Saturday, December 16, 2023

Death of a Bookkeeper (part four)

In the mid-1970s, when we were reporters at Rolling Stone, Lowell Bergman and I decided to take am in-depth look into the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign to disrupt progressive organizations. We focused first on the Black Panther Party.

In a 1967 memorandum, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, had stated that the program’s intent was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalists.” 

By September 1968, the Panthers had emerged as the leading edge of the black power movement in the U.S. A key FBI memo solicited suggestions from its field agents for new ways to “create factionalism between not only the national leaders but also local leaders, steps to neutralize all organizational efforts of the (Panthers), as well as create suspicion amongst the leaders as to each other’s sources of finances, suspicion concerning their respective spouses and suspicion as to who may be cooperating with law enforcement.”

In another memo, in July 1969, Hoover declared that the Panthers were “without question the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

Starting late in 1968, there were numerous police raids on Panther offices around the country; sometimes including federal law enforcement officials. Several Panther leaders were killed or wounded, many others were sent to prison, or fled into exile.

In the course of gathering documents under the Freedom of Information Act and interviewing Panthers and ex-Panthers, including Eldridge Cleaver and Elaine Brown, Bergman and I were able to document hundreds of actions taken by FBI agents in pursuit of Hoover’s stated goals. 

Many of these involved “disinformation,” sending letters purportedly from Cleaver to Huey Newton, for example, or vice versa, promoting the growing paranoia and distrust that already was driving the two leaders toward an eventual split.

I interviewed Elaine Brown during this period. She was the head of the party, as Newton was still in Cuba. She was smart, articulate and projected a sense of power. 

“The government didn’t succeed in destroying us,” Brown told me. “We survived…These motherfuckers intended to kill every one of us. But it’s too late now. Our ideas are out there –- they cannot be erased from the minds of the people.”

After months of work, Bergman and I produced a story that presented an exhaustive catalogue of the federal government’s war against the Panthers. We also noted that the FBI’s relentless attempts to disrupt the organization “encouraged local police departments to harass the group” as well.

But the process of reviewing a huge number of law enforcement files had also exposed to us evidence suggesting there was a sinister side to the Panthers, including internecine violence that had nothing to do with government provocation but was more like ruthless gang activity.

In 1977, once we had founded the Center for Investigative Reporting and opened an office in Oakland, we received numerous complaints from people in that community that the Panthers were by then “out of control.” Several Panther sources stated that Newton in particular was wreaking havoc inside the inner-city neighborhoods by committing random violent assaults, often fueled by consuming alcohol and cocaine at the same time.

We decided that CIR should look into these allegations, and the result in 1978 was a long investigative article called “The Party’s Over,” by a courageous Berkeley journalist, Kate Coleman, and a veteran police reporter, Paul Avery, published in New Times magazine. 

(Avery was later portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. in the 2007 Hollywood movie “Zodiac” for his work on the unsolved case of a notorious serial killer in the San Francisco Bay Area.)

Their article, “The Party’s Over,” documented dozens of violent incidents caused by Newton and his “security squad” against members of the party who had provoked Newton’s wrath, as well as non-party members, including a prostitute he killed, a tailor he pistol-whipped to the verge of death, and other random victims of his rage.

CIR was heavily criticized by the left for doing this story, but I’d long since grown used to such reactions from the PC crowd.  We were journalists, not political partisans, so naturally both political extremes hated us for exposing their dirty secrets. It came with the territory.

As they were pursuing the investigation, Coleman and Avery had come upon the unsolved murder of Betty Van Patter, and thanks to Avery’s connections, gained access to the Berkeley Police Department file on the case. 

Quoting that file:

“11:30 a.m. January 17th, 1975: Sgt. R. Scofield, piloting San Mateo County Sheriff’s Helicopter 2-H-10, was on patrol above San Francisco Bay when he spotted a body floating about a mile south of the San Mateo Hayward Bridge, between markers 670 and 680.

“He immediately put out distress calls to the U.S. Coast Guard, the Foster City Police Department, and the San Mateo Coroner’s Office. Within 15 minutes, the Coast Guard was on the scene, recovered the body, and took it to Old Warder Pier, on the corner of East Hillsdale Avenue and Teal Street, where representatives of the police department and coroner’s office quickly gathered.

“The medical examiner observed that the body was that of an adult female in a state of “moderate to severe post-mortem decomposition.”

“The remains were transported to Chope Hospital for an examination and identification. The body was placed in container #7 and sealed at 2:05 p.m. An autopsy was scheduled for 10 a.m. the following morning.”

It took three days for the coroner to determine an identity through the use of dental charts, but there was little doubt about the cause of death. The victim had been murdered -- killed by a massive blow to the head -- a “fractured calvarium” is noted in the autopsy report.

There was no water in the woman’s lungs, which means she was dead before her body got into the bay. The coroner estimated she was in the water for around three weeks, drifting on the currents, back and forth along the tide lines. 

She was identified as Betty Van Patter.

(Part Five will appear tomorrow.)

Part Three

Part Two

Part One

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Friday, December 15, 2023

Death of a Bookkeeper (part 3)

Although I never met Betty Van Patter in person, I did speak with her on the phone in 1972. She was working at Rampartsmagazine across town at the time. Her daughter, Tamara Baltar, was helping us set up the administrative systems for SunDance magazine, and she asked Betty to talk us through that process.

What I remember about the phone call was the kind, thoughtful voice on the other end of the land line.

Like most startups, SunDance didn’t last very long, but in 1977 Tamara was again helping us set up administrative systems, this time for our new non-profit, the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) in downtown Oakland.

(Note: CIR announced yesterday it has merged with Mother Jones.)

Between that call in 1972 and 1977, something awful had happened. Betty had taken a job as bookkeeper for the Black Panther Party, discovered a number of irregularities, which she duly reported to her boss, Elaine Brown. But rather than fix the problems, Brown fired Betty on Friday, December 13, 1974.

Later that night, Betty went missing. Her body was found floating in San Francisco Bay five weeks later. He skull had been bashed in.

***

Betty had been recommended for the job with the Panthers by David Horowitz, a former editor at Ramparts. A few days after Betty went missing, Tamara called Horowitz, who in turn called Elaine Brown.

Horowitz recorded the call:

DH: “I got a call from Betty’s daughter who says she hasn’t been home since Friday.”

EB: “Well, listen, let me tell you something about Betty. Betty wanted to know too much of everything…And she was getting into the Lamp Post…I was scared of her getting into my campaign books and all the other stuff. She started asking about where money was going.”

After some back and forth, Brown told Horowitz that she had fired Betty.

Horowitz then called Tamara back and told her that she should go to the police. But Tamara didn’t want to involve the police since they might be biased against the Panthers so she called the most famous private eye in the Bay Area, Hal Lipset, instead.

When Lipset advised her to go the police as well, she finally contacted the Berkeley Police six days after Betty had disappeared. In response, the police conducted an investigation, which included an interview with Elaine Brown.

Brown claimed that she had fired Betty a week before she disappeared, on December 6th. (The police investigators noted in their files that this was contradicted by all the known evidence.) Brown then added a curious detail — that she had seen Betty at the Lamp Post and spoke “briefly” with her on “one weekend evening” after December 6th.

From other evidence we can be virtually certain that that evening was December 13th, the very night Betty disappeared.

But Brown’s attorney terminated the interview before the police could ask any followup questions.

***

In 1983, almost nine years to the day after her mother had gone missing, Tamara decided to meet again with private eye Hal Lipset in his San Francisco office to discuss the case. She asked me to accompany her to this meeting.

Until then, Tamara had remained, in her own words, in “complete denial” that the Panthers could have been responsible for killing her mother. But questions raised by CIR reporters Kate Coleman and Paul Avery, as well as by David Horowitz, slowly convinced her to consider that possibility.

On January 12th, 1984, Tamara officially hired Lipset to re-investigate Betty’s murder. One of Lipset’s protégés was David Fechheimer, by then a prominent P.I. in his own right.

Fechheimer had been working for the Panthers’ defense attorneys in 1974 and knew a great deal about Betty’s case. He chose to confide in his old mentor about what he knew. Afterwards, Lipset met with Tamara and told her she should have “no doubt” that the Panthers had killed her mother.

During that meeting, Tamara and I saw Lipset’s notes from his conversation with Fechheimer. They indicated who had ordered the killing only by initials (E.B.) and who had carried it out (F.F.)

A Panther named Flores Forbes was Brown’s head of security.

***

These are just a few of the salient details of this unsolved case. I’ll publish more over the next week, because there is a lot more to this story and it needs to be told. It’s time for justice to be served. 

After all, the statute of limitations never lapses on murder.

(Part Four will appear tomorrow.)

Part Two

Part One

HEADLINES:

  • Rudy Giuliani made it ‘dangerous’ for Georgia election workers, attorney says in closing arguments in defamation case (CNN

  • It’s the Beginning of the Disastrous End for Rudy Giuliani (Daily Beast)

  • CIR and Mother Jones Merge (CIR)

  • Impeachment inquiry threatens Biden with election-year headache (BBC)

  • Senate immigration negotiators see a ray of hope as clock ticks on Biden's aid package (NBC)

  • There Is a Path to Victory in Ukraine (Foreign Affairs)

  • An emboldened, confident Putin says there will be no peace in Ukraine until Russia’s goals are met (AP)

  • Ukraine’s Zelenskyy faces doubters and detractors in US and EU (Al Jazeera)

  • Just as 9/11 altered America, so has Oct. 7 altered Israel (WP)

  • Humanitarian crisis worsens in Gaza as Israel-Hamas war intensifies (CNN)

  • Hungry, thirsty and humiliated: Israel’s mass arrest campaign sows fear in northern Gaza (AP)

  • Unguided ‘dumb bombs’ used in almost half of Israeli strikes on Gaza (WP)

  • U.S. and China race to shield secrets from quantum computers (Reuters)

  • Older Workers Are Growing in Number and Earning Higher Wages (Pew)

  • Failure of Cop28 on fossil fuel phase-out is ‘devastating’, say scientists (Guardian)

  • Abortion Ruling Keeps Texas Doctors Afraid of Prosecution (NYT)

  • All the Carcinogens We Cannot See (New Yorker)

  • Why Is the Colorado River Running Dry? (Mother Jones)

  • When the New York Times lost its way (Economist)

  • Is This How Amazon Ends? (Atlantic)

  • Scores of underage Rohingya girls forced into abusive marriages in Malaysia (AP)

  • OpenAI’s Ilya Sutskever Has a Plan for Keeping Super-Intelligent AI in Check (Wired)

  • Recent advances and outstanding challenges for machine learning interatomic potentials (Nature)

  • Artificial intelligence is not a silver bullet (NPR)

  • Supercomputer that simulates entire human brain will switch on in 2024 (New Scientist)

  • Thoughtful Neighbor Shovels Fallen Elderly People Off Of Sidewalk (The Onion)

 

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Thursday, December 14, 2023

Death of a Bookkeeper (part 2)



Betty Van Patter was a 45-year-old Black Panther Party bookkeeper and idealist who admired the party and its programs to fight racism and help the poor.

But somebody killed her and despite many clues and much evidence the mystery has remained unsolved for 49 years.

Meanwhile, over the course of my 58 years in journalism, I have worked on a lot of big stories. We got some of them, we didn’t get others, and I have a few regrets.

The Betty Van Patter case is one of my major regrets. The Alameda District Attorney, the Berkeley Police Department, several private investigators, and a number of other journalists are among those who have looked into the case and come up empty.

Some of the best work on the case has been done by investigative reporter Kate Coleman, who published one plausible scenario for Betty’s murder in the now defunct magazine Heterodoxy in 1994. Coleman revealed that the well-known private investigator David Fechheimer, who was working for the Panthers at the time of Betty’s murder, told his mentor, the legendary private eye Hal Lipset, who it was inside the Panthers who ordered Betty’s murder and who carried it out.

Lipset was working for Van Patter’s family at the time and he confirmed Coleman’s report to me. Both Lipset and Fechheimer have since died.

Yet nobody has ever been charged in the case. 

By now, interest by law enforcement and the media has all but vanished. The problem with this as a story is obvious. Historians, academics, young activists and old activists alike want to be able to celebrate the positive legacy of the Black Panthers, which includes exposing systematic racism, the harassment and arrest of countless black people, as well as the poverty and oppressive living conditions endured by millions to this day.

I want that too.

The issue is that to honestly tell the story of what happened to Betty Van Patter may seem to some to run counter to the ideal narrative, because it brings up the Panthers’ internal corruption, violence, sexism, prostitution, drugs, shakedowns, weaponry and justification of gratuitous violence.

All of which are just as true as the good stuff.

Therefore, any honest appraisal of the group’s place in history must first be capable of holding both sides of the truth in one hand, both the good and the bad, unflinchingly.

And for that, Betty’s case must be solved.

(Part Three appears tomorrow.)

Part One.

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Wednesday, December 13, 2023

Who Murdered Betty Van Patter?

 Forty-nine years ago today, on December 13, 1974, 45-year-old Betty Van Patter, mother of three, was nursing a drink and crying softly after work at a bar on University Avenue called the Berkeley Square.

She had just been fired from her job as bookkeeper for the Black Panther Party by Elaine Brown, who headed up the party while co-founder Huey Newton was in exile in Cuba. Van Patter, an idealistic supporter of the party, had witnessed irregularities and misuse of cash by party members and had warned Brown that they were illegal and needed to be stopped to avoid bringing unwanted attention from law enforcement authorities.

While she was at the bar, a man walked in and handed Van Patter a note. She got up and followed him out of the door.

Later that night, she was spotted at Jimmy's Lamp Post, another bar on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. The Lamp Post, owned by a cousin of Newton's named Jimmie Ward, was the site of most of the illegal cash transactions Van Patter was worried about.

Meanwhile, back at the Berkeley Square, one of Betty's friends arrived to join her, only to find her missing. He then placed a telephone call to the Lamp Post and asked if she was there.

"That party has left," he was told.

That was the last any of her friends or family heard from Betty Van Patter. Her badly beaten body was found floating in San Francisco Bay over a month later, on January 17, 1975.

***

The Black Panther Party was an extraordinary, historically significant attempt by a group of young black people to aggressively fight back against entrenched racism in U.S. society. Its leaders established a number of remarkable programs, including a free school, a free breakfast program, and an armed effort to monitor arrests of black people by the police.

The party, unlike other black power organizations, welcomed white support and forged alliances with Latino groups and gay organizations. It also developed a strong cadre of women leaders, like Elaine Brown, who helped the party gain international prominence.

At the same time, some of the party's leaders, including Newton, could behave like street thugs, shaking down local merchants for protection money, and running drug and prostitution rackets out of various locations, including the Lamp Post. 

The visionary programs and the criminality co-existed side by side. It wasn’t one or the other; it was both at the same time. The party’s complicated legacy cannot be understood without acknowledging that.

The party was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover, the long-time racist head of the FBI, as a severe national security threat; he and other elements of the federal government waged an illegal campaign known as COINTELPRO to infiltrate, disrupt, and destroy the Panthers. 

Certain state and local law enforcement forces cooperated with the FBI in this effort, which at one point resulted in the brutal murder by police of Panther leader Fred Hampton and a colleague in Chicago.

The Panthers also waged a terror campaign of their own, executing party members suspected of being agents or informers, as well as killing innocent members of the community whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Co-founder Huey Newton was at the epicenter of all that was good and all that was evil about the Black Panther Party.

One of Huey's major white supporters was David Horowitz, a Berkeley radical, who got Betty Van Patter her job with the organization. He knew her from Ramparts magazine, the left-wing voice of the movement to upend racism and imperialism during the 1960s, where he was an editor.

In the aftermath of Betty's murder, Horowitz underwent a loud, long and very public political migration from the left to the right, where he emerged as one of the fiercest critics of progressives in this country. He wrote books and articles and delivered lectures that shredded the idealistic vision of those seeking progressive social change by comparing them to Stalin's murderous regime in the Soviet Union and Mao's reign of terror in China.

As Horowitz used his intellectual ability and historical knowledge to carry on his anti-left crusade, he repeatedly cited his guilt over Betty's death as the catalyst that propelled him on his journey. Many progressives believe he was simply exploiting Betty’s murder to justify his crusade.

In 1976, Lowell Bergman and I co-authored a major piece in Rolling Stone magazine on the FBI's Cointelpro initiative to destroy the Panthers. In the process of doing that and related articles, we interviewed Newton, Brown, Eldridge Cleaverand many other Panthers and their most prominent supporters, including Hollywood celebrities, left-wing lawyers and Berkeley intellectuals.

While we were doing the Rolling Stone article, Bergman and I became aware of the dirty underbelly of the Panther organization, and later at the Center for Investigative Reporting, we coordinated and I edited the breakthrough investigative article by reporters Kate Coleman and Paul Avery called "The Party's Over," in New Times magazine in 1978.

That article, more than any other, pierced the facade of the Panthers and documented some of the awful crimes carried out by Newton and his followers, including the murder of Van Patter.

A few years after she died, Betty's warning of what would happen to the Panthers if they didn’t stop their financial abuse came to pass. Law enforcement authorities closed in and effectively shut the party down for the illegal misuse of government funds. The Party really was over now.

Meanwhile, during the nearly half-century since Betty's murder, the Berkeley Police, the Alameda District Attorney, and a number of private investigators and journalists have tried to solve her murder case. 

To date, none of us has succeeded.

The known evidence strongly suggests that the Panthers were responsible for her death. She was allegedly held in a secret chamber attached to the Lamp Post, where she was reportedly tortured before she was killed by a massive blow to the head. Her body was then dumped into the Bay.

In the years since this happened, some evidence has been produced as to who killed her, who ordered it and why.  Probably the most informative and provocative piece is Kate Coleman’s "Death in Berkeley" in Heterodoxy in 1994. In it, Coleman reported that private investigator David Fechheimer, who was working for the Panthers at the time of Betty’s murder, later told his mentor, private eye Hal Lipset who ordered the hit and who carried it out.

Lipset’s notes, later obtained by Betty’s family, listed the two as “E.B” and “F.F.”

Betty Van Patter’s murder constitutes a deep stain on the positive legacy of the Panthers and their many important accomplishments, and it remains officially unsolved.

But the statute of limitations never runs out on murder.

(Part Two will appear here tomorrow.)

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Tuesday, December 12, 2023

Above All Else

 (Update: It turns out that Kate Cox, the pregnant woman I wrote about yesterday, left the state of Texas to obtain an emergency abortion elsewhere. It is lucky she did because after she left the Texas Supreme Court rejected her request for an exemption from the state’s strict ban on abortion. This is therefore a shameful day for the once-great state of Texas. I just wish the late Molly Ivins was still here to comment on that.)

***

When Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court Monday for an expedited ruling on the question of whether Donald Trump can be prosecuted for the alleged crimes he committed while president, he cited as precedent a ruling from the Watergate scandal half a century ago.

Back then, the court rejected President Richard Nixon’s claim of presidential privilege, forcing him to turn over the secret tape recordings he had made in the Oval Office. The court’s unanimous ruling helped lead to Nixon’s resignation.

As part of the deal for him to leave office, Nixon received a pardon from his successor, Gerald Ford. That pardon guaranteed that Ford would lose his re-election bid in 1976 against a little-known governor from Georgia named Jimmy Carter.

People my age remember all of this stuff vividly, but people my age also need to recognize that fully two-thirds of our fellow citizens had not yet even been born at the time of Watergate.

We considered it the biggest political scandal imaginable, but one that in the end strengthened our belief in the democratic system because it reaffirmed the principle that no one — not even a president — is above the law.

That was four decades before the rise of the would-be dictator Donald Trump, however. And of course, Trump now claims that he is and was above the law, although luckily for now at least that is not his decision to make. Perhaps he thinks he will prevail in the matter because the body that will decide his fate is stacked with three of his own appointees, plus three other conservative partisans, one of whom’s wife is a prominent election denier.

And maybe he’s right or maybe not. This Supreme Curt is not the quality of the one that judged Nixon, but it’s still a group of individuals who consider themselves the final arbiters of all things Constitutional. And they will not want to get this one wrong in the eyes of history.

All of this elevates the stakes to the highest level since Watergate, as the man who literally co-wrote (with Carl Bernstein) the book on the matter, Bob Woodward, recently confirmed.

The rest of us, old or young, can only hope that like Watergate, this one also has a happy ending.

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Monday, December 11, 2023

A State of Disgrace

Kate Cox is 20 weeks pregnant with a fetus that has a fatal genetic condition. Giving birth could endanger her health as well, possibly rendering her unable to have children in the future.

In any place with a reasonable legal standard, Cox would be able to have an immediate abortion. But, unfortunately, she lives in the state of Texas, which is not such a place. In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, abortion has become effectively illegal in Texas. 

(Roughly half of the U.S. states now restrict abortions to a significant degree.)

Hoping to get relief, Cox sued the state, and a judge ruled that she indeed qualified for an emergency exemption from the ban.

But then the state’s grandstanding attorney general, Ken Paxton, petitioned the Texas Supreme Court to block her abortion, and threatened to aggressively prosecute any doctor who performed it. 

(Paxton, you may recall, narrowly escaped being removed from office earlier this year on charges of extreme corruption.)

So far, the Texas Supreme Court has issued a temporary block on the lower court’s decision, preventing Cox from going ahead with the procedure.

All she can do now is hope that the Court will reverse itself and allow her to proceed.

 

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Monday Links

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Sunday, December 10, 2023

It's Life

The holiday season brings with it the usual flood of sentimental Christmas movies presumably meant to counter the flood of unrestrained consumerism. 

Among them is that exceptional, odd Frank Capra film, "It's a Wonderful Life." Until I read Zachary D. Carter's excellent essay in The Huffington Post (2018), there were many things I didn't know about that film or the Sicilian immigrant who made it.

Hoping to revive a career that had been disrupted by the war, Capra produced the film in 1946, but when it was released just before Christmas it bombed, losing a half million dollars at the box office. Critics panned it and Capra lost the rights and control of the film’s negatives.

His personal fortunes then proceeded to nose-dive, accelerated by the anti-Communist furor of the early 1950s. (His crime — like that of many thoughtful people — was that he had briefly flirted with Marxism when he was younger.) 

His decline was such that he eventually reached a hopeless state and attempted suicide on a number of occasions. Rather like George Bailey.

Later, when he looked back on making the film that had helped ruin his career, he said: “I can’t begin to describe my sense of loneliness in making (it), a loneliness that was laced by the fear of failure. I had no one to talk to, or argue with.” 

As an aside, that probably describes what these holidays are like for many people, but for now let’s return to Capra’s story.

The Wonderful Life negatives lay forgotten and unvisited for almost three decades, by which time the film, considered worthless, had slipped into the public domain and was free for the taking. In the mid-1970s, the Public Broadcasting System did just that, becoming the first to air it since 1946. The commercial networks soon followed.

With that, a not-so-instant classic was (re)born. It’s now every bit as much a part of the season as Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.”

Happily, Capra lived long enough to see this all come to pass before he joined the angels himself at the robust age of 94 in 1991. He had always maintained that “Wonderful Life" was the greatest film he ever made.

The main actors in the piece — James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore — are long since dead, of course. But recently, two surviving members among the children cast in the movie confirmed that Capra indeed controlled every detail of the filming down to the slightest detail of their expressions and movements.

The main point of the film — that each life matters — is always worth revisiting at this or any time of year when for so many, life feels considerably less than wonderful.

Depression is a widespread in our society. And suicidal thoughts are no stranger to one who is deeply depressed. But as in the story, there could be hidden value in holding on, perhaps helped by an angel or two. 

Of course the inequalities of wealth displayed in the film are worse today than they were in the America of post-World-War-Two, and the only way out of that mess would be a radical redistribution of wealth, which certainly isn’t going to be happening around here anytime soon.

So for now this is roughly as wonderful a life as we can make of it, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. And in any event, it wouldn’t be what it is if we were no longer a part of it.

With that, bring on Christmas! And maybe listen for someone’s bell to ring out there somewhere along the way.

(This one I originally published two years ago.)

HEADLINES:

  • In plea for Ukraine funding, Biden says open to 'significant compromises' on border issues (USA Today)

  • Ukraine’s Zelensky appears increasingly embattled as U.S. backing wavers (WP)

  • ‘Double standards’: World reacts to US veto on Gaza truce resolution at UN — International rights groups say US ‘risks complicity in war crimes’, has ‘callous disregard for civilian suffering’. (Al Jazeera)

  • For Palestinians, the Future Is Being Bulldozed (NYT)

  • Hunter Biden’s Taxes and the Law — The nine charges are substantial with much supporting evidence. (WSJ)

  • If you're one of Arizona's fake electors, Monday could be a no good, very bad day (Arizona Central)

  • Federal judge prohibits separating migrant families at US border for 8 years (AP)

  • The land of the future (Economist)

  • Study makes troubling revelation about killer whales: ‘We’ve really come to learn that you are what you eat’ (Yahoo)

  • The rise of inexpensive Chinese electric vehicles has upped the pressure on legacy automakers who have turned to suppliers, from battery materials makers to chipmakers, to squeeze out costs and develop affordable EVs quicker than previously planned. (Reuters)

  • F.D.A. Approves Sickle Cell Treatments, Including One That Uses CRISPR (NYT)

  • Tomato lost in space by history-making astronaut has been found (CNN)

  • Inside OpenAI’s Crisis Over the Future of Artificial Intelligence (NYT)

  • EU reaches landmark deal on world’s first comprehensive AI regulation (Axios)

  • The Inside Story of Microsoft’s Partnership with OpenAI (New Yorker)

  • How Nations Are Losing a Global Race to Tackle A.I.’s Harms (NYT)

  • AI creates, transforms and destroys... jobs (NPR)

  • UAE’s top AI group vows to phase out Chinese hardware to appease US (Financial Times)

  • AI’s ‘Fog of War’ — How can institutions protect Americans against a technology no one fully understands? (Atlantic)

  • Things To Never Google After You Commit A Crime (The Onion)

 

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