine.'' At SUNY Stony Brook, activists sought to expel Hillel from campus, arguing, ''If there were Nazis, white nationalists, and KKK members on campus, would their identity have to be accepted and respected?'' At Rice University, in Texas, an LGBTQ group severed ties with Hillel because it allegedly made students feel unsafe. What made this incident darkly comic is that Hillel couldn't be more progressive on issues of sexual freedom. What made it so worrying is that Hillel's practical purpose is not to defend Israel, but to provide Shabbat dinners and a space for ritual and prayer. To condemn Hillel is to condemn Jewish religious life on campus.

Gal Beckerman: The left abandoned me

As exclusion of Jews became a more regular occurrence, the leadership of the left, and of universities for that matter, had little to say about the problem. To give the most generous explanation: Jews simply didn't fit the analytic framework of the new left.

At its core, the intersectional left wanted to smash power structures. In the American context, it would be hard to place Jews among the ranks of the oppressed; in the Israeli context, they can be cast as the oppressor. Nazi Germany definitively excluded Jews from a category we now call ''whiteness.'' Today, Jews are treated in sectors of the left as the epitome of whiteness. But any analysis that focuses so relentlessly on the role of privilege, as the left's does, will be dangerously blind to anti-Semitism, because anti-Semitism itself entails an accusation of privilege. It's a theory that regards the Jew as an all-powerful figure in society, a position acquired by underhanded means. In the annals of Jewish history, accusations of privilege are the basis for hate, the kindling for pogroms. But universities too often ignored this lesson from the past. Instead, they acted, as the British comedian David Baddiel put it in the title of his prescient book about progressive anti-Semitism, as if ''Jews don't count.''

6 In the death spiral of liberalism, extremism on the right begets extremism on the left, which begets further extremism on the right. To protest the censoriousness of the new progressives, right-wing edgelords and trolls attempted to seize the mantle of liberty.

The most powerful of the edgelords was Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter ostensibly to save discourse from the woke mob. To make good on his noble aims, he reversed bans that the platform's previous regime had imposed on the most vile anti-Semites, including the white nationalist Patrick Howley, the comic Sam Hyde, and the Daily Stormer's founder, Andrew Anglin. By restoring them to the site, Musk was, in essence, conceding that their words shouldn't have been considered taboo in the first place. He legitimized their claims of victimhood, the sense that they had been excluded only because they'd offended the wrong people.

In fact, Musk hinted that he shared this conspiratorial view of censorship. In May 2023, he retweeted an aphorism that he attributed to Voltaire: ''To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.'' Those words were actually uttered by a neo-Nazi named Kevin Alfred Strom, not the French philosopher. It shouldn't have been hard to imagine that the words had dubious origins, because they captured a view of the world in which shadowy forces furtively censor their enemies.

Nor was it hard to imagine that those shadowy forces might include the Anti-Defamation League, which relentlessly called attention to the proliferation of Jew hatred on Twitter under Musk's ownership. Musk threatened to sue the group, accusing it of trying to ''kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic.'' The Jews, he all but spelled out, were those who couldn't be criticized'--which, by the logic of the Strom quote, made them society's secret masters.

Musk wasn't alone in this argument. In 2022, Dave Chappelle used the opening monologue of Saturday Night Live to muse about the cancellation of the hip-hop artist Ye (formerly Kanye West), who had lost a deal with Adidas after he promised, among other things, to go ''death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.'' Chappelle exuded empathy for Ye. ''I don't want a sneaker deal, because the minute I say something that makes those people mad, they're going to take my sneakers away '... I hope they don't take anything away from me,'' he said, adding with a smile and a conspiratorial whisper: ''Whoever they are.'' There was no mystery about his use of pronouns: ''I've been to Hollywood '... It's a lot of Jews. Like, a lot.'' He went on, ''You could maybe adopt the delusion that the Jews run show business.''

Dave Chappelle opens Saturday Night Live, November 2022. (Will Heath / NBC / Getty)Chappelle practices shock comedy as a form of shock therapy: The authoritarian impositions of the left justify offensive comments, which are a form of defiance. He has taken a genuine problem'--anti-liberalism on the left'--and used it as a pretext for smuggling anti-Semitism into acceptable discourse.

That Chappelle and Musk see fit to indulge anti-Semitism in order to protect freedom of speech contains a dark irony. In the 20th century, starting with Louis Brandeis's dissents on the Supreme Court, Jews stood at the vanguard of the movement to protect ''subversive advocacy,'' even when it came at their own expense. This could be understood as a defense of the Talmudic tradition of disagreement, what Rabbi David Wolpe calls the ''Jewish sacrament'' of debate. The movement culminated in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977, when the ACLU deployed the lawyer David Goldberger to sue to allow neo-Nazis to march through the Chicago suburb, which was filled with Holocaust survivors. The Jewish community was hardly unanimous on the Skokie question'--unanimity would have been inconsistent with the tradition'--but the ACLU position reflected a commitment to free speech officially espoused by major Jewish communal institutions in the postwar years.

In the Jewish vision of free speech, open interpretation and endless debate mark the path to knowledge; the proliferation of discourse is the antidote to bad ideas. But in the reality of social media, free speech also consists of Jew hatred that masquerades as comic entertainment, a way to capture the attention of young men eager to rebel against the strictures of what they decry as wokeness.

When I asked Oren Segal, who runs the ADL's Center on Extremism, to point me to a state-of-the-art anti-Semitic hate group, he cited the Goyim Defense League. The spitefully silly name reflects its methods, which include pranks and stunts broadcast on its website, Goyim TV. Its leader sometimes dresses as an ultra-Orthodox Jew, calling himself the ''Honest Rabbi.'' In one demented piece of guerrilla theater, he apologizes on behalf of the Jewish people for fabricating stories about the Holocaust. The group has attempted to popularize the slogan ''Kanye is right about the Jews,'' hanging a banner proclaiming it on a freeway overpass in Los Angeles and projecting it on the side of a football stadium in Jacksonville, Florida, as 75,000 fans filed out. GDL hecklers have stood in front of Florida synagogues and Holocaust museums, shouting, ''Leave our country. Go back to Israel'' and ''Heil Hitler.''

In a short span, as the edgelords successfully pushed the limits, American culture became permissive regarding what could be said about Jews. Anti-Semitism crept back into the realm of the acceptable.

7 For a brief moment , it felt as if the October 7 attacks might reverse the tide, because it should have been impossible not to recoil at the footage of Hamas's pogrom. Israel had yet to launch its counterattack, so there was no war to condemn. Still, even in this moment of moral clarity, the campus left couldn't muster compassion. At Harvard, more than 30 student groups signed a letter on October 7, holding ''the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.'' Days later, the incoming head of NYU's new Center for Indigenous Studies described the attacks as ''affirming.'' This sympathy for Hamas, when its crimes were freshest, was a glimpse of what was about to come.

On the afternoon of October 11, Rebecca Massel, a reporter at the Columbia Daily Spectator, received a tip. She was told that a woman, her face wrapped in a bandanna, had assaulted an Israeli student in front of Butler Library in a dispute over flyers depicting hostages held by Hamas. The woman's alleged weapon was a broomstick. Her battle cry was said to be ''Fuck all of you prick crackers.'' After striking him with the broomstick, the man said, she attempted to punch him in the face. By the end of the fracas, she had bruised one of his hands and sprained a finger on the other.

Massel began to report out the story. She spoke with the victim, who told her, ''Now, we have to handle the situation that campus is not a safe place for us anymore.'' She spoke with the NYPD, which confirmed that it had arrested the woman, who was charged with hate crimes and has pleaded not guilty. Massel and her editors curbed their impulse to quickly score a scoop, double-checking every sentence. They didn't publish the story until 3 a.m. on October 12.

Later that morning, Massel, a sophomore studying political science, was sitting in her Contemporary Civilization seminar when her phone lit up. It was her editor, calling her back. She had texted him to get his sense of the response her article had elicited, so she stepped out of class to hear what he had to say. She had already caught a glimpse of posts on social media, harping on her Jewishness and accusing her of having a ''religious agenda.'' She'd worried that these weren't stray attacks. The editor told her the paper had been inundated. The messages it had received about the article were vitriolic, but he didn't give her any specifics. Before returning to class, she checked her own email. A message read, ''I hope you fucking get what you deserve '... you racist freak.''

Read: The juvenile viciousness of campus anti-Semitism

For as long as she could remember, Massel had wanted to be a journalist. She'd founded the newspaper at her elementary school. During high school, she'd read She Said, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's book about investigating Harvey Weinstein's sexual assaults. The New York Times reporters insisted that they were journalists, not feminist journalists. Massel vowed to take the same approach. The accusations of bias, therefore, didn't just feel anti-Semitic. They felt like an attack on the integrity that she hoped would define her work.

But anger was an emotion for another day. At that moment, she was overwhelmed by fear. She thought about what the Israeli student had told her the day before. A dean had apparently advised him to leave campus because the university couldn't guarantee his safety. Now Massel felt unsure of her own physical well-being. She decided that she would stay with her parents until she could get a better sense of the fury directed at her.

In her unnerved state, Massel threw herself into her journalism. She decided to interview Jewish students, from all corners of the university, to gauge their mood. After the office of public safety assured her that she could return to campus, she parked herself in the second-floor lounge of Columbia's Hillel center. When she overheard a student mention an incident, she would approach them and ask to talk.

Over the course of two weeks, Massel spoke with 54 students. What she amassed was a tally of fear. Thirteen told her that they had felt harassed or attacked, either virtually or in person. (One passerby had barked ''Fuck the Jews'' at a small group of students.) Thirty-four reported that they felt targeted or unsafe on campus. (At one precarious moment, the Hillel center went into lockdown, out of concern that protesters might descend on the building.) Twelve said that they had suppressed markers of their Jewish identity, wearing a baseball cap over a yarmulke or tucking a Star of David necklace into a sweatshirt. She learned that a group of students had created a group-chat system to arrange escorts, so that no Jew would have to walk across campus alone if they felt unsafe.

Perhaps even more ominously, Massel uncovered incidents in which teachers expressed hostility toward Jewish students. One Israeli student told Massel that a professor had once said to him, ''It's such a shame that your people survived just in order to perpetuate another genocide.'' When I made my own calls to students and faculty, I heard similar stories, especially instances of teaching assistants seizing their bully pulpit to sermonize. One TA wrote to their students, ''We are watching genocide unfold in real time, after a systematic 75+ years of oppression of the Palestinian people '... It feels ridiculous to hold section today, but I'll see you all on Zoom in a bit.'' One student left class in the middle of a professor's broadside against Israel in a required course in the Middle East''studies department. Afterward, he sent an email to the professor explaining his departure, to which the professor wrote back, saying they could discuss it in class later. When the student returned, the professor read his email aloud to the whole class, and invited everyone to discuss the exchange. It felt like an act of deliberate humiliation.

When I talked with Jewish students at Columbia, I was struck by how they, too, tended to speak in the language of the intersectional left. They described their ''lived experience'' and trauma: the pain they felt on October 7 as they learned of the attacks; the fear that consumed them when they heard protesters call for the annihilation of Israel. They sincerely expected their university to respond with unabashed empathy, because that's how it had responded in the past to other terrible events. Instead, Columbia greeted their pain with the soon-to-be-infamous concept of ''context,'' including a panel discussion that explained the attacks as the product of a long struggle. This historicizing felt as if it not only discounted Jewish students' suffering but also regarded it as a moral failing. (In early November, in response to criticism, Columbia announced that it would create a task force on anti-Semitism.)

A Jewish Columbia student watches a pro-Palestine demonstration outside the gates of the university, November 2023. (Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis / Getty)There are many reasons for the unusual intensity of events at Columbia, which is located in a city that is a traditional bastion of the American left; its campus is where the late Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said achieved legendary status. But Columbia is also a graphic example of the collapse of the liberalism that had insulated American Jews: It is a microcosm of a society that has lost its capacity to express disagreements without resorting to animus.

The events on campus that followed October 7 were a sad coda to the Golden Age. When I was a student at Columbia, in the '90s, the Ivy League was a primary plot point in a triumphalist tale. During the first half of the 20th century, Columbia had deployed extraordinary institutional energy to limit the presence of Jews. The modern college-application process was invented by Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler to more effectively weed out Jews. In the late '20s, the university created an ersatz version of itself in Brooklyn, Seth Low Junior College, so that it could educate otherwise qualified Jewish applicants there, rather than having them mingle with the Gentiles in Morningside Heights. But once Columbia lifted its quotas after World War II, the Jewish presence swelled. By 1967, the student body was 40 percent Jewish. The institution that arguably had fought hardest to exclude them became a welcoming home.

But in the 21st century, the Jewish presence in the Ivy League has steadily receded. In the 2000s, Yale was 20 percent Jewish. The proportion is now about half that. The University of Pennsylvania went from being a third Jewish to about 16 percent. The reasons for that plummet aren't nefarious. There has been a deliberate institutional drive to reengineer the elite, to provide opportunities to first-generation college students and students of color. Some Jews have chafed at this reengineering. But the concept of meritocracy that Jews celebrated was far from a pure reward for test scores and grades. Jewish alumni came to benefit from the same dynastic system of preference that their Protestant predecessors had taken advantage of. Their children applied from prestigious high schools, which maintained a cozy relationship with university admissions offices. It was a system that desperately required reforming in the name of fairness.

The problem exposed in the limp university response to campus anti-Semitism after October 7'--distilled to then''Harvard President Claudine Gay's phrase, ''It depends on the context'''--is that Jewish students aren't just a diminished presence but a diminished priority. Whereas Jews thought of themselves as a vulnerable minority'--perhaps not the most vulnerable, but certainly worthy of official concern'--their academic communities apparently considered them too privileged to merit that status. This wasn't just scary. It carried the sting of rejection.

There's a number that haunts me. In 2022, the Tufts political scientist Eitan Hersh conducted a comprehensive study of Jewish life on American college campuses, which surveyed both Jews and Gentiles. Hersh found that on campuses with a relatively high proportion of Jewish students, nearly one in five non-Jewish students said they ''wouldn't want to be friends with someone who supports the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.'' They were saying, in essence, that they couldn't be friends with the majority of Jews.

8 Each spring , during the Passover seder, Jews recite this phrase from the Haggadah: ''In every generation, our enemies rise up to destroy us.'' To participate in the most universally observed of all Jewish rituals, a celebration of liberation and survival, is to be reminded of the grim cycle of Jewish history, in which golden ages are moments of dramatic irony, the naive complacency just before the onset of doom. Some of these moments are within living memory.

In 1933, the Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith published a 1,060-page book meticulously enumerating the achievements of the community. It was quite a list. Weimar Germany is remembered as a period of instability, a time of beer-hall-putschists, louche cabarets, and rampant assassinations. But Weimar was also the pinnacle of Jewish power, a golden age in its own right, especially if one considers the whole of German culture, which sprawled across borders on the map. During the first decades of the 20th century, Jewish contributors to German music included Gustav Mahler, Kurt Weill, and Arnold Schoenberg; to German literature, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, and Walter Benjamin; to science, Albert Einstein. Jews presided over the Frankfurt School of social criticism and populated the Bauhaus school of art and architecture. The Central Union's compendium could be read as the immodest self-congratulation of a people who represented 0.8 percent of the total population'--or as a desperate, futile plea for Germany to return the love that Jews felt for the country.

Americans maintain a favorable opinion of Jews. The community remains prosperous and politically powerful. But the memory of how quickly the best of times can turn dark has infused the Jewish reactions to events of the past decade. ''When lights start flashing red, the Jewish impulse is to flee,'' Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, told me.

Back in 2016, many liberals blustered about leaving the country if Donald Trump was elected president; after he won, many Jews actually hatched contingency plans. My mother tried, in vain, to get a passport from Poland, the country of her birth. An immigration lawyer I know in Cleveland told me that he had obtained a German passport, and suggested that I call the German embassy in Washington to learn how many other American Jews had done the same.

The German government, for understandable reasons, doesn't count Jews. But the embassy sent me a tally of passport applications submitted under laws that apply to victims of Nazi persecution and their descendants. In 2017, after Trump's election, the number of applications nearly doubled from the year before, to 1,685, and then kept growing. In 2022, it was 2,500. These aren't large numbers in absolute terms; still, it's extraordinary that so many American Jews, whose applications required documenting that their families once fled Germany, now consider the country a safer haven than the United States.

I also saw signs of flight in Oakland, where at least 30 Jewish families have been approved to transfer their children to neighboring school districts'--and I heard similar stories in the surrounding area. Initial data collected by an organization representing Jewish day schools, which have long struggled for enrollment, show a spike in the number of admission inquiries from families contemplating pulling their kids from public school.

After 1967, the previous moment of profound political abandonment, the American Jewish community began to entertain thoughts of its own radical reinvention. A coterie of disillusioned intellectuals, clustered around a handful of small-circulation journals and think tanks, turned sharply rightward, creating the neoconservative movement. Among activists, the energy that had once been directed toward Freedom Rides was plowed into the cause of Soviet Jewry, which became a defining political obsession of many synagogues in the 1970s and '80s. Meanwhile, Jewish hippies turned inward, creating new spiritual movements centered on prayer and ritual.

Although not all of these movements proved equally fruitful, this history, in a way, is cause for optimism, an example of how conflict might provide the path to religious renewal and a fresh sense of solidarity. It's also a reminder that the Golden Age was not an uninterrupted rise.

The case for pessimism, however, is more convincing. The forces arrayed against Jews, on the right and the left, are far more powerful than they were 50 years ago. The surge of anti-Semitism is a symptom of the decay of democratic habits, a leading indicator of rising authoritarianism. When anti-Semitism takes hold, conspiracy theory hardens into conventional wisdom, embedding violence in thought and then in deadly action. A society that holds its Jews at arm's length is likely to be more intent on hunting down scapegoats than addressing underlying defects. Although it is hardly an iron law of history, such societies are prone to decline. England entered a long dark age after expelling its Jews in 1290. Czarist Russia limped toward revolution after the pogroms of the 1880s. If America persists on its current course, it would be the end of the Golden Age not just for the Jews, but for the country that nurtured them.

*Lead image source: Top row from left to right: Michael Ochs Archives / Getty; Universal History Archive / Getty. Middle row from left to right: Robert Mitra / WWD / Penske Media / Getty; Ulf Andersen / Getty; Jean-R(C)gis Roustan / Roger Viollet / Getty; CBS Photo Archive / Getty; Daily Herald / Mirrorpix / Getty; Bettmann / Getty; David Lefranc / Getty; Bettmann / Getty; Frederick M. Brown / Getty; CBS Photo Archive / Getty; Theo Wargo / Getty; Max B. Miller / Archive Photos / Getty. Bottom row from left to right: ABC Photo Archives / Getty; Bachrach / Getty; Getty; Bernard Gotfryd / Getty.

This article appears in the April 2024 print edition with the headline ''The End of the Golden Age.'' When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Tue, 09 Apr 2024 19:10

Two United Airlines planes clipped wings while parking on Thursday night at San Francisco International Airport, a spokesperson from the airline confirmed.

None of the 105 passengers or five crew members on the plane, United Airlines Flight 2181, an Airbus A319, was injured. The flight was arriving from Reno and headed next from San Francisco to Fort Lauderdale, flight records show. The other plane was parked.

Passengers from UA 2181 deplaned normally, the spokesperson said.

This is the most recent in a series of incidents involving United Airlines. On March 29, a United flight headed to San Francisco from Frankfurt, Germany had to turn around after a toilet started overflowing into the cabin.

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Tue, 09 Apr 2024 19:04

Fat loss shots like Ozempic and Zepbound have been linked to more than 100 deaths in the US, DailyMail.com can reveal.

One of the victims was a person in their 20s who developed an 'intestinal mass' and another was a pregnant woman.

The cases have been recorded in an FDA monitoring system used to track the safety of medicines used in the US, called FAERS.

None of the deaths are proven to have been directly caused by the injections. But experts say the reports indicate cases where the drugs were suspected to have been involved.

The cases have been recorded in an FDA monitoring system used to track the safety of medicines used in the US, called FAERS. They are shown above in a graphic

Trish Webster, 56, pictured above, died after using Ozempic to lose some weight before her daughter's wedding

There are also concerns about counterfeit versions of the drugs which are becoming more common as patients struggle to get the real thing.

Fake versions have been found to contain insulin which if not used in correct doses can cause seizures, a coma and even death.

The youngest patient with information was a 28-year-old woman who was hospitalized and diagnosed with an 'intestinal mass'.

Another fatality involved a woman who took Ozempic while she was pregnant, which the drug maker advises against after studies in pregnant rats on the drug showed their offspring had growth problems and developmental abnormalities.

In total, the FDA's system has recorded 117 fatalities among people taking blockbuster weight loss drugs since 2018.

Of these, 81 were linked to patients using semaglutide '-- the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy '-- while 36 were linked to patients using tirzepatide, the ingredient in Mounjaro and Zepbound.

More than half of the fatalities linked to semaglutide '-- 54 deaths, or 66 percent '-- were recorded after a version of the drug, Wegovy, was approved for weight loss in June 2021. Ozempic has not been approved for weight loss but is prescribed off-label for this use.

No deaths have been recorded linked to tirzepatide after a version of the drug '-- Zepbound '-- was approved for weight loss, but it only got the green light for this use in November 2023.

Symptoms recorded ranged from seizures to blockages in the intestines and pancreatic cancer.

Fatalities surged 230 percent in 2023 compared to previous years, although experts said that about this time prescriptions also exploded. If there are millions more people taking a drug, then this raises the likelihood of fatalities in patients using it.

None of the US victims who died while using Ozempic have been identified.

Last year, however, the family of a 56-year-old mother from Australia said she had died from Ozempic '-- after being diagnosed with 'acute gastrointestinal illness' and collapsing at home with a 'brown substance' foaming from her mouth.

Despite being hailed as one of the most powerful pharmaceutical tools to date, experts have warned it is not a 'magic pill' or miracle fix-all. Trials have shown that users can rapidly pile pounds back on once they stop taking the drug and it can trigger a variety of nasty side effects. Users commonly complain of nausea, constipation and diarrhea

She had lost 35lbs (16kg) while on Ozempic and another weight loss drug, as she tried to lose weight for her daughter's wedding.

Experts told DailyMail.com they were surprised that the fatalities figure linked to weight loss drugs 'was not higher'.

Toni Adamrovich, a nurse and obesity medicine specialist at TB2 in Ohio who works with patients prescribed semaglutide and tirzepatide, said: 'I am not surprised by this number. I am actually surprised it is not higher.

'I am not saying this because I believe these medications are inherently dangerous, but because of the surge in their use for weight loss.'

He added: 'One must remember that the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) does not require a causal relationship between a medication and event be proven, so it can be ambiguous as to whether an event was solely due to the medication reported.

'Conversely, the FDA also does not receive reports of all adverse events and any deaths at all are one too many.'

Broken down by drug, Ozempic had the most fatalities linked '-- 56 deaths '-- followed by Mounjaro '-- 36 deaths '-- and Wegovy, three deaths.

There were no deaths linked to Zepbound (active drug is tirzepatide), but there were 22 linked to other combinations of semaglutide.

Nearly all the reports in the FAERS were submitted by the manufacturer '-- Novo Nordisk or Eli Lilly '-- which are obliged to report serious adverse effects to the FDA.

The FDA told DailyMail.com on the figures previously: 'While FDA relies on the FAERS database as a drug safety surveillance tool after a product is approved and marketed, submission of a report does not mean that the information included in it has been medically confirmed.

'The event may have been related to the underlying disease being treated, or caused by some other drug being taken concurrently, or occurred for other reasons.'

They added: 'Duplicate reports and heightened awareness of an event with a particular product may inflate the reported occurrence of an adverse event.'

In comparison to the 100 deaths linked to weight loss drugs every year, there are 16,000 attributed every 12 months to NSAIDS '-- non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs used to treat pain and inflammation such as ibuprofen and aspirin.

The FDA has previously warned that in rare cases Ozempic can cause an intestinal blockage, called ileus, because it slows the passage of food through the intestines.

This can cause them to rupture and spill their contents into the body, which can lead to sepsis and multiple organ failure if not treated quickly.

Many patients taking the drug are also obese, which puts them at a higher risk of suffering serious side effects from any complications caused by the drug.

Ozempic and its competitors have risen to prominence in the last few years, with a whopping 9million prescriptions written for the drugs in the last three months of 2022 alone, the latest available '-- marking a surge of 300 percent in three years.

Eli Lilly's Zepbound overtook Wegovy this March, data showed '-- with 6,000 more prescriptions written in a month to a total of 77,590.

Deaths can be reported to FAERS by doctors, consumers, manufacturers, family members and others.

Medical documents are not requested with the initial report, but those submitting one will be asked to give detailed information on the adverse event.

Reports are reviewed and constantly monitored by FDA investigators to detect side effects of medications that may not have been picked up in clinical trials.

The agency previously used these to add the side effect ileus to the warning label '-- or a partial or complete blockage of the small intestine.

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Tue, 09 Apr 2024 18:56

U.S. World Business Arts Lifestyle Opinion Audio Games Cooking Wirecutter The Athletic The Interpreter

Israel has quietly sought, and perhaps achieved, a large measure of autonomy from its half-century of reliance on the United States.

A man waving the flags of Israel and the United States in front of a rally in support of Palestine last week in Copley Square in Boston. Credit... Joseph Prezioso/Agence France-Presse '-- Getty Images Israel, a small country surrounded by adversaries and locked in conflict with the Palestinians, depends absolutely on American diplomatic and military support. By giving it, the United States safeguards Israel and wields significant leverage over its actions.

That's the conventional wisdom, anyway. For decades, it was true: Israeli leaders and voters alike treated Washington as essential to their country's survival.

But that dependence may be ending. While Israel still benefits greatly from American assistance, security experts and political analysts say that the country has quietly cultivated, and may have achieved, effective autonomy from the United States.

''We're seeing much more Israeli independence,'' said Vipin Narang, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist who has studied Israeli strategy.

Israel no longer needs American security guarantees to protect it from neighboring states, with which it has mostly made peace. Nor does it see itself as needing American mediation in the Palestinian conflict, which Israelis largely find bearable and support maintaining as it is.

Once reliant on American arms transfers, Israel now produces many of its most essential weapons domestically. It has become more self-sufficient diplomatically as well, cultivating allies independent of Washington. Even culturally, Israelis are less sensitive to American approval '-- and put less pressure on their leaders to maintain good standing in Washington.

Image Israeli ground forces at the Gaza Border, Israel Sunday, May 16, 2021. Credit... Dan Balilty for The New York Times And while American aid to Israel remains high in absolute terms, Israel's decades-long economic boom has left the country less and less reliant. In 1981, American aid was equivalent to almost 10 percent of Israel's economy. In 2020, at nearly $4 billion, it was closer to 1 percent.

Washington underscored its own declining relevance to the conflict last week, calling for a cease-fire only after an Egyptian-brokered agreement was nearing completion, and which Israeli leaders said they agreed to because they had completed their military objectives in a 10-day conflict with Gaza. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will visit the region this week, though he said he did not intend to restart formal Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

The change comes just as a faction of Democrats and left-wing activists, outraged over Israel's treatment of Palestinians and bombing of Gaza, are challenging Washington's long-held consensus on Israel.

Yet significant, if shrinking, numbers of Americans express support for Israel, and Democratic politicians have resisted their voters' growing support for the Palestinians.

The United States still has leverage, as it does with every country where it provides arms and diplomatic support. Indeed, former President Donald J. Trump's unalloyed embrace of the Israeli government demonstrated that Israel still benefits from the relationship. But American leverage may be declining past the point at which Israel is able and willing to do as it wishes, bipartisan consensus or not.

Steps Toward Self-SufficiencyWhen Americans think of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, many still picture the period known as the Second Intifada, when Israeli tanks crashed through Palestinian towns and Palestinian bombs detonated in Israeli cafes and buses.

But that was 15 years ago. Since then, Israel has re-engineered the conflict in ways that Israeli voters and leaders largely find bearable.

Violence against Israelis in the occupied West Bank is rarer and lower-level, rarer still in Israel proper. Though fighting has erupted several times between Israel and Gaza-based groups, Israeli forces have succeeded in pushing the burden overwhelmingly on Gazans. Conflict deaths, once three-to-one Palestinian-to-Israeli, are now closer to 20-to-one.

At the same time, Israeli disaffection with the peace process has left many feeling that periodic fighting is the least bad option. The occupation, though a crushing and ever-present force for Palestinians, is, on most days and for most Jewish Israelis, ignorable.

''Israelis have become increasingly comfortable with this approach,'' said Yal Mizrahi-Arnaud, a research fellow at the Forum for Regional Thinking, an Israeli think tank. ''That's a cost that they are willing to accept.''

It's a status quo that Israel can maintain with little outside help. In past years, its most important military tools were American-made warplanes and other high-end gear, which required signoff from Congress and the White House.

Now, it relies on missile defense technology that is made and maintained largely at home '-- a feat that hints at the tenacity of Israel's drive for self-sufficiency.

''If you had told me five years ago,'' said Mr. Narang, the M.I.T. scholar, ''that the Israelis would have a layered missile defense system against short-range rockets and short-range ballistic missiles, and it was going to be 90 percent effective, I would have said, 'I would love what you're smoking.'''

Image Streaks of smoke from Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepting rockets launched from the Gaza Strip toward Israel, as seen from Ashkelon, Israel, on May 15. Credit... Amir Cohen/Reuters Though heavy American funding under President Barack Obama helped stand up the system, it now operates at a relatively affordable $50,000 per interceptor.

Israel began working toward military autonomy in the 1990s. Cool relations with the George H.W. Bush administration and perceived American failure to stop Iraqi missiles from striking Israel convinced its leaders that they could not count on American backing forever.

This belief deepened under subsequent presidents, whose pressure to strike peace with the Palestinians has run increasingly counter to Israeli preferences for maintaining control of the West Bank and tightly blockading Gaza.

''The political calculus led to seeking independent capabilities that are no longer vulnerable to U.S. leverage and pressure,'' Mr. Narang said, adding that Israel has also sought independent intelligence gathering. ''It certainly appears they've been able to get to that point.''

The 'Other Friends Policy'There is another existential threat from which Israel no longer relies so heavily on American protection: international isolation.

Israel once sought acceptance from Western democracies, which demanded that it meet democratic standards, but bestowed legitimacy on a country that otherwise had few friends.

Today, Israel faces a much warmer international climate. ''Anti-imperialist'' powers that once challenged Israel have moved on. While international attitudes toward it are mixed, and tend starkly negative in Muslim-majority societies, Israel has cultivated ties in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Even nearby Arab states, such as Jordan and Egypt, once among its greatest enemies, now seek peace, while others have eased hostilities. Last year, the so-called Abraham Accords, brokered under President Trump, saw Israel normalize ties with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Israel subsequently normalized ties with Morocco and reached a diplomatic agreement with Sudan.

''We used to talk about a diplomatic tsunami that was on its way. But it never materialized,'' said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli political analyst and pollster.

Ms. Scheindlin runs an annual tracking poll asking Israelis to rank national challenges. Security and the economy reliably come first. Foreign relations are now near the very bottom.

Even as European diplomats warn of consequences that never come and Democrats debate the future of the alliance, she said, Israelis view their international standing as excellent.

On diplomacy, too, Israel has sought independence from the Americans.

In the mid-2010s, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, all but directly campaigned against President Obama's re-election because of his Middle East policies, sending relations plunging.

Since then, Mr. Netanyahu has cultivated a network of illiberal democracies that, far from condemning Israel's treatment of Palestinians, treat it as admirable: Brazil, Hungary, India and others.

Image Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, left, was welcomed by Brazil's president-elect, Jair Bolsonaro, at the Copacabana fort in Rio de Janeiro in 2018. Credit... Pool photo by Leo Correa Ms. Scheindlin calls it the ''other friends policy.'' As a result, Israelis no longer see American acceptance as crucial to survival.

At the same time, rising nationalism has instilled a greater willingness to shrug off international criticism.

Washington's support for Israel's democratic credentials, a soft kind of leverage long wielded by American diplomats, means less every year.

Risking the ConsensusOne of the top jobs of any prime minister, it has long been said in Israel, is safeguarding Washington's bipartisan consensus in support of the country.

So when Mr. Netanyahu aligned Israel with Republicans in the mid-2010s, even haranguing Mr. Obama from the floor of Congress, he was expected to pay a political cost at home.

But Mr. Obama and congressional Democrats did little to modulate their support. Americans then elected Donald J. Trump, who catered to Mr. Netanyahu more than any previous president.

The episode instilled a ''sense of impunity,'' Ms. Scheindlin said. ''Israelis have learned that they can handle the heat, they can handle a little bit of rocky relations.''

In a series of focus groups conducted since President Biden's election, Ms. Scheindlin said she had found that Israelis no longer fear reprisal from American politicians.

''People are just not that moved,'' she said. ''They're like, 'It's America. Biden will be fine.'''

At the same time, many Israelis have lost interest in the peace process. Most see it as doomed, polls show, and growing numbers consider it a low priority, given a status quo that much of the Israeli public sees as tolerable.

''That changes the nature of the relationship to the U.S.,'' Ms. Mizrahi-Arnaud said.

Because Israeli leaders no longer feel domestic pressure to engage in the peace process, which runs through Washington, they do not need to persuade the Americans that they are seeking peace in good faith.

Image Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu participating with President Donald J. Trump in an Abraham Accords signing ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House on Sept. 15, 2020. Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times If anything, leaders face declining pressure to please the Americans and rising demands to defy them with policies like expanding settlements in the West Bank, even annexing it outright.

Israel is hardly the first small state to seek independence from a great-power patron. But this case is unusual in one way: It was the Americans who built up Israel's military and diplomatic independence, eroding their own influence.

Now, after nearly 50 years of not quite wielding that leverage to bring an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it may soon be gone for good, if it isn't already.

''Israel feels that they can get away with more,'' said Ms. Mizrahi-Arnaud, adding, to underscore her point, ''When exactly is the last time that the United States pressured Israel?''

Max Fisher is a New York-based international reporter and columnist. He has reported from five continents on conflict, diplomacy, social change and other topics. He writes The Interpreter, a column exploring the ideas and context behind major world events. More about Max Fisher

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Tue, 09 Apr 2024 15:52

The Federal Aviation Administration on Sunday said it will launch an investigation after the engine cowling of a Southwest Airlines plane fell off during takeoff in Denver and struck the wing flap. The cowling is the protective cover over the plane's engine.

The engine cowling hanging from the wing of Southwest Airlines Flight 3695 on Sunday. Cooper GlassSouthwest Airlines Flight 3695 returned safely to Denver International Airport around 8:15 a.m. local time on Sunday after the pilot reported the incident, the FAA said. The plane was headed to William P. Hobby Airport in Houston.

In a statement, Southwest Airlines said it is working to get customers on their way to Houston on another aircraft after Flight 3695 landed safely in Denver and that its maintenance teams are reviewing the aircraft.

Frank Sanger, who was on the flight, expressed shock after getting a glimpse of the plane's state when he deplaned.

''You could see the jet engine had a panel stripped away, all the way around,'' Sanger said in an interview that aired Monday on NBC's ''TODAY'' show.

This is the second incident in recent days involving a reported malfunctioning of equipment on a Southwest Airlines flight. The FAA is investigating a reported engine fire before takeoff at Lubbock Preston Smith International Airport on Thursday.

United Airlines flights have also recently faced safety issues, with eight incidents having been reported in the last two weeks.

Sasha Johnson, the vice president of corporate safety at United, said in a statement that the FAA will be playing a larger role in the company.

"Over the next several weeks, we will begin to see more of an FAA presence in our operation as they begin to review some of our work processes, manuals and facilities," Johnson said.

These incidents come on the heels of skyrocketing scrutiny the airline industry continues to face, with Boeing under investigation by the FAA, Department of Justice and National Transportation Safety Board, following the Alaska Airlines door plug blowout.

Summer Concepcion Summer Concepcion is a politics reporter for NBC News.

Cheyenne Darcy Amaya Associate Producer at NBC News

Noah Osborne Noah Osborne is a news associate with NBC News Digital.

Jay Blackman contributed.

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Tue, 09 Apr 2024 15:26

It's the middle of summer in Nice, and the Mediterranean is lapping gently against the walls of the quay. A man with shortly trimmed dark hair in a black suit and a radiant white shirt is striding briskly toward a cutter. A second man is carrying his case. An attractive woman '' tall and blond, her summer dress fluttering in the wind '' is pacing on the aft deck of the Poseidon III, laughing nervously. Her name is Natalya Zlobina, and she is the Russian lover of Jan Marsalek, one of the most-wanted men in Europe.

DER SPIEGEL 10/2024 The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 10/2024 (March 2nd, 2024) of DER SPIEGEL.

SPIEGEL International The scene, recorded by a camera at the Port of Nice, becomes a bit blurry. The man in the black suit climbs down a ladder to the Poseidon III and greets the woman with a kiss. She laughs; he seems annoyed. Now, it's possible to recognize his face, well-known these days from the wanted posters plastered on the walls of train stations and airports: It is Jan Marsalek himself, the former COO of Wirecard, which was once listed on Germany's blue-chip stock index, the DAX. He has been on the run since June 2020.

The moment hardly lasts a minute, and it can be seen in the video that the woman quickly makes it clear to him that the cutter is just part of a little prank. The real ship is rocking in the waves one slip over '' a luxurious mega-yacht, of course, where a group of laughing men is waiting. Later, Zlobina will celebrate her 30th birthday here. It is July 6, 2014, the day on which Jan Marsalek's life will change. The day on which he will meet a man with excellent ties to the Russian military secret service agency GRU, and on which he will apparently begin his second life as a spy.

Marsalek's story has thus far been more of a financial thriller, already an almost unbelievable tale of fraud, lies and deception. A story of a school dropout rising to become the COO of the financial company Wirecard, a firm considered for a time as one of the most powerful newcomers to the German economy in decades, courted by government ministers and premiers. But Wirecard's success, as would become clear, was a sham. Billions of euros in account balances evaporated, almost 6,000 people lost their jobs and top executives were arrested.

The drama is now taking a bizarre turn, the plot gets even crazier. Suddenly, the financial thriller has become a spy thriller. And the main character is no longer a charismatic trickster, but a villain straight out of a James Bond movie, cynical and dangerous. A man who is still on the run today. But where is he? And how has he managed to escape the authorities all this time?

Joint reporting by DER SPIEGEL, German public broadcaster ZDF, the Austrian newspaper Der Standard and the Russian investigative platform The Insider has now found some answers. On the basis of confidential documents, mobile phone data, travel records, lab results, investigation files, emails and chats, Marsalek's story can now be told in its entirety. Marsalek isn't just the main character in one of Germany's largest ever financial scandals. He is also '' so it would seem from interviews with secret service agents, police investigators and people from his orbit '' a spy working for the Kremlin. A man whose activities in his role as an agent endangers lives. Marsalek has apparently commissioned Bulgarian accomplices to track Moscow's critics across all of Europe, spy on them and possibly even eliminate them. The plot was uncovered at the last moment by the British domestic intelligence agency MI5.

Marsalek's ties to Russian secret service agencies go back an entire decade. It seems that he was initially recruited by the GRU, but he is also thought to have worked for the KGB's successor agency, the FSB, in recent years. Zlobina, his girlfriend, is also in touch with men from the security services. Over the several years Marsalek spent as the head of a DAX-listed company, he was apparently able to quietly expand his spying network, traveling to Russia on more than 60 occasions and using six Austrian passports and a diplomatic document to do so.

There are plenty of indications that Marsalek also involved Wirecard in Russian intelligence activities '' that money was laundered and mercenaries were paid through the company. Was Marsalek using Germany's model company to help an adversarial power? Did a DAX-listed company assist in the waging of war? How did all this take place without German intelligence officials taking notice?

Jan Marsalek's tracks lead into a shrill parallel world that feels at times like a poorly lit B movie. At others, it slips into the horror genre. It includes scenes with flights in MiG fighter jets and rocket-propelled grenades are fired in Syria. And others with champagne parties on the C´te d'Azur and mercenary armies are recruited in Libya. Characters include agents, nude models, mercenaries, politicians, psychopaths and murderers.

And a Russian priest who has astounding similarities to Jan Marsalek.

THE PRIESTHalfway between Moscow and Rostov-on-Don lies the city of Lipetsk. Founded in the early 18th century by Peter the Great, it is home to half a million residents today. At a traffic circle on the way into the center of town is a charming, 200-year-old chapel with a golden dome and a fa§ade colored brightly in yellow, blue and white. Twice a day except for Tuesdays, a priest named Konstantin Bayazov holds services there. He has a dark beard and shortly trimmed hair. If you watch the priest during his services, you start seeing similarities to Marsalek, and the two men's birthdays are also just a single year apart. The parallels were also apparently noticed by Russian secret service agents.

Marsalek's Russian passport, passport file, Pastor Konstantin Bayazov

[M] Lea Rossa / DER SPIEGEL; Fotos: DER SPIEGEL (3)

Bayazov '' the real Bayazov '' hasn't used his own passport since September 2020. Because since then, there has been a second Bayazov, a fake one. The passport file was changed on September 5, 2020, and a new passport was issued with the number 763391844. Both the file and the travel document now include the scowling image of Jan Marsalek.

From the passport files of Konstantin Bayazov: Photos of the priest and of the fugitive Marsalek

[M] Lea Rossa / DER SPIEGEL; Fotos: DER SPIEGEL (4)

A contact person is also included in the file, complete with a telephone number: Evgeniya Kurochkina. She is thought to provide assistance to the Russian domestic intelligence agency FSB. According to leaked information from Russia, Kurochkina has regularly telephoned and traveled with a Moscow-based agent of the authority.

This won't be the only moment in the course of this story that feels like you've suddenly landed in a spy novel by John le Carr(C).

MARSALEK, THE GAMBLERMarsalek established his first ties to Russia in 2010. Shortly before that, he had become a member of the executive board of the financial services provider Wirecard, a company that was largely unknown at the time. Wirecard's main line of business was taking care of the technical processing of credit card payments for online vendors. Early on, that consisted primarily of porno and gambling sites. But the head of the company, Markus Braun, was looking for more. A native of Vienna, Braun saw himself as an intellectual visionary and was fond of wearing black turtle-neck sweaters like Apple's Steve Jobs. And he, too, wanted to lead a global company.

Marsalek, who is also Austrian, was Braun's right-hand man. He had started working for Wirecard '' called Wire Card at the time '' when he was 20 as "Director Technology" for a starting monthly salary of 9,000 deutsche marks '' not bad for someone who had just dropped out of school. But Marsalek was good at programming and understood the new network technology. That was enough to impress the founder of Wirecard.

Braun and Marsalek would prove to be a dream team, they were ambitious and brash. Their goal was global expansion, envisioning telecom companies, airlines and retailers all taking care of their digital payments through Wirecard. The company's stock price climbed continuously, even if its revenues and profits didn't keep pace early on. In February 2010, Marsalek was promoted to chief operating officer.

The two were also interested penetrating the Russian market, and their door opener was Florian Stermann, the enigmatic and somewhat shady president of the Austrian-Russian Friendship Society. With his assistance, Wirecard began negotiating with the Russian telecommunications company Megafon in 2011. Wirecard was hired to provide prepaid credit cards for mobile phone customers, but the project failed. The company got a second chance to secure a significant deal in Russia though '' by processing transactions for the Moscow subway, with its 7 million passengers per day.

It was up to Marsalek to usher the deal to completion, and he began making frequent trips to Russia. It was a life he quickly took to '' the world of the international executive, complete with luxury hotels and gourmet restaurants. It was a validation for him, a school dropout with no advanced degree who had always wanted to prove everyone wrong and leave all those behind who just seemed to get in his way. Including his mother.

Marsalek was born in Vienna on March 15, 1980, and grew up just a few kilometers away in the town of Klosterneuburg. He went to a French private school before attending the local high school. He was a good student, quite talented. "Eloquent," with a "great aptitude for computer sciences," say former teachers.

But he was also a child who always had a hard time with rules and conventions, as his mother told DER SPIEGEL with a shake of her head just a few weeks after Marsalek's disappearance. The interview took place in July 2020 in an old farmhouse not far from Vienna. She reverted to her birth name years ago and asked that it not be used in print. She said she hadn't been in touch with her son for quite some time. She calls him a "arrogant showoff."

A few old photos from his childhood still exist. One of them shows him wearing a gray coat and a floppy hat that is far too big for him, looking like the clich(C) of a secret agent. His father was hardly ever at home during the week due to his job as the managing director of a company in the Czech Republic. Back home, says his mother, arguments were frequent.

Childhood photos of Jan Marsalek

[M] Lea Rossa / DER SPIEGEL; Fotos: DER SPIEGEL (2)

In June 1999, she says, her son suddenly moved out after a fight. For a long time, the only indications that he was alive came in the form of mobile phone bills and past-due notices, she recalls. She kept track of his career through the media. "I was always suspicious of Wirecard. The fact that Jan rose so quickly in the company without a diploma, how is that possible?"

"Charisma," is the response given by almost all former Wirecard employees when asked that question. Former teachers, past lovers and former friends agree. Even as a 20-year-old, Marsalek exuded self-confidence and intelligence. "You immediately see him as a successful person who knows what he is talking about and what he is doing," says Pav Gill, the former chief legal officer for Wirecard in Asia. "A genius salesman who attracts people," says a former confidant. "He is eloquent, charming and extremely intelligent," says J¶rn Leogrande, the former head of innovation for Wirecard.

It was an impression reinforced by Marsalek's lifestyle, which included parties in Saint Tropez and 15,000-euro dinners in the Mandarin Oriental in Munich, including several 2,500-euro bottles of champagne and Remy Martin Louis XIII cognac to wash it down.

Marsalek's girlfriend Zlobina

[M] Lea Rossa / DER SPIEGEL; Foto: DER SPIEGEL

But he was also erratic. Before long, the deal with the Moscow metro ran into difficulties and Marsalek seemed to lose interest in Russia. It was at this moment that Natalya Zlobina made her appearance. The dubious Russian businessman Sergey Lee, say people who were present at the time, recommended her with the warmest of words. Zlobina, he told Marsalek, citing her excellent contacts in the Moscow administration, could save the metro deal.

Surprisingly good contacts for a 29-year-old who had, to that point, primarily made a name for herself as an online erotic model. In the horror sex film "Red Lips 2 '' Blood Lust," she plays a Russian secret agent who kills her victims with a neurotoxin. Being an agent was apparently a role she was comfortable with '' also, it seems, in real life.

One clue is the fact that her personal information is closely protected. Access to her passport file in an official database was temporarily blocked, with officials instead providing information for a completely different woman. Someone also deleted Zlobina's travel data from a police system. Such security measures are frequently used by Russian secret service agencies to protect their operatives.

Zlobina was also likely acting as a "honey trap" for Marsalek, a term used in the agency world for attracting a target with a romantic liaison.

The subway deal between Moscow and Wirecard never actually materialized, but the relationship between Marsalek and Zlobina quickly deepened beyond mere professional interests. They took quick trips together to places like Barcelona and Santorini, with Marsalek picking up his new girlfriend in Moscow with a private jet. These and dozens of other trips can be retraced with the help of confidential flight and border-crossing databases, internal emails, chats and reports from acquaintances.

Zlobina, vacation photos from Jan Marsalek

[M] Lea Rossa / DER SPIEGEL; Fotos: DER SPIEGEL (3)

The two of them were looking for adventure, sources close to them say when describing their relationship. Marsalek apparently called her "Zebra," and she allegedly had an animal nickname for him as well.

In September 2013, the couple took a trip to the Chechnyan capital of Grozny, apparently to meet relatives of the dictator Ramzan Kadyrov, according to witnesses. Kadyrov's clan, the witnesses say, had parked around $100 million in accounts in Hong Kong and were looking for a way to get the money to Western Europe, laundered.

Zlobina allegedly introduced Marsalek as the one who could solve the problem. Wirecard was taking care of large financial transactions every day. Perhaps nobody would notice a few extra million?

Witness accounts in combination with trips taken by both Zlobina and by a Kadyrov confidant show that people involved met later on two occasions, once in Vienna and once in Asia. Whether a deal ever actually took shape is unclear. But Marsalek apparently proved his worth in one way or the other.

A couple of months later, in summer 2014, on that warm July evening in the Port of Nice, it was time for the next, decisive step. A special guest was in attendance for Zlobina's birthday party. According to the recollections of other guests at the party, she introduced him to Marsalek as "Stas," saying he was a "general."

His complete name is Stanislav Petlinsky, a figure from the shady world of the Russian security apparatus who is as illustrious as he is indistinct. In the 1990s, he worked for the Russian special forces unit Spetsnaz and was later part of the Presidential Administration of Russia in the Kremlin, according to people close to him. After that, his rank and his role become less clear. Western agents believe Petlinsky works for several Russian secret service agencies.

Marsalek, in any case, was smitten from the very beginning, say those who witnessed the early days of their friendship. Others say you can see Marsalek from two perspectives: Marsalek before Stas, and Marsalek after Stas.

Marsalek wined and dined his friend Stanislav Petlinsky for the latter's birthday at the high-end Munich restaurant Tantris.

[M] Lea Rossa / DER SPIEGEL; Foto: DER SPIEGEL

Marsalek had an interest in weapons? Stas offered to arrange a shooting training session for him. Yan had questions about the underground world of Russian secret service agencies? Stas seemed to have all the answers.

Petlinsky would later tell some that he handed Marsalek off to the GRU after their first meeting. That would mean that starting in summer 2014, Marsalek was a tool of Russian secret service agencies, a view shared by Western intelligence officials.

Zlobina knew that Marsalek was an adrenalin junky, and they took a flight together in a fighter jet. One photo shows Marsalek sitting in a MiG-29 wearing a pilot's helmet and oxygen mask, giving the thumbs up. A "Top Gun" fever dream.

Zlobina and Marsalek in a MiG fighter jet

[M] Lea Rossa / DER SPIEGEL; Fotos: DER SPIEGEL (3)

Petlinsky guided Marsalek into the world of the Russian secret service. Companions say that Marsalek even presented himself as an agent during this period. Others recall his interest over the years in the art of disappearing without a trace, in fake identities and escape routes. "It was a constant topic, almost an obsession," says one person close to Marsalek.

Petlinsky also introduced Marsalek to a brawny man who occasionally wore a Hells Angels sweatshirt. He called him "Vladimir, my mercenary." In Moscow, he was known as "Biker," likely because of his predilection for rocker gang gear. His real name is Anatoly Karazy. He is thought to have served as an officer with the GRU special forces together with Petlinsky in Chechnya. After leaving the military, Karazy joined the notorious mercenary army Wagner Group, a paramilitary organization so powerful that it has its own secret service '' of which Karazy had taken over leadership by 2017, at the latest.

On May 5, 2017, the Wagner secret service chief Karazy flew from Moscow to Munich for a meeting with Marsalek. The two traveled onward together in a private jet to Beirut, where they met Petlinsky. From there, the trip took them across the mountains to the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, where the Russian army, Wagner mercenaries and troops from Syrian dictator Bashar Assad's military were fighting against Islamic State and against insurgents. At around this time, Wagner members were involved in torturing civilians to death in the area.

Marsalek and his two Russian companions stayed for several days. Photos show the Wirecard executive wearing aviator sunglasses, a bulletproof vest and a combat helmet. In one photo, a rapid-fire rifle can be seen. In another, the ancient Roman theater of Palmyra.

Marsalek and Petlinsky in Syria, Petlinsky with rocket-propelled grenade launcher

[M] Lea Rossa / DER SPIEGEL; Fotos: DER SPIEGEL (2)

Some say that Marsalek fired at Islamist fighters. Anatoly Karazy did not respond to a request for comment about his past and about Marsalek.

Was the trip to Syria just another example of Marsalek's addiction to adrenaline? Or were the Russians, was Petlinsky, interested in getting Marsalek to do things for which he could later be blackmailed?

DER SPIEGEL received a tip: Those interested in finding Stanislav Petlinsky would be advised to have a look in Dubai, on the terrace of the hotel restaurant Al Mandhar at the five-star beach resort Jumeirah al-Naseem. Guests there are served champagne and beluga caviar among the palms and pools. In the background is the shimmering Persian Gulf and the Dubai trademark Burj Al Arab. This, apparently, is where Petlinsky likes to meet his business contacts.

On a Friday in mid-February, the terrace is full of young Russian women dressed in luxury labels and accompanied by muscular men wearing olive green T-shirts. The oligarch Alexander Lebedev, a former secret service officer, can be seen sitting in one of the pavilions next to his wife, a model and influencer with 2.7 million followers on Instagram. The news is just spreading on the internet that the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny has died in prison.

It doesn't take long before Petlinsky actually does appear on the terrace. In his early 60s, he is wiry and muscular, a physique clearly visible from his fitted, light-gray pinstriped suit and tight black T-shirt. On his left wrist, he is wearing a silver Rolex, his eyes are hidden behind mirrored aviator sunglasses, and his hair is shorn close. He nods to the oligarch Lebedev, who nods back.

Yes, he says, he met Marsalek back on that yacht in the South of France. "You know what? I was in love with him from the very first moment," Petlinsky says with a laugh.

Why?

"He has such a wonderful spirit," Petlinsky says. "I always think so small, in terms of what's possible. Jan always thinks big '' really, really big."

What do you mean?

Petlinsky says that the office of German chancellor would probably be too meaningless for his friend. A big project like leading Europe, China and Russia together as a counterbalance to the United States, he says '' that's the kind of thing that would interest Jan.

So he's a star-gazer?

Petlinsky doesn't want to say anything bad about his friend Jan. "Jan always had himself under control." He wanted his brain to be working at maximum capacity. "Jan wasn't addicted to anything," says Petlinsky, "except perhaps to power."

Marsalek is "a nerd," always "super precise, a bit autistic really." And then Petlinsky, who has excellent contacts with mercenary leaders, says: "Human relationships are not Jan's biggest strength. He lacks empathy."

The skyline of Dubai, Marsalek in a Learjet

[M] Lea Rossa / DER SPIEGEL; Fotos: DER SPIEGEL; Kamran Jebreili / AP

It isn't difficult to tell that this conversation is lasting longer than he wants. A couple of tables away, a man in mirrored glasses and golfing shorts is waiting. A young woman comes by looking for attention. "Moscow people," says Petlinsky.

Does Marsalek work for Russian intelligence services?

No, but he is "obsessed with the world of espionage," says Petlinsky.

Did Petlinsky introduce him to a lot of people in Russia?

Yes, including "high-ranking decision-makers," some of them members of the Duma, Russia's parliament.

Including agents?

Petlinsky changes the subject. He is apparently well-versed in laying false trails and interweaving truth with fiction.

Is Petlinsky himself currently with the GRU, and in what rank?

There is no evidence for this, he responds. Petlinsky claims to be a "security consultant," only to later talk about personal encounters with President Vladimir Putin. And about how he once tracked a corrupt FSB officer around the world, catching up to him in Montenegro. He complains about how unprofessional the Berlin Tiergarten park murder was, referring to the 2019 murder of a Georgian enemy in the German capital committed by an FSB killer who was then captured. Petlinsky makes clear that he would have liked to kill the murder victim himself '' and would have then spit on the body.

Tattooed, militaristic-looking men show up on the terrace, some of whom drop by for a chat. He shakes hands with some. A "hero," he says on one occasion, indicating a brawny mercenary who, says Petlinsky, has 3,000 men under his command in Ukraine. Petlinsky seems to know almost everybody here. The hotel terrace in Dubai appears to be something of a hub for Russian mercenaries, businesspeople and much, much younger women.

"What was it like in Syria?"

He apparently finds the subject unobjectionable and freely confirms it. The trip with the Wagner commander, he says, had been a dream of Jan's that he was able to fulfil.

And what about Marsalek's boasts that he had been allowed to shoot at Islamists?

Petlinsky smiles. Jan, he says, had likely imagined flying in a helicopter with the side door open, loud music and Ray-Ban sunglasses. He says he quickly took a hand grenade away from Jan.

And what about firing at people. What weapons did he use?

Petlinsky is silent for a moment. Then he uses the abbreviation RPG, rocket-propelled grenade. It had been "cool for Jan," he says, when someone instructed him on the correct way to position his legs when shooting from a lying position. "We may have also told him roughly in which direction the front was." Later, Petlinsky will write in a message to DER SPIEGEL that firearms training was "a standard part of preparing to travel to crisis areas."

Petlinsky now wants to bring our conversation to an end, perhaps because it was taking an uncomfortable turn: After Marsalek disappeared, an employee of Petlinsky's arranged a Russian passport for him '' after which he and Jan apparently spent time together traveling in Russia.

"Who told you that?" Petlinsky wants to know. "I have great respect for your work, but you might also make mistakes."

What about the spy ring that Marsalek had apparently established, and the allegedly planned kidnappings and assassinations that Western agencies were able to foil.

That was alarming, says Petlinsky. But murders were certainly never part of the plan, that was falsely interpreted. Petlinsky smiles.

You can insist over and over again that he is clearly lying, that there is evidence for certain things. But Petlinsky just draws down the corners of his mouth and shrugs. He has to go, and politely declines when asked about being photographed. Sorry guys.

MARSALEK'S TWO LIVESMany of those who encountered Marsalek in Munich in summer 2017 shortly after his return from Syria describe him as having been "completely exhilarated." At Wirecard headquarters on the outskirts of Munich, meanwhile, the mood was jubilant. The company was expanding rapidly '' to Africa, Australia, Asia and North America. The hype was immense. After a wait of several decades, Germany had finally produced another global player, a company that appeared to be in the big leagues '' at a time when German banks, even years after the financial crisis, still hadn't returned to health. Commerzbank was almost broke and Deutsche Bank was but a shadow of its former self.

At Wirecard, though, it seemed that the future of banking was taking shape, with software solutions for the kind of payment transactions that made online shopping possible in the first place. According to company records, Wirecard was processing payments for 279,000 clients per year, including the supermarket chain Aldi and travel company TUI.

But rumors were swirling. People were saying that Wirecard was inventing profits and cooking the books, that the company was sleazy. Money laundering was mentioned.

In 2015, Munich prosecutors searched Wirecard offices on behalf of U.S. authorities. Additional investigations took place in the U.S. It remained unclear what they found.

Braun and Marsalek responded to the accusations with irritation. Everything was just malicious attempts at stock price manipulation by hedge funds and journalists, they said. They had naysayers shadowed and threatened by private detectives.

In 2018, Wirecard became part of the DAX, the German blue-chip index that included, at the time, the 30 most valuable and most important companies in the country. With more than 270,000 customers, Wirecard processed 125 billion euros in transactions and generated 560 million euros in revenues that year. At least according to the balance sheet. Later, it would be declared void. Either many of the declared sales didn't actually exist, which is what prosecutors believe. Or they were funneled by Marsalek through dark channels, as claimed by Braun, who has been in investigative custody for three years and denies all of the accusations leveled against him. At the time, though, nobody saw what was going on. In fact, Braun and Marsalek were even planning a takeover of Deutsche Bank, an operation they had codenamed "Panther."

Marsalek's main job was to make Wirecard even bigger, and to do so as rapidly as possible. Increasingly, though, he became something of a phantom at Wirecard headquarters, largely invisible even for senior managers. "Nobody really knew what he did," says a colleague. For several years toward the end, Marsalek only rarely stepped into his 110-square-meter (1,180-square-foot) office on company premises on the outskirts of Munich.

Instead, he built up his own center of operations around 10 kilometers away in the center of Munich. It was here where his two lives '' the official and the secret '' would merge.

The four-story, art nouveau villa at Prinzregentenstrasse 61 is one of the most exclusive addresses in the Bavarian capital, a property of more than 1,600 square meters filled with Italian furniture, bronze sculptures and paintings of historic battles. Acquired in 1903 by Prince Alfons of Bavaria as a prestigious aristocratic residence, it was later inhabited by Conrad R¶ntgen, the discoverer of x-rays. Starting in 2016, the villa served the Wirecard executive as a hub for his secret operations. At least some of the 680,000 euros in annual rent was covered through back channels by Wirecard. At the time, the Russian consulate was located on the other side of the street.

Marsalek's headquarters on Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich, photos from his office there

[M] Lea Rossa / DER SPIEGEL; Fotos: DER SPIEGEL (2); Robert Haas / picture alliance / SZ Photo

Marsalek set up his office on the first floor, receiving his visitors in an elegantly furnished meeting room. Leaning against a wall of the office was the framed Austrian declaration of war against Sardinia from 1859. The room was frequented by politicians, bankers and agents. The visitors included a former Libyan intelligence chief, a former senior domestic security official from Austria '' and, on one occasion, a former chief of staff from Helmut Kohl's Chancellery, Bernd Schmidbauer. And Petlinsky, of course, often.

"People were coming in and out all the time," says a woman who worked closely with Marsalek for many years. She was already at his side when he first made it onto the Wirecard board of executives in 2010. For this story, we have chosen to refer to her as Johanna Singer; she requested anonymity as a condition for being interviewed for this story.

She also got to know Petlinsky in the Prinzregentenstrasse villa. "I thought he was really nice," she says, adding that he talked about his grandchildren. Singer arranged a birthday party for him in the gourmet restaurant Tantris in Munich. A photo shows him laughing at a table together with Marsalek, a star-shaped birthday cake between them.

Singer says she only learned later from state prosecutors about the many other shady characters who frequented the villa. Did she really think things were completely normal? That Marsalek equipped the villa with medical supplies, hospital beds and gas masks? That he invited a security expert in from Israel to inspect the place for surveillance devices? "As I now know today, Jan had a number of different personalities."

She paints the picture of an erratic man who liked to live life on the edge, a man who, after leaving work, would go to the cinema in tailor-made Brioni suits to watch spy films. An adrenaline junky with a tendency for hypochondria for whom she would quickly fly over to London just to buy his favorite cough syrup.

Some investigators raise their eyebrows when Johanna Singer is mentioned. She has been questioned several times '' as a witness, not as a suspect, investigators emphasize. But it is also just as true, they say, that Singer is likely holding back information. She has been too close to Marsalek for too long, they say.

It is hard to believe, for example, that in all these years she never noticed who had turned into of the most important regulars in Prinzregentenstrasse. For Singer, he is just "a former civil servant from Austria" who is now "working as a consultant in the private sector." But Martin Weiss wasn't just any civil servant. For years, he had headed Department II at the Austrian Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism (BVT), the Austrian domestic intelligence service. There, he had been responsible for gathering information, conducting investigations and analyzing intelligence. A top agent in charge of the core operational business of the intelligence service. All intelligence information collected by the BVT ended up in the department he oversaw. That includes all information sent to Vienna by partner services such as the CIA, the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution or Israel's Mossad.

After Weiss officially left the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Marsalek hired him as a "consultant." But the two had probably known each other since at least 2015. It appears that Marsalek needed Weiss mainly as a henchman for dirty agent work and not really for Wirecard business.

For example, to investigate people of interest to Marsalek and the Kremlin in particular. It was an easy game for Weiss, with his network in Western intelligence services. Weiss had searches conducted of more than two dozen people in internal databases to find out what the authorities knew about them. They included Marsalek's own family and Petlinsky, as well as journalists living in Europe and a Kazakh opposition activist.

Weiss would later admit some of it following his arrest in interrogations with the special investigation unit of the Austrian Interior Ministry.

According to documents from the investigation, it was "conspicuous" that people, "apparently in the interests of the Russian Federation," were investigated with particular frequency. Also striking was the fact that it took quite some time before the Austrian intelligence service took notice of Marsalek. A Viennese special investigation unit called AG Fama, which was investigating possible Russian moles in the BVT, only came across him after Marsalek's escape. Today, the investigation file comprises thousands of pages. The investigation came to the conclusion that Weiss and Marsalek were part of an "intelligence cell whose capacities and capabilities were used by Russian intelligence services."

IN THE KREMLIN'S SIGHTSMarsalek's activities could have been discovered earlier, in part because yet another agent also belonged to the cell: A brawny, cagey veteran of the BVT with the mellifluous name Egisto Ott, a controversial figure in the Austrian intelligence scene for some time. As early as 2017, foreign intelligence services '' presumably the American CIA and the British MI6 '' had sounded the alarm. Ott, they said, had repeatedly sent data from his official e-mail address at BVT to his private account. The foreign intelligence services presumed that he was spying for the Russians. His superior at BVT at the time was Martin Weiss.

Ott was suspended, but his network continued to function. He used it to gather sensitive information on target persons for Weiss and Marsalek. To that end, he apparently employed informants at home and abroad to make inquiries for him on official service computers. Weiss allegedly paid Ott thousands of euros for his work, as investigators would later determine. Ott has denied the allegations.

Despite the severity of the accusations, he was released after a short period in custody. It takes a bit of looking around in Austria these days if you want to talk to him. Neighbors haven't seen him at his apartment in Vienna for some time. But in Ott's home region of Carinthia, in a valley near W¶rthersee lake, a beautiful estate lies shimmering in the winter sun.

A few hours later, Mr. and Mrs. Ott emerge to walk their dog. Ott, a stocky man with a green quilted jacket and a firm handshake, agrees to a walk with the DER SPIEGEL reporter.

"You can tell that I'm a Russian spy just by the fact that I still have my old mobile phone number," he jokes. He says the accusations are baseless, a vast conspiracy by influential opponents in politics and the intelligence service '' because he knew too much. In long monologues, Ott tells outlandish stories about ransom money that allegedly disappeared during hostage rescues and ended up in the pockets of his enemies. "I never took part in breaking the rules, but always did an excellent job," says Ott. He claims they just wanted to shut him down.

Mountains of investigation files on Ott's activities cast a few doubts on his account. How the flow of information appears to have worked, through various channels and connections, is demonstrated by the screenshot of a chat that Ott saved on his iPhone 8 on September 10, 2019. In the message, Petlinsky turns to his friend Marsalek with a problem. The mistress of Russian billionaire Arkady Rotenberg and her sister were constantly having trouble when crossing borders into Europe. Marsalek, at the time still a Wirecard board member, forwarded the message to his helper Martin Weiss and asked "whether we could provide support in the matter." Petlinsky confirmed the instance, but said that the request had just been a favor for the two women.

It fell to Ott to actually take care of the task. As further text messages suggest, Ott apparently asked a police colleague in Italy for discreet help. The Italian returned two weeks later after uncovering some information. The women, he found, had an entry in the European border search system SIS that had been issued by Latvia for undercover checks on the grounds of "terrorism." In this manner, sensitive data found its way to Petlinsky and thus to Moscow.

A question to Ott during the walk: How could this assignment have had a work-related purpose? His answer: "I didn't make an inquiry with us. This is verifiable: There is nothing."

The probes carried out by Ott and Weiss could sometimes be extremely threatening for those affected, as shown by the case of a journalist who was spied on. Christo Grozev has spent many years investigating the machinations of Russian intelligence services. Grozev was head of the renowned research platform Bellingcat and now works for DER SPIEGEL. He contributed to this article.

Grozev's investigative reporting has revealed the most terrible secrets of the Russian state, uncovering the intelligence ties of the killer of Georgian national Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin's Tiergarten park in August 2019. Reports from Bellingcat about the secret service men who poisoned the now deceased politician Alexei Navalny in 2020 caused a global sensation. Jan Marsalek was also the focus of Grozev's attention on several occasions: One DER SPIEGEL article traced his escape route to Minsk in Belarus and revealed for the first time dozens of trips to Russia made by the former executive in previous years.

Accordingly, Grozev has long held a high position on the Kremlin's wanted list. Early last year, Western security authorities gave the journalist, who was living in Vienna at the time, a sudden warning that he should leave Austria as soon as possible. He says he was told that they had concrete knowledge of attack plans by Russian services. Grozev relocated.

Around two years earlier, on December 15, 2020, Weiss had sent an encrypted message to Ott. It read: "Could we make a query in Austria about a Mr. Christo Grozev?" In a later message, Weiss wrote to Ott: Grozev is supporting an operation "against the cause." Ott then provided the address of Grozev's private apartment.

Ott confirms the interaction during our walk with him in Carinthia. "All I did was go to the Registration Office and pay 3.40 euros to find out where he lives." He says he also may have taken a few photos of Grozev's building. That's not illegal, he adds. Why was Weiss so keen to know where Grozev lived? Did the assignment come from Marsalek? Ott claims he never gave it any thought. He denies that he may have helped Putin's spies locate an enemy. "I always fought the Russian intelligence service throughout my career," he says.

In any case, he says, the investigations into his activities were sloppy and not conducted in accordance with the rule of law. This is one reason why he was released from custody, he says. And it is true that despite years of investigation, the Public Prosecutor's Office has yet to bring charges, as is also the case in the investigation into Weiss. This has prompted suspicions among high-ranking officials that someone in Vienna is stepping on the brakes. Is the influence of Marsalek's network in Austria still so strong that investigations into suspected collaborators are fizzling out?

In the meantime, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has been reformed, renamed and most of its personnel replaced. But there isn't enough evidence against some agents who were considered close to Marsalek and Weiss to remove them from office, one intelligence officer complains. The danger is real that Marsalek is still spying on Austrian authorities, politicians and companies on behalf of Russian services, the intelligence officer says.

WIRECARD, A RUSSIAN ENTITY?Why was Moscow interested in recruiting Marsalek in the first place? There is much to suggest that it was his position as Wirecard's chief operating officer that sparked Moscow's interest.

An agent in a company that is involved in global payment transactions: how practical.

All kinds of sensitive information wound up at Wirecard headquarters, all the more so once the company joined the DAX index of blue-chip German companies. Dozens of international companies processed some of their financial transactions through Wirecard. Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office was also a customer and regularly used the company's payment technology. At one point, Marsalek instructed subordinates to compile a year's worth of customer data '' allegedly, as he said, for the BND, Germany's foreign intelligence agency. It would later turn out that the BND had never actually requested the data. Instead, it's possible that the confidential information wound up in Moscow.

Also extremely useful was the fact that Wirecard organized its business in Asia through so-called third-party partners. Billions in transactions for customers were processed outside of Wirecard, but the revenues were credited to the company and the supposed commission income was booked to escrow accounts. Even for the auditors, the cash flows were extremely difficult to understand. Hardly surprising then that it took quite some time before it was discovered that billions of euros in Wirecard funds were not in the accounts where they were purported to be held. The whole structure seemed like it had been designed for money laundering.

Some in intelligence circles even allege that Marsalek helped to pay agents and informants of the Russian GRU through Wirecard, a claim that has thus far not been verified.

Several sources did, however, confirm that Marsalek likely used Wirecard funds to buy his own mercenary company through proxies, to be deployed in crisis zones.

Apparently, Marsalek wanted to make himself more and more useful to his Russian friends. What could he do? According to people close to him, Petlinsky had a few ideas, and pointed out that war-torn Libya needs to be rebuilt. Russia has a great interest in the North African country, which is rich in oil and gas reserves '' and is also in a position to manage refugee flows to Europe. Petlinsky is said to have suggested getting involved in the business of cement, which would ultimately be needed for reconstruction. The sources claim that Marsalek promptly invested in cement factories.

The people close to Petlinsky also say he made Marsalek aware of an experienced Russian company operating in the gray area between mercenary operations and security service called the RSB Group. The company, Petlinsky allegedly told Marsalek, had experience in counter-terrorism missions, providing protection against pirate attacks and, most importantly, a license for mine clearing. Marsalek was impressed, but he didn't just hire the outfit for a mission in Libya, he apparently immediately bought the entire company. Marsalek now apparently owned his own mercenary company through a murky construct. Petlinsky denies having advised Marsalek to make the investments.

An RSB mercenary in Libya, the logo of the Wagner Group

[M] Lea Rossa / DER SPIEGEL; Foto: DER SPIEGEL

And Marsalek had even bigger plans. On June 28, 2017, he described them to crisis expert Kilian Kleinschmidt, who had worked for the United Nations for many years, at K¤fer-Sch¤nke, an upscale restaurant in Munich.

Kleinschmidt was commissioned with completing a study for Marsalek, for 200,000 euros, on how Libya could be rebuilt. The invoice, as Kleinschmidt notes today, was to be sent to the "Russian-Libyan Cultural Institute" in Moscow. Initially, he says he thought the goal was to make Libya a better place for people to live.

But at a second meeting, this time at the villa on Prinzregentenstrasse, Marsalek dismissed the first proposals from Kleinschmidt's team as "childish" and revealed his real idea: a military "conversion program" that would train 15,000 to 20,000 Libyan militiamen. According to this idea, the private army was to control Libya's southern border and thus the migration flows.

Kleinschmidt wanted nothing to do with it and was disconcerted. Also because during a coffee break Marsalek had raved about the new equipment that mercenaries were wearing in the field. And of "cool bodycams" that produced videos in top quality. Behind it all was a gruesome idea that Marsalek also presented to Petlinsky: Wagner mercenaries could use these cameras attached to their uniforms to broadcast their fight against the Islamists on the Internet. They could livestream their murder and pillaging. Viewers who liked what they saw should be given the opportunity to donate to the militia in return. The only problem, Marsalek reportedly said, is that the existing Wagner videos "cannot be used as advertising because the boys shoot all their prisoners."

Kleinschmidt wanted nothing more to do with the project, and the two sides ended their collaboration. Of the 200,000 euros that had been promised, Kleinschmidt ultimately only received 80,000 euros.

And the German security authorities? Why hadn't they sent a swarm of agents after Marsalek by that point? From their perspective, they say in Berlin, Marsalek was just a businessman. They simply had no reason to suspect that he was working for Russian intelligence services. In any case, they could hardly start monitoring board members of DAX companies who were flying to Moscow, they claim, saying it really wasn't their job.

An official statement from the Chancellery offers a similar tone. There were "no indications" that "would have justified the intelligence services to take action," it reads.

Part of the problem is that the counterintelligence department inside the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's domestic intelligence agency, is small. Meanwhile, the BND is only now starting to rebuild its counter-intelligence operations. Since the end of the Cold War, German security authorities have been focused on terrorists, not spies. Some Berlin agents also complain that they are now being so strictly controlled and regulated that they are barely able to do their work.

The officers concentrate on monitoring registered agents in embassies, although Marsalek probably never even had anything to do with them. He met his intelligence service contacts in Moscow, on the C´te d'Azur or in Tripoli, far away from German observers.

Furthermore, many politicians were vying for the attention of executives at Wirecard. That also likely contributed to a broader unwillingness to take a closer look at the company. On the contrary.

When Wirecard entered the Chinese market for digital payment processing in 2019, the consulting firm of former German Economics and Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg helped with support at the highest political levels. Close advisors to Chancellor Angela Merkel were also involved. In September 2019, when Merkel traveled to Beijing, she put in a good word for Wirecard in China.

The German Finance Ministry, then led by current Chancellor Olaf Scholz, also lent a helping hand. And all this even as the allegations of fraud and money laundering against Wirecard were growing louder.

According to sources close the chancellor, Scholz never met with Wirecard executives during his time as finance minister. They say that Wirecard did not receive any more international support from the German government than other German companies.

That could be true. At the same time, "other German companies" weren't suspected of fraud.

MARSALEK'S NEW IDENTITYBarely nine months after Merkel's trip to China, Wirecard AG filed for insolvency on June 25, 2020, because almost 2 billion euros had disappeared from escrow accounts. Or it never existed in the first place. Marsalek went into hiding. The ID of one of Petlinsky's business partners was used to rent a private jet, and a contact of former agent Weiss organized two trustworthy pilots. False tracks were then laid towards Asia, and Philippine immigration officials were even bribed to fake Marsalek's entry.

In reality, Marsalek landed in Belarus on the night of June 20 and then continued by car toward Moscow, according to confidants of Marsalek who were involved in the escape plans. They claim his escape had been organized by a political functionary who is otherwise in charge of Russian-Libyan relations. In addition to Russian citizenship, the man also holds a passport from Belarus. And he is, how could it be otherwise, a close acquaintance of Petlinsky.

Then there was silence for several weeks. Marsalek had to wait for his new Russian identity, taking the name of the priest Konstantin Bayazov. On September 5, the document was picked up, and the Petlinsky confidant and suspected FSB aide Evgeniya Kurochkina rented a minibus and drove with Marsalek to Crimea. This can be seen by the location data of her mobile phone number, which was obtained by The Insider, and other evidence. Petlinsky was most likely with them. Whether Natalya Zlobina joined them as well is unclear.

On the evening of September 8, Kurochkina's mobile phone was logged in Sevastopol, Crimea. The peninsula annexed by Russia seems to be popular among those who need to disappear quickly. Barely a year earlier, in August 2019, the family of the man who killed the Georgian in Berlin's Tiergarten park was hidden here as well, accompanied by an FSB agent.

Now, it was Marsalek and his friends who showed up. The next morning, on September 9, the group ordered several taxis, according to leaked phone data, and scoured hotels on the southern coast of Crimea. Marsalek apparently checked into one of the overnight accommodations. There, he presented his new passport for registration and an employee scanned it. DER SPIEGEL has seen the document. It is the passport of the priest Bayazov with Jan Marsalek's photo.

There are indications that Marsalek later assumed the identity of Alexander Schmidt in Moscow, and probably also that of a second Russian priest, Vitaly Malkin.

The group initially stayed in Crimea for a few days. Petlinsky chartered a private jet from Simferopol airport in Crimea back to Moscow on September 12, according to booking data. But there was apparently a problem and he didn't board the flight. Petlinsky ultimately returned to the Russian capital one day later. And that's the point where the trail to Marsalek is lost.

Petlinsky confirmed to DER SPIEGEL that he was in the area at the time and that he flew back on a private jet. But he denied having helped Marsalek escape. When asked about the allegations, Evgeniya Kurochkina, the passport courier, said that interactions between strangers should be "beneficial for both sides" '' in other words, she would only provide information for money. Natalya Zlobina left a request for comment about all the accusations unanswered. When asked about Marsalek over the phone, the priest Bayazov said that he couldn't say anything about it. "Why do you refuse to understand that?" Marsalek's defense attorney left an extensive list of questions unanswered.

Did this also mark the end of Jan Marsalek's career as an agent? No. Marsalek apparently continued looking for other ways to make himself useful to his Russian masters. Ways that were even more extreme. The trail leads to a courtroom in Britain.

It's raining in London on this gray autumn day in October 2023 '' what else might you expect in a spy thriller? Inside: A wood-paneled hall, the judge in a robe and wig is enthroned on an upholstered seat. "My Lord," the barristers say when addressing him. The benches, the chairs, the stairs: Everything squeaks and creaks in the Old Bailey, Britain's most famous criminal court. Three men and two women follow the preliminary hearing via video link from different prisons with grim expressions on their faces.

The accusations of the public prosecutor's office weigh as heavily as the air is thick in the hall. They claim that Jan Marsalek conspired with the defendants between August 30, 2020, and February 8, 2023, to gather information that is directly or indirectly useful to an enemy and thus harmful to the interest and security of the state, according to a court document.

British agents and criminal investigators claim that Marsalek commissioned the gang to spy on people disliked by the Kremlin, follow them across Europe '' and presumably kidnap or even eliminate them in the end. London police arrested the Bulgarian defendants in February 2023 on suspicion of espionage. The domestic intelligence service MI5 had been monitoring them for some time.

In addition to the group's forged passports and masses of travel data, around 80,000 chat messages serve as key evidence, the public prosecutor's office says. According to the prosecutors, the spying was part of kidnapping or assassination plans by Russian agencies. The exact instructions for the Bulgarians allegedly came via Telegram messages from Marsalek. They were apparently paid by cryptocurrency and in cash through an intermediary.

It is not known exactly how the group came to the attention of counterintelligence. But they apparently hit the right target. Investigators allegedly found electronic surveillance equipment and 19 forged documents, including press cards and clothing labeled "Discovery Channel" and "National Geographic." Apparently, some of the suspects had posed as journalists during their clandestine operations.

Businessman Orlin Roussev, 46, a surveillance specialist, is believed to be the ringleader of the group of agents. The British investigators likely tracked down Marsalek through Roussev, an old acquaintance of his from the Wirecard days. As emails between him and Marsalek show, he seemingly provided the executive with specially secured mobile phones several years ago. Roussev once wrote to Marsalek that he knew a Chinese provider who was "more than capable" of delivering "customized solutions" for smartphones and other electronic devices.

In early February, the German authorities revealed just how seriously they now take the danger posed by Marsalek. The key witness in the Wirecard trial, Oliver Bellenhaus, was released from custody on conditional release after around three and a half years. The former Dubai representative of Wirecard heavily incriminated Braun and Marsalek in the trial.

Since then, Bellenhaus has been escorted to and from the high-security Munich courtroom two heavy vehicles. Because of articles published by DER SPIEGEL and other media on the agents allegedly led by Marsalek and operating out of London, the public prosecutor's office and the police consider it necessary to provide Bellenhaus with a security detachment.

The trial in London against the Bulgarian spy ring is due to begin at the end of this year. Some of the targets are still in danger to this day because Moscow has them in its crosshairs.

The alleged principal and ringleader Jan Marsalek will most likely not be in the dock. He remains missing, well hidden by his Russian protectors, largely invisible.

It's a bit like the Loch Ness Monster: Allegedly spotted again and again, but never caught. Some sources believe he is in Thailand, others say India. And then digital tracks point to Caracas in Venezuela. The Kremlin has written to the German judiciary suggesting that they ask around in Kazakhstan. And the Wall Street Journal has reported that Marsalek is in Dubai.

That's also where Petlinsky happens to be.

What does he say when asked where Marsalek can be found? "I don't know, we lost contact because of the pandemic," Petlinsky said on a warm February day in the desert sun of Dubai.

He smiles. "Probably somewhere nice."

With additional reporting by Kate Manchester

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Fugitive Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek used compromised intelligence officials in Vienna to spy on European citizens and plot break-ins and assassinations by elite Russian hit squads. He also obtained a Nato government's cutting-edge cryptography machine and smuggled stolen senior Austrian civil servants' phones to Moscow.

The allegations '-- based on new evidence obtained by British intelligence '-- are contained in an Austrian police warrant for the arrest of a former Austrian police and intelligence official, Egisto Ott.

Ott was taken into custody last Friday.

A copy of the warrant was seen by the Financial Times. Its contents were first reported by Austria's Der Standard newspaper.

They are the most extensive official allegations to date that Marsalek, 44, was not only compromised by Russia, but may have been one of the Kremlin's most powerful European intelligence assets, using his position as chief operating officer at the top of a Dax-listed company that almost took over Deutsche Bank, to facilitate violent clandestine operations across the continent and in Africa.

Egisto Ott was taken into custody last week (C) YouTubeThe 86-page warrant claims Marsalek commissioned Ott, and another senior security official, Martin Weiss, the head of Austrian intelligence operations, to facilitate undercover work for Russia's military intelligence (GRU) and domestic intelligence (FSB) on European soil over a period of at least five years from 2017. Weiss has since fled Austria and now lives in Dubai. He could not be immediately reached for comment.

The revelations add to the concerns that Wirecard itself, a payment processing company that was once the darling of Europe's fintech scene before being exposed as a fraud by the FT, may for years have been used as a shadow financial network to pay and facilitate Russian undercover operations beyond the detection of Nato security services.

Marsalek's shadowy connections to Russia, and the suspicions of three European intelligence agencies that he was a Russian spy, were first revealed by the FT in 2020, shortly after Wirecard's collapse.

Further details of Marsalek's links to Moscow '-- where he now lives, having fled Europe with the help of his Austrian network '-- have slowly emerged over the past few years as investigators and journalists have pored over Wirecard's wreckage.

Last month, a report by a consortium of European news outlets, including Der Spiegel, ZDF, The Insider and Der Standard, claimed that Marsalek had been recruited as early as 2014 by Kremlin agents. The group reported in detail on Marsalek's long-standing relationships with Russian intelligence operatives.

The warrant against Ott contains significant new information and indicates that Austria '-- a country with deep ties to Moscow, permissive espionage laws and a political establishment dogged by corruption and scandal in recent years '-- was at the heart of Marsalek's own network.

It claims, based largely on evidence supplied to Austria by Britain's MI5 in recent weeks, that:

Ott used his security clearance to request confidential police information from other European police authorities, including those in Britain and Italy, on people the Russian government was interested in tracking. Ott also used the Schengen Information System '-- a database of visitors entering and leaving Europe's border-free area '-- to track individuals' movements. Those people included Russian dissidents, as well as Russia's own agents.

Ott prepared a ''lessons learned'' analysis for Russian intelligence, following the GRU's assassination of a Chechen dissident in central Berlin in August 2019. The Russian assassin, Vadim Krasikov, was captured and sentenced in Germany. He was floated in a tentative prisoner swap that fell apart when Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny died in a Russian prison earlier this year. Ott's analysis used his knowledge of police and intelligence-sharing practices to suggest ways Russian agents could avoid capture or detection for future murders in Europe.

Ott supplied information to Marsalek on the address and security arrangements of Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist resident in Vienna who exposed Russia's attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal and other GRU operations. Marsalek used the information to co-ordinate an elite ''seal'' squad of FSB agents who broke into Grozev's apartment and stole a laptop and USB sticks. Grozev left Vienna in 2023 after being told by intelligence authorities that Russia might be plotting an attempt on his life.

Ott helped Marsalek smuggle a stolen SINA computer to Moscow. It is unclear how Marsalek obtained the computer. Much like a modern enigma machine, the laptop-like device is one of the most advanced cryptographic tools used by western governments to transmit classified information. The SINA computer was sent to ''the Lubyanka'', Marsalek wrote in a text message, referencing the headquarters of the FSB.

Ott gave Marsalek the full content of the mobile phones of three top officials in Austria's interior ministry, including the ministry chief with responsibility for all Austrian policing and intelligence. The phones fell into Ott's hands after they were dropped in the Danube by accident during a boat trip. The officials believed police experts might be able to recover data from them. Instead, Ott mirrored their contents and passed them to Marsalek, who had the sensitive information ''transferred to Moscow for further analysis''. Several highly politically embarrassing stories based on the contents of WhatsApp messages on the phones later appeared in the Austrian press.

Ott's lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. Ott has previously insisted on his innocence, and dismissed evidence against him as ''games''. He had admitted his relationship with Marsalek but denied knowing he might have been compromised by Russia.

Recommended

Austria's justice minister, the Green party's Alma Zadić, promised on Thursday to urgently review Austrian espionage legislation in response to the revelations.

The debate about changing Austria's spying laws '-- which permit foreign agents to operate at liberty in the country, provided they do not spy on the Austrian state itself '-- has already dragged on for months, however, with no legislation yet proposed despite mounting pressure from allies and opposition politicians.

Vienna is one of Europe's major centres of political espionage as a result. One-third of the 180 accredited Russian diplomats stationed there are undercover intelligence agents, western officials believe.

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Tue, 09 Apr 2024 15:18

United Airlines asked pilots to take unpaid time off next month due to excess staffing, which the airline said is due to Boeing aircraft delays.

Delivery delays have reduced the number of flying hours United anticipated for its pilots, pushing the airline to offer unpaid leave, a United spokesperson told Bloomberg. The Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), a union that represents United pilots, said United will offer more time off through the summer and potentially into the fall. United reported in a Feb. 29 SEC filing that it is contracted to receive 165 Boeing aircrafts in 2024'--but it expects to receive only 63 this year.

'‹'‹''Due to recent changes to our Boeing deliveries, the remaining 2024 forecast block hours for United have been significantly reduced,'' the United chapter of the ALPA wrote in a Friday memo to its members, CNBC reported. ''While the delivery issues surround our 787 and 737 fleets, the impact will affect other fleets as well.''

The ALPA did not respond to Fortune's requests for comment.

What's happening to all of United's pilots?Asking pilots to take unpaid time off is one step further than United's decision in March to slow its hiring of pilots and pause new-hire classes through June as a result of Boeing delivery delays. As of March 7, United hired 450 pilots and had plans to hire 800 by the end of April. For context, the airline hired 2,350 pilots in all of 2023.

United's operating plans were further stymied by the Federal Aviation Administration's increased scrutiny of the airline after a series of 10 safety mishaps over just two weeks in early and mid March. The probe may limit new routes during the busy summer months and has already prevented United from promoting and approving pilots to fly different aircraft models.

United CEO Scott Kirby said the repeated safety incidents were unrelated and welcomed increased FAA attention. He has spoken repeatedly about his frustrations with Boeing's delivery problems, which are set to continue as the 737 Max 10 model is yet to be certified. United asked Boeing to instead focus on slightly smaller Max 9 production for the airline.

''Boeing is not going to be able to meet their contractual deliveries on at least many of those airplanes,'' Kirby said in a January call with investors. ''And let's leave it at that.''

Last month, United was closing in on a deal to acquire three dozen Airbus A321neo jets. Of the 26 Airbus A321neo aircrafts United is contractually obligated to receive in 2024, it expects to receive 25 this year, according to the Feb. 29 SEC filing.

Years of mounting delaysAirbus has kept its promise to deliver its contracted aircrafts, but it has been in spite of continued supply-chain delays that have plagued the entire airplane manufacturing industry.

Engines and other jet components are in tight supply, but delays lasting months or years are the modern norm in the industry, Air Lease executive chairman Steven Udvar-Hazy said in February.

Airline manufacturers across the board are still navigating pandemic-era supply-chain delays'--sometimes two to five times as long as before 2020 because of prolonged labor shortages and supplier bottlenecks caused by ongoing war in the Ukraine.

Airbus has felt the brunt of these supply-chain issues because of increased demand for its jets, but Boeing has had the opposite fate. After a door plug blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 on a January Alaska Airlines flight'--along with a series of safety mishaps on Boeing planes'--the FAA barred the manufacturer from expanding production of its 737 Max beyond 38 planes per month. Boeing had said in previous earnings reports that it hoped to produce up to 50 jets of the model monthly by 2025.

Boeing CFO Brian West said customers have been supportive of the manufacturer's increased safety checks following the incidents, though they have exacerbated delivery delays.

''We are in regular, very transparent communications [with customers] and they know precisely where we stand and the progress that we're making,'' West said at a Bank of America conference on March 20. ''We, at the same time, have to understand what their needs are as they think about their flight schedules and their passengers.''

The impact of Boeing's mishaps and resulting FAA crackdown have reverberated across the industry. Southwest and Alaska Air both said their flying plans may be at risk because of Boeing's delays. Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary piled on to Boeing's misery, telling Reuters in February that the discount airline expects to have seven to 10 fewer Boeing plane deliveries by the summer. The delays could force Ryanair to hike ticket fares by up to 10%.

''The [Boeing] management team in Seattle don't appear to have a grip on the situation at the moment,'' O'Leary said.

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Tue, 09 Apr 2024 14:13

U.S. World Business Arts Lifestyle Opinion Audio Games Cooking Wirecutter The Athletic A bill introduced by the Canadian government to safeguard against online harms has stirred opposition from free speech advocates.

Arif Virani, the justice minister and attorney general of Canada, speaking about the Online Harms Act during a news conference in Canada in February. Credit... Blair Gable/Reuters April 9, 2024, 5:00 a.m. ET

Canada has waded into the contentious issue of regulating online content with a sweeping proposal that would force technology companies to restrict and remove harmful material, especially posts involving children, that appears on their platforms.

While the intent to better monitor online content has drawn widespread support, the bill has faced intense backlash over its attempt to regulate hate speech. Critics say the proposal crosses the line into censorship.

The bill would create a new regulatory agency with the power to issue 24-hour takedown orders to companies for content deemed to be child sexual abuse or intimate photos and videos shared without consent, often referred to as revenge porn.

The agency could also initiate investigations of tech companies and impose hefty, multimillion dollar fines. Companies would have to submit digital safety plans, including design features to shield children from potentially harmful content.

The proposal by the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is meant to address ''the anarchy and lawlessness'' of the internet, said Arif Virani, the justice minister and attorney general.

''Right now, you can empower your kids until you're blue in the face about the internet,'' Mr. Virani said in an interview. ''If there are no rules on the internet, about how things will happen, how platforms will behave, then we've got a problem. We're here to solve that problem.''

But others say parts of the bill, particularly the targeting of hate speech, are so onerous that they would muzzle free expression. The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood called the bill ''Orwellian.''

Since 2014, the police in Canada have seen a fourfold increase in reports of child pornography and sexual offenses against children online, according to data published in March by the national census agency.

Canada's move to regulate tech giants comes amid intensifying concern over the power of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, to disseminate harmful content with few checks.

The European Union, the United Kingdom and Australia have all adopted laws meant to police online content, while the United States is also wrestling with how to address the matter. U.S. lawmakers summoned tech executives in January to a congressional hearing on online child safety.

Image Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg departing a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing entitled ''Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis,'' in Washington in January. Credit... Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times The bill in Canada is winding its way through Parliament and must be passed by the House of Commons and the Senate before it becomes law. Because Mr. Trudeau's Liberal Party has an agreement with an opposition party to support government legislation, some version of the proposal is likely to pass.

The comprehensive bill calls for civil and criminal penalties on hate speech, a move that has provoked the strongest opposition.

One provision would, for the first time in Canada, establish hate as a separate crime that would encompass both written and physical acts. Currently, depending on the circumstances, hate can be added as an element to other criminal offenses but cannot be charged as a separate crime. The government argues that making it a separate crime would make it easier to track offenses.

Another measure would allow people to seek the equivalent of a protection order against someone they accuse of targeting them with hate.

The bill would also restore a regulation repealed by Parliament about a decade ago allowing Canadians to file complaints to an existing human rights commission that can ultimately lead to financial penalties of up to 50,000 Canadian dollars against people judged to have committed hate speech.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association criticized the bill, saying it would lead to ''overbroad violations of expressive freedom, privacy, protest rights and liberty,'' and would give a new regulatory agency the power to be ''judge, jury and executioner.''

The government seems to want to ''create a much more sanitized internet and that's very harmful for free speech because it's the controversial stuff we need to be able to talk about,'' said Josh Dehaas, counsel at the Canadian Constitution Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes civil liberties.

Mr. Virani, the justice minister, rejected any suggestion that the government was trying to limit free speech, saying the bill seeks to protect people from hatred.

''Free speech in this country doesn't include hate speech,'' he said.

Some experts and tech companies praised the bill, saying that the stiffest penalties were reserved for the worst forms of content and would not trample on free speech.

Image Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada. Mr. Trudeau's Liberal Party has an agreement with an opposition party to support government legislation, making it likely that some version of the proposal will pass. Credit... Chris Wattie/Reuters ''It's an incredibly thoughtful piece of legislation, if you're looking at balancing protection from harm and protection of fundamental rights,'' said Emily Laidlaw, a professor who focuses on cybersecurity law at the University of Calgary.

As the bill is in the early stages of the legislative process and criticism has been robust, changes are likely to come before a final vote. Government officials said they expected that amendments would need to be negotiated.

The leader of the Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre, has questioned the need for more bureaucracy, saying online crimes could be dealt with through expanded criminal enforcement.

But some supporters of the bill say it would provide a faster way to tackle crimes on the internet since tech platforms could be ordered to remove content within a day.

Beyond social media sites, the bill would also apply to pornography websites and livestreaming services like Discord. Private message platforms such as Signal would be excluded.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said it supported the Canadian government's goal to protect young people online and wanted to collaborate ''with lawmakers and industry peers on our longstanding priority to keep Canadians safe.''

Tech companies have responded to internet safety laws in other countries by saying that their internal tools, like parental controls, are already effective at protecting children, though some experts argue that it is still too easy for minors to bypass safeguards and access inappropriate content.

Image Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said it supports the Canadian government's goal to protect young people online. Credit... Jim Wilson/The New York Times Canada's proposal has become a target for right-wing and conservative media outlets in the United States, who have seized on the criminal and civil penalties to accuse Mr. Trudeau of trying to suppress political speech.

Some supporters say the bill provides regular online users a way to rein in content that can sometimes have tragic consequences.

Carol Todd, who lives in British Columbia, knows from painful personal experience what it means to confront sexual images of children online.

Her daughter was 15 when she died by suicide after a Dutch man, using some two dozen fake accounts, shared sexual images of her online and demanded money. He was eventually arrested and convicted in 2022 for sexual extortion, and is imprisoned in the Netherlands.

Ms. Todd said it was hard enough finding a place on Facebook to report the images of her daughter. ''It was just so much work and it defeated my kid,'' she said. (The posts were eventually removed, Ms. Todd said, though Facebook never commented on the case.)

Lianna McDonald, the director of the Canadian Center for Child Protection, said the government's proposed online regulations could prevent other tragic outcomes.

''We've lost too many children,'' she said, ''and too many families have been devastated by the violence that occurs online.''

Both Canada and the United States have a three-digit suicide and crisis hotline: 988. If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 and visit 988.ca (Canada) or 988lifeline.org (United States) for a list of additional resources. This service offers bilingual crisis support in each country, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

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Tue, 09 Apr 2024 13:53

Who's In the Know: The Privacy Pulse Report The Ghostery report explores the disparity between average Americans and those with experience in advertising, computer programming and cybersecurity when it comes to their knowledge of online trackingand approach to digital privacy. Fueled by data from 2,000 Americans gathered through Censuswide, the findings reveal that those ''in the know'' are more readily protecting themselves from privacy threats that remain invisible to the general population.

Advertisers Are Protecting Their Data More Than the Average American While 52% of Americans said they use an adblocker, which is up 18% from a 2022 analysis by Statista, that figure grew to 66% for experienced advertisers (those with five or more years of ad experience).

Notably, advertisers said they were most likely to use an adblocker to protect their privacy, followed by blocking ads, and to a lesser degree, to speed up their page loads.

It's very telling that individuals who are not only more knowledgeable about the inner workings of the internet, but actually behind the mechanisms for targeted advertising and tracking, are protecting themselves far more than the average American. As these experts shore up their privacy and data protection against their own products, everyday consumers must take action to avoid remaining susceptible to the ever-expanding, invisible world behind their browser.

'-- Jean-Paul Schmetz, CEO of Ghostery Advertisers aren't the only profession protecting their privacy by using ad and tracker blockers.

76% of experienced cybersecurity professionals and 72% of programmers also reported using an adblocker, compared to just 52% of Americans.

YouTube's Crackdown On Ad Blockers Fuels UsageThe usage of adblockers is only growing as the online tracking landscape continues to evolve.

For example, 49% of Americans said that Big Tech's attempts to enforce advertising and tracking '' like Google's crackdown on YouTube adblocking and browser changes like Manifest V3 '' have increased their willingness to use an adblocker. In addition to usage:

A third of Americans believe that adblockers should be federally protected '' a move that even 38% of experienced advertisers support38% of Americans believe they should be able to choose when they see ads online26% of Americans believe the internet should be ad-free by defaultAmericans Are Underestimating Health and Political TrackingWhen asked which privacy concerns are most contributing to their adblocker usage, or would, Americans said they're most concerned about their:

Browser/search data (38%)Location data (37%)Shopping data (33%)'‹'‹Health data (33%) Data being used for political reasons (26%) and data from adult content sites (22%) were lesser concerns. However, different privacy priorities from experts highlight where consumers should really be placing their distrust.

Experienced programmers and cybersecurity experts were both most worried about protecting highly sensitive information, like their health data (48% across these groups), as well as significantly more concerned about their data being gathered and used for political reasons than the average American.

According to data from WhoTracks.Me, these concerns are rightfully placed '' popular health websites are littered with trackers, including AARP, Walgreens.com, WebMD and more.

Lesser-Known Big Tech Players Sow Distrust Among ExpertsAs Big Tech continues to face public scrutiny over their handling of sensitive user information, a third of Americans said they want to see these companies fined more aggressively for their privacy failings.

When looking at the public's overall perception of big tech companies, experts in advertising, programming and cybersecurity are more aware of and concerned about the niche companies that play a significant, yet lesser-known, role in the online tracking ecosystem:

At least a third of all Americans rank TikTok, Meta, X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI, Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft as likely to abuse data '' TikTok and Meta are the worst public offenders, with 59% and 56% of Americans believing they are likely to abuse personal data, respectivelyMeanwhile, 44% of those experienced in advertising, programming or cybersecurity felt it was likely that Adobe was abusing their data (compared to just 31% of average Americans)Between 41% and 47% of those professionals, depending on expertise, were concerned about their data usage with Comscore (compared to just 32% of average Americans)

There's a clear gap in awareness and action between industry insiders and the general public. But, with the right tools and education, all users can take back control of their personal information and help fight for a future where the internet accurately reflects our shared privacy values.

'-- Jean-Paul Schmetz, CEO of Ghostery Ghostery's Tracker & Ad Blocker empowers users to take back control of their online experiences. By blocking ads, trackers, cookies, popups & other annoyances, the extension protects your personal information from leaving your preferred browser and creates a more private, transparent and faster internet experience.

Launched in 2009, Ghostery has nearly seven million monthly active users who access the tool via app or browser extension.

The intuitive user interface enables every user to protect their privacy by default, in addition to providing expert users with a broad set of customizable features and settings.

Have questions? Get in touch. We're always happy to help.

Download the ReportMethodologyAll figures, unless otherwise stated, are from Censuswide. Total sample size was 2,000 nationally representative US consumers. Fieldwork was undertaken between January 10-12, 2024. The survey was carried out online. The figures are representative of all US adults aged 16+. Censuswide abides by and employs members of the Market Research Society and follows the MRS code of conduct which is based on the ESOMAR principles.

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Mon, 08 Apr 2024 21:54

Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that AI companies were running into a wall when it comes to gathering high-quality training data. Today, The New York Times detailed some of the ways companies have dealt with this. Unsurprisingly, it involves doing things that fall into the hazy gray area of AI copyright law.

The story opens on OpenAI which, desperate for training data, reportedly developed its Whisper audio transcription model to get over the hump, transcribing over a million hours of YouTube videos to train GPT-4, its most advanced large language model. That's according to The New York Times, which reports that the company knew this was legally questionable but believed it to be fair use. OpenAI president Greg Brockman was personally involved in collecting videos that were used, the Times writes.

OpenAI spokesperson Lindsay Held told The Verge in an email that the company curates ''unique'' datasets for each of its models to ''help their understanding of the world'' and maintain its global research competitiveness. Held added that the company uses ''numerous sources including publicly available data and partnerships for non-public data,'' and that it's looking into generating its own synthetic data.

The Times article says that the company exhausted supplies of useful data in 2021, and discussed transcribing YouTube videos, podcasts, and audiobooks after blowing through other resources. By then, it had trained its models on data that included computer code from Github, chess move databases, and schoolwork content from Quizlet.

Google spokesperson Matt Bryant told The Verge in an email the company has ''seen unconfirmed reports'' of OpenAI's activity, adding that ''both our robots.txt files and Terms of Service prohibit unauthorized scraping or downloading of YouTube content,'' echoing the company's terms of use. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said similar things about the possibility that OpenAI used YouTube to train its Sora video-generating model this week. Bryant said Google takes ''technical and legal measures'' to prevent such unauthorized use ''when we have a clear legal or technical basis to do so.''

Google also gathered transcripts from YouTube, according to the Times' sources. Bryant said that the company has trained its models ''on some YouTube content, in accordance with our agreements with YouTube creators.''

The Times writes that Google's legal department asked the company's privacy team to tweak its policy language to expand what it could do with consumer data, such as its office tools like Google Docs. The new policy was reportedly intentionally released on July 1st to take advantage of the distraction of the Independence Day holiday weekend.

Meta likewise bumped against the limits of good training data availability, and in recordings the Times heard, its AI team discussed its unpermitted use of copyrighted works while working to catch up to OpenAI. The company, after going through ''almost available English-language book, essay, poem and news article on the internet,'' apparently considered taking steps like paying for book licenses or even buying a large publisher outright. It was also apparently limited in the ways it could use consumer data by privacy-focused changes it made in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Google, OpenAI, and the broader AI training world are wrestling with quickly-evaporating training data for their models, which get better the more data they absorb. The Journal wrote this week that companies may outpace new content by 2028.

Possible solutions to that problem mentioned by the Journal on Monday include training models on ''synthetic'' data created by their own models or so-called ''curriculum learning,'' which involves feeding models high-quality data in an ordered fashion in hopes that they can use make ''smarter connections between concepts'' using far less information, but neither approach is proven, yet. But the companies' other option is using whatever they can find, whether they have permission or not, and based on multiple lawsuits filed in the last year or so, that way is, let's say, more than a little fraught.

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Mon, 08 Apr 2024 14:05

The CPM model of advertising does not '-- and will not ever '-- work to sustain podcasting.

Back when I was working as Head of Content for Pushkin Industries, I never made it my business to truly understand how the CPM model works. I had my hands full with all the shows and people I was managing, and we had talented folks handling the marketing and sales. So I left that work to them.

I heard complaints about it, for sure: too many shows to sell at once, not enough revenue, bad partnerships, endless misunderstandings and frustrations. Back then I stayed out of the weeds. But now that I'm focused on a new vision for funding audio storytelling, I need to wrap my head around what, exactly, is wrong with the current model.

So I did a bit of research.

Let's begin with the basics: What even is a CPM? I found this straightforward definition in the Online Advertising Guide.

The M stands for ''Mille,'' or the Roman numeral for 1,000. And impressions essentially equals download numbers since most people only listen to a podcast once.

CPMs were first introduced in 1995 to set advertising rates for online banner ads. On a static website, it was a convenient and fair way to determine the value of an advertising campaign. And that became the norm for all digital advertising content.

In a podcast episode, there are basically three opportunities to advertise:

Before the show (pre-roll)In the middle of the show (mid-roll)After the show (post-roll) But these three methods are not created equal. Pre-roll and mid-roll spots are viewed as the most valuable, because who really listens all the way through the show credits, much less to the ads that follow? Also, there's a limit to how many ads you can run while still maintaining the integrity of the listening experience. Too many ads ruin the mood. The rule of thumb in my experience is one pre-roll, two mid-rolls, and one post-roll.

In the early podcasting days, advertisers quickly learned that host-read ads are the most effective. This is when the trusted narrator of the podcast shares their firsthand experience with the product or service they're advertising, trying to sound as genuine as possible. Serial's Mailchimp ad is the classic example of this.

There are all kinds of ethical concerns here. The whole idea of ''ad music'' came about when listeners got confused about the difference between show content and ad content. (Gimlet, at the time, wrote up this handy guide.)

Plus these ads '-- especially the engaging ones '-- can take a lot of time to write, record, and produce, taking valuable time away from show production and adding to overall production costs.

How are CPMs valued?According to Acast '-- one of the biggest podcast ad sales companies around '-- average CPM rates for podcasts range from $15 for a pre-recorded 60-second spot to $40 for a host-read ad.

Since CPM rates are based on impressions/download numbers, and new shows don't know how many downloads they'll get, CPM rates are generally based on estimates for how a show will perform. If a show does well, everybody wins. But if a show underperforms, the company who sold the ad has to offer what's called a make good '-- offering spots on other related shows to fill the void. Not a good situation for anyone.

Let's be generous and say a show runs four host-read ads at the $40 rate.

That's $160 for every 1,000 impressions.

In a previous essay I talked about fair rates for creators at various experience levels. Survey respondents determined that $60,000 is a fair yearly baseline salary for an entry-level producer. That means a show would need to have 375,000 downloads in a year to pay for that one producer's salary with CPM-based ad revenue.

I also argued that the yearly cost of a highly-produced, 10-part narrative show made by a top-notch team amounts to about $500,000.

A show like that would need over 3 million downloads in a year just to break even.

Of course, there are shows that get more downloads than that, typically ''always on'' shows. But according to the 2023 Podcast Marketing Trends Report, the majority of podcasts, even high-quality ones, get far less.

Per episode download distribution from the 2023 Podcast Marketing Trends ReportThere are other factors at playSome podcasts can secure higher CPM numbers by having longer host-read ads or high-profile talent. But those high-profile talents typically have some kind of revenue-share deal, so any extra dollars earned are likely not contributing to the bottom line, much less trickling down to the production team.

Some advertisers are interested in reaching niche audiences with particular subject matter and will pay a premium for that access. And some event-related pods or other timely shows will garner higher rates. Plus you can bundle a bunch of shows together and sell ads across a whole network or series of shows rather than sell them individually. That's how most of the existing networks do it, and it's the best way to guarantee the scale and reach most advertisers are looking for.

But that means each show/creator gets an even smaller slice of the pie. Plus podcast ads are easy to skip. Advertisers shy away from any podcast content that's controversial or overly sensitive. And many shows don't book any ads at all.

Here's another complicating factor: When Apple released its iOS 17 operating system at the end of 2023, download numbers dropped across the board. This was a carefully thought-out change on Apple's part to ensure more accurate download reporting. But there are other instances when creators of shows big and small see unexplainable changes to their download numbers. Outages, hacks, bots '-- no doubt there are countless ways to game the system. Guidelines put in place by the Interactive Advertising Bureau try to create some order in the download chaos.

But the bottom line is this: Any system that relies on download numbers to determine the value of a podcast is unreliable, unfair, and untenable.

The CPM model does not work for podcasts.

What about sponsorships?There's another way to secure advertising dollars for podcasts '-- sponsorships. That's when an advertiser supports a whole show or series of shows, associating their name or brand with the content in a broader sense. This is typically done through a promotional spot at the beginning or end of a show. And it's most commonly heard on public radio in the form of underwriting.

Public radio stations actually aren't allowed to use host-read ads. It's seen as a conflict of interest and unethical for reporters to speak on behalf of the products or services that are funding their show. So instead, the ads (or underwriting spots) are read by a neutral voice with a clear separation between the two.

Unlike CPMs, underwriting rates are flexible, and are based on the perceived value of the listening audience. So how do you figure that out?

In 1946, the first Nielsen mailable audimeter is presented to the radio industry.Public radio primarily uses Nielsen ratings to determine who is listening to what and for how long. The history of Nielsen is long and fascinating, and you can read about it here. But most important, for our purposes, is that their metrics are based on actual human behavior. Nielsen installs hardware in people's homes to track their viewing and listening. They ask people to record daily diaries chronicling their media habits. And since 1987, they've had ''People Meters'' (now wearable) to track listener behavior as accurately as possible.

Until recently, Nielsen wasn't able to track headphone listening. But they are constantly evolving, and actual human behavior remains at the center of the equation.

Salespeople take these Nielsen ratings along with a bunch of other metrics and go out into the marketplace to convince advertisers that their station's shows will reach listeners who will buy their brands. And they convince those brands to pay a premium to reach those audiences.

The rates are nuanced and specific, and, I would argue, a much better way to do pricing.

But from what I can tell, even the most well-funded radio stations have not been able to bundle their broadcast offerings with their podcast offerings when selling underwriting, leaving their podcasts reliant on that broken CPM model. And even with underwriting options, public radio stations are not immune to the chaos and mass layoffs of the past year.

So what now?Whether you're listening in a podcast app or on a terrestrial broadcast, high-quality content is essentially the same: a combination of reported narratives, interviews, and chat shows. Nearly all stations offer up their broadcast content through online streaming services or other apps, and more and more podcasts are making broadcast deals to distribute their content via terrestrial radio.

If we listen to the content in the same way, shouldn't we pay for it in the same way, too?

Shouldn't there be a way to combine the human-centered, nuanced approach of radio underwriting with the high-volume, purely quantitative model of CPMs?

Building off my idea of a cooperatively-run network, where creators can make a sustainable living and shows are monetized through a grassroots salesforce:

What if the network included ''podcast stations'' that operate like radio stations, but with more content and less overhead?What if we moved away from a CPM model and instead used human-generated metrics to determine the value of a podcast listening audience?What if the salespeople are true fans of the content they're selling, and maybe even read the ad spots themselves?And what if salespeople sold not just ads and underwriting spots, but memberships, too? Sales is sales, right? There's something for everyone.I've been kicking around these ideas with Kristen Hayford, a veteran marketing professional who's been testing some of these theories with The Kids Should See This. The membership-supported website offers curated educational content for kids, helping parents ''avoid 'the Wild West' of YouTube algorithms.'' I'll be watching her work closely.

For now, I'll leave you with this good news:

According to the IAB's 2023 US Podcast Advertising Revenue Study, podcast ad spending reached $1.8 billion dollars last year and is expected to grow to roughly $4 billion by 2025.Ad revenue for terrestrial radio is around $13 billion.And just for context, YouTube ad revenue topped $30 billion last year. There are a lot of ad dollars to go around. Let's figure out how to distribute them differently.

Mia Lobel is a veteran audio producer, manager and educator, and the founder of the long-standing community group, Freelance Cafe, a networking resource for public media independents, now in the form of a Substack. Building on her experience as the former Head of Content for Pushkin Industries, she now works as a mentor and consultant, helping individuals and companies build great teams, set up sustainable production processes and create impactful, entertaining and memorable content.

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Mon, 08 Apr 2024 12:32

Bitcoin BTC has defied its fiercest critics with a barnstorming price rally over the last few months (and could now be in for its biggest month ever).

Subscribe now to Forbes' CryptoAsset & Blockchain Advisor and "uncover blockchain blockbusters poised for 1,000% plus gains" ahead of bitcoin's looming halving earthquake!

The bitcoin price has topped $70,000 per bitcoin, up from lows of $15,000 at the end of 2022, with "leaks" this week sparking wild speculation of a Wall Street price game-changer.

Now, as the market braces for a huge Federal Reserve inflation flip, Fed president Neel Kashkari has issued an "incredible" response when asked, "when will the Fed put bitcoin on its balance sheet?"

Sign up now for the free CryptoCodex'--A daily five-minute newsletter for traders, investors and the crypto-curious that will get you up to date and keep you ahead of the bitcoin and crypto market bull run

MORE FROM FORBES Bitcoin ETF 'Leak' Sparks Wild Speculation Wall Street Is 'Racing' Toward A Huge Price Game-Changer By Billy Bambrough Federal Reserve president Neel Kashkari was asked when will the Fed put bitcoin on its balance sheet ... [+] amid the huge bitcoin price rally.

Getty Images"You already said on record that you have an unlimited supply of dollars, doesn't it make sense to trade some of them in for a currency with a hard cap," Jennifer Ablan, editor in chief of Pensions & Investments, asked Kashkari during a LinkedIn Live event on behalf of an audience member and referring to bitcoin's fixed supply of 21 million bitcoin.

"What is that hard cap," Kashkari, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, responded. "The hard cap could be zero for bitcoin, it could go down to zero. Just replace the word bitcoin with Beanie Babies. Should the Fed buy Beanie Babies, because Beanie Babies were a fad for a while?"

For bitcoin's "hard cap" of 21 million to be changed it would require a majority of bitcoin miners, who maintain the network in exchange for bitcoin, to vote for a change. This would "fork" the network, with the minority of miners continuing to maintain the bitcoin with a 21 million hard cap.

Kashkari said that like Beanie Babies, bitcoin has "no actual utility in the economy, other than being a nice toy that some people enjoy owning and trading," adding the only use for bitcoin is "trying to subvert banking regulations, get around either marijuana banking or illicit activities."

Bitcoin "has been around for more than a decade, and more than a decade later, there's still no legitimate use case in an advanced democracy," Kashkari said, warning, "there's a lot of fraud, hype and confusion so I am worried from a consumer perspective."

Kashkari's comments were described as "incredible" by Human Rights Foundation's chief strategy officer Alex Gladstein, who said the clip would be "studied by future historians."

"The last two words are interesting," Gladstein posted to X. "Does that mean he thinks there's a use case in a flawed democracy or a dictatorship? Maybe we are getting somewhere."

Bitcoin has found demand in countries suffering from hyper inflation in recent years, such as Turkey and Venezuela.

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MORE FROM FORBES 'A Very Big Deal'-Crypto Suddenly Braced For A Huge China ETF Earthquake After Bitcoin, Ethereum And XRP Price Boom By Billy Bambrough The bitcoin price has bounced back from its 2022 price crash, topping $70,000 per bitcoin.

Forbes Digital AssetsGladstein added that there are "dozens of legitimate use cases for bitcoin in an advanced democracy ranging from power grid management to sending money abroad to saving for your family's future to micro payments to multi-sig treasury management to turning waste energy into profit to reducing methane emissions to building a surveillance-resistant digital commerce experience to donating to charity."

Kashkari, who is among the more hawkish of the Federal Reserve's interest rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), went on to warn the Fed might not cut interest rates at all this year if inflation fails to fall further.

"If we continue to see inflation moving sideways, then that would make me question whether we [need] to do those rate cuts at all," Kashkari said.

The bitcoin price rally over the last few months has been partly put down to market expectations the Fed will soon have to cut rates from their post-2008 crisis high as the U.S. grapples with its spiraling debt pile.

Last month, Michael Novogratz, the chief executive of bitcoin and crypto financial services company Galaxy Digital, predicted the bitcoin price and wider crypto market will benefit from the gargantuan U.S. debt.

"There's one number I think that you should keep on your refrigerators, $34 trillion of debt, and in 100 days, it'll be $35 trillion, and in 200 days, it'll be $36 trillion, and until the United States, and other countries, get their finances in order, the story for bitcoin and other digital assets is going to continue to grow," Novogratz said during the company's recent earnings call. "The [bitcoin] story is powerful right now."

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Wed, 10 Apr 2024 20:30

The consumer price index accelerated at a faster-than-expected pace in March, pushing inflation higher and likely dashing hopes that the Federal Reserve will be able to cut interest rates anytime soon.

The CPI, a broad measure of goods and services costs across the economy, rose 0.4% for the month, putting the 12-month inflation rate at 3.5%, or 0.3 percentage point higher than in February, the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for a 0.3% gain and a 3.4% year-over-year level.

Excluding volatile food and energy components, the core CPI also accelerated 0.4% on a monthly basis while rising 3.8% from a year ago, compared with respective estimates for 0.3% and 3.7%.

Stocks slumped after the report while Treasury yields spiked higher.

Shelter and energy costs drove the increase on the all-items index.

Energy rose 1.1% after climbing 2.3% in February, while shelter costs, which make up about one-third of the weighting in the CPI, were higher by 0.4% on the month and up 5.7% from a year ago. Expectations for shelter-related costs to decelerate through the year have been central to the Fed's thesis that inflation will cool enough to allow for interest rate cuts.

Food prices increased just 0.1% on the month and were up 2.2% on a year-over-year basis. There were some big gains within the food category, however.

The measure for meat, fish, poultry and eggs climbed 0.9%, pushed by a 4.6% jump in egg prices. Butter fell 5% and cereal and bakery products declined by 0.9%. Food away from home increased 0.3%.

Elsewhere, used vehicle prices fell 1.1% and medical care services prices rose 0.6%.

Increasing inflation was also bad news for workers, as real average hourly earnings were flat on the month and increased just 0.6% over the past year, according to a separate BLS release.

The report comes with markets on edge and Fed officials expressing caution about the near-term direction for monetary policy. Central bank policymakers have repeatedly called for patience on cutting rates, saying they have not seen enough evidence that inflation is on a solid path back to their 2% annual goal. The March report likely confirmed worries that inflation is stickier than expected.

Markets had expected the Fed to start cutting interest rates in June with three reductions in total expected this year, but that shifted dramatically following the release. Traders in the fed funds futures market pushed expectations for the first cut out to September, according to CME Group calculations.

"There's not much you can point to that this is going to result in a shift away from the hawkish bent" from Fed officials, said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab. "June to me is definitively off the table."

The Fed also expects services inflation to ease through the year, but that has shown to be stubborn as well. Excluding energy, the services index increased 0.5% in March and was at a 5.4% annual rate, inconsistent with the Fed's target.

"This marks the third consecutive strong reading and means that the stalled disinflationary narrative can no longer be called a blip," said Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management. "In fact, even if inflation were to cool next month to a more comfortable reading, there is likely sufficient caution within the Fed now to mean that a July cut may also be a stretch, by which point the US election will begin to intrude with Fed decision making."

Later Wednesday, the Fed will release minutes from its March meeting, providing more insight into where officials stand on monetary policy.

Multiple Fed officials in recent days have expressed skepticism about lowering rates. Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic told CNBC that he expects just one cut this year, likely not coming until the fourth quarter. Governor Michelle Bowman said an increase may even be necessary if the data does not cooperate.

Don't miss these stories from CNBC PRO:

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NOW - 3:30 PM

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Wed, 10 Apr 2024 17:02

The Russian republic of Chechnya has taken the rare step of banning music it deems either too fast or too slow. Officials there have outlawed songs that don't conform to new rules which specify their beat per minute, which excludes most of Western pop. The move is meant as a way to preserve the region's culture, as Monte Francis explains.#Music #Chechnya #Culture

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Wed, 10 Apr 2024 16:50

STRASBOURG, France (AP) '-- Europe's highest human rights court ruled Tuesday that countries must better protect their people from the consequences of climate change , siding with a group of older Swiss women against their government in a landmark ruling that could have implications across the continent.

The European Court of Human Rights rejected two other, similar cases on procedural grounds '-- a high-profile one brought by Portuguese young people and another by a French mayor that sought to force governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But the Swiss case, nonetheless, sets a legal precedent in the Council of Europe's 46 member states against which future lawsuits will be judged.

''This is a turning point,'' said Corina Heri, an expert in climate change litigation at the University of Zurich.

Although activists have had success with lawsuits in domestic proceedings, this was the first time an international court ruled on climate change '-- and the first decision confirming that countries have an obligation to protect people from its effects, according to Heri.

She said it would open the door to more legal challenges in the countries that are members of the Council of Europe, which includes the 27 EU nations as well as many others from Britain to Turkey.

The Swiss ruling softened the blow for those who lost Tuesday.

''The most important thing is that the court has said in the Swiss women's case that governments must cut their emissions more to protect human rights,'' said 19-year-od Sofia Oliveira, one of the Portuguese plaintiffs. ''Their win is a win for us, too, and a win for everyone!''

People demonstrate outside the European Court of Human Rights Tuesday, April 9, 2024 in Strasbourg, eastern France. (AP Photo/Jean-Francois Badias)

The court '-- which is unrelated to the European Union '-- ruled that Switzerland ''had failed to comply with its duties'' to combat climate change and meet emissions targets.

That, the court said, was a violation of the women's rights, noting that the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees people ''effective protection by the state authorities from the serious adverse effects of climate change on their lives, health, well-being and quality of life.''

A group called Senior Women for Climate Protection, whose average age is 74, had argued that they were particularly affected because older women are most vulnerable to the extreme heat that is becoming more frequent .

''The court recognized our fundamental right to a healthy climate and to have our country do what it failed to do until now: that is to say taking ambitious measures to protect our health and protect the future of all,'' said Anne Mahrer, a member of the group.

Switzerland said it would study the decision to see what steps would be needed. ''We have to, in good faith, implement and execute the judgment,'' Alain Chablais, who represented the country at last year's hearings, told The Associated Press.

Judge Siofra O'Leary, the court's president, stressed that it would be up to governments to decide how to approach climate change obligations '-- and experts noted that was a limit of the ruling.

''The European Court of Human Rights stopped short of ordering the Swiss government to take any specific action, underscoring that relief from the Swiss government 'necessarily depends on democratic decision-making' to enact the laws necessary to impose such a remedy,'' said Richard Lazarus, a professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in environmental and natural resources law.

Activists have argued that many governments have not grasped the gravity of the climate change '-- and are increasingly looking to the courts to force them to do more to ensure global warming is held to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, in line with the goals of the Paris climate agreement .

A judge in Montana ruled last year that state agencies were violating the constitutional right to a clean environment by allowing fossil fuel development '-- a first-of-its- kind trial in the U.S. that added to a small number of similar legal decisions around the world.

Municipal workers clean a street that was flooded overnight in Alges, just outside Lisbon, on Dec. 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Armando Franca, File)

As part of trying to meet climate goals, the European Union, which doesn't include Switzerland, currently has a target to be climate-neutral by 2050 . Despite those efforts, the Earth shattered global annual heat records in 2023 and flirted with the world's agreed-upon warming threshold, Copernicus, a European climate agency, said in January.

Celebrity climate activist Greta Thunberg was in the courtroom as the decision was announced. ''These rulings are a call to action. They underscore the importance of taking our national governments to court,'' the 21-year-old Swede told the AP.

''The first ruling by an international human rights court on the inadequacy of states' climate action leaves no doubt,'' said Joie Chowdhury, senior attorney with the Center for International Environmental Law, ''the climate crisis is a human rights crisis.''

___Casert reported from Brussels.

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Sound InvestigationsCIA Officer/Former FBI Boasts ''Can Put Anyone in Jail'...Set 'Em Up!'' ''We Call It a Nudge''

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''I hope they all ban us''December 14, 2023''They [Aylo] need to push stuff that's less accepted''December 6, 2023Customer support: ''We won't ask you'... if you have the consent,'' ''won't call the cops''November 29, 2023''We've had people come in and be like, 'Yeah, take that down. That's me.'''November 1, 2023''It's Pedophilic Men Who Like Seeing Young Boys [in Ads]''October 19, 2023''Nobody gave a sh*t''September 20, 2023''I wouldn't be able to defend this in court''September 13, 2023

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