Fighting Fake News

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Over the past few months some readers have asked – who is on the team behind Daily Pnut? Daily Pnut’s publisher is Tim Hsia. Tim is a distinguished honor graduate of West Point, former active duty US Army infantry officer with two deployments to Iraq, Stanford JD/MBA grad, and serves on the board of two veteran organizations: Service to School and the Marines’ Memorial Club. Linkedin profile here and more about Tim here.

Also, we’ll be notifying the winner of last week’s Daily Pnut Week in Review today.

 
 
 
SEASONED NUTS: QUOTABLE
 

“Spring is the time of plans and projects.” – Leo Tolstoy

 
 
 
IN A NUTSHELL: MUST READ
 

Wikipedia’s Fight Against Fake News: Jimmy Wales is the co-founder of Wikipedia, the crowdsourced encyclopedia that is – wait for it – 15 years old this week. For more than 25% of the people in today’s world, Wikipedia’s been around as long as they have. But the vast majority of us didn’t grow up with it. Maybe we were even reluctant to use it at first, because how could something anyone could write on, and/or edit the content of something someone else had written, be completely trustworthy? But according to Wales, what’s actually happened is – a lot of “information” out there has gotten “fakier,” and Wikipedia, one of the most visited online sites, has actually become verifiable.

Wales says these days internet users are adrift in “fake news.” Fictional narratives, hoaxes, conspiracy theories, written by volunteers and paid workers, appear online as actual news stories and truthful facts (or even “alternate facts”). Many of these offerings are picked up and shared on social media, sometimes thousands of times. As we reported a week ago, in developing countries especially, false, inflammatory rumors and other violence-inspired misinformation appearing on Facebook can result in real-world bloodshed.

Yet even in the face of serious fakery, Wales still believes the more open and connected people are online, the better it is for everyone. As for his baby, Wales says: “Wikipedia has had almost no problems with (fake news)  at all. Simply because our community is quite—you know, it’s their hobby to debate about the quality of sources, and it’s very difficult to fool the Wikipedia community with this.”

 
 
 
NUTS AND BOLTS: SHOULD READ
 

The United States Military and Africa: It’s not widely known, but the US has troops all over Africa, conducting missions in roughly 20 countries that are primarily in the northern half of the continent. There are more than 1,000 personnel in the region, according to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. Mostly they are there to advise, assist, and train African militaries. But sometimes US troops accompany their African partners into the field, which is what happened when our troops were ambushed in Niger last October and four Americans were killed. No group claimed responsibility, although Mattis has made reference to the Islamic State.

The Africa Command, or AFRICOM, was established by the US military in 2007 to help deal with emerging extremist threats. In order to keep the profile low, the headquarters are in Stuttgart, Germany, and not in Africa. Former president Obama sent US troops to Niger in 2013 when extremists were on the rise in northwest Africa. Boko Haram was active in Nigeria, Niger’s neighbor to the south, and radicals aligned with al-Qaida had taken over large parts of Mali, Niger’s neighbor to the west. An Army colonel at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a think tank sponsored by the Defense Department, said: “The missions are different…(yet) it’s hard to say it’s not a combat mission when there’s the potential for conflict and combat as they accompany these African troops.”

 
 
 
MIXED NUTS: QUICK TAKES ON WORLD NEWS
 

-Newly commissioned Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is making his first official tripa three-day visit to the Middle East. Sunday he spoke in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, urging unity among Gulf States and calling for the easing of economic tensions with Qatar. He also assured the Saudis that President Trump will pull out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. That must have been very disheartening news to French President Emmanuel Macron, who was just here in the US  hugging it out with Trump in an effort to convince him to stay in the Iran deal. (NPR)

-There was also some tree-hugging going on during the Macron visit – the French leader gifted Trump an oak sapling from the site of an important battle of WWI. The BFFs planted the tree together last Monday, but a photo taken by Reuters on Saturday showed only a yellow patch of grass where the tree had been given its new home. A French government official said the tree was “doing well,” but under quarantine. (The Guardian)   

-Meanwhile the two leaders of the divided Korean peninsula, Kim-Jong-un of the North, and  Moon Jae-in of the South, were hugging it out this weekend and pledging to rid the peninsula of nuclear weapons and formally end the Korean War. Kim said he would close down his main nuclear testing site in May, and even promised “experts and journalists” from both South Korea and the US could visit the site to verify the deactivation. Even though the saying goes one “shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” some South Koreans “feel they’ve been sold this horse before—and once the euphoria wears off, they warn, North Korea will still have its nukes, diplomacy will have failed and the threat of war will have only increased.” (NPR)

Syrian state media said Sunday government forces had captured four villages from the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces. At least two villages are near Syria’s border with Iraq on the eastern shore of the Euphrates River, where Kurdish-led forces are in control. The area is economically important, and whoever controls it “will have a greater say in the post-ISIS carve-up of Syria.” (NPR)

More News Reads:

 
 
 
NUTS IN AMERICA
 

-Some 3000 guests gathered at the Hilton Hotel Saturday night for the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. Many current and past White House staff were present and dressed to the nines for the glittery media affair. And while press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, seated on the dais and quite stunning in a beautiful blue gown and flattering updo, was in good company as the target ofcomedian Michelle Wolf’s jaw-dropping diatribe on the Trump administration, nothing could have prepared Sanders for what she heard about herself. Then again, the evening was billed as supporting the First Amendment. (The Guardian)

Additional Read: The Puzzle of Sarah Huckabee Sanders. How a bright, competent and likable young operative became the face of the most duplicitous press operation in White House history. (Politico Magazine)

-President Trump wasn’t at the Washington DC correspondents’ dinner because he was holding his own in Washington Township, Michigan. Trump told the crowd of autoworkers, farmers, and others wearing red caps that he much preferred their company, and launched into a long, angry blast at Democrats, the news media, immigration laws, and other favorite adversaries that lasted an hour and 15 minutes. (NYT)

-US House Democrats forced a vote Friday to try establishing an investigative panel to look into Speaker Paul Ryan’s abrupt decision to fire the House chaplain, Rev. Patrick Conroy, who has served since 2011. Ryan is Catholic and Conroy is a Jesuit priest. Conroy was actually fired two weeks ago. Ryan denied the firing was politically motivated, but questions surrounding the decision gained momentum and now threaten a bitter religious-freedom debate in Congress in the coming weeks. (NPR)

 
 
 
KEEPING OUR EYE ON
 

Cuba After Castro: As we reported two weeks ago, Raul Castro’s handpicked successor, Miguel Diaz-Canel, is Cuba’s new president. The 58-year-old Communist Party loyalist was born one year after the overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista by Fidel Castro, who became the head of Cuba’s fledgling Communist government. Diaz-Canel is the first person outside the Castro dynasty to lead the country since 1959, but he is relatively unknown, both across the island and beyond.

The picture that is emerging of Diaz-Canel is one of an individual whose potential was recognized early on. The son of a schoolteacher and a factory worker, Diaz-Canel grew up about three hours from Havana, in the central province of Villa Clara. He studied electrical engineering at the Central University of Las Villas and was active in political life. As he steadily climbed the bureaucratic ladder, he demonstrated an astute political gravitas by displaying  unflagging loyalty to the socialist cause while remaining approachable and seemingly open to change. Over time stories about him spread that showed an Everyman quality: riding his bike to work during a gas shortage; defending the rights of a gay club; patiently listening to complaints from academics about the minister of education, as he himself was for a time. More recently, Diaz-Canel pushed for internet access across Cuba, taking the position that the nation cannot seal itself off from the rest of the world.

Others, however, say the new president’s persona is crafted, less genuine than often supposed, even demagogic. As one psychologist said, while Diaz-Canel himself rode a bike to work, he was followed by personal security in a number of vehicles. And last year a video leaked showing Diaz-Canel addressing a group of party officials in which he lambasted a website, whose work he considered subversive, saying the government would shut it down whether or not people considered it censorship.

 
 
 
LOOSE NUTS: FASCINATING NEWS
 

-“There has been a gradual but steady erosion of both client and partner loyalty. A generation ago, clients were reflexively loyal to their law firms. The relationship today is more transactional and clients tend to be more loyal to particular partners. This new paradigm creates more opportunity, but also creates more flux.” (NYT)

The new director of the Centers for Disease Control, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, has a yearly salary of $375,000. His predecessor, Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, who resigned in January, was paid $197,300 a year. (NYT)

-With Trump’s victory, Republicans have more power than they have had in nearly a century. They control both houses of Congress, the White House, a majority of the country’s governorships, and a majority on the Supreme Court. Even so, the founder of Right Wing News, John Hawkins, says the average American conservative still “feels bombarded daily with disrespect.” (NPR)

What attributes define intellectuals on the right and left in the strange era of Donald Trump? (The Atlantic)

More Fascinating News:

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