On Tuesday, an arsonist reportedly hit the offices of the Internet Research Agency, the Putin-tied Russian troll factory that has been charged by Robert Mueller with meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
According to the Moscow Times and video posted by the troll farm, "an unknown suspect" broke into the first floor of the Russian intelligence operation "and threw a Molotov cocktail inside" at around 3 a.m. on Tuesday.
One of the media sites run by the trolls, Federal News Agency, posted surveillance footage of the incident.
“I believe this is tied to FAN’s activities,” operative Yevgeny Zubarev said. “We’re most often attacked online, but these types of attacks have already taken place offline.”
American authorities say the firm is directed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, Putin’s “cook.” He has been indicted on charges of defrauding the U.S. government by interfering with its political process.
In the memory of many Americans, the only comparable scandal was in Massachusetts, where, in 2002, the Boston Globe published more than 600 articles about abuses under the administration of Cardinal Bernard Law. That investigation was immortalized in the 2015 award-winning film, “Spotlight.”
What many Americans don’t remember, however, are other similar scandals, some even more dramatic and national in scope.
Doubling down on secrecy
The Vatican has known about priestly pedophilia for many decades.
While the problem of priestly pedophilia might be centuries old, the modern paper trail began only after World War II, when “treatment centers” appeared for rehabilitating abusive priests. Instead of increased transparency, bishops, at the same time, developed methods for denying and hiding allegations of child sexual abuse.
During the 1950s and 1960s, bishops from around the U.S. began referring abusive priests to church-run medical centers, so that they could receive evaluation and care without disclosing their crimes to independent clinicians.
Fr. Gerald Fitzgerald, who began his ministry in Boston and Quebec, was among those who advocated prayer over medicine. In 1947, Fitzgerald moved to New Mexico and founded the Servants of the Paraclete, a new order of Catholic priests devoted to healing deviant clergy. His belief in faith healing reflected a vocal minority of Catholic leaders who still viewed psychology as a threat to Christian faith.
Fitzgerald based the Paracletes in New Mexico. From 1947 to 1995, the state became a dumping ground for pedophile priests. As Kathleen Holscher, chair of Roman Catholic studies at the University of New Mexico, has observed, this practice forced New Mexico’s parishes to absorb, in effect, abusive priests from across the country.
Other priests sent to the Paracletes were returned back into ministry in their home diocese, reassigned to new parishes that had no way of knowing about their abusive past.
This system was sustained, in part, by the fact that few diocesan personnel files recorded past accusations by children and parents. As Richard Sipe, a psychologist who worked at a similar Catholic treatment center later revealed, bishops generally masked past accusations by instead recording code words like “tickling,” “wrestling” or “entangled friendship” in personnel files.
By 1956, Fitzgerald became convinced that pedophilia could not be treated, even as he continued to believe that prayers could cure other illnesses, such as alcoholism. He petitioned U.S. bishops to stop sending him their child abusers, advocating instead for firing abusive priests and permanently removing them from ministry.
Fitzgerald eventually appealed directly to the Vatican, and met with Pope Paul VI to discuss the problem in 1963.
These included Fr. Thomas Doyle, a nonparish priest who specialized in Roman Catholicism’s internal laws; Fr. Michael Petersen, a trained psychiatrist who believed that priests with abusive disorders should be treated medically; and Roy Mouton, a civil attorney who represented one of the church’s most notorious pedophile priests.
Together, they authored a 92-page report and submitted it for presentation at the 1985 meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Church’s apparatus for controlling and governing American priests.
The document estimated that American bishops should plan to be sued for at least US$1 billion, and up to $10 billion, over the following decades.
In response, Doyle mailed all 92 pages, along with an executive summary, to every diocese in the United States. Yet there is no evidence that any bishops headed the report’s warnings.
1992: The nation’s first scandal
During the 1980s, victims began to speak out against the church’s systemic attempts to mask the scope of the crisis. In 1984, survivors of Fr. Gilbert Gauthe refused to be silenced by hush money, instead choosing the painful path of initiating public lawsuits in Louisiana. Gauthe ultimately confessed to abusing 37 children.
Representative of SNAP, Survivors’ Network for Those Abused by Priests, talk to the media during a press conference in Rome, in 2010.
As these stories became public, more and more victims began to bring lawsuits against the Church. In Chicago, the nation’s first two clergy abuse survivor organizations, Victims of Clergy Sexual Abuse Linkup (LINKUP) and the Survivors’ Network for Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), were created in 1987.
In 1992, survivor Frank Fitzpatrick’s public allegations led to revelations that Fr. James Porter had abused more than 100 other children in Massachusetts. Widespread shock followed at the time as well as after Fitzpatrick’s appearance on ABC’s “Primetime Live,” when news anchor Diane Sawyer interviewed Fitzpatrick and 30 other Porter victims.
In spite of internal pledges to reform their culture of covering up abuses, the Pennsylvania grand jury report demonstrates that the Church’s de facto policy remains unchanged since the 1950s: Instead of reporting rape and sexual abuse to secular authorities, bishops instead continue to transfer predatory priests from one unsuspecting parish to the next.
Victims with no hope of justice
The issue of clergy sex abuse has also unleashed broader questions about justice and faith: Can courtrooms repair souls? How do survivors continue to pray and attend Mass?
As a scholar who studies communities of clergy abuse victims, I have asked Catholics to share their thoughts about the current crisis. Many of them tell me that “at least” Boston’s Cardinal Law “went to jail.” That leads to an awkward moment when I have to refresh their memory.
Cardinal Law was neither indicted nor arrested. Instead, Pope John Paul II transferred Law to run one of the Vatican’s most cherished properties, the Basilica of Saint Mary, essentially rewarding Law for his deft cover-up of the abuses in Boston.
Victims of clergy sexual abuse or their family members react after the release of the report by Pennsylvania grand jury.
In fact, no American bishops or cardinals have ever been jailed for their role in covering up and enabling child sexual abuse. Civil settlements have held the Church accountable only financially. A combination of political complacency and expired statutes of limitations has prevented most survivors from obtaining real justice.
Outraged by this lack of justice, survivors urged the International Criminal Court at The Hague to investigate the Vatican for crimes against humanity. The International Criminal Court declined, citing the fact that many of the alleged crimes occurred before the court was formed, and were thus beyond the scope of the court’s “temporal jurisdiction.”
To date, the highest-ranking priest tried in an American court is Philadelphia’s Monsignor William Lynn, who was charged with conspiracy and two counts of endangering children. His 2012 conviction for one count of endangerment was vacated by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 2016. He now awaits an unscheduled retrial.
“There have been other reports about child sexual abuse within the Catholic church… For many of us, those earlier stories happened someplace else, someplace away. Now we know the truth: it happened everywhere.”
France's most famous Nazi hunters, Serge Klarsfeld and his German wife Beate, received top honours in a ceremony led by French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday.
Serge Klarsfeld, 83, received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, France's highest award, while the 79-year-old Beate Klarsfeld received the National Order of Merit, having already been decorated with the Legion of Honour in 2014, with the rank of Grand Officer.
The Chief Rabbi of France Haim Korsia was among those who attended the ceremony at the Elysee Palace limited to family and close friends and associates.
Born September 17, 1935, in the Romanian capital Bucharest, Serge Klarsfeld escaped the Holocaust after his family moved to France but saw his father taken away to die in the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp.
He was naturalised in 1950, and 10 years later, while studying at the prestigious Science-Po university in Paris, Klarsfled met Beate Kuenzel, the daughter of a former German soldier, on a metro platform.
The two, who married three years later, decided to bring fugitive Nazis to justice, a mission they pursued for more than half a century.
In one of their most high-profile cases, the Klarsfelds found the notorious Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, a former Gestapo officer known as the "Butcher of Lyon" for his wartime torture of prisoners, who had escaped to South America.
In 1971, the Klarsfelds revealed that Barbie was living in Bolivia, and in 1983 he was extradited to France. Four years later he was convicted in a trial, and later died behind bars.
They also pursued members of France's collaborationist Vichy regime, including Rene Bouquet, Jean Leguay and Marice Papon -- despite obstruction from president Francois Mitterrand.
Mitterrand's successor Jacques Chirac finally recognised France's role in the deportations, a declaration Serge Klarsfeld said owed much to his and Beate's campaigning.
"Neither could have succeeded without the other," their daughter Lida once said.
After a tense, violent and polarized campaign, Brazilians have voted to advance two candidates from opposite sides of the ideological spectrum to a presidential runoff on Oct. 28.
Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right congressman who enjoys strong evangelical backing for his law-and-order stance on policing, support for gun rights and opposition to abortion, won 46 percent of the valid votes.
Fernando Haddad, a leftist candidate of the Brazilian Workers Party and former mayor of São Paulo, came in second place with 29 percent, his portion of the vote split with the other left-of-center presidential candidates, Ciro Gomes and Marina Silva.
Nine other presidential candidates shared the remaining 12 percent of the vote.
Congress will remain highly fragmented, with no political party controlling a majority of seats. But maintaining a pattern seen in previous elections, conservative caucuses – which represent the evangelical, agribusiness and crime-fighting interests – have increased their influence.
Despite electing right-of-center candidates to Congress, Sunday’s vote also show the loss of support for traditional parliamentarians. Several influential Brazilian politicians were not reelected. The results for state governors’ races paint a more complex picture. Left-wing candidates won in the first round in seven of Brazil’s 27 states, showing progressive parties’ continues popularity at the state level.
Disinterested voters
The stakes of this year’s election are extremely high.
Hundreds of politicians, including former President Lula, have been arrested and jailed in a judicial investigation that has exposed corruption at the highest level of government.
Now, as the country prepares for its presidential runoff, public trust in Brazil’s politicians and political institutions has never been lower.
Hundreds of thousands of women across Brazil marched against presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who is known for his disparaging remarks about women, on Sept. 29.
Other public opinion polling has put faith in Brazil’s government closer to zero.
The 2018 campaign did little to reassure the electorate.
Bolsonaro, who trailed the popular former President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva by a wide margin throughout the campaign, saw a boost in the polls after he was stabbed at a campaign rally on Sept. 6. His attacker appears to suffer from mental health problems, but the attacker’s Facebook posts also showed outrage at both Bolsonaro and Brazil’s political system in general.
The election was thrown into further disarray a few days later when front-runner Lula – who was jailed on corruption charges in July – was forced to withdraw from the presidential bid after an electoral commission ruled he could not stand for office.
With less than a month to go before election day, the Workers Party chose Fernando Haddad, education minister under Lula, to replace Lula on the ticket.
Lula had been in first place with 37 percent of voter support, but his forced withdrawal put Bolsonaro into the lead.
The fact is that Brazilians, who are required by law to vote, will return to the polls on Oct. 28 with very little expectation either Bolsonaro or Haddad will do much to improve their lives – despite the country’s instability and troubles. Both candidates in the latest polls had more than 40 percent rejection rates.
Such situations tend to favor what I call the “politics of disillusionment.”
When voters don’t believe in their politicians or government institutions, candidates who tap into voter disdain for the political system can find success. In my opinion, this phenomenon helped lead right-wing outsiders to triumph in the United States, Italy and Hungary.
Over the last eight months, the politics of disillusionment have driven Brazil’s presidential race.
The two front-runners – Bolsonaro and Lula – may sit on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but they both espoused an openly anti-establishment agenda throughout the campaign.
Even from jail, former President Lula has loomed large over Brazil’s election.
Rather than make concrete proposals for pulling Brazil out of the crisis that grips it, Lula – who left office in 2010 with 80 percent approval – spent much his campaign attacking the country’s political institutions.
He depicted Brazil’s judiciary as a corrupt institution in the thrall of powerful right-wing politicians who use Congress to persecute their enemies.
“I am an innocent,” he said. “These judges are trying to prevent an innocent man from once again running a government that’s good for Brazil.”
Racism, misogyny and anger
Bolsonaro’s rightist critique of Brazilian society is far more scathing.
To capitalize on Brazilian voters’ frustration with political corruption and extreme violence, the former army captain defends Brazil’s military dictatorship which ran the country from 1964 to 1985, saying that the only problem with the authoritarian leaders was that they “tortured rather than killed” dissenters.
He also regularly uses homophobic, misogynistic and racist rhetoric to stigmatize, sideline or criminalize large swaths of Brazilian society. Critics point to Bolsonaro’s often violent messages as one explanation for the Sept. 6 knife attack against him.
When asked why he wants to roll back affirmative action at Brazilian public universities, Bolsonaro replied with a question: “Why don’t they [minorities] just study?”
He has also said that he would “never allow” his children to get romantically involved with a black person. He told a fellow congressional representative that she “did not deserve to be raped” by him because she was “terrible and ugly.”
To tackle Brazil’s record-high violence, Bolsonaro says he would ease gun laws and reduce the age of criminal responsibility from 18 to 16. He is a staunch proponent of reactivating the death penalty in Brazil, saying that he would “volunteer to kill those on death row” himself.
The outcome of Brazil’s first-round presidential election reveals a deeply polarized, angry and alienated electorate.
In such a political climate, my experience shows that the most radical candidate – in this case Bolsonaro – is likely to triumph.
Haddad has softened the kind of anti-establishment discourse Lula used, hoping to attract moderate voters, and he may well have more concrete proposals for reforming and improving a democracy that’s frayed at the edges.
But in the politics of disillusionment, that will give him no advantage.
It may be hard to fathom, but the human body is occupied by large collections of microorganisms, commonly referred to as our microbiome, that have evolved with us since the early days of man. Scientists have only recently begun to quantify the microbiome, and discovered it is inhabited by at least 38 trillion bacteria. More intriguing, perhaps, is that bacteria are not the most abundant microbes that live in and on our bodies. That award goes to viruses.
Transmission electron micrograph of multiple bacteriophages attached to a bacterial cell wall.
It has been estimated that there are over 380 trillion viruses inhabiting us, a community collectively known as the human virome. But these viruses are not the dangerous ones you commonly hear about, like those that cause the flu or the common cold, or more sinister infections like Ebola or dengue. Many of these viruses infect the bacteria that live inside you and are known as bacteriophages, or phages for short. The human body is a breeding ground for phages, and despite their abundance, we have very little insight into what all they or any of the other viruses in the body are doing.
I am a physician-scientist studying the human microbiome by focusing on viruses, because I believe that harnessing the power of bacteria’s ultimate natural predators will teach us how to prevent and combat bacterial infections. One might rightly assume that if viruses are the most abundant microbes in the body, they would be the target of the majority of human microbiome studies. But that assumption would be horribly wrong. The study of the human virome lags so far behind the study of bacteria that we are only just now uncovering some of their most basic features. This lag is due to it having taken scientists much longer to recognize the presence of a human virome, and a lack of standardized and sophisticated tools to decipher what’s actually in your virome.
The 411 on the virome
Here’s a few of the things we have learned thus far. Bacteria in the human body are not in love with their many phages that live in and around them. In fact they developed CRISPR-Cas systems – which humans have now co-opted for editing genes – to rid themselves of phages or to prevent phage infections altogether. Why? Because phages kill bacteria. They take over the bacteria’s machinery and force them to make more phages rather than make more bacteria. When they are done, they burst out of the bacterium, destroying it. Finally, phages sit on our body surfaces just waiting to cross paths with vulnerable bacteria. They are basically bacteria stalkers.
A virus called a bacteriophage infects bacteria and inserts its genetic material into the cell. The bacterium ‘reads’ the genetic instructions and manufactures more viruses which destroy the bacterium when they exit the cell.
It’s clear that there’s a war being fought on our body surfaces every minute of every day, and we haven’t a clue who’s winning or what the consequences of this war might be.
Viruses may inhabit all surfaces both inside and outside of the body. Everywhere researchers have looked in the human body, viruses have been found. Viruses in the blood? Check. Viruses on the skin? Check. Viruses in the lungs? Check. Viruses in the urine? Check. And so on. To put it simply, when it comes to where viruses live in the human body, figuring out where they don’t live is a far better question than asking where they do.
Viruses are contagious. But we often don’t think about bacterial viruses as being easily shared. Researchers have shown that just living with someone will lead to rapid sharing of the viruses in your body. If we don’t know what the consequences are of the constant battle between bacteria and viruses in our body, then it gets exponentially more complicated considering the battle between your bacteria and their viruses that are then shared with everyone including your spouse, your roommate, and even your dog.
Viruses keeping us healthy?
Viruses destroy the bacterium when they burst out of the cell. Here, the clear circles reveal where the bacteriophage have killed the bacteria.
Ultimately, we need to know what all these viruses in the human body are doing, and figure out whether we can take advantage of our virome to promote our health. But it’s probably not clear at this point why anyone would believe that our virome may be helpful.
It may seem counterintuitive, but harming our bacteria can be harmful to our health. For example, when our healthy bacterial communities are disturbed by antibiotic use, other microbial bad guys, also called pathogens, take advantage of the opportunity to invade our body and make us sick. Thus, in a number of human conditions, our healthy bacteria play important roles in preventing pathogen intrusion. Here’s where viruses come in. They’ve already figured out how to kill bacteria. It’s all they live for.
So the race is on to find those viruses in our viromes that have already figured out how to protect us from the bad guys, while leaving the good bacteria intact. Indeed, there are recent anecdotal examples utilizing phages successfully to treat life-threatening infections from bacteria resistant to most if not all available antibiotics – a treatment known as phage therapy. Unfortunately, these treatments are and will continue to be hampered by inadequate information on how phages behave in the human body and the unforeseen consequences their introduction may have on the human host. Thus, phage therapy remains heavily regulated. At the current pace of research, it may be many years before phages are used routinely as anti-infective treatments. But make no mistake about it; the viruses that have evolved with us for so many years are not only part of our past, but will play a significant role in the future of human health.
Florida’s governor mobilized National Guard troops and thousands of Gulf Coast residents were ordered evacuated on Monday, two days before Hurricane Michael was forecast to slam ashore with life-threatening waves, winds and rains.
Michael was packing sustained winds of up to 85 miles per hour (140 kph) and gaining strength as it skirted past Cuba’s western tip en route to a likely Wednesday landfall as the most powerful storm to strike the Florida Panhandle in at least a decade.
Currently ranked as a Category 1 storm on the five-step Saffir-Simpson wind scale, Michael could grow into a Category 3, becoming the second major hurricane in the Atlantic basin this year following Florence last month, forecasters said.
The storm is expected to unleash coastal storm surges of up to 12 feet (3.7 meters) along Florida’s Panhandle and dump as much as a foot (30 cm) of rain across Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) reported.
The NHC warned that both could trigger deadly flooding, and that residents within the hurricane warning zone should likewise “prepare for life-threatening winds.”
Florida Governor Rick Scott declared a state of emergency in 35 counties along Florida’s Panhandle and Big Bend regions. Mandatory evacuations were under way in coastal areas, with 1,250 National Guard soldiers aiding the process and more than 4,000 troops placed on standby, Scott tweeted.
“The FL panhandle needs to be prepared for a direct hit with sustained hurricane force winds,” Scott wrote on Twitter on Monday.
In Gulf County alone, the first to begin ordering residents of low-lying areas to higher ground, mandatory evacuation notices encompassed an estimated 3,800 homes, said Jessica Sasich of the county’s emergency operations center.
Many are located in the coastal town of Port St. Joe, the county’s largest municipality, lying directly in the hurricane’s projected path, she said.
In neighboring Alabama, Governor Kay Ivey declared an emergency for the entire state on Monday in anticipation of wind damage, heavy rains and power outages.
MICHAEL KILLS 13 IN CENTRAL AMERICA
As the storm moved north it battered Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and western Cuba with drenching rains and winds of up to 80 mph (130 kph), the Miami-based hurricane center said.
Torrential downpours and flash-flooding over the weekend caused 13 deaths in Central America after Michael formed off the coast of northern Honduras.
In Florida, state offices, schools and universities were set to close on Tuesday through the end of the week in panhandle counties. Some beach town residents were left to decide on their own for the time being whether to leave their homes.
“I haven’t made up my mind yet, but I know some of my staff are going,” said Dave Trepanier, owner of Firefly, a restaurant a block from the beach in Panama City, Bay County, an area where the hurricane is expected to come ashore.
Lines at gasoline stations were growing long in Panama City as people prepared to leave areas under mandatory evacuation, Trepanier said.
Hurricane Michael would be the first major hurricane to hit the panhandle since Hurricane Dennis in 2005, which made landfall near Pensacola, according to hurricane center data.
After striking Florida, Michael is forecast to move up the East Coast on Wednesday and Thursday plowing through the Carolinas, still recovering from Hurricane Florence last month.
Energy companies halted nearly a fifth of Gulf of Mexico oil production and evacuated personnel from 10 platforms on Monday.
The Gulf of Mexico is home to 17 percent of daily U.S. crude oil output and 5 percent of daily natural gas output, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Reporting by Gina Cherelus in New York; Additional reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta, Jon Herskovitz in Austin, Texas, Steve Gorman in Los Angeles, Nelson Renteria in San Salvador, Ismael Lopez in Managua, Gustavo Palencia in Tegucigalpa and Andrew Hay in New Mexico; Editing by Bill Tarrant, Cynthia Osterman and Sandra Maler
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has invited Pope Francis to visit Pyongyang in a gesture designed to highlight peace efforts on the Korean peninsula, South Korea’s presidential office said on Tuesday.
North Korea and the Vatican have no formal diplomatic relations. South Korean President Moon Jae-in will deliver Kim’s invitation when he meets Francis next week during a trip to Europe, Blue House spokesman Kim Eui-kyeom said.
“President Moon will visit the Vatican on Oct. 17 and 18 to reaffirm its blessing and support for peace and stability of the Korean peninsula,” the spokesman told a news briefing.
“Especially when he meets with Pope Francis, he will convey Chairman Kim’s message that he will ardently welcome him if he visits Pyongyang.”
Kim told Moon of his wish to meet the pope during last month’s summit of the two leaders, the spokesman added, without elaborating on the timing. The pope has said he wants to visit Japan next year.
The Vatican said in a statement that the pope will receive Moon at noon (1000 GMT) on Oct. 17.
The day before, in St. Peter’s Basilica, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state and the pope’s second-in-command, will say a “Mass for Peace” on the Korean peninsula. Moon will attend the Mass, the Vatican said.
North Korea’s constitution guarantees freedom of religion as long as it does not undermine the state, but beyond a handful of state-controlled places of worship, no open religious activity is allowed.
The invitation to the pope is the first by a North Korean leader since 2000. Although that meeting, proposed by Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, never materialized, the plan for Francis to visit is the North’s latest diplomatic initiative this year.
Kim held an unprecedented summit with U.S. President Donald Trump in Singapore in June, and pledged to work toward denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
While Kim’s actions since have fallen short of Washington’s demands, the Trump administration is preparing for a second summit.
Before they turned the page on decades of public acrimony, the leaders regularly traded threats and insults as North Korea pushed to develop a nuclear missile capable of hitting the United States.
The two Koreas held three summits this year, following years of confrontation marked by the North’s nuclear and missile tests.
Moon’s European tour, scheduled for Oct. 13 to 21, is primarily to attend the Asia–Europe Meeting in Belgium and includes stops in France, Italy and Denmark, his office said.
Additional reporting by Philip Pullella in Rome, Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Kevin Liffey
Americans William Nordhaus and Paul Romer, pioneers in adapting the western economic growth model to focus on environmental issues and sharing the benefits of technology, won the 2018 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday.
In a joint award that turned the spotlight on a rapidly shifting global debate over the impact of climate change, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the duo’s work was helping to answer basic questions over how to promote long-term, sustainable prosperity.
Romer, of New York University’s Stern School of Business, is best known for his work on endogenous growth, a theory rooted in investing in knowledge and human capital. He said he had been taken by surprise by the award, but offered a positive message.
“I think one of the problems with the current situation is that many people think that protecting (the) environment will be so costly and so hard that they just want to ignore them,” he told a news conference via telephone. “We can absolutely make substantial progress protecting the environment and do it without giving up the chance to sustain growth.”
He told reporters he had long ago decided he would never seek to win the prize because doing so can “tear you apart.” He initially missed the early morning call from Sweden telling him he won before calling back, when he was asked if would accept the prize.
“‘I didn’t ever want it, but, yeah, I’ll accept!’” he recalled replying at a separate news conference later at New York University.
Hours before the award, the United Nations panel on climate change said society would have to radically alter the way it consumes energy, travels and builds to avoid the worst effects of global warming. The panel declined to comment on Monday’s award.
U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly called climate change a hoax, and last year announced that he would withdraw the United States from a global pact to combat it reached in 2015, calling the deal’s demands for emissions cuts too costly.
Nordhaus, a professor of economics at Yale University, was the first person to create a quantitative model that described the interplay between the economy and the climate, the Swedish academy said.
“We overslept and when we got up, I got a nice call from my daughter,” Nordhaus told Reuters at his home in New Haven, Connecticut. “She said, ‘Dad, you won. It’s so nice.’ It was a really lovely call. It’s a nice way to find out.”
He said he was being honored for his work on carbon tax as a mechanism to reduce global warming. “It was for work on one of the most important problems the globe faces, which is climate change,” he said. “I’ve been working on that for almost 40 years, and the time’s ripe.”
BIG GLOBAL QUESTIONS
Nobel committee chair Per Stromberg told Reuters Monday’s award was honoring research into “two big global questions”: how to deal with the negative effects of growth on the climate and “to make sure that this economic growth leaves prosperity for everyone.”
Romer had shown how economic forces govern the willingness of firms to innovate, helping some societies grow many times faster than others. By understanding which market conditions favor the creation of profitable technologies, society can tailor policies to promote growth, the academy said.
Romer’s career has taken him outside the academic world. While on leave from the Stern School, he served as chief economist and senior vice president at the World Bank until early this year.
His work on endogenous growth theory is not universally admired.
Fellow Nobel economics Laureate Paul Krugman told the New York Times in 2013 that too much of it involved “making assumptions about how unmeasurable things affected other unmeasurable things.”
Monday’s award of the last of the 2018 Nobels took place less than a month after the 10th anniversary of the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers.
That triggered an economic crisis from which the world’s financial system is arguably still recovering.
Interest rates remain at or close to record lows in many major economies, including Sweden, where they have languished below zero since early 2015.
Worth 9 million Swedish crowns ($1 million), the economics prize was established in 1968. It was not part of the original group of five awards set out in Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel’s 1895 will.
The physiology/medicine, physics, chemistry and peace prizes were awarded last week.
This year’s proceedings have been overshadowed by the absence of the literature prize, postponed to give the Swedish Academy time to restore public trust after a sexual assault scandal.
Reporting by Simon Johnson, Niklas Pollard; Additional reporting by Daniel Dickson, Helena Soderpalm and Anna Ringstrom in Stockholm and Jonathan Allen and Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss in New York; editing by John Stonestreet and Nick Zieminski
Google will shut down the consumer version of its social network Google+ after announcing data from up to 500,000 users may have been exposed to external developers by a bug that was present for more than two years in its systems.
The company said in a blog on Monday it had discovered and patched the leak in March of this year and had no evidence of misuse of user data or that any developer was aware or had exploited the vulnerability.
Shares of its parent company Alphabet Inc, however, were down 1.5 percent at $1150.75 in response to what was the latest in a run of privacy issues to hit the United States’ big tech companies.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier that Google had opted not to disclose the issue with its Application Program Interfaces (API) partly due to fears of regulatory scrutiny, citing unnamed sources and internal documents.
Google said it had reviewed the issue, looking at the type of data involved, whether it could accurately identify the users to inform, whether there was any evidence of misuse, and whether there were any actions a developer or user could take.
“None of these thresholds were met in this instance,” it said. “We found no evidence that any developer was aware of this bug, or abusing the API, and we found no evidence that any Profile data was misused.”
Under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), if personal data is breached, a company needs to inform a supervisory authority within 72 hours, unless the breach is unlikely to result in a risk to the rights and freedom of users.
“It seems like the downside risk of having a story that says they intentionally hid information about a major breach from users is bigger than the upside of avoiding scrutiny,” said Geoffrey Parker, an engineering professor at Ivy League college Dartmouth.
“I wonder if there wasn’t more depth to the internal debate.”
REGULATORY INTEREST
Google said a software glitch in the social site gave outside developers potential access to private Google+ profile data between a major redesign in 2015 and March 2018, when internal investigators discovered and fixed the issue.
The affected data was limited to static, optional Google+ Profile fields including name, email address, occupation, gender and age.
The WSJ report said that a memo, prepared by Google’s legal and policy staff and shared with senior executives, warned that disclosing the incident would likely trigger “immediate regulatory interest” and invite comparisons to Facebook’s leak of user information to data firm Cambridge Analytica.
Allegations of the improper use of data for 87 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica, which was hired by President Trump’s 2016 U.S. election campaign, has hurt the shares of the world’s biggest social network and prompted multiple investigations in the United States and Europe.
Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai was briefed on the plan not to notify users after an internal committee had reached that decision, according to the WSJ.
Google came under criticism for refusing to send a top executive to a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Sept. 5 about efforts to counteract foreign influence in U.S. elections and political discourse.
“I think Google does have a public relationship issue and this now makes their lack of openness even worse,” Ivan Feinseth, an analyst at Tigress Financial Partners said.
Facebook’s chief operating officer and Twitter’s chief executive testified at the hearing, where an empty chair was pointedly left for Google after the committee rejected Google’s top lawyer as a witness.
Reporting by Arjun Panchadar and Munsif Vengattil in Bengaluru, Paresh Dave in San Francisco; Editing by Patrick Graham and Saumyadeb Chakrabarty
A top Senate ally of President Donald Trump warned Monday of a "devastating" impact on the US alliance with Saudi Arabia if allegations are confirmed that the kingdom killed a prominent journalist.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said Riyadh must provide "honest answers" after a Turkish government source said that the Saudis killed Washington Post opinion contributor Jamal Khashoggi when he visited the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul.
"We agree that if there was any truth to the allegations of wrongdoing by the Saudi government it would be devastating to the US-Saudi relationship and there will be a heavy price to be paid -- economically and otherwise," Graham tweeted.
"Our country's values should be and must be a cornerstone of our foreign policy with foes and allies alike," he said.
Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warned in a tweet against governments attacking journalists outside their countries.
"I have raised Jamal's disappearance personally with the Saudi ambassador, and while we await more information, know we will respond accordingly to any state that targets journalists abroad," he wrote.
Trump and his administration have not commented on the fate of Khashoggi, whom Saudi Arabia insists left the Saudi consulate.
Graham has a close relationship with Trump, especially on defense policy.
A military hawk, Graham has enthusiastically supported Trump's policy of working with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states to contain the influence of Iran.
The Hubble space telescope, which has been in orbit since 1990, is currently out of action because of a gyroscope failure, the US space agency said Monday.
"Mission experts are taking steps to return Hubble to great science," the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said in a tweet.
It said Hubble went into "safe mode" on Friday because of the failure of another of the six gyroscopes used to orient the telescope.
Hubble is currently down to two working gyroscopes and needs at least three for optimal operations but it can continue to provide observations with just one functioning gyroscope.
Dr. Rachel Osten, the deputy head of the Hubble mission, said it had been a "very stressful weekend."
"First step is to try to bring back the last gyro, which had been off, and is being problematic," Osten said on Twitter
ESA/AFP/File / A. Simon, J. DePasquale This handout photo from the European Space Agency shows observations of the planets Mars and Saturn made with the Hubble Space Telescope
"We knew it was coming," Osten added. "The gyro lasted about six months longer than we thought it would (almost pulled the plug on it back in the spring).
"We'll work through the issues and be back," she promised.
Hubble has made numerous outstanding observations of the cosmos since it was deployed in 1990.
The James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble, is scheduled to be launched in March 2021.
Conservatives in the United States helped spread a fake video against "manspreading" that resulted in a misogynistic backlash against women.
The video purportedly shows a feminist woman pouring a mix of water and bleach on the crotches of multiple men riding on a subway, who were "manspreading" by widening their legs into the area in front of adjacent seats.
The website EU vs Disinforeported on Monday that the video features paid actors. The report originated with the Russian language online magazine Bumaga, which interviewed one of the men seen in the video.
Conservatives in the United States spread the video, including The Blaze (founded by conservative radio personality Glenn Beck), The Daily Wire (founded by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro) and the website Chicks on Right.
The website investigated why Russia Today, the Kremlin's English-language propaganda website, was pushing the video to international audiences.
"The key to a possible answer is found in the reactions the video has been able to spur," EU vs Disinfo explained. "In the comments section on Facebook, users express outrage against the alleged feminist activist, often in strongly misogynic language, with this comment as the most popular, gathering by now more than 14,000 likes:"
[caption id="attachment_1367017" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Top comment on the Facebook post of "Russia Today" video on manspreading.[/caption]
"In other words, the video stages extreme feminist activism and manages to provoke extreme anti-feminist reactions," EU vs Disinfo noted.
They noted this video features a "central element in the modus operandi of the famous 'troll factory' in St. Petersburg" that was used to sow divisions in the United States during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating whether President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign conspired with Russia to win the election.
The second Russian who Britain says was responsible for the poisoning of former double-agent Sergei Skripal was a military doctor for Russia’s GRU military intelligence unit, investigative website Bellingcat said on Monday.
Bellingcat said the real name of the man previously known as Alexander Petrov was Alexander Yevgenyevich Mishkin.
“Bellingcat’s identification process included multiple open sources, testimony from people familiar with the person, as well as copies of personally identifying documents, including a scanned copy of his passport,” the website said.
Reporting by David Milliken; Editing by Richard Balmforth
ESA/AFP/File / A. Simon, J. DePasquale 
Top comment on the Facebook post of "Russia Today" video on manspreading.[/caption]
