A court in Boston sentenced Dzhokar Tsarnaev to death, as the Boston Globe reports, “for detonating a bomb amid Boston Marathon spectators that left wounds — emotional and physical — that will persist across lifetimes.”
Massachusetts is a liberal place, where the death penalty is unpopular. Historically, it has been unevenly applied in this country, in ways affected by race (particularly the race of the victim), class, region, and blind chance. Its benefits are elusive. To sit on a jury in a capital case, one needs to be “death qualified”—to be willing to kill someone after voting to convict him. If you believe in the death penalty, the verdict form, with all its factors, may look as simple as a road map: How could it but lead to Tsarnaev’s execution? The ways in which death qualification can distort a pool are clear. But then the death penalty twists everything it touches.
At 21, Tsarnaev is to become the youngest inmate on federal death row, and as The Guardian reports, his fate “will take years to reach its conclusion: only three of 340 prisoners sentenced to federal death row have been executed in the last 50 years.”
Though the Justice Department could attempt to fast-track executions in the name of public interest, death penalty experts expect the very quickest timeframe from Friday’s sentence to Tsarnaev actually being put on a gurney and injected with lethal chemicals would be at least 10 years.
Tsarnaev’s lawyers are the cream of American death penalty defenders. Clarke, probably the most famous of them all, successfully defended the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, from the death penalty, as well as Jared Loughner, the man who shot congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona.
But this is perhaps the hardest case she has ever tried – partly because the defendant remained such an enigma. There was little opportunity for them to graft a fully cohesive narrative to his actions.
“…is not without risk, especially given recent demonstrations and unrest linked to the arrest and death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray. O’Malley, who spent seven years as Baltimore’s mayor, has faced renewed criticism of his “zero tolerance” policing policies since the death of Gray, who was severely injured while in police custody.
As he visited New Hampshire on Wednesday, O’Malley defended his policies, which were credited for reducing violent crime, and said the country needs to invest more heavily in its cities, which he said policymakers from both parties have neglected for years.”
The past few news cycles have been dominated by Jeb Bush’s waffling on Megyn Kelly’s question “Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion [of Iraq]?”…
…former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley is a well-known War of 1812 buff but, emulating Jeb Bush, he refused to take a stand on whether, knowing what we know now, he would support James Madison’s decision to declare war on Great Britain in 1812.
Without Wisconsin, Democrats would need to run the table in less-inviting states such as New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Florida or pick up an unexpected win in more conservative-leaning locales like North Carolina or Indiana. (Meanwhile, the party also has to defend seats against potentially stiff challenges in Colorado and Nevada.) That’s not impossible, but it’s a much more difficult path.
***
* WORLD * The jury in the Boston marathon bombing trial completed its first full day of deliberations in the penalty phase, and is expected to reconvene on Friday. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was convicted last month of all 30 federal charges against him, including 17 carrying the possibility of the death penalty.
This paltry performance drives the landscape we see today. With little in net, these companies have little to invest. They’re still paying off debt, issuing dividends, keeping up with pension obligations, and anticipating print ad results that can’t find a bottom. That makes it tough to invest in new products and to travel with the audience as it moves to mobile. And of course it’s bound to mean even more reductions in workforces, including newsrooms, which are already down by more than 20,000 in less than a decade.
* CULTURE * There’s a really nice little read – no pun intended – by Alex Johnson at Slate on the world’s smallest libraries.
Tiny libraries in converted phone booths, purpose-built kiosks, experimental art installations, quirky handmade boxes—and even one refrigerator—are springing up on street corners around the world at a rapid rate. These miniature lending libraries lead the communal book revolution, bringing reading material to the masses at a level that far exceeds their size.
Congress must act by June 1 or the NSA’s existing authority, under Section 215 of the 2001 Patriot Act, lapses, and along with it not only the phone records program but also other intelligence authorities that the government says are crucial to detecting and preventing terrorist attacks.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said he plans to move forward with a renewal of the NSA’s existing authority. A federal appeals court in New York ruled last week that that law did not provide sufficient legal authority for the phone records program, but key backers of the program say they believe no changes to the law are necessary.
So for the N.S.A., which has been internally questioning the cost effectiveness of bulk collection for years, the bill would make the agency’s searches somewhat less efficient, but it would not wipe them out. With the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the spy agencies or the F.B.I. could request data relevant to an investigation. Corporate executives have said that while they would have to reformat some data to satisfy government search requirements, they could most likely provide data quickly.
It’s no mystery why much of our public infrastructure is overloaded and crumbling. America is a growing country, and investment in infrastructure has failed to keep up with expanding needs. According to the Congressional Budget Office, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties we spent close to five per cent of G.D.P. on new transport and water projects, and on maintaining existing systems. European nations still spend about that much today, while China and other rapidly developing Asian countries spend close to twice as much. In the United States, however, spending on infrastructure is only about half of what it used to be, relative to G.D.P.
More than 200 people were thought to be on board, including five Amtrak crew. There was no official word so far as to the cause of the accident, but officials said there was no indication there had been a collision with another train or vehicle. Some passengers reported feeling a “vibration” before the incident occurred. The NTSB has dispatched a team to begin an investigation.
NBC10 Philadelphiareported that Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter called the scene an “absolute disastrous mess.” The Mayor later said it would be unlikely there would be any service on the line for the rest of the week.
North Korea may have executed its defense chief according to reports in South Korea, while a high-level defector has been telling CNN about Kim Jong Un’s “reign of terror.”
[Former Attorney General Dominic] Grieve vetoed the information tribunal’s original decision to order publication in 2012, warning that the letters “contain remarks about public affairs which would in my view, if revealed, have had a material effect upon the willingness of the government to engage in correspondence with the Prince of Wales, and would potentially have undermined his position of political neutrality”.
Not surprisingly, the prospect of a Facebook partnership is generating palpable anxiety inside the Times newsroom, with some Times journalists casting it as an end-of-the-Times-as-we-know-it inflection point. When rumors of a deal surfaced last October, the Times‘ late media columnist David Carr articulated this view, writing “the wholesale transfer of content sends a cold, dark chill down the collective spine of publishers, both traditional and digital insurgents alike.”
"I'm going to be a journalist, mum! I'm going to be fearless and honest and change the world!"
20 years later… pic.twitter.com/47LkRTy9jO
— Pointless Letters (@pointlesslettrs) May 12, 2015
The Kremlin didn’t immediately confirm the meeting with Mr. Putin, though a spokesman had said last week one was possible. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said: “It’s certainly our understanding that it’s confirmed.”
The Saudi foreign minister said the King’s decision to skip Thursday’s gathering was not a “snub” but Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post writes:
To say this is a slight or an insult is to minimize the symbolism of the decision. The Saudi king is telling America and the world: There is nothing President Obama can promise that is worth the trip.
If [Hersh’s account] seems like worryingly little evidence for a story that accuses hundreds of people across three governments of staging a massive international hoax that has gone on for years, then you are not alone.
On Sunday night, national security journalists and analysts on Twitter picked through the story, expressing dismay at its tissue-thin sourcing, its leaps of logic, and its internal contradictions.
Three years of tuition at Rutgers. The amount Christie spent at football games is almost exactly enough to cover freshman through junior years at Rutgers.
Are the Governor’s presidential ambitions finally finished this time? Olivia Nuzzi at The Daily Beast writes that “.. history suggests that Christie is a political cockroach, or a zombie, or a tomb-escaping, well-fed Jesus. But can he come back from the dead again?”
Leave Chris Christie alone, $82k of stadium food is like three hot dogs, an order of nachos and six beers.
“We will not stand idly by as workers are deprived of their hard-earned wages and robbed of their most basic rights,” said Cuomo in a statement. “This task force will crack down on these kinds of abuses in the nail salon industry, enforce all of New York’s health and safety regulations, and help ensure that no one, regardless of their citizenship status or what language they speak, is illegally victimized by their employer.”
Mr Whittingdale is expected to make changes in the way the BBC is funded and governed. He has described the flat-rate, £145.50-a-year licence fee as “worse than the poll tax” and suggested it could become “unsustainable” in the long term. He said last autumn: “I think there’s quite an attractive option of linking it to a specific household tax – maybe council tax.”
Bellingcat, the investigative site that has pioneered the use of geolocating images to contextualize and amplify news stories, says it has a “big announcement” on Ukraine set for Tuesday.
Bellingcat is now on Facebook, there will be a big announcement on there tomorrow relating to Ukraine https://t.co/MK76HaAGcz
European officials expect no breakthroughs at a meeting of the currency union’s finance ministers on Monday. That means Greek lenders will remain under pressure, dependent on relatively expensive liquidity from the Greek central bank and at risk of bank runs in case doubts emerge over their ability to pay out deposits.
John Hooper at The Guardianwrites that “There is a striking disconnection in Athens between the blithe lack of concern that the government evinces, and which it has successfully communicated to much of the public, and the objective seriousness of Greece’s plight.”
A Moroccan F-16 jet fighter taking part in Arab coalition air strikes in Yemenwent missing after apparently being hit, a Moroccan Air Force statement said. Meanwhile, Yemen’s dominant Houthi group accepted a five-day humanitarian ceasefire proposed by Saudi Arabia on Sunday. The truce could begin by Tuesday.
Suddenly, a vision of a different future has opened up, especially for a certain kind of English Tory: Without dour, difficult, left-wing Scotland, maybe they could rule the rest of what used to be Great Britain, indefinitely. For U.S. readers who find the significance of this hard to understand: Imagine that a Texan secessionist party had, after years of campaigning, just taken every Texan seat in Congress. And now imagine that quite a few people in the rest of the country — perhaps in the Democratic Party — had, after years of arguing back, finally begun to think that Texan secession really might not be so bad and were beginning to calculate the electoral advantages accordingly.
Meanwhile, former Labour PM Tony Blair weighed into the debate on how the party needs to re-invent itself. “Ed [Miliband] was absolutely right to raise the issue of inequality and to say that Labour should focus anew on it,” Blair wrote in The Observer. “This will stand as his contribution to the party’s development. In so far as this was an implied rebuke to my politics, I accept it. But we still need ways relevant to today and tomorrow, not yesterday, to tackle it.”
Nate Silver, formerly of the New York Times and now writing his FiveThirtyEight blog as part of his gig with ESPN, was forecasting 272 seats for Conservatives and 271 for Labor – dead even. It takes 326 seats for a clear majority, and in the end Tories won big with 331 seats – 99 more than their main rival Labor.
How does Mr. Silver (who correctly predicted the outcome in the last three US presidential elections) explain this?
“Perhaps it’s just been a run of bad luck. But there are lots of reasons to worry about the state of the polling industry,” he writes. “Voters are becoming harder to contact, especially on landline telephones. Online polls have become commonplace, but some eschew probability sampling, historically the bedrock of polling methodology. And in the U.S., some pollsters have been caught withholding results when they differ from other surveys, ‘herding’ toward a false consensus about a race instead of behaving independently.”
You didn’t have to be Nostradamus to see that things were looking bleak for the team of Bill Simmons and ESPN. When Simmons appeared on the Dan Patrick Showon Thursday, he once again attacked [NFL commissioner Roger] Goodell, saying with a certain formality that Goodell lacks “testicular fortitude.”
Finally, the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay has some suggestions for how the NFL should punish Tom Brady. An example: “During the two Patriots-Jets games, Brady must play every other quarter for the Jets. I know this sounds crazy but it’s simply a reversal of the normal routine, since the Jets offense historically plays every other quarter for the Patriots.”
(An actual announcement by the NFL on Brady’s punishment for his role in the “deflategate” episode is expected this week, according to the New York Daily News.)
The biggest Labour casualty of the night, though, was Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, who lost his Morley and Outwood seat to the Conservatives by just over 400 votes.
“Any personal disappointment I have at this result is as nothing compared to the sense of sorrow I have at the result Labour has achieved across the UK, and the sense of concern I have about the future,” he said.
But as the evening developed, it appeared that not only was that original exit poll broadly accurate, but analysts suggested the Conservatives could even secure their own working majority. Their previous coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, had a hugely disappointing night, losing their deposits in some early seats and battling for third place in several constituencies with UKIP.
The BBC later revised its projections to show the Conservatives within touching distance of a parliamentary majority.
BBC FORECAST UPDATE
CON 325
LAB 232
SNP 56
LIB 12
UKIP 1
GRN 1
— NumbrCrunchrPolitics (@NCPoliticsUK) May 8, 2015
In Cameron’s acceptance speech in his Witney constituency, he talked about governing for “one nation” and delivering on devolution pledges for Wales and Scotland, as well as a referendum on Britain’s role in Europe. He said:
This is clearly a very strong night for the Conservative party. I think it has a positive response to a positive campaign about safeguarding our economy, about creating jobs, about our record in government over the last five years but above all our plan for the next five years, based on clear values of wanting to reward work in our country, that those who put in and do their best should find the system is on their side.
Pound surges 1% against the US dollar to $1.54 after exit poll shows Conservatives are largest party #GE2015pic.twitter.com/2NdbUn6Ans
The court, in a unanimous ruling written by Judge Gerard E. Lynch, held that Section 215 “cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it, and that it does not authorize the telephone metadata program.” It declared the program illegal, saying, “We do so comfortably in the full understanding that if Congress chooses to authorize such a far-reaching and unprecedented program, it has every opportunity to do so, and to do so unambiguously.”
The Huffington Post marked its ten-year anniversary by, according to founder Arianna Huffington, “looking to the next ten.” She writes:
Above all, in the next 10 years we are determined to reimagine journalism with our What’s Working global initiative, taking it beyond the tired “If it bleeds, it leads” approach. We will of course continue covering the crises, the stories of violence, tragedy, dysfunction and corruption, but we’re dramatically increasing our coverage of stories of innovation, creativity, ingenuity and compassion, because we believe we owe it to our readers to give a full picture of what is happening in the world. At the moment we talk about media coverage inspiring a lot of copycat crimes. We also want to produce the kind of journalism that inspires copycat solutions.
“I have too much respect for Dave to do anything that would distract viewers from watching his final show,” Mr. Kimmel said in an email. “Plus, I’ll probably be crying all day, which makes it hard to work.”
Also at the New York Times magazine, former Letterman writer Steve O’Donnell lists the Top Ten Letterman on-air moments, including Bud Melman welcoming travelers to the PABT, Warren Zevon’s final show and, of course, Dave’s monologue on the first show back after 9/11. Gems all.
First is money. It’s huge. I was a media consultant for 25 years and while I did all the things I’m doing here I also produced advertising. That’s a huge difference between American politics and British politics. Ads help define campaigns in America and they’re absent here — which may be better for the commonweal but it’s one less really powerful tool in the tool box.
Second difference is length of campaign, which is quite short. So you have a short time to communicate your message.
As a result there is a disproportionate power in the media and a much more aggressive media that you have to navigate.
Supporters want the bill passed free of controversial add-ons they claim could scuttle negotiations with Tehran, draw a presidential veto or leave lawmakers with no say on a national security threat. Negotiators for the U.S. and five other nations are rushing toward a June 30 deadline to finalize a deal in which Iran would curb its nuclear program in exchange for relief from sanctions choking its economy.
Banjo, a platform for instantaneously scanning social media for trending topics and images, raised $100million in new funding. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Damien Patton, Banjo’s founder and chief executive, likes to call the program a “crystal ball,” because it gives users a view of the entire globe. His team has overlaid a map of the globe with a grid of 35 billion squares, each one about the size of a football field. Any time an image is publicly shared to the Web and tagged with a specific location, Banjo’s system automatically places it within the grid and keeps track of what time it happened and classifies objects within the image. Patton said his computers currently process about 1 quadrillion computations every 10 seconds, and by the end of the year that will be up to 1 quadrillion per second.
***
* SPORTS *
(YouTube/FutSoccerHD)
Messi: “The praises are always nice and that the people speak very well of you.”
“..it is more probable than not that New England Patriots personnel … were involved in a deliberate effort to circumvent the rules…. we also have concluded that it is more probable than not that Tom Brady was at least generally aware of the inappropriate activities.”
Hillary Clinton marked Cinco de Mayo by making a bold pronouncement on immigration policy, calling for a path to citizenship. The Los Angeles Times reports:
Although many details of her immigration policy remain to be filled in, Clinton’s comments in Las Vegas drew a purposely sharp line between her stance and that of the large GOP field — none of whom supports a path to citizenship for people lacking proper legal documentation.
It also highlighted a split among Republicans, between hard-liners who favor an enforcement-driven approach to illegal immigration and others who support a more comprehensive overhaul that, in some fashion, would allow millions of people in the country without proper documentation to stay permanently.
Jeb Bush, still to formally join the race, also issued a Cinco De Mayo message, as New York magazine observes, “recorded for some unknown reason on the floor of a factory.”
The first debate, in Cleveland in August, will be the most pivotal, according to GOP operatives and campaign aides. Failure to earn a place on the stage will likely be the death knell to a campaign, depriving a candidate of an opportunity to shine, and a visible mark of failure in a crowded field. Republicans who have traveled the country boosting their name recognition but who haven’t made any steps toward actually running, like Rep. Pete King and former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, are, by all accounts, out.
Carly Fiorina, who entered the race on Monday, sat down with Yahoo’s Katie Couric, who expertly knocked back Fiorina’s attempt to plead sexism when asked if she was really running for vice-president.
Away from potential Presidential politics, in Staten Island on Tuesday, Republican Dan Donovan won a special election to replace Rep Michael Grimm, who had been elected to a third term while under federal indictment, and resigned in January after pleading guilty to tax evasion charges.
On Tuesday, a statement from ISIS’s Al Bayan radio claimed responsibility for the attack, marking the first such ISIS claim for an attack on U.S. soil. “We tell America that what is coming will be even bigger and more bitter, and that you will see the soldiers of ISIS do terrible things,” the group said.
In France, new legislation gives the government broader surveillance and intelligence-gathering powers.The BBC‘s Hugh Schofield writes: “It has been an unusual debate. Many in the Socialist Party who would normally have spoken out against the new powers have instead kept quiet. In the wake of the January attacks, there is little political mileage in raising doubts about the intelligence services…The consensus means that the powerful civil liberties arguments have had little of an airing in the National Assembly. In some sessions there were no more than a handful of deputies in attendance.”
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* BRITISH ELECTION * With one more full day of campaigning to go, the papers are fairly ramped up, many pushing their proprietors’ preferences.
Thursday may not, of course, be the end of the democratic process. Our politics seems to have entered a new world in which the post-election negotiations are as important as the pre-election campaigning. Our view is that the coalition was too rushed last time, and that if there are to be multi-party negotiations, they should take time, they should be transparent and the people should feel that they reflect how they voted rather than being stitched up behind closed doors. To be continued next week …
[Mike] Tobin’s report caused about 30 minutes of unease in Baltimore before Fox anchor Shepard Smith went on-air to correct the story and apologize for the incorrect information. His apology followed a statement from Baltimore police that there had been no shooting.
Live news reports often have errors, and Tobin’s is merely the latest in a long series of them. Yet few recent reports have had as much potential as Tobin’s to stir a violent reaction, considering it came amid more than a week of protests about alleged police misconduct.
Bill Clinton firmly asserted that the foundation he started after his presidency has not done anything “knowingly inappropriate” in accepting foreign cash while his wife was secretary of state. He also veered into territory that was classic Clinton, and not in a good way.
His justification for his own $500,000-a-pop speaking fees — “I gotta pay our bills” — and his insistence that his family is held to unfair standards, in an interview aired Monday on NBC, raised eyebrows inside of Clinton world and out.
(image: Huffington Post)
The Overnight Note 