Tuesday Morning: What’s News, Tiwes?

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[Screencap, Newsmap, 0815h EDT]

[Screencap, Newsmap, 0815h EDT]

It’s the day belonging to Tiwes, the Norse god of single combat. What will we engage in battle about today? Looks like sketchy news coverage is a good reason, after taking a peek at Newsmap this morning to check global media coverage of the Panama Papers.

Very thin reporting, according to the results. Canada, come on — Bill Cosby is bigger news than global corruption?

Ditto for India, which covered the HSBC money laundering scandal exhaustively last year. Very little coverage in that country’s English language outlets.

Don’t get all peeved off about the U.S. media, which hasn’t done a particularly good job over the last 24 hours. It’s not just us; the lack of coverage may say something about media ownership around the world.

One possible example on shore here: the acquisition of the Las Vegas-Review Journal last year. Nevada happens to be the eighth most popular tax haven in the world, and Las Vegas is its heart. Was this paper acquired in order to influence reporting in and about this topic?

Mossack Fonseca has a subsidiary in Las Vegas, by the way.

Let’s take a look at science and technology news…

  • No change yet to claims that Panama Papers were obtained by an attack on Mossack Fonseca’s email server (The Register-UK) — Of particular note, this observation by this tech news outlet:

    To date, The Register hasn’t seen a strong presence from the tech sector in the staged release of the documents, perhaps because the “Double Irish Dutch Sandwich” tactic favoured in this business works without hiding companies’ links to their international associates.

    The comments at that link are rather interesting, offering both a perspective from our overseas “cousins” as well as technical assessment about the leak.

  • Are you ready for some Thursday night Twitter streaming? (WaPo) — NFL’s awarded a deal to Twitter for streaming some of its games. This is an interesting development, given how much co-watching TV Twitter users do.
  • I’m afraid I can’t do THAT, Dave: humans aroused by touching robots special places (Phys.org) — Ewww. Don’t ask me to travel through the Uncanny Valley with you on this one.
  • Revolv’s home automation hub now a casualty in the Internet of Things universe (BoingBoing) — Device fell out of the product plans for Google’s home automation subsidiary, Nest. Unfortunately, Revolv was sold with a lifetime subscription which will be defunct in May.
  • “Routine management reshuffle” replaces three senior execs at China’s telecom manufacturer ZTE (Reuters) — coincidentally happens weeks after U.S. authorities revealed attempts by ZTE to circumvent sanctions against Iran.
  • Name a non-Zika disease also transmitted by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, facing a drastic vaccine shortage (Science) — You win if you said yellow fever, which has no cure and can be deadly.
  • Article 27: Algorithmic Politics (Furtherfield) — Necrocapitalism. Wrap your head around that term. A thought-provoking essay about a world where algorithms are our political system.

That’s enough for your coffee break or lunch hour. Catch you here tomorrow morning!

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15 replies
  3. blueba says:

    Given the condescending initial report at emptywheel yesterday crying “where are the Americans?” after all we’re exceptional and we should be #1 and first in all things. Who cares about Cameron or the PM of Iceland there not important only the exceptionals are important. As if that is a legitimate criticism of the story – this sounds like the pot calling…

    And then there was in yesterday’s report an unjustifiable casting of suspicion over the report itself, what’s your beef with ICIJ anyway?

    What is the point of emptywheel standing on the sidelines and whining?

  5. Rayne says:

    PeasantParty 11:10 — You know what’s really odd about that Money 20/20–the organization putting that convention together? It’s one of the very few entities I’ve seen with more than parity in gender for women. ?? That’s odd for something so tightly aligned with financial industry.

    blueba 11:47 — You are particularly unintelligible today. I’m surprised you didn’t take issue with the bit about ZTE, given your usual bash-emptywheel-on-anti-China-content tactic.

    P J Evans 12:03 — Yeah, that’s why yellow fever was nasty in New Orleans and along lower Mississppi river and not the northern states. Bugs up here didn’t carry it, tended to be spread by other means like bad sanitation in port cities during summer months.

    • bevin says:

      Rayne, what do you think of this account. I believe the book was first published sixty years or more ago but it was recently reprinted.

      “… By now, the biology of yellow fever is well known. It is caused by a virus that is transmitted among humans by the female of the mosquito species Aëdes aegypti. Once infected, a mosquito remains a carrier for her entire life, which might run from spring to frost. The mosquitoes feed every third day (and are reportedly most savage in the afternoon), each time potentially transmitting the fever. Philadelphia is north of their natural range, but they are prolific breeders and once introduced would flourish there for a season— as happened repeatedly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yellow fever was common in the United States until the twentieth century. In Philadelphia alone it struck in 1699, 1747, 1762, 1793, 1794, 1797, 1798, 1802, 1803, 1805, 1819, 1820, and 1853. It ravaged many other American cities as well, particularly in the south, where the last major outbreak was in New Orleans in 1905. It subsided for reasons that are not precisely known, long before vaccines appeared. Better public sanitation was surely a factor. The disease has been, and still remains, a serious threat in tropical countries. It killed 40,000 of Napoleon’s best troops after they won the military battle against l’Ouverture in Santo Domingo in 1802– 1803….”

      Powell, J. H. Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793

      It would seem that emigrants from Haiti brought mosquitoes with them. Is that the view now?

    • P J Evans says:

      Niece-by-marriage has some ancestors who died in the yellow-fever epidemic in Virginia in 1855. I figure I’m lucky to have found any records – they were poor, Irish, and Catholic.

  7. Rayne says:

    bevin (1:36) — I don’t know enough about the history of yellow fever, just that it affected coastal urban areas in early US from 17th-19th century. On vacation years ago I toured the graveyards around French Quarter+Garden District in New Orleans — amazing to see entire families decimated within days of each other by yellow fever, the disease’s impact on the city etched in headstones.

    No idea if Haiti was the origin of first cases. I do know dengue has made it to US, same mosquito vector, and it’s the spread of both yellow and dengue we can look to as partial models for Zika’s anticipated spread.

    But Zika’s worse in that it’s also sexually transmitted, and not deadly enough to light a fire under the government to address it more aggressively.

    • bevin says:

      It would be easy to make the case that it was the 1802 Yellow Fever outbreak in Haiti which killed LeClerc (Josephine’s brother) and reduced his army to a ghost corps.
      And that this in turn led to Napoleon dropping his ambitious plan to link a revived St Domingue up with Louisiana and build a new French Empire in America. It was part of Napoleon’s strategy during the Peace of Amiens during which the British navy did not interfere with French troop movements.
      When the extent of the Haiti disaster became known, Napoleon gave orders for his fleet and army ready in Dutch ports to sail to New Orleans to stand down. Cutting his losses the Emperor to be arranged the sale of Louisiana to the US. The forces in Holland were transferred to the Channel coast for a possible invasion of England and one of the main reasons for maintaining a truce with the British disappeared.
      Had St Domingue been restored to French rule-and slavery- it would have been a vital outpost on the route from France to New Orleans.
      So the US has a lot to thank Aëdes aegypti for. The rest if the world may not agree.

  8. earlofhuntingdon says:

    Nice reminder about Las Vegas as a source for tax planning/avoidance strategies. Why should the cash capital of the US, the source for the patently false jingle that what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas (one of the world’s most surveilled cities) be left out of the headlines. The flip side of the tax avoidance coin, of course, is the plethora of states providing virtually anonymous corporate shells, via accommodating legislatures. Nevada, Wyoming and Delaware are very popular jurisdictions for that sort of thing, and that’s just in the US.

    • bloopie2 says:

      Well, for a blog that values and promotes privacy, this one sure is getting a lot of “privacy sucks” comments. How about that!

      • martin says:

        C’maaan bloopie2…you know privacy is over rated. I mean.. every IC asshole out there claims so. I mean..hey.. they even took the doors off their bedrooms and bathrooms, and all the curtains in their house just to prove it, right? And they stopped wearing clothing too! They even pee in public naked. So if they can do it.. well who are we to want privacy..right?

        Insert two rolling eye smiley here.

  9. Evangelilsta says:

    A note about “Tue” of “Tuesday”: “Ti” means “God” (“Tis” = “Goddess”). The “T” elided to “D” provides “Di”, and with the “i’ elided to “e”, we have “De”. “Ti U”, pronounced “Ti Yu”, means “The God Yu”. Elided we have “Diu” and “Deu”, and, of course, “Deo”. “Yu” is the God of War. A God who roams from place to place, camp to camp, campaign to campaign, lives in a tent (or lived in a tent until His followers conquered Canaan and then Solomon built Him a Temple). Yes, the God “Ti Yu” is the God of the “Yudisher”, also spelt “Judischer”, and the “Deu”/Deo/Deos/Dieu etc. of Judeo-Christianity. Allso, by the way, with an alternate course of “T” elision, “Zeu” (originally pronounced “Ts-Yu”, further elided to English “Zeus”, with the soft “Z”. What we know as “Norse Mythology” is of late medieval manufacture, made up by monks and entertainers to sow confusion and discount and discredit Judeo-Christianity competitors (The Finnish and Welsh “mythologies” we know today are also made up). “Odin”, incidentally, (also “Woden” and “Wotan”) is the same God, the ‘name’ reflecting a descriptive reference epithetic “Ódan”, the God “Yu” being “the ó dan” (See the bible-book of Daniel, fiery-furnace scene for indication of the meaning of “dan”).

    P.S. My suspicion is that Mossack Fonseca weren’t hacked at all, but sold their list for an undisclosed sum and a tax-break. Those guys are lawyers, after all, and all their better clients, who bought their Premium Service, and so are not on the list, will be needing, and looking for, a deeper pocket to dive their untold wealth into. Even giving them a discount on the transfer fees the lawyers stand to make a premium over their usual Premium fees…

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