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Two recent incidents of authors changing their writing in response to triggered fans is misguided virtue signaling that "puts all storytellers in professional jeopardy," writes THR's columnist.
merica’s storytelling took a massive kick to the head this June — and hardly anyone knows about it or about the DIY censorship tsunami it may have started that could seriously damage creative work in the future. When bestselling romance author Elin Hilderbrand (The Golden Girl) was attacked for what some online readers considered a disrespectful and passively anti-Semitic reference to Anne Frank by one of her teenage characters, she had the publisher remove the passage and apologized. A couple weeks later she announced she would retire from writing novels. The same month, Casey McQuiston (Red, White & Royal Blue) received criticism that her character’s mentioning Israel was normalizing the occupation of Palestine. McQuiston quickly promised that future editions of her novel will omit the line.
These two incidents have established a horrific precedent for writers and artists on two fronts: First, writers now must be careful about how their characters talk — even though they are fictional and the authors may be deliberately having them say less-than-admirable things. Second, in both cases it wasn’t experienced critics who offered the criticism, but people on social media whose opinions are based on personal bias and triggers, not the literary necessities of the works. If this knee-jerk pandering and self-censorship becomes widespread, it’s only a matter of time before all forms of fiction, including TV and movies, will be reacting, retooling and regurgitating to the whims of social media rather than the needs of their characters or story.
In Hilderbrand’s novel, two teenage girls discuss having one of them hide in her friend’s attic for the summer. One of the girls jokes, “like Anne Frank.” That is exactly the kind of dismissive, irreverent joke a teen might make which makes her character more believable. It is a typical coping mechanism that allows youth to disassociate themselves from the horrors of the past. One of the most brilliant uses of Anne Frank’s story is in the pilot episode of My So-Called Life. High-schooler Angela is reading the book for her English class. In class, the teacher asks her bored students, “How would you describe Anne Frank?” Unwittingly, Angela says aloud, “Lucky.” To which the outraged teacher explodes: “Is that supposed to be funny, Angela? How on earth could you make a statement like that? Hmm? Anne Frank perished in a concentration camp. Anne Frank is a tragic figure. How could Anne Frank be lucky?” Embarrassed by all the shocked stares of her disapproving classmates, Angela quietly replies, “I don’t know. Cause she was trapped in an attic for three years with this guy she really liked?” Ironically, the scene reveals that Angela is the only one in the class, including the teacher, who actually takes Frank’s book to heart. Angela is able to look beyond the stereotypical Tragic Figure she’s supposed to see and relate to her as a peer, as a teenage girl who feels helpless and controlled by others. Angela mentions the book again at the end of the episode and we can see how Angela has grown, in part because she’s able to see how the book applies to her own life, which is the point of literature. However, if some on social media have their way, that touching and insightful scene might be eliminated because someone who didn’t understand the point of using the book would have been offended. Like the clueless teacher.
Casey McQuiston’s character merely mentioned Israel, which a few readers found offensive. The list of things people find offensive or triggering would eliminate every work of literature from the Bible to The Catcher in the Rye to To Kill a Mockingbird to The Bluest Eye. These works are filled with rape, murder, child abuse, racism, incest, misogyny and homophobia. A Clockwork Orange is one of the best movies ever made and it features a protagonist who is a rapist and murderer. No, we don’t admire him, nor are we encouraged to emulate him. Instead, we are meant to see him as the result of a society that is even worse than him.
I don’t blame those on social media who expressed their personal concerns. Doing so is part of a vigorous and necessary debate about the topics they raise. I appreciate their candor and vulnerability. The villains of this piece are the authors who capitulated so quickly to those on social media whose personal feelings may be understandable, but do not justify changing the words. It’s one thing to have a protagonist who we are supposed to admire spouting racist, misogynistic or other hateful opinions that the book clearly endorses. Readers may justifiably raise an outraged ruckus and advocate boycotting the author. But that is not the case here. A handful of readers had a negative response and the authors, in misguided virtue signaling, quickly folded. In doing so, they put all storytellers in professional jeopardy.
A culture’s stories often celebrate the virtues it wishes its members to uphold: love, compassion, kindness, honesty. But our stories are also our way of understanding, explaining and coping with the varieties of life experiences, including the dark and tragic ones. We learn how to see ourselves more clearly through the prism of fiction. That special insight gives us the opportunity to change our behavior, to grow, to become better people and a better society. Fiction paves the path to Truth and that path must be protected by all of us.
A patient hospitalized with COVID-19. (photo: Belga)
ummer is only halfway done, but the carefree Covid season is over.
Case numbers and hospitalizations are up. Vaccinations are down and the US government has labeled vaccine misinformation a "serious threat to public health."
"This is not a problem we can take years to solve," US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told Jake Tapper after releasing a 22-page health advisory.
The White House blames Facebook, in part, and White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the platform must move faster to take down misinformation, before people see it and not after it's been posted for days.
This is the strange and deadly new Covid conundrum:
- The vaccine saves lives and we have it. Public health professionals are crying out that every single new US Covid death is preventable by a vaccine the country has in abundance.
- Some don't trust it. Much of the US in numerous groups can't be convinced to take the vaccine despite the experience of the past year and a half.
- Freedom to infect. Some Republican lawmakers and governors seem to be actively trying to push Americans away from the vaccine the health community insists will save lives.
Convincing the unconvinced. I watched a very sad interview Friday on CNN in which sisters from Arkansas who lost their unvaccinated mother to Covid explained that she just didn't think the disease would come to her.
"I tried being very factual with her about what we know about Covid and that you could get it from somebody that isn't even showing symptoms yet," Rachel Maginn Rosser told CNN's Kate Bolduan. "And I don't really, I don't know if her opinion really changed. She was -- she was stubborn and so she made up her mind that she wasn't going to do it, and so she wasn't going to do it."
Breakthrough cases. The vaccine does not entirely stop transmission. There are more and more stories of vaccinated people contracting Covid. But they are not dying or, for the most part, being hospitalized.
Three Texas state House Democrats who are fully vaccinated have tested positive, the Texas House Democratic Caucus said Saturday. They were part of a group of state House Democrats who flew from Austin to Washington, DC, this week to break the state House's quorum and block Republicans from passing a restrictive new voting law.
The New York Yankees, for the second time this season, had so-called "breakthrough" cases of Covid in vaccinated players, which postponed Thursday's planned game against the Red Sox.
The NFL Network anchor Rich Eisen posted about his breakthrough Covid and encouraged people to get vaccinated even though they might still get the disease.
"Every health care professional I've come across in the last few days tells me the two shots of Pfizer I got in February are what's keeping a 52-year-old like me from a far worse experience than the awful one I'm having," he posted on Instagram from quarantine.
Not hesitancy. Hostility. The anti-vaccine rhetoric pushed on Fox News and spread on social media sites like Facebook sounds absurd when it is carved into soundbites -- listen here -- but it is helping to turn vaccine hesitancy into outright hostility. Conservatives at CPAC last weekend cheered the idea of low vaccination numbers.
Cases were down. Now they're up. Cases are rising, to varying degrees, in all 50 states, an abrupt switch from just weeks ago.
The US seven-day average of new cases hit a low the week of June 20, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In less than a month, that figure has more than doubled, to 26,306 daily new cases.
Vaccinations have stalled. The pace of new full vaccinations -- about 302,000 per day -- is less than a quarter of the high mark of 1.3 million vaccinations a day during the spring, according to CDC data.
Just under half the US population -- 48.4%, or about 160 million people -- is fully vaccinated. A higher rate -- 56.6% -- of the population eligible for the shots has been fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.
Re-Masking. In Los Angeles County, officials are reinstituting an indoor mask requirement for both vaccinated and unvaccinated people. More than 1,500 new cases were reported in Los Angeles on Thursday, up from just 210 in mid-June, according to data from the county, where more than 10 million people live.
"We expect to keep masking requirements in place until we begin to see improvements in our community transmission of COVID-19," said LA County Health Officer Dr. Muntu Davis, according to CNN's report. "But waiting for us to be at high community transmission level before making a change would be too late."
Los Angeles has a relatively high level of vaccinations. Other areas, while not as densely populated, are at risk because their populations aren't nearly as vaccinated.
Vaccination helps slow transmission. "If you go look at the New England states and up in the mid-Atlantic states that are doing so well and where almost all the adults and adolescents are vaccinated, what that has the added benefit of is really reducing the overall level of transmission in the community," Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccinologist and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN's John King on Friday. "So that also protects some of the unvaccinated individuals."
Anticipating hot spots. He added: "On the other hand, you look at the other extreme, places like Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, almost no one is vaccinated except the older Americans. What you're going to see is transmission is going to accelerate and we're going to see lots of adolescents and young people get sick."
The Delta variant could be more transmissible in schools. More Hotez: "The thing that really worries me is here in the South, sometimes the school year starts pretty early in August. And now we're going to have all those people mixing together in the schools. This is going to be tough."
The schools question will be hotly debated again. Many Americans got more comfortable with the idea of in-person schooling at the end of the last school year, when cases were dropping, masks were commonplace and vaccine rates were rising.
There's no indication the FDA will soon authorize Covid vaccines for children under 12, however.
And many Americans, vaccinated or not, gave up on masks after the CDC said they were not needed, outdoors or in, for most situations as long as a person had been vaccinated.
Forced freedoms. Republican-led states have tried to outdo each other in limiting the power of cities and counties to impose Covid restrictions in case of a new outbreak.
- Cities can't impose lockdowns or issue new mask requirements.
- School districts can't require masks, even though children are not currently eligible for vaccines.
- Adolescents cannot be required to be vaccinated for in-person public school, despite the long history of vaccine requirements for other diseases.
Now, in Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey's office has demanded that school districts drop a requirement for unvaccinated students exposed to Covid to quarantine. The districts are fighting the demand.
Nearby California about-faced on a strict statewide mask mandate for K-12 students and ultimately decided to leave the decision up to local districts.
One governor's complaint. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed such a bill to keep schools from requiring vaccinations, although he's also argued that the Food and Drug Administration must fully approve the vaccines quickly, which currently have only emergency use authorization, even though the government is urgently trying to get Americans to take them. Nearly half the country has!
"It is past time for the FDA to take into account that hundreds of millions of people have received these vaccines, and move it from an emergency basis over to a regular basis," DeWine said this week, according to WBNS. "That will help us, in Ohio and across the country, to get more people vaccinated."
DeWine has a valid point about the FDA, but his signing of the bill probably didn't help with vaccine hesitancy, either. Ohio's 46% vaccination rate trails the national average.
From left, Saudi activist Loujain al-Hathloul, French lawyer Joseph Breham and Indian activist Umar Khalid, whose numbers appeared in the leaked data. (photo: Reuters/EPA/Alamy)
Leaked records show dissidents and those who help them prominent among those under threat from NSO spyware
leak of phone data suggests human rights lawyers, activists and dissidents across the globe were selected as possible candidates for invasive surveillance through their phones.
Their mobile phone numbers appeared in leaked records, indicating they were selected prior to possible surveillance targeting by governmental clients of the Israeli company NSO Group, which developed the Pegasus spyware.
The records were obtained by the nonprofit organisation Forbidden Stories and shared with a consortium of media outlets including the Guardian.
NSO has repeatedly said Pegasus, which can access all data on a target’s device as well as turn it into an audio or video recorder, is meant for use only against terrorists and serious criminals.
The selection of activists, dissidents and journalists by NSO clients paints a very different picture, though one that campaigners will say was grimly predictable given the tool has been sold to some of the world’s most repressive regimes.
The activists at risk from surveillance
In Azerbaijan, where the longtime dictator Ilham Aliyev tolerates little dissent, numerous activists appear in the data. Some found their personal correspondence or intimate photographs published online or on television.
The phone numbers of six dissidents or activists in the country whose private correspondence was featured on a muckraking television programme in 2019 are listed in the leaked records.
Female activists are often targeted with sexual kompromat. In one particularly egregious case in 2019, intimate photographs of the civil society activist and journalist Fatima Movlamli, then 18, were leaked on to a fake Facebook page.
It is not clear how the photographs were obtained, and Movlamli believes her private data was accessed when police seized her phone during a violent interrogation and forced her to unlock it. Her number was also in the records obtained by the consortium.
“At an age when I didn’t fully realise I was a woman, I was ashamed that I had a female body and that people saw it naked,” said Movlamli. She described the experience as “hard to bear” and said it had led to suicidal thoughts. “In this country, women are doomed to live within the limits of what men want, and they can lynch a woman just because they see her body.”
Without forensic analysis of a device, it is not possible to confirm a successful Pegasus attempt or infection. Movlamli said she regularly resets her phone or changes device, so analysis was not possible.
In India, the numbers of a variety of activists were found in the data.
Umar Khalid, a student activist at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi and the leader of the Democratic Students’ Union, was selected ahead of a possible targeting in late 2018, shortly before sedition charges were filed against him. He was arrested in September 2020 on charges of organising riots, and police claimed the evidence against him included more than 1m pages of information gleaned from his mobile phone, without making it clear how the information was obtained. He is in jail awaiting trial.
The mobile numbers of writers, lawyers and artists who advocated for the rights of indigenous communities and low-caste Indians were also in the data. Members of the network have been arrested over the past three years and charged with terrorism offences, including plotting to assassinate the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi. The network included an 84-year-old Jesuit priest, Stan Swamy, who died this month after contracting Covid-19 in prison.
The records show that several people accused of being Swamy’s accomplices, including Hany Babu, Shoma Sen and Rona Wilson, were selected for possible targeting in the months before and the years after their arrests.
Loujain al-Hathloul, the most prominent women’s rights activist in Saudi Arabia, was selected for possible targeting just weeks before her 2018 abduction in the United Arab Emirates and forced return to Saudi Arabia, where she was imprisoned for three years and allegedly tortured. It is believed Hathloul was selected by the UAE, a known client of NSO and close ally of Saudi Arabia.
Despite her release from jail in February 2021, the Saudi activist is not permitted to speak to journalists or move freely within Saudi Arabia and is still subject to a travel ban. Her mobile phone could not be obtained or tested for evidence that it had been infected or hacked.
Hathloul had previously revealed her emails had been hacked. “My assumption is that they were hacking her to know the networks of people she is organising with,” said Hala al-Dosari, a US-based Saudi activist who communicated with Hathloul before her 2018 arrest.
Dosari said Saudi authorities had gained non-public information about per diem payments of about €50 (£43) a day that had been made to Hathloul in connection to her advocacy, possibly via her mobile phone.
In Mexico, the data shows widespread selection of campaigners, lawyers and rights defenders for possible targeting, including Eduardo Ferrer Mac-Gregor Poisot, a judge who was the president of the Inter-American court of human rights and Alejandro Solalinde, a Catholic priest and champion of migrants’ rights.
Solalinde said he believed the previous Mexican government was “looking for something to damage my reputation and use as blackmail” due to his support for a political rival, and said he had been warned by a former national intelligence agency (Cisen) agent that he was under surveillance .
John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab, which released a report on the targeting of the Emirati activist Ahmed Mansoor with Pegasus in 2016, said: “The targeting of dissidents [should] sit in the same mental box as the targeting of heads of state, the targeting of ambassadors, as the targeting of big corporations and defence contractors.”
The lawyers at risk from surveillance
Lawyers also feature heavily in the leaked data.
Rodney Dixon, a prominent London-based lawyer, who has taken on numerous high-profile human rights cases, was selected for targeting in 2019. Forensic analysis of his device showed Pegasus-related activity but no successful infection.
His clients have included Matthew Hedges, a British doctoral student jailed in the UAE, and Hatice Cengiz, the fiancee of the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. She was also targeted with Pegasus, with forensics showing evidence of a successful infection.Dixon said: “No one should be targeted in this fashion. For lawyers it is particularly concerning as it violates the fundamental principles of lawyer-client privilege and confidentiality, which are central to fair and just legal proceedings.”
Forensic analysis on the phone of the French human rights lawyer Joseph Breham shows it was compromised multiple times with Pegasus in 2019, and the leaked records suggest he had previously been selected for potential targeting by Morocco.
“There is no possible justification for a foreign state to listen to a French lawyer. There is no justification on a legal, ethical or moral level,” he said.
Two lawyers who are bringing a lawsuit against NSO on behalf of Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi living in exile in Canada, also had their numbers appear in the leaked data. Abdulaziz was a close collaborator and friend of Khashoggi.
Analysis of both lawyers’ mobile phones did not find evidence of any attempt to use the Pegasus software against them.
“Not only do they hack people because of their political activities, but if these [victims] are seeking any kind of accountability, they will go after the people helping them,” said one of the lawyers, who asked not to be named.
A spokesperson for the Indian government said: “The allegations regarding government surveillance on specific people has no concrete basis or truth associated with it whatsoever.” The governments of Morocco, Azerbaijan and Mexico did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
NSO Group has claimed it will cut off clients if they misuse Pegasus. In a response to the consortium, it denied the leaked records were evidence of targeting with Pegasus and said it “will continue to investigate all credible claims of misuse and take appropriate action based on the result of these investigations”.
The use of spyware and hacking in a country such as Azerbaijan, where compromising activists appears to be government policy, can have a chilling effect not just on those targeted, but across civil society.
Samed Rahimli, an Azerbaijani human rights lawyer, whose own number was in the data, said the use of kompromat had made life difficult for the country’s activists, especially female activists. “Many people are afraid to live their personal lives in a normal way. Many also face psychological problems and they have sought professional support.”
A police officer passes a portrait of Khashoggi near the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul before a 2019 ceremony marking the anniversary of his murder. (photo: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP)
The cellphones of murdered Saudi columnist’s
fiancee and associate hacked after his murder
SO Group’s Pegasus spyware was used to secretly target the smartphones of the two women closest to murdered Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi, according to digital forensic analysis.
The Android phone of his wife, Hanan Elatr, was targeted by a Pegasus user six months before his killing, but the analysis could not determine whether the hack was successful. The iPhone of his fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, was penetrated by spyware days after the murder, the forensics showed.
Their cellphone numbers appeared on a list of more than 50,000 numbers that are concentrated in countries known to spy on their citizens and also known to have been NSO clients.
Another of Khashoggi’s close associates was successfully hacked after the journalist’s murder. Two other associates and two senior Turkish officials involved in his homicide investigation appear on the list.
NSO executives have asserted that its spyware was not used to monitor Khashoggi or his family.
But a Pegasus user sent texts to Elatr, an Egyptian flight attendant Khashoggi fell in love with and eventually married, with links that could have implanted spyware; the user twice masqueraded as her sister. The texts were sent November 2017 and again in April 2018, six months before Khashoggi’s murder on Oct. 2, 2018, according to a digital forensic examination conducted by Amnesty International’s Security Lab.
She has no memory of clicking on the links. Because she was using an Android phone, Amnesty’s researcher was unable to determine whether the device was successfully penetrated. Unlike iPhones, Androids do not log the kinds of information required for Amnesty’s detective work.
During the months when the targeting occurred, Elatr and Khashoggi were talking and texting multiple times a week, she said in recent interviews. They also met in person three times in various locations. Khashoggi taught her to use various apps because he thought switching among them would help thwart surveillance, she said.
“Jamal warned me before that this might happen,” said Elatr, who married Khashoggi in an Islamic wedding in June 2018 in Alexandria, Va., near where he lived in self-imposed exile. “It makes me believe they are aware of everything that happened to Jamal through me.” Elatr said she kept her phone on the tea table in their living room in Virginia while he talked to colleagues overseas. Pegasus can steal a phone’s content and turn on its microphone for real-time monitoring, according to cybersecurity experts.
After Khashoggi’s murder, someone using Pegasus targeted Cengiz’s iPhone. She had accompanied him to the gates of the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul as he went to pick up documents in October 2018.
Her cellphone was breached just four days after Khashoggi’s murder and then five times in the days following that, according to the Amnesty analysis. The analysis could not determine what was taken from the phone or whether any audio surveillance took place.
At the time, the two women did not know about each other.
When Cengiz was told of the breach in an interview in Istanbul, she replied: “I was expecting that, but I am upset. I want to be a normal person, as anyone. All these things make me sad and scared. My phone could be attacked again in the future, and I feel I don’t have any way to protect myself from this.”
Whether Khashoggi’s cellphone was also hacked is not known. He left his phone with Cengiz when he entered the consulate. She gave it to Turkish authorities. Authorities have kept it and have declined to say whether it had been hacked, citing the ongoing homicide investigation.
Agnès Callamard, the former United Nations rapporteur who investigated the murder and is now secretary general of Amnesty International, said the use of Pegasus against Khashoggi’s inner circle and investigators “indicates an attempt to be on top of what may be revealed [by the Turkish investigation].”
This article is part of a global investigation, organized by the Paris-based journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories, into the use of NSO’s Pegasus spyware against journalists, civic activists, business executives and political opponents. The Israeli firm says it licenses its spyware only to vetted governments and does not operate the software that its clients use under license. NSO says its spyware is supposed to be deployed against terrorists and criminals. It says it operates ethically and monitors its clients for human rights abuses.
The investigation by 17 media organizations, including The Post, relied on interviews and digital analysis of 67 iPhones that appeared on a list of more than 50,000 numbers that are concentrated in countries known to spy on their citizens and also known to have been NSO clients. The list does not name the clients nor does it indicate whether the phones were targeted or surveilled. Amnesty and Forbidden Stories had access to those records, which were subjected to further analysis by the media partners.
Read key takeaways from the Pegasus Project
The company denied that its technology was used against Khashoggi or his associates.
“As NSO has previously stated, our technology was not associated in any way with the heinous murder of Jamal Khashoggi,” NSO said in a statement. “This includes listening, monitoring, tracking, or collecting information. We previously investigated this claim, immediately after the heinous murder, which again, is being made without validation.”
The second Khashoggi associate whose phone was penetrated with Pegasus, according to the forensics, was Wadah Khanfar, a former Al Jazeera journalist.
“I felt my phone or Hatice’s phone might have been hacked because some of the conversations we had about Jamal’s disappearance came out [in public] during the first days,” Khanfar said.
The Khashoggi associates whose phone numbers appear on the list, but whose smartphones were not forensically examined, are Turkish journalist Turan Kislakci and an exiled human rights defender in London who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared for his safety.
Two Turkish officials deeply involved in the Khashoggi homicide investigation also appear on the list that contained the numbers of the two women closest to Khashoggi: Irfan Fidan, then the prosecutor, and Yasin Aktay, an influential member of the ruling conservative Islamist party and adviser to the president. They declined to submit their phones to forensic analysis.
Only one of the Turkish officials, Aktay, agreed to be interviewed.
Aktay said that shortly after Khashoggi’s murder, Turkish intelligence officials informed him that they had discovered that his new iPhone had been hacked and that he had been under surveillance.
“I was warned by someone from the Turkish security authorities that they had detected someone trying to hack into my phones back then,” he said. “They didn’t say who tried to hack my phone. However, they said that there are many such attempts. They also said that the simplest precaution I should take in this regard would be to change my phone device. So I changed my phone device. But I always saw the possibility of such a leak.”
Aktay said he was not told who did the hacking. The intelligence officials declined to comment for this article.
How Pegasus works
Target: Someone sends what’s known as a trap link to a smartphone that persuades the victim to tap and activate — or activates itself without any input, as in the most sophisticated “zero-click” hacks.
Infect: The spyware captures and copies the phone’s most basic functions, NSO marketing materials show, recording from the cameras and microphone and collecting location data, call logs and contacts.
Track: The implant secretly reports that information to an operative who can use it to map out sensitive details of the victim’s life.
Aktay said authorities then gave him special security protections, including a bodyguard and a car equipped with police lights and a handheld, remote-controlled siren. They also gave Cengiz a bodyguard and car for her protection after she began receiving death threats on social media, she said.
Aktay still has a bodyguard, who recently drove him and two journalists at 120 mph to the Ankara airport. As the car barreled down the highway, he was asked about the excessive speed and danger. “It’s the best way,” Aktay said. “It’s very hard to assassination, to have an assassination plan, when you go fast.”
Khashoggi gave Aktay’s name to Cengiz and others as his emergency contact. Aktay believes that when he became a vocal critic of the Saudi government after the murder, the monarchy became interested in what they believed he was planning against them.
The U.S. intelligence community concluded that the murder could not have taken place without the prior knowledge of Saudi Arabia’s young iron-fisted leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Aktay said he believes he was targeted because he continues to write about Khashoggi and to send his writings to thousands of readers. “They are trying to kill even the ghost of Jamal Khashoggi,” he said, referring to the Saudi government.
Callamard said the Saudi government “saw Turkey as the heart of what they needed to control.”
In the current cold war power struggle in the Middle East, Turkey, Qatar and Iran are aligned against Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE and Bahrain. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, himself a frequent jailer of journalists and bloggers critical of his rule, nonetheless befriended Khashoggi.
The disruption in the lives of the two women in Khashoggi’s life shows the impact that even the fear of spying can have. Both of them had fulfilling, independent lives before they began a romantic relationship with him; both now live in hiding and have been forsaken by friends who fear for their own safety because they know authorities can link them via their phones and through social media, texts and other communications.
Elatr’s life was endangered after she began dating the columnist in March 2018. In April, authorities in the UAE stopped her at the airport, where they confiscated her phone, detained her and interrogated her several times. Later, they twice placed her under house arrest for weeks. She said they wrongly portrayed his efforts to create an independent media organization as the formation of a secret network to overthrow autocrats in the Middle East.
Elatr lives in hiding in the Washington area and has applied for political asylum. She said she fears most for family members, some of whom have been interrogated by UAE and Egyptian authorities. “I just want them to leave me in peace, please leave me in peace,” she said.
Cengiz was a scholar who conducted field work in the Middle East before she met Khashoggi. “Before I met him, I was living a really rich life,” she said. “I had many things to do every day. I became a working person.” Now she says she can’t return to her scholarship as a Persian Gulf expert. “Now I cannot travel to any Arab country. Can you imagine that?”
“I’m paying a price, but for what?” she asked.
Sign outside Wi Spa in Koreatown at previous rally on July 3.(photo: Adam Elmahrek/Los Angeles Times)
The protests stemmed from a video that showed a customer of the Wi Spa in Koreatown angrily confronting a staff member complaining that a disrobed transgender woman had entered into the women’s section.
The video, which was shared on social media earlier this month, quickly went viral in far-right and anti-transgender websites, but its veracity has since been put into question.
A source at the spa told the Los Angeles Blade that there’s no record of appointment of any of its usual transgender clients on the day in question. Additionally, treatments at the spa are by appointment only, and most of its trans clients are known to the staff, the source said.
On Saturday morning, LGBTQ activists gathered outside the spa to counter a protest of people who opposed access of trans women to the facility, carrying signs that read “Save our children” and “Stop defending pedos.”
According to the Los Angeles Times, the two groups clashed around noon, prompting the LAPD to declare an unlawful assembly in the area.
“Most people did leave the area, but currently there are a number of arrests made for failure to disperse,” LAPD Det. Meghan Aguilar Aguilar said.
Videos circulating on social media show police officers in riot gear hitting protesters with batons, “shooting bean bag rounds and 40-millimeter hard-foam projectiles at protesters,” the Times reported.
Lois Beckett, a reporter for The Guardian, posted a short video of a group of anti-trans protesters throwing bottles of water at her.
“Just got thrown to the ground by right-wing anti-pedophile protesters as a crowd [converged] on me and chased me. They threw water at me and screamed about Jesus and said to grab my phone,” she wrote. “Police would not let me through the police line but after I got thrown on the ground they did.”
According to the L.A. Times, anti-transgender protesters were demonstrating against the spa’s policy of opening their doors to transgender clients.
After the video incident, Wi Spa defended its position in a statement sent to Los Angeles Magazine.
“Like many other metropolitan areas, Los Angeles contains a transgender population, some of whom enjoy visiting a spa,” the statement said. “Wi Spa strives to meet the needs of all its customers.”
Reuters journalist Danish Siddiqui, poses for a photo in Kabul, Afghanistan July 8, 2021. (photo: Mohammad Ismail/Reuters)
Oil barrels are seen in this July 17, 2007 file photo in Kulusuk, Greenland near the arctic circle as Denmark raced to claim the potentially vast oil and other resources of the North Pole region. (photo: John McConnico/AP)
reenland has suspended all new oil and gas exploration, the country's government announced Thursday. Government officials said they believe the "price of oil extraction is too high," citing both economic considerations and the fight against climate change.
"This step has been taken for the sake of our nature, for the sake of our fisheries, for the sake of our tourism industry, and to focus our business on sustainable potentials," the government, called Naalakkersuisut, said in a statement.
Greenland is believed to have massive amounts of unexplored oil deposits. One study cited in the statement estimated that there were billions of barrels worth of oil along the country's west coast and large deposits under the east coast's seabed.
Greenland has four active exploration licenses, owned by two small companies, that the government will still be required to respect as long as licensees are still exploring, The Associated Press reported.
Kalistat Lund, the country's minister for agriculture, self-sufficiency, energy and environment, said that the government "takes climate change seriously."
"We can see the consequences in our country every day, and we are ready to contribute to global solutions to counter climate change," Lund said. "Naalakkersuisut is working to attract new investments for the large hydropower potential that we cannot exploit ourselves. The decision to stop new exploration for oil will contribute to place Greenland as the country where sustainable investments are taken seriously."
The government also announced that it has sent out a draft bill for consultation that would ban preliminary investigation, exploration and extraction of uranium.
Uranium, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is a widely-used radioactive element that is now primarily used as fuel for nuclear energy. There are several ways to extract uranium, but all of them, according to the EPA, produce radioactive waste.
"The Greenlandic population has based its livelihood on the country's natural resources for centuries, and the ban on uranium mining is rooted in a profound belief that business activities must take nature and the environment into account," Naalakkersuisut said in a statement.
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