The skies of Beirut lit up with fireworks on Thursday night as Lebanon finally formed a government eight months after May’s general election.
Prime Minister Saad Hariri will head a 30-member government and has promised to initiate urgent economic and political reforms.
In a speech, Hariri said the economy would be the new government’s main challenge.
“Let’s get to work,” he said on Twitter.
In the absence of a government, Lebanon‘s economy, in decline even before the elections, deteriorated further. The World Bank had previously warned that conditional loans and grants worth $11bn might be redirected if Lebanon did not form a government.
The news that a government had been formed had an immediate, positive impact on Lebanon’s sovereign dollar bonds, reported The Daily Star, a Lebanese newspaper.
‘Turn the page’
Mr Hariri said it was “time to turn the page” after the eight-month crisis, caused by arguments over the allocation of ministries in the cross-sectarian cabinet.
Gebran Bassil, the leader of the Christian-dominated Free Patriotic Movement, a Hezbollah ally, will retain the Foreign Ministry while Ali Hassan Khalil, from Hezbollah’s Shia ally Amal, will continue as Finance Minister.
Raya al-Hasan has become the first woman to hold the Interior Minister portfolio. Three other women will also take charge of key ministries.
Despite pressure from the United States not to give Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shia armed group-cum-political movement, the Ministry of Health, the Hezbollah-affiliated Jamal Jabak has become the new health minister.
The ministry has the fourth largest budget and the US fears Hezbollah will use these funds to ease financial pressures on itself as sanctions on Iran may end of reducing support.
Hariri cedes to Hezbollah
After much wrangling, Mr Hariri was forced to give in to Hezbollah demands that one of the six Sunnis backed by the group be given a cabinet position. The prime minister had originally rejected that demand outright. Hasan Mrad, the son of MP Abdel-Rahim Mrad, was given the post of Minister of State in the new government.
“For over eight months Hariri has been negotiating from a high ground, that all Sunni ministers should be his followers,” said Elias Farhat, a political analyst. “At last he gave in to a settlement.”
Thanassis Cambanis, the author of a book on Hezbollah and a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, said that Hariri and the rest of the Lebanese political class did not really have a choice, as Hezbollah was the single most powerful entity in the country.
He said it would have a say in the government formation, “whether it takes cabinet posts directly or allocates them to allies”.
The election results in May last year strengthened Hezbollah’s hold over Lebanon as its allies scored a majority of seats. Mr Hariri’s Future bloc lost a third of its lawmakers, securing only 17 of the 27 legislative seats allocated to Sunnis.
Although Mr Hariri maintains his position as the political leader of the Sunnis in Lebanon, losing Sunni voters revealed his weakening grip on power.
He blamed the loss on the new electoral system of proportional representation introduced last year.
The politics in the tiny state of Lebanon are a microcosm of the bigger currents flowing in the region and can serve as an indicator of the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Hezbollah’s ability to put pressure on Mr Hariri suggests that Iran and not Saudi Arabia currently has more influence in Lebanon.
In November 2017, Riyadh tried to strong arm Hariri by making him resign, a move which ultimately had no impact on containing Hezbollah.
Long-time observers of the country like Mr Thanassis said any adventurism in Lebanon by the Saudis or the US would only make the situation worse.
“Lebanon is in a precarious situation, hoping influential outside powers let its fragile power-sharing arrangement limp on because any alternative might prove far worse,” he said.
Winter of protest
On the streets of major cities across Lebanon, protests will not stop. Lebanon has witnessed a winter of demonstrations as thousands marched across the country, demanding jobs, better healthcare and an end to corruption.
“First thing now should be to kick off the economic wheel,” said Vicky Khoury, a member of the Sabaa Party which emerged out of the civil society movement in Lebanon and succeeded in securing one seat in the parliament. “People are concerned about the economic situation and about their basic needs such as free public healthcare, infrastructure, schools,” she said.
Nasser Yassin, director of research at the Issam Fares institute in the American University of Beirut, said he found nothing original in the formation of the government, but welcomed it anyway.
“The much-awaited government did not bring any groundbreaking news, neither in most names of ministers nor in the limited shuffling of portfolios,” he said. “Still, it is a positive development.”
The San Francisco office of California’s Department of Justice occupies a 14-story tower amid what might the most formidable density of high-tech money and power in the world. The top floor looks across to Twitter’s headquarters, just five blocks away; Facebook is 30 miles down the peninsula in Silicon Valley; and Google not far beyond that.
On the afternoon of February 4, 2015, executives from those companies, as well as Microsoft and other online giants, filed through the building’s doors and into a distinctly unglamorous, windowless below-ground room. They sat in rows. The companies there had made hundreds of billions of dollars collectively during the freewheeling internet boom of the aughts and 2010s, and they weren’t accustomed to being summoned by local law enforcement. If anything, politicians were usually eager to catch a bit of their reflected glamour. President Barack Obama had dined with high-tech CEOs and invited industry leaders to the White House for advice; Hillary Clinton, then preparing her 2016 White House bid, was making speeches in Silicon Valley.
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But as the internet had become a central part of American life, and as social media exploded as a force, concerns were growing that something was going uncontrollably wrong. Just months earlier, a hacker breaking into iCloud had stolen and published the private photographs of a sweeping collection of female celebrities, including the actresses Gabrielle Union, Kirsten Dunst and Jennifer Lawrence. Lawrence, the 24-year-old “Hunger Games” star, called the experience a “sex crime.” And while those stars could afford lawyers and PR experts to fight such a violation, there were uncounted women, and some men, who struggled to reel back horrifying photos of themselves once posted online.
Alongside the tech executives in that room sat lawyers for victims and experts on online harassment. At the head of the group was the person who had brought them all here: the state attorney general, a career public prosecutor named Kamala Harris.
Harris had built much of her career looking out for victims of exploitation, whether that was child abuse or sex trafficking. She had been looking into so-called “revenge porn” for months. And now, as a prosecutor with the full power of California’s legal infrastructure behind her, she had a plan to change the way this online crime was policed. Observers tended to focus on the malicious hackers who broke into accounts and posted them on big national platforms. But Harris had begun to see the real issue as the platforms themselves.
The meeting was closed to the press, and no transcript has been released. But the message was clear, says Danielle Citron, a University of Maryland law professor who was present: This was a serious crime, and it needed to be stopped.
First, don’t call it revenge porn. It’s not, said Harris to start the meeting, recalls Citron.
Harris made the point that this had nothing to do with love affairs gone wrong, and it wasn’t online mischief. It wasn’t even about sex, really. It was a crime, the way domestic abuse was a crime. Said Harris, as Citron remembers it, People do it to torment people. They do it to make money. And to call it pornography is to misunderstand the problem, because there’s no consent, It’s “cyber exploitation,” and let me tell you how it ruins lives.
To Citron, who had been working for years to push this exact issue into the public conversation, it felt like a watershed. She draws a parallel to domestic violence and workplace harassment, serious offenses that were once seen more lightly and largely ignored. Here was the self-described “top cop” in all of California — the country’s biggest state and the geographical center of the global tech industry — making the decision that these were crimes, and uniquely devastating crimes. This meeting was a shot across Silicon Valley’s bow.
Harris didn’t threaten to prosecute the companies, or even flex the considerable muscles she had as AG, but there’s no question the message got through. The next month, Twitter banned nonconsensual intimate photos and videos from its service. That summer, Google began stripping explicit photos from its search results at victims’ request. Next, Microsoft said it would block links to intimate content on its Xbox Live gaming service.
“I cannot emphasize enough how leaders in technology have stepped up,” said Harris during a news conference on cyber exploitation in October of that same year. “I’m not suggesting any of them were happy to get a call from the AG saying, ‘Come in, we want to talk with you.‘ But they all did. They did.”
Harris won a U.S. Senate seat the next year, and launched her presidential campaign last weekend with a rally in Oakland.
But all has not been kumbaya with the tech industry. Harris didn’t go after Facebook or Google directly, but she did launch two high-profile prosecutions for online sexual exploitation, and her aggressive legal tactics—peeling away the legal protections that insulate online platforms from the content they host—have gotten her sideways with many people in her state’s most important industry. Mike Masnick, who writes the influential blog Techdirt and has emerged as a critic, worries that Harris’ approach threatens to destroy an online ecosystem that, despite its problems, has produced a flourishing of ideas and tools and human connections. “It’s something of a populist position,” he says of Harris’ legal push, “but I fear where that populist position ends up undermining the internet as we know and love it.” (Harris, through a spokesperson, declined repeated requests for an interview.)
Now, with the downside of technology again at the center of the national conversation, Harris is almost uniquely positioned among the presidential candidates to understand some of the thorniest issues that face the country on this front, and how government might tackle them. But in the Senate she has been largely quiet. When Congress took up an internet-policing bill closely connected to her own legal work, she barely played a role, and in fact initially refused to sign on.
Why is she sitting it out? Harris has burst quickly onto the national stage; she currently polls behind only Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders among Democrats as a likely challenger to Donald Trump in 2020. Her legal fight against online harassment is one of her most innovative, and least-understood, contributions to public policy. But it’s also potentially toxic with important Democratic constituencies. Harris, by all accounts, is unfazed by such concerns. In her inaugural address as attorney general of California, in 2011, she quoted someone who’d also once held that job: Earl Warren, who later became chief justice of the United States. Said Harris with a laugh, “Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for.”
***
At 54, Harris is a member of the exact cohort of Americans whose careers grew alongside the Internet itself. The year she graduated from Howard University, in 1986, her college yearbook reported that personal computers were becoming a campus “mainstay,” though one professor warned students to save their $3,000 unless they really had a need for one. Howard at the time was linked to five other historically black colleges on a small network; the professor running the project expressed his aspiration to one day connect it to ARPANET, the Defense Department network that within a few years would evolve into what we know as the Internet.
As Harris moved up the legal ladder — a law degree at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco; jobs with the Alameda County district attorney and the San Francisco city attorney — the Internet was growing, too. With it came a spirited debate over what laws should apply to this new realm of civic activity. With the rise of the web, more people began to shift their lives online, and thinkers and philosophers began to stake out this new territory as a special place requiring special protections. In 1996, one of the foundational texts of that debate arrived on the scene: techno-libertarian thinker John Perry Barlow’s “The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which would quickly go what would later be called viral:
“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind,” it began. “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
As sententious as the wording was (in an interview, Barlow would later tell me that he was drunk when he wrote it), it was responding to a very concrete concern. The day Barlow released it, President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act into law — an attempt both to boost the commercial potential of the nascent internet and to tame it. Buried in the Telecommunications Act was a bill called the Communications Decency Act, which made it a federal crime to use the internet to spread “patently offensive” sexual or otherwise graphic content, or push obscene content to minors. Its supporters said this was only necessary to protect children from the excesses of this new medium. (Its champion, Nebraska Democrat James Exon, said on the Senate floor: “The information superhighway should not become a red-light district.”) Barlow and its opponents were horrified: It was as though in this important new digital landscape, the Constitution’s free-speech protections suddenly didn’t apply.
In the years to follow, Barlow and his ilk were ascendant. The Supreme Court struck down major parts of the Communications Decency Act on First Amendment grounds, and other courts did away with much of the rest. It was the techno-libertarians, not the techno-skeptics, who would set the tone for a more freewheeling conception of online life — one that would come to be a bigger sector of the economy than even they might have imagined.
Harris pursued a sprawling set of cases as a public prosecutor in the 1990s and 2000s, from homicides to drug dealing to crimes targeting LGBT people, and developed a reputation as a tough lawyer. “As a career prosecutor,” Harris wrote in her 2010 book Smart on Crime, “I believe that nothing is more important than how we choose to keep ourselves, our families, and each other safe.” In speeches about her inspiration, she quotes civil rights leaders like Cesar Chavez and Fannie Lou Hamer. “My sister, Maya, and I joke we grew up surrounded by a bunch of adults who spent full time marching and shouting about this thing called justice,” she has said more than once.
Much of her work as a prosecutor had little to do with technology. But by the time she ran for attorney general of California in 2010, it had become clear that the internet was not just a commercial bonanza, but also a hyper-efficient mechanism for personal harm, whether by allowing online harassment, or facilitating the easy buying, selling and renting of women, girls, and occasionally men. She won the election; among the challengers she beat was Facebook’s former top lawyer. And it was clear that tech was now in her sights. When she delivered her inaugural remarks on the steps of a Sacramento History Museum, it wasn’t much more than a hundred words into the speech that she promised to protect Californians from “online predators.”
Harris’ focus on technology was fairly novel. It was only three years earlier that Steve Jobs, by then Apple’s CEO, had stood on stage at downtown San Francisco’s Moscone Center to announce the first iPhone, saying what with hindsight was justifiable bravado, “Apple is going to reinvent the phone.” When Harris took office, law enforcement across the country was still struggling to figure out how this ubiquitous new version of the online world would change their jobs. “We quickly realized that everyone who was arrested was arrested with a smartphone. It didn’t matter what the crime was,” says Travis LeBlanc, then a special assistant attorney general and senior adviser to Harris.
But while the technology was new, say those close to Harris, the new state attorney general realized the crimes it enabled were old and familiar ones. In 2012, Harris issued a 134-page report called “The State of Human Trafficking in California,” and the role of technology figured prominently. Harris has called trafficking “modern day slavery,” and in the report she said that the internet was making it worse, with perpetrators now using social media, online marketplaces, and other digital tools to both find and sell victims, often anonymously. The situation, wrote Harris, was “atrocious.”
Harris was uniquely poised to do something about it. She had a sprawling department of more than 4,000 workers and a budget of over $800 million, and she had a powerful legal tool in California’s Constitution, which, unlike the U.S. Constitution, includes an explicit right to privacy.
When it came to technology, she took a multiprong approach, and one that often roamed far afield from the courtroom. She engaged in what she likes to call “convenings” with tech companies, in sessions like the 2015 basement meeting. She pushed for legislation to expand local officials’ ability to prosecute cybercrimes in which either victim or perpetrators lived outside their home district. If that approach to the job sounds exhausting, her staff agrees: “She wants to solve every single problem out there, the world’s biggest problems,” LeBlanc told me. “And there are obviously only 24 hours in a day. She’s only one person. Her staff are [each] only one person.”
In trying to push Silicon Valley firms to change their behavior, Harris borrowed from a civil-rights tactic called “interest convergence theory,” which holds that advocates make progress when they can show how their causes align with the self-interest of those in power. Tech companies should want to make their websites and platforms safer, her argument went, because people who feel unsafe will leave them. That hurts corporate bottom lines.
If that appeal to self-interest failed, she made it clear she was also willing to play a more traditional game: “I’m very well aware that I have a carrot and a stick,” Harris has said. “I prefer to start with the carrot. But I’m also prepared to use the stick.”
As Harris’ push gained momentum, she began triggering criticism that she was running roughshod over some fundamental rights, including free speech. One case involved a bill she’d sponsored just before taking office as attorney general, when she was San Francisco’s district attorney. Harris pushed to ban registered sex offenders from using any social media sites. Though the idea might have seemed like a smart way to stop online predators, it’s also of questionable legality. “It’s the type of thing that might get you some votes, but that will also get you a constitutional challenge,” says Chris Hoofnagle, a professor of internet law at the University of California at Berkeley. The bill did not pass. (The U.S. Supreme Court would in 2017 strike down a similar North Carolina ban; Justice Anthony Kennedy, a civil-libertarian voice on the court, said the state was wrong to cut off access to “perhaps the most powerful mechanisms available to a private citizen today to make his or her voice heard.”)
Those around Harris say that Harris knew she was walking a fine line on cyber-exploitation, but thought it one worth walking. As Citron, the Maryland law professor puts it, Harris wanted to answer the question: “How do you address this problem without letting anti-porn lunatics take over?”
***
On October 7, 2016, an airplane arrived from Amsterdam at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. Onboard was an executive named Carl Ferrer, the CEO of Backpage.com, an online martketplace for everything from used cars to odd jobs to strippers, a business said to be worth more than a half-billion dollars. Waiting for Ferrer when he landed was a team of local law enforcement agents, who arrested him on a warrant issued by Harris in California.
Backpage was by far the biggest internet fish Kamala Harris had gone after. The arrest warrant alleged that Ferrer oversaw the posting of paidads for prostitutes, including minors. Working with Texas authorities, she also had Backpage’s Dallas offices raided. The case would turn out to be something of an embarrassment in legal terms. But it was a huge political win for Harris, and it embodied exactly the mix of political ambition and legal risk-taking that makes people in the tech world nervous about her.
By that time, Harris had already notched one major win in her campaign against internet harassment. In 2013, she had arrested a 27-year-old San Diego resident named Kevin Bollaert who ran a website called UGotPosted. Its business model was as vicious as it was simple: It solicited nude photos along with the personal details — name, address, Facebook profile — of the people in them. The photos had often been stolen, or taken in secret and posted without consent. Once Bollaert posted the photos and details, often triggering a barrage of phone and online harassment of the women in the pictures, Bollaert would then charge victims to have them removed.
Bollaert’s defense was that his site was a neutral platform, and he had no legal liability for what people posted there. It was a defense based on Section 230, a piece of federal law that had survived, orphanlike, from when the courts scuttled most of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Section 230 limited the liability of so-called online intermediaries, declaring that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” In the 20-plus years since, this one passage of the law had become a linchpin of internet freedom, and a rallying point for the techno-libertarians whose thinking dominated Silicon Valley. At the highest level, it protected Facebook, Twitter and others from being held responsible for illegal content their users posted. At the lowest, it protected operators like Bollaert the same way. Bollaert argued that his nude-photo platform and his take-down service, a sister company called ChangeMyReputation.com, which purported to be a straightforward online reputation-management service, were protected because his was an open platform.
“Is it illegal to host a website where bad things happen?,” asked Bollaert’s attorney in her closing argument. “Is it illegal to hold up a big blank canvas to anyone who wants to paint it?”
In one sense, Harris’ case simply ignored the “internet” part of Bollaert’s internet operation and treated his behavior as real-world crimes; her office charged him with both extortion and identity theft. But many also saw it as a direct attempt to weaken a law that was protecting a huge and important industry. Harris and her team argued that it was clear that Bollaert’s site wasn’t like Facebook or Twitter, open platforms where users decide what to post. Bollaert, instead, was a publisher. One legal analyst who worked on the case attempted to upload to UGotPosted a photo of her cat, named Shiloh. The cat photo was rejected, which the prosecutors said was proof Bollaert was actively managing the site with the goal of exploiting real people.
A jury agreed, and Bollaert was found guilty and sentenced to 18 years in prison. In a press statement on the day of his conviction, Harris declared it a landmark in holding bad actors accountable, even online. “Sitting behind a computer, committing what is essentially a cowardly and criminal act, will not shield predators from the law or jail,” she said. Bollaert appealed, but the court found that by requiring identifying details on victims before they were posted, Bollaert was actively engaged in posting the offending content, and was thus not protected by Section 230. Harris had scored the country’s first major revenge porn conviction — and it wasn’t lost on advocates that she had done it by whittling down the definition of a protected site.
The Backpage case she prosecuted in 2016 was much bigger, and Harris tried to take it one step further. An online classified site, Backpage had been launched in 2004 by the owners of the country’s largest chain of alternative newsweeklies as a way to tap into the digital ad revolution triggered by Craigslist. It became known for its “adult” section, which critics said was a hub for illegal prostitution — some of it nonconsensual — and human trafficking, including that of minors. Law enforcement officials had been watching Backpage from the start, and had been trying, with little success, to get Backpage taken down. Backpage wasn’t simply an online classified site, they believed: It functioned as an online brothel, with the full knowledge of its operators.
Backpage, however, had largely operated with the protection of Section 230. Its owners argued that they were running a legitimate classified ad platform and weren’t liable for how people chose to use that ad space.
Harris decided to come at them head-on. After a three-year investigation by her office, Harris had Ferrer arrested on charges of pimping and pandering. Harris herself was given play-by-play updates during the dramatic arrest and raid in Texas, according to her staff. Ferrer was extradited to California and jailed. The prosecutors’ request for a warrant argued that it was “obvious” that ads on the Backpage site were for illegal prostitution and trafficking, and that Ferrer and other company stakeholders, who were also charged, were knowingly profiting from those postings. “The Communications Decency Act was not meant to a shield from criminal prosecution for perpetrators of online brothels,” said Harris. Her de facto chief of staff at the time, Venus Johnson, put it more bluntly in a recent interview: “It was a long time coming,” she said.
That wasn’t how Backpage’s lawyers saw it. “Frankly outrageous,” one of Backpage’s attorneys called Harris’ theory of the prosecution. He pointed to a 2013 letter to Congress by 49 attorneys general of U.S. states and territories — including Harris — which argued that Section 230 needed to be amended to allow state officials to prosecute sex trafficking crimes. In other words, she knew full well that Section 230 didn’t allow her to press this case. This wasn’t the Bollaert case, Ferrer’s lawyers argued. Ferrer had taken a hands-off approach to the site, and thus was inarguably legally protected.
There was one other important fact about the arrest: It occurred just weeks before the November 2016 election, in which Harris was running for U.S. Senate.
The dramatic arrest was widely covered not only in California newspapers, but by USA Today, NPR, CNN, the New York Times, and scores of other publications. Harris featured prominently in the coverage. Backpage’s general counsel, in a press statement, called Ferrer’s arrest and the office raid “an election-year stunt, not a good faith action by law enforcement.” In a statement released to the public as they asked a judge to drop the charges, Backpage shareholders Michael Lacey and James Larkin, who were charged alongside Ferrer, added a few digs of their own: “Make no mistake; Kamala Harris has won all that she was looking to win when she had us arrested,” they said. “Like Sheriff [Joe] Arpaio, she issued her sanctimonious public statement, controlled her media cycle and got her ‘perp walk’ on the evening news.”
On the legal front, at least, the court agreed with Backpage. On December 9, 2016, a Superior Court judge threw out Harris’ case on Section 230 grounds. “Any rational mind would concur that the selling of minors for the purpose of sex is particularly horrifying,” wrote Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman. But, said the judge, the government’s hands were tied by free speech and the law of the internet: “Congress has spoken on this matter and it is for Congress, not this Court to revisit.” Harris, in a statement, called herself “extremely disappointed” by Bowman’s ruling.
LeBlanc, Harris’ one-time senior adviser, who by then had moved to a job back in Washington running a bureau of the Federal Communications Commission, called it “an innovative lawsuit.” Added LeBlanc, “when you do something that hasn’t been done before, there’s some risk that you take.”
By that time, however, there wasn’t much risk for Harris herself: She had easily won the Senate seat in a 25-point victory over rival Loretta Sanchez. Harris refiled an amended set of charges and left for Washington. The California Department of Justice stayed focused on Backpage, and the next California attorney general, former congressman Xavier Becerra, would keep up the pursuit, focusing on the more technical complaint that Backpage’s operators had committed bank fraud by disguising the true origins of their revenue from payment processors skittish about working with the site. In April 2018, Ferrer pled guilty to state and federal counts of money laundering and conspiracy. Federal authorities, pursuing their own charges, seized the site and Backpage shut its doors.
At some level, Harris’ prosecution worked. Her aggressive approach had opened the door to the case that eventually took down the site. And to her supporters who saw her crusade as long overdue, it was a win — however tortured the road. To the tech world, however, it was clear that Harris was willing to steamroll the legal protections the industry considered, and still considers, central to its business model. “Her position was perfectly clear,” says Eric Goldman, professor at Santa Clara University’s law school, and head of its institute of technology. “She was doing everything in her power to undermine Backpage, and she was willing to sacrifice Section 230 to do it.”
***
When Harris took her seat in the Senate, she became arguably one of the most tech-savvy members of a body sorely lacking in digital know-how. But she hasn’t made technology her key issue in Washington, and if anything has shied away from the topic.
In the fall of 2017, she and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Sen. Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, introduced a bill that would criminalize the knowing distribution of revenge porn, but it never attracted a single Senate co-sponsor beyond the original three. She did pose questions to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his April 2018 Senate hearing, and COO Sheryl Sandberg that September, but otherwise hasn’t been a high-profile player in the debates over Facebook’s privacy violations.
Her most notable absence came on the issue closest to her own record. In the spring of 2018, Congress debated and passed a bill that would change how Section 230 applies to sex-trafficking cases, freeing state and federal officials alike to bring prosecutions. The federal measure was targeted at Backpage, but would also apply more widely to online operators. Silicon Valley dug in against it, with Google calling it a “disaster”: making online platforms more liable for sex-trafficking content would lower their incentive to police for it, the company argued. In September 2017, New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof published an industry-shaming column called “Google and Sex Traffickers Like Backpage.com.” After winning some wording changes and once its passage looked inevitable, mainstream tech companies later dropped their opposition to the bill.
The issue would normally be squarely in Harris’ wheelhouse, but she played no public role in either drafting or advancing the bill. In fact, she was not among its original 25 backers in the Senate, and initially balked at signing the bill at all, though she eventually added her name to the measure three months after it was introduced. Those close to her say she and her staff worried that the bill was so vaguely written that companies, unsure how to comply with it, would simply stop attempting to clean up their platforms.
Did Harris’ White House ambitions lead her to back off? If history is any guide, political figures can get eviscerated when they’re seen as cracking down on free speech: In the 1980s, Tipper Gore was vilified by critics for pushing for parental advisory labels. And in the mid-2000s Hillary Clinton was hotly criticized for attempting to impose restrictions on violent video games. Said Clinton at the time, “We need to treat violent video games the way we treat tobacco, alcohol, and pornography.”
Harris’ aggressive record on online exploitation could pose a problem with two core Democratic constituencies: civil libertarians, who serve as an ideological validator inside the party, and the tech industry, which has served as a cultural one — not to mention the major fundraising power of Silicon Valley.
Evan Engstrom is the executive director of Engine, a California-based policy advocacy group representing small tech companies. He worked closely with Harris’ Senate office on the sex-trafficking bill, which his group opposed. “Obviously there was a lot of skepticism going in because of the positions she took as AG,” says Engstrom. “Her reputation wasn’t all that great. But I can say with enthusiasm that they were responsive, engaged and thoughtful.”
Still, Harris hasn’t appeased all critics. Says Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, “in a lot of circles, she’s certainly looked upon as being friendly to tech, of having a close relationship with tech, and I wish that were more true.”
Goldman, the Santa Clara professor, says that we’re already beginning to see the negative repercussions of a chipping away of free speech online in a way that diminishes the online world. Craigslist has taken down its own adult section. Tumblr now bans “adult content,” including depictions of genitalia and sex acts. And Patreon, a platform for artists and other creators to connect with supporters, has banned from its platform fundraising for the production of legal pornographic material. Says Goldman, “One way to think about it is the Internet has shrunk a bit. The boundaries have moved in.”
As a candidate for president, Harris would benefit greatly for having tech show up big for her, not just merely see her as acceptable. Harris could likely use the U.S. tech industry’s financial largess. She’s been a government lawyer all her life — the only client she’s ever had, she has said, has been the people of California; her top salary as attorney general was $157,000, less than some of her staff earned. Silicon Valley has become a major stop on Democrats’ fundraising circuit, the way Hollywood once was. During her 2016 run, she took in a bit of tech money — some $214,000 from the internet industry, per the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign fundraising. But she raised far more from the television, movie and music industries that have long been critical of the internet, to the tune of nearly a million dollars.
LeBlanc, the former California special assistant attorney general, now a lawyer in private practice in Washington, D.C., says that Harris isn’t blind to possible tensions with the tech industry, and their effect on what’s next for her in politics. She’s just not distracted by them. “Every elected official in any state is concerned about where their major industries are on issues,” says LeBlanc, “but I think she follows her own moral compass.”
What remains today for Harris is a reputation on tech that is largely in the eye of the beholder. Harris is, at once, a tech-savvy law enforcement official who looked the internet’s dark side squarely in the eye, a single-minded tough-on-crime type who cared little about her effect on digital world, a circumspect state official who ultimately did not go hard enough on her home state’s biggest tech corporations, a creative regulator who came up with nuanced solutions to high-tech problems, or—depending on the case, legal question or even day—some blend of all those.
“She was in the heart of Silicon Valley and she didn’t take no nonsense,” says Danielle Citron, the law professor. “I think her preference is, ‘It’s good for business, but let’s figure out how it’s good for society.’ I don’t think she’s cowed by anybody.””
If you’ve seen their birthday messages to each other, or that glorious photo of them at the “Christmas sweater” party together, you’ll know that Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman’s relationship is largely based on their shared desire to totally destroy one another.
Well, not anymore. Apparently the feud has come to an end.
I feel the most tense right after a kill. There’s still a job to finish and an escape to stage. It’s never easy, and if I fail… that’s it. I can’t go after the target ever again.
That’s the brilliance of Hitman 2‘s Elusive Target challenges. They’re available in the game for two weeks. If you manage to get your target before time runs out, you unlock a new outfit for your assassin avatar. But if you take your shot and die trying, you can never access that mission again. Every risk you take is trailed by worry and dread, but pulling off a successful hit feels incredible.
Hitman 2 is already a tension-filled experience. Fundamentally, it’s a stealth game where every level is set in an open, freely explorable space. You have a target or targets and no real rules to follow, beyond “don’t die.” The disguises you use, the weapons you pick up, the intel you find and act upon — all of it depends on your powers of observation and patience.
Elusive Targets always appear in one of Hitman 2‘s existing levels, usually accompanied by minimal-to-moderate changes to the way things are laid out. A room you’re used to hiding out in may be repurposed for something related to the time-limited target, for example.
They’re different enough that you don’t feel like you’re rehashing an old mission, but familiar enough that you can go in like an old pro. You can use your knowledge of map layouts and interior spaces to your advantage. You can even pick up on clues in the trailer that accompanies every one of these challenges.
The latest Elusive Target sends Agent 47, the game’s star, after a target known as The Appraiser. The setting is the Isle of Sgail, a location from one of Hitman 2‘s later missions. This sprawling island is home to a restored castle that serves as the site of a big nighttime party for evil, masked billionaires.
Take a look at the setup.
Miranda Jamison has been polluting the art world for far too long. Be sure she’s taken care of, Agents.#Hitman2’s third Elusive Target, The Appraiser, is now active in the Isle of Sgail. pic.twitter.com/hvUG1vHq8Z
That trailer is everything you know going in, so when you start, your first task is to locate your target and get a sense of their movement patterns. You need to think about how you might isolate them, or catch them unaware during a private moment. Before even that, you also probably need to nab yourself a few disguises to ensure you have access to the right locations.
Elusive Targets operate under a couple rules. You can try these missions as many times as you want while they’re active. You don’t get permanently locked out unless you die during an attempt, or fail in some other way after you’ve completed at least one objective but before you escape.
So you’re free — as I did here, and always do — to jump in and fart around with relatively few worries until you actually have a plan you’re ready to act upon. If your cover is blown during a recon run, you can always quit and start over. I did that too.
Every risk you take is trailed by dread, but pulling off a successful hit feels incredible.
Eventually, I found The Appraiser. I followed her. I found her forgery room, and the precious notebook she kept there. I watched her leave the room and walk into an alley to take a phone call. Her guard, always a few feet away, turned around to give her privacy.
I found my moment. It was pure opportunity. No one was watching her, and no one could see me hiding in a door in the alley. I took out my silenced pistol and did the deed, then slipped away as guards rushed in to investigate after The Appraiser suddenly crumbled to the ground.
But this was hardly mission accomplished. I still needed to procure her notebook, then get both it and myself to one of the island’s escape locations. (A hit is never finished until you escape.) I’d need to do some more sneaking, but my murder left everyone on high alert. It meant more people patrolling the map would see right through my disguises if I got too close.
These are the most tense moments in any Elusive Target. You’ve committed, and locked yourself into either finishing now or failing forever. But this time, I did it. I got the notebook. I avoided the guards. I fled the island by boat. All without ever being spotted. I was grinning for a good 20 minutes after the results screen hailed my success.
Remember: This is a new, free addition to the game that launched on Jan. 25. It’ll be gone for everyone on Feb. 3, but sooner or later another one will come along. And in the meantime, there are plenty of other reasons to revisit Hitman 2. Things like Escalation Contracts, added on a regular basis, which give you one target and five increasingly difficult sets of rules you must adhere to when pursuing that target.
There’s also the entire previous game. When Hitman 2 launched, it arrived alongside a download pack containing remastered versions of every level from the 2016 game. All the new toys and features in the sequel work with those older levels. Best of all, owning the first game meant you could get the remastered pack for free.
PlayStation Plus users especially should take note of all this. The 2016 game is one of the subscriber-only free game downloads for Feb. 2019. If you get it during the month and then later pick up the sequel, you’ll enjoy that same benefit.
This game is a gift that keeps on giving. Even if you just play through every story mission once and never again — a terrible idea! — there’s still a steady supply of new stuff being added to keep you busy on a monthly basis. Hitman 2 has great fundamentals, but the fact that it’s constantly inviting you back with new reasons and ways to play — that’s what makes it exception.
India’s government has announced a massive increase in spending for rural areas and projected the country to become a $5 trillion economy in the next five years.
In a bid to assuage voters unhappy with Prime Minister Narendra Modi‘s leadership and rising living costs, the government on Friday announced a basic annual income for farmers, benefits for workers in the unorganised labour sector and tax exemptions for the middle class as part of its last interim budget before elections.
Among the important announcements in the federal budget were big ticket farm giveaways, with a major farm income support scheme costing 750 billion rupees ($10.5bn) and tax cuts for the middle class.
Piyush Goyal, India‘s acting finance minister, presented the budget in the absence of Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, who is on medical leave.
Spending for rural areas
The government will allocate 600 billion rupees ($8.4bn) per year for farmer income, Goyal said.
The ruling BJP party is aiming to shore up support among voters in rural areas, where two-thirds of India’s 1.3 billion people live, with plenty of measures announced to boost the rural economy.
The government also said it would spend 190 billion rupees ($2.6bn) for the construction of rural roads.
Goyal announced handouts of 6000 rupees ($84) per year for small farmers owning less than 2 hectares (20000 square metres) of farmland. The government says this would aid 120 million farm families and would be directly transferred to bank accounts of farmers.
“Under the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi, 6000 rupees per year for each farmer, in three instalments, to be transferred directly to farmers’ bank accounts, for farmers with less than 2 hectares landholding,” Goyal told the lower house of parliament.
The finance minister said the government would provide up to 5 percent interest subvention to farmers hit by natural calamities.
The government also proposes to provide 2 percent interest subvention for farmers pursuing animal husbandry and fisheries.
This budget is a clear sentiment changer, at least among the middle class.
The government projects a 2018/19 fiscal deficit of 3.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), the acting finance minister said, slightly above its 3.3 percent target.
“This is the second consecutive year that the budget discipline appears to have been lost,” said Prakash Sakpal, Asia Economist at ING in Singapore. “This doesn’t come as a total surprise given that this is the election year and the government is poised to do as much as it could in a bid for reelection.This package of 750 billion rupees ($10.5bn) is a bit above what we expected but it just goes to tell you that this is a vote seeking thing.”
Goyal also announced plans to provide a pension of 3000 rupees ($42) per month for unorganised sector workers over the age of 60. The scheme would cover 100 million workers in India’s unorganised sector.
In a move aimed at shoring up support among India’s the middle class, Goyal announced a full tax rebate on annual income up to 500,000 rupees ($7030), as ruling party lawmakers, including the Prime Minister, thumped their desks in parliament in approval.
India’s financial markets rose steadily on Friday morning.
The domestic stock market registered strong gains as the S&P BSE Sensex surged as much as 449.72 points, while the Nifty50 barometer of the National Stock Exchange rose by 127.8 points on Friday afternoon.
First farmers, then unorganised sector, then govt employees, now MSMEs… This Budget speech is divided into vote banks more than anything else #InterimBudget2019
The new announcements come as India enters an intense political season with what are expected to be keenly fought general elections.
Growing rural distress and a resultant set of shock defeats in recent state elections have put pressure on the government to expand social spending.
Lack of jobs
“The biggest problem in India today is that we have record unemployment,” Mohan Guruswamy, economist and former economic adviser to the federal government, told Al Jazeera. “There’s no mention of that today. The only way you can address unemployment is by increasing capital expenditure. Capital expenditure allocated by the government in this budget is 3.36 lakh crores [3.36 trillion rupees], about 2% of the GDP. This does not help at all.”
Modi’s BJP party, in power since 2014, has not made good on promises to create jobs for 10 million young people each year.
On Thursday, The Business Standard, an Indian daily newspaper, reported that an official survey withheld by the government shows India’s unemployment rate in 2017/18 rose to its highest level in at least 45 years.
More than 900 million people will be eligible to cast votes in the Indian elections due by May, the world’s biggest ever democratic exercise.
In previous votes, political parties have been rewarded with electoral success on the back of welfare schemes for the poor and subsistence farmers.
“The budget really covers all the key segments, the voter classes, that would decide the fate of the Modi government,” said Charu Chanana, Deputy Head of Asia Research Asia, Continuum Economics in Singapore. “But then of course we still are dealing with the impacts of the unpopular de-monetisation program and the implementation of the GST which is what led to the decline of the popularity of Prime Minister Modi.”
“So I think it’s a good response to some of the opposition claims that they made in the recent weeks about launching a universal basic income if they were voted into power. So It’s a good response on that front. But I think it’s a risky game,” she added.
British Prime Minister Theresa May has pledged to go back to Brussels and reopen negotiations on the withdrawal agreement with the European Union after MPs on Tuesday voted in favour of replacing the backstop – a safety net to prevent a hard Irish border – with “alternative arrangements”.
MPs also approved a non-binding amendment against leaving the EU without a deal.
On January 15, parliament overwhelmingly rejected May’s withdrawal agreement by 432 votes to 202.
After that resounding defeat, the result this week was hailed by some commentators as a success for May, who backed the amendment tabled by Conservative MP Graham Brady, seen as an attempt to get Conservative politicians against the backstop to vote for her deal.
May is to take any request to Brussels on a yet unspecified date, hoping that parliament’s support of the backstop amendment will serve to persuade EU negotiators she can get a deal through and avoid a no-deal scenario.
However, the amendment does not come with any guarantee that MPs will vote in favour of any revised deal on February 14, a day after May is due to report back to parliament.
European reaction
EU officials have repeatedly ruled out reopening negotiations with the United Kingdom.
Minutes after the vote, a spokesperson for European Council President Donald Tusk said: “The withdrawal agreement is and remains the best and only way to ensure an orderly withdrawal of the UK from the European Union. The backstop is part of the withdrawal agreement, and the withdrawal agreement is not open for renegotiation.”
Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, said Tuesday’s vote had “further increased the risk of a disorderly exit” while the clock keeps ticking towards March 29, the date of the UK’s scheduled departure from the EU.
Until the EU has sight of what those changes are, I can’t see them moving their position. What is clear, is that no one has come up with proposals that are acceptable to the EU that would replace the backstop.
David Phinnemore, professor of European Politics at Queen’s University, Belfast
The backstop, a compromise to avoid a hard border in the island of Ireland, is seen as one of the main stumbling blocks in the way of achieving a deal with the EU that the UK parliament can approve.
Eurosceptic conservative MPs argue that without a time limit, the backstop would dilute Brexit by potentially binding the UK in a customs union with the EU in perpetuity.
“There’s obviously clear opposition in the Tory party to elements of the withdrawal agreement,” David Phinnemore, a professor of European Politics at Queen’s University, Belfast, told Al Jazeera.
“Whether that translates into greater bargaining power is very much open to question. Until the EU has sight of what those changes are, I can’t see them moving their position. What is clear, is that no one has come up with proposals that are acceptable to the EU that would replace the backstop,” he added.
“There are opinion polls that suggest the majority [of people] in northern Ireland is comfortable with the terms of withdrawal,” Phinnemore explained.
“A lot of people do appreciate that if the backstop were to be enforced, there would be increased controls between Great Britain and Northern Ireland in terms of the movement of goods, but there are going to be changes in customs as a consequence of Brexit. I think more people would say that is the cost they are willing to bear, rather than see a hard border in the island of Ireland.”
A hard border in Ireland would have economic as well as political implications, strangling local agriculture, which relies heavily on cross-border trade.
Various sectors of the business community in the UK have called on the government to rule out a no deal, which would mean that existing trade agreements between the UK and the EU would end overnight. Countries across the EU have also announced beginning preparations for such a scenario.
“Italy’s exports towards the UK count towards five percent of the country’s total exports,” Antonio Villafranca, co-head of the Europe and Global Governance programme at the Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI) in Italy told Al Jazeera.
“I don’t agree with those who say this will have no effect. We have a trade surplus with the UK of 12 billion euros ($13.7bn), including some key export sectors,” he continued.
Figures by the Italian Statistics Agency (ISTAT) published this week show Italy’s economy fell into a recession as it shrank by 0.2 percent in the last three months of 2018. The whole of the eurozone is facing sluggish growth, with Germany – its largest economy – expected to grow at the slowest pace in six years in 2019, according to the country’s economy ministry.
The problem is not what the EU would lose from a no deal. It’s that if avoiding a no deal it’s going to be more damaging, it’s not going to do it.
Benjamin Martill, UK-EU relations researcher at LSE
Estimates by the Dutch Court of Audit have put the cost of a no-deal Brexit for the Netherlands at 2.3 billion euros ($2.6bn) by 2023.
“Certainly there would be consequences for Italy, for Ireland most of all, for the Netherlands and Germany.
“But repercussions would be far worse for the UK as 50 percent of its trade is with the EU. Add to that 16 percent of trade it has with non-EU countries at zero tariffs through EU deals,” Villafranca continued. “And so far, the EU has demonstrated absolute unity on this.”
For Benjamin Martill, a Dahrendorf Forum post-doctoral fellow at the London School of Economics researching UK-EU relations, what the EU stands to lose from a bad deal outweighs the losses it would incur from a no deal scenario.
If the EU wants to prevent a no deal outcome, it could cause damage by throwing Ireland “under the bus at the last minute”, he said.
Such a move would prove the Brexiteers right when they said the EU couldn’t hold its nerves, he added, “and would … open up again this problem of giving Britain a seemingly good deal, and inviting all of the other member states to come out and say, we’d like a deal like this”.
“That moral hazard is still very much there. So the problem is not what the EU would lose from a no deal. It’s that if avoiding a no deal, it’s going to be more damaging, it’s not going to do it.”
Following the takedown of hundreds of pages and groups linked to Iran on Thursday, Facebook has continued its cull in Indonesia.
The social media giant has been targeting “coordinated inauthentic behavior” on the platform, announcing the same the removal of accounts, pages, and groups linked to the Saracen Group.
Described as a “fake news syndicate,” the Saracen Group has been under the spotlight for its smear campaigns against Indonesian politicians and other people.
According to The Straits Times, the syndicate reportedly charged $5,600 for a customised fake news article, which would then be disseminated to its hundreds of thousands of followers.
207 Facebook Pages, 800 Facebook accounts, 546 Facebook groups, and 208 Instagram accounts were closed down as part of the takedown.
It includes pages and groups with titles such as “ac milan indo,” “Darknet ID,” and “Kata Warga” (“Citizens said”). At least one of these pages had at least 170,000 followers, while at least one Instagram account had at least 65,000 followers.
“We’re taking down these Pages, groups and accounts based on their behavior, not the content they were posting,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy, said in a statement online.
“In this case, the people behind this activity coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves, and that was the basis for our action.”
In January, Facebook also action against digital marketing group Twinmark Media Enterprises in the Philippines for similar reasons.
Facebook’s seemingly increased vigilance in Asia comes after it was found to not have done enough to stop offline violence and division in Myanmar, where the social network was used to spread anti-Muslim and anti-Rohingya sentiment.
Congratulations to my lil bro Jokic aka “Big Honey” on his first & much deserved all star selection. Proud of you big fella! Happy to watch you grow from ya rookie season to the best center in the league! Keep going kid you have no ceilings!
Rudy deserved to be named an All-Star. Complete non-sense and we need more integrity and accountability. If the coaches vote than their ballots should be made public.
This Needs to Happen
Stri:(a @StrikaNation24_
If D’Angelo Russell gets Oladipo’s spot in the all star game, when he gets introduced he should bring a phone with him to the stage and then throw it backstage as his name gets announced https://t.co/1TnB9te1Ye
Everyone Wanted Rudy
Josh Lloyd @redrock_bball
I don’t agree with Klay or Aldridge in. Gobert, Tobias
He’s Not Gonna Be Happy
Tim MacMahon @espn_macmahon
The Jazz fully expected Rudy Gobert to receive his first All-Star selection. This will not go over well in Utah.
The Snub Is Real
Ben Dowsett @Ben_Dowsett
It’s totally conceivable that Rudy Gobert could win consecutive Defensive Player of the Year Awards without making the All-Star game in either season.
Says a lot about how the sides of the ball are evaluated, even by coaches.
Fair Point
sreekar @sreekyshooter
Rudy Gobert should’ve made the All-Star game but consider this: Jazz fans being extremely angry for the next week will probably be more entertaining than the All-Star game itself
Congratulations to my lil bro Jokic aka “Big Honey” on his first & much deserved all star selection. Proud of you big fella! Happy to watch you grow from ya rookie season to the best center in the league! Keep going kid you have no ceilings!
Rudy deserved to be named an All-Star. Complete non-sense and we need more integrity and accountability. If the coaches vote than their ballots should be made public.
This Needs to Happen
Stri:(a @StrikaNation24_
If D’Angelo Russell gets Oladipo’s spot in the all star game, when he gets introduced he should bring a phone with him to the stage and then throw it backstage as his name gets announced https://t.co/1TnB9te1Ye
Everyone Wanted Rudy
Josh Lloyd @redrock_bball
I don’t agree with Klay or Aldridge in. Gobert, Tobias
He’s Not Gonna Be Happy
Tim MacMahon @espn_macmahon
The Jazz fully expected Rudy Gobert to receive his first All-Star selection. This will not go over well in Utah.
The Snub Is Real
Ben Dowsett @Ben_Dowsett
It’s totally conceivable that Rudy Gobert could win consecutive Defensive Player of the Year Awards without making the All-Star game in either season.
Says a lot about how the sides of the ball are evaluated, even by coaches.
Fair Point
sreekar @sreekyshooter
Rudy Gobert should’ve made the All-Star game but consider this: Jazz fans being extremely angry for the next week will probably be more entertaining than the All-Star game itself
Bangkok, Thailand – The small park in Bangkok’s Rama III district is mostly popular with runners circling its neatly trimmed garden track to the sound of birdsong.
But on Thursday, they were joined by a convoy of fire trucks and half a dozen military drones, drawing dozens of curious onlookers.
After an hour setting up, the drones and water cannon were pumping thick plumes of water into the empty sky above. Speakers blared warnings about the operation and instructed runners to keep their distance.
The odd display was the Thai government’s latest attempt at curbing the alarmingly high levels of pollution that have been plaguing the capital for weeks. The drones, geared with water tanks and fire-fighting sprinklers, were supposed to break up the smog that has been smothering the city of around 10 million people for at least a month.
Initially, Thailand‘s authorities said the worsening pollution was being blown over from China, predicting that it would be gone within a week or so. Then, as the smog persisted, they tried cloud seeding. Now, drones and water cannon are their latest salvo.
“Do they actually think this is going to help?” asked Gong, a 50 year-old man who comes to the park often to use its free-weight gym.
“The only thing happening today is that runners are getting wet and they have to watch out for these drones,” he said, drawing laughter from weightlifters nearby.
Thailand deployed water cannon and drones to a local park in Bangkok to try and disperse the toxic smog that’s been hanging over the city for weeks [Caleb Quinley/Al Jazeera]
Toxic air
As amusing as they might have have found the scene, Bangkok residents are welcoming any attempts to combat the toxic smog that has forced authorities to close more than 400 schools, advise people to wear a mask when they’re not indoors and limit the time they spend outside. New research from Thailand’s National Institute of Development Administration (NIDA) suggests Bangkok’s air has reached particularly concerning levels of toxicity, with the lingering smog being full of dangerous heavy metals and various carcinogenic compounds.
Professor Siwatt Pongpiachan, director of NIDA and a global leading expert on urban pollution, told Al Jazeera he was concerned to find that Bangkok’s air contained dangerous levels of cadmium, tungsten, arsenic and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) inside the fine dust air, known as PM 2.5.
Siwatt explained that their levels are particularly dangerous, based on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) standards for measuring safe air, adding that Bangkok’s pollution was largely coming from within the city itself.
Drones have been used as part of Thailand’s efforts to shift the smog that’s settled over the city [Caleb Quinley/Al Jazeera]
PAHs are toxic carcinogenic compounds that can be sourced to forest fires, car exhausts, cigarette smoke and insecticides, among others.
The Thai capital, meanwhile, has some 10 million registered vehicles pollutant-pumping factories and numerous daily cremations.
Siwatt said the widespread burning of sugarcane fields in northern provinces is also contributing to the crisis, which makes tackling the problem extremely difficult.
The WHO has been campaigning to decrease toxic pollution around the globe for years, educating the public on the dangers to health and urging governments to prioritise clean air as megacities such as Delhi and Beijing struggle with debilitating levels of pollution. Its guideline for PM2.5 is for an annual average of no more than 10 micrograms per m3.
‘Sense of urgency’
Bangkok has never seen pollution on this scale, and many residents were shocked at the smog lurking above. On social media, where Thais often go to express their outrage, memes comparing the city to post-apocalyptic backdrops in films such as Bladerunner 2049 and Mad Max have been widely shared.
Many are concerned the government is focusing on the symptoms rather than the cause of the problem.
“I think we need to push the government with a sense of urgency if we want to see positive results,” said Sirima Panyametheekul, an academic in the Department of Environmental Engineering at Thailand’s Chulalongkorn University . “We need urgent measures to be implemented, like reducing the density of traffic and cleaning the streets.”
Thailand also needs to adopt more stringent measures of PM2.5, he added.
The density of the microscopic particles can reach 50 micrograms per m3 before the government has to act, according to Sirima, who recommends that level be halved.
Currently, air quality is sitting around 61 to 93 micrograms per m3 depending on the location.
“I know that’s challenging,” she said. “But it’s important. If not 25, we can at least start at 35 or 30.”
Women protective mask at the bus stop in heavy air pollution in Bangkok last month. [Sakchai Lalit/AP Photo]
Need for legislation
The government, which dropped a plan to use sugar water that was supposed to “capture” the toxins, stands by its approach to the current air crisis.
“It’s going to work,” said Somjiak Nonthagaew, the director of Bangkok’s Fire and Rescue Department, on deploying drones and fire-fighting equipment to combat the smog.
“It should definitely help, but of course not 100 percent. We would have liked to do more, but we have limited options and resources. But we sprayed at six locations today, and we think it was a success,” added Nonthagaew, between shouting loud updates into his phone as mist began to descend over the park.
But Siwatt is not convinced.
He says Thailand needs to develop policies that would reduce the toxic compounds in the air, citing neighbouring countries such as Singapore and the Philippines. He’s also urging authorities to introduce a Clean Air Act, like the one the British government rolled out after the deadly 1952 London Smog, which blanketed the UK capital for several days.
Thai authorities say that the current smog should lift in a few days as a result of their tackling operations. According to Somjiak, they plan to spray water cannons and fly drones until the air quality improves.
But without major changes, the smog is bound to return.
“It’s going to take a few years before we see any Clean Air Act laws,” Siwatt said. “And before thinking about the time frame, we need to convince the government and all the future political parties to agree that Thailand really needs clean air.”
no Tobias???
Daily Trends Hunter 