Today News: May 2018

U.S. to slap tariffs on steel, aluminum from EU on Thursday: sources

WASHINGTON/PARIS (Reuters) - Washington will announce plans to slap tariffs on EU steel and aluminum imports as early as Thursday morning, sources said, while the U.S. commerce secretary said any escalation of their trade dispute would depend on the bloc's reaction.

from Reuters: Top News https://reut.rs/2kCyBor

Ex-FBI official McCabe gives memo on Comey firing to Mueller: New York Times

(Reuters) - Former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe wrote a confidential memo last spring recounting a conversation that provided "significant behind-the-scenes" details on the firing of former FBI director James Comey, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

from Reuters: Top News https://reut.rs/2stn52r

Kremlin critic turns up alive at televised briefing about his 'murder'

KIEV/MOSCOW (Reuters) - A dissident Russian journalist reported murdered in Kiev on Tuesday dramatically reappeared alive on Wednesday during a televised briefing by Ukrainian state security about the killing, which they then said they had faked.

from Reuters: Top News https://reut.rs/2kElAuN

Uber, Waymo in talks about self-driving partnership: Uber CEO

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. (Reuters) - Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] is talking with Alphabet Inc's autonomous driving unit Waymo about using its technology on Uber's ride-hailing app, Uber Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi said on Wednesday, signaling a possible thaw in relations between the firms.

from Reuters: Top News https://reut.rs/2Ha3BoY

China says reserves right to retaliate to U.S. actions against its investments

BEIJING (Reuters) - The United States' measures against China's investments are against World Trade Organization rules, and China reserves the right to take countermeasures, the commerce ministry said on Thursday.

from Reuters: Top News https://reut.rs/2kB4qOx

L3's growth strategy guided by credit rating risk

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For L3 Technologies Inc, it's not a case of if but when the maker of everything from airport scanners to night vision equipment for the military will get bigger through acquisitions.

from Reuters: Top News https://reut.rs/2H7lbcY

Volcanic lava flow spurs more evacuations on Hawaii's Big Island

HONOLULU (Reuters) - Molten rock from several lava-spewing fissures opened by Kilauea Volcano crept toward clusters of homes and vacation rentals on the eastern tip of Hawaii's Big Island on Wednesday, prompting authorities to usher residents out of the area as a precaution.

from Reuters: Top News https://reut.rs/2J2vNQb

Blurred Lines Between Journalists and What We Cover

By DAMIEN CAVE from NYT World https://nyti.ms/2sj1EC0

Group Text

By NATALIE PROULX from NYT The Learning Network https://nyti.ms/2J4DQb6

Cambridge Analytica’s Parent Company Helped Shape Saudi Arabia’s Reform Movement

By DANNY HAKIM from NYT Business Day https://nyti.ms/2sj1xq4

Prosecutors raid Korean Air over suspected embezzlement by founding family

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korean prosecutors raided the headquarters of Korean Air Lines Co Ltd on Thursday over suspected embezzlement, tax evasion and breach of trust by members of its founding family, a prosecution official told Reuters.

from Reuters: World News https://reut.rs/2LMNIYY

Polls show most Italians want to stay in euro

ROME (Reuters) - Two polls show that between 60-72 percent of Italians want the country to remain part of the euro while 23-24 percent would choose to drop the common currency.

from Reuters: World News https://reut.rs/2xvVPGe

World Cup 2018: BBC iPlayer to stream matches in 4K HDR

The iPlayer service will offer 29 matches in higher-than-normal quality, but access will be limited.

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2Jf7BJF

School shooting game Active Shooter pulled by Steam

Active Shooter is removed from the Steam Store a week before its release after a public outcry.

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2snQlaT

Google launches solar power service in UK

An energy expert said that the tool "is a good way" to make information more accessible.

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2xtOHu3

Tesla hit parked police car 'while using Autopilot'

The driver said her Tesla car was using Autopilot technology when it hit a parked police car.

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2LO18Um

Apple and Russia face off over Telegram on App Store

Russian regulators have given the company one month to remove the messaging app from its App Store.

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2xuF2TW

UK drone users face safety tests and flight restrictions

The proposed laws - which also include flying restrictions - could come into effect by July.

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2sogara

Pokemon reveals four new games for Nintendo Switch

A video games expert said that the releases are likely to "broaden the appeal" of the console.

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2LJ9QmW

Fortnite sued for 'copying' rival game PUBG

The makers of the hit video game are accused of copying rival PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2J2MGWO

GDPR 'risks making it harder to catch hackers'

Tool used by journalists and the police has reduced the information it shares.

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2LLl8Hp

Don't buy tickets from Viagogo, minister warns

Margot James tells consumers to boycott the ticket reseller after it fails to change its policies.

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2spyPmy

Nuisance call bosses could be fined up to £500,000

They could be fined up to £500,000 if delayed plans to hold them personally liable are implemented.

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2LJUM8R

Star Citizen video game launches $27,000 players' pack

Star Citizen's "Legatus" package is only available to players who have already spent over $1000 (£750).

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2J4dDtx

Airprox board says police drone and jet had 'near-miss'

The drone operator "honestly believed" the 520mph plane would hit the remote-controlled device.

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2LKrF4Y

Facebook to be banned in Papua New Guinea for a month

Papua New Guinea aims to crack down on fake profiles and may make its own rival social network.

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2J3L27B

Facebook Live lands Tommy Robinson in jail

A ban had prevented media from reporting on the 35-year-old's sentencing at Leeds Crown Court.

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2LM6gbD

Twitter 'bans women against trans ideology', say feminists

A women's group says there is "a concerted attack on women's free speech" over transgender issues.

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2xpI8bM

YouTube stars' fury over algorithm tests

The website says it has been manipulating the subscription feed for some viewers.

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2LJULBP

Tomorrow's cities: Google's Toronto city built 'from the internet up'

A disused waterfront in Toronto is being transformed by a firm owned by Google's parent company.

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2J4dpmb

YouTube deletes half of 'violent' music videos

YouTube says it has deleted more than half of the 'violent' music videos which the country's most senior police officer asked it to take down.

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2LIMYnE

Dixons Carphone to close 92 stores as profits slide

Shares in the retailer sink almost 21% as it announces closures and says profits will fall sharply this year.

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2xvgA4Z

Busking goes cashless with 'a world first' for London

London introduces a contactless payment scheme for buskers that allows tap-to-pay donations.

from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2LadrJI

Sam’s Dream

This piece appears in the LARB Print Quarterly Journal: No. 18, Genius

To receive the LARB Quarterly Journal, become a member or donate here.

Sam’s Dream

One day there is no day because there is no day
before, no yesterday, then a now, & time, & a cell
divides and you, you are in time, time is in you, as
multiplying now u slip into our stream, or is it u grow
a piece of stream in us, is it flesh or time you grow,
how, is it an American you grow, week 28, when we
are told dreaming begins. Welcome. Truest stranger.
Perhaps one of the last conceived & carried in womb.
Father and mother singular and known. Born of
human body. Not among the perfected ones yet. No. A

mere human, all firsthand knowledge, flying in as if
kindling—natural. The last breath before the first
breath is mystery. Then u burn into gaze, thought,
knowledge of oblivion. Rock yourself. Kick so I can
feel you out here. Push your hands against the
chamber. The world is exhausted. I moisten my lips
and try to remember a song. I have to have a song to
sing you from out here.They say you now hear vividly.
This could have been a paradise my song begins. No,
this is, was, is, never will be again, will be, we hope

desperately wasn’t a dream, maybe in your dream
now there is a clue, can you dream the clue, you who
are dreaming what having had no life to dream of,
dream from—what populates you—bloodflow and
lightswirl, stammering of ventricles, attempts at
motion, absorbings, incompletions, fluidities—do you
have temptation yet, or even the meanwhile—such a
mature duration this meanwhile, how it intensifies
this present—or nevertheless—no beyond of course
in your dream what could be beyond—no

defeat as so far no defeat—cells hum—no partiality
as all grows in your first dream which is the dream of
what you are—is that right—no attempt as there is
no attempting yet—no privacy—I laugh to myself
writing the word—oh look at that word—no
either/or—but yes light filtering-in, root-darknesses,
motion—and the laughter, do you hear it from us out
here, us, can you hear that strain of what we call
sincerity—Oh. Remain unknown. Know no daybreak
ever. Dream of no running from fire, no being shoved

into mass grave others falling over you, dream of no
bot, no capture filter store—no algorithmic memory,
no hope, realism, knowing, no quest-for, selling-of,
accosting violently to have, no lemon-color of the end
of day, no sudden happiness, no suddenly. It is much
bigger, faster—try to hear out—this place you’re
being fired into—other in it—judgment of other—
logic, representation, nightmare—how to prepare
you—what do you dream—what must I sing—it says
you cry in there & laugh—out here a late October

rain has started down, soon you shall put your small
hand out & one of us will say slowly and outloud rain
and you will say rain—but what is that on your hand
which falling has come round again in the forever of
again to reach your waiting upturned hand. I look up
now. Clouds drift. Evaporation is a thing. That our only
system is awry a thing. That u will see rains such as I
have never seen a thing. Plain sadness, this hand-knit
sweater, old things, maybe u shall have some of—in
this my song—in my long song not telling u about the

paradise, abandoning my song of what’s no longer
possible, that song, it is a thing. Oh normalcy, what a
song I would sing you. Child u shall god willing come
out into the being known. First thing will be the
visible. That’s the first step of our dream, the dream of
here. You will see motes in light. And lights inside the
light which can go out. A different dark. And spirits,
wind exhaustion a heavy thing attached to you—your
entity—as u enter history and it—so bright, correct,
awake, speaking and crying-out—begins. And all the

rest begins. Amazing, you were not everything after
all. Out you come into legibility. Difference. Why
shouldn’t all be the same thing? It’s a thing, says the
stranger nearby, it’s a new thing, this stance this skin
like spandex closing over you, it’s you. A name is
given you. Take it. Can you take it? All seems to be so
overfull at once. Now here it is proffered again, this
sound which is you, do u feel the laving of it down all
over you, coating you, so transparent you could
swear it is you, really you, this Sam, this crumb of life

which suddenly lengthens the minute as it cleans off
something else, something you didn’t know was
there before, and which, in disappearing now, is felt.
The before u. The before. That dream. What was that
dream. There, as if a burning-off of mist, gone where—
not back, where would back be—dried away—a
sweetness going with it—no?—feel it?—I do—I
almost smell it as it is dissolved into the prior by
succession, by events, not raging, not burning, but
going—nothing like the loud blood-rush in the

invisible u & u in with its elasticities, paddlings, nets,
swirls. In this disunion now stretch. Take up space.
You are that place u displace. That falling all round u
is gazing, thinking, attempted love, exhausted love,
everything, or it is everyone, always going and coming
back from some place. They do not stay. They do not
stay. And then out here circumference. One day you
glimpse it, the horizon line. You are so…surprised.
How could that be. What are we in or on that it stops
there but does not ever stop. They tell u try to feel it

turn. The sun they will explain to you. The moon.

How far away it all becomes the more you enter. How

thin you are. How much u have to disappear in order

to become. In order to become human. Become Sam.

Jorie Graham is the author, most recently, of Fast and From The New World (Poems 1976–2014). She lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Harvard.

The post Sam’s Dream appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2J6PxOR

Small Victories

ALAN PARKS HAS a terrific resume for a first-time novelist. As the creative director of Warner Music UK, he created campaigns for musicians as diverse as New Order and CeeLo Green, and in his role as managing director of 679 Artists he launched numerous careers. Naturally, Bloody January features notable music references and scenes. But as I read the book, it was not Parks’s former career that I thought about — not even when Ziggy Stardust showed up. Instead, I was fixated on his degree: an MA in Moral Philosophy from the University of Glasgow.

According to the university’s website these days: “In moral philosophy you will consider questions such as the objectivity of morality and the application of ethics to the study of difficult practical problems.” Sure, Bloody January has all the gritty bells and whistles expected of noir, but at the same time its main character, Detective Harry McCoy of the Glasgow Police Force, grapples with the contradictions of morality on a multitude of levels.

Despite being a classic noir antihero, McCoy is not a predictable guy. His complexity grows alongside the crime he’s charged with solving. It’s 1973, and McCoy is summoned to Barlinnie Prison, where one of the convicts informs him that a girl named Lorna is going to be killed tomorrow. McCoy follows the few vague clues he’s given, but he doesn’t make it to Lorna in time. Given that he sees the shooter, before the kid turns the gun on himself, solving the murder should be straightforward. But the warning at the prison doesn’t sit right with McCoy. Peeling back the layers, McCoy is led to hookers, hustlers, loan sharks, and one of the city’s most prominent and powerful families. Along the way, Parks keeps the prose fluid with some knockout descriptions. My favorite: A woman who has “a face like she was chewing a wasp.”

I talked to Alan Parks about Bloody January, as well as Aleister Crowley, Chinatown, and whodunits via email.

KIM FAY: Noir makes certain demands on a writer. In Bloody January, you maintain many of the genre’s conventions. For example: McCoy’s tormented childhood and his being saddled with an annoying, newbie partner. At other times, the book goes its own way. Were there any tropes you deliberately chose to avoid, or any you wanted to explore in new ways? Were there any you felt a novel like this absolutely could not do without?

ALAN PARKS: The only thing I consciously wanted to avoid was the novel having an arch, bon mot–laced kind of dialogue. I didn’t want to use the kind of overwrought descriptive phrases and metaphors that noir can be a bit fond of. I wanted the dialogue to be realistic and to include humor, to try and reflect the way people really speak to each other.

The book is pretty standard in some ways. Troubled detective, newbie partner, corrupt town. Those are the kind of conventions I like and wanted to include. Once the book is rooted in those you can move off and explore other areas. They are a kind of reassurance as much as anything else, a way of recognizing what the book is.

I also didn’t really want to write a whodunit as such. I always find those books a bit confusing. Either it’s obvious who did it from the beginning or the last few pages are a tortured and convoluted explanation of who the murderer is that often leaves you none the wiser. Or maybe that’s just me.

At the beginning of Bloody January, McCoy arrives at the scene of a murder, just in time to witness the killer shooting himself in the head. As the young man lays dying, McCoy holds his hand, needing “to feel he was some comfort to the boy.” Despite McCoy’s coarse exterior and painfully broken interior, this is not an unusual response for him. His relationships with colleagues, women, and even his enemies are complicated by degrees of empathy. Empathy is not a trait commonly found in noir. What do you feel it can add to the genre?

I think empathy is a vital component. The detective character has to have it, and the reader has to have it for him. Without empathy, or a notion of some sort of depth from the main character, it just becomes increasingly difficult to care what’s going on with him. It was also part of the hope to make the book seem more realistic. Most people do act with empathy in situations similar to the ones McCoy finds himself in. Why should he be any different just because he is a cop?

McCoy’s personal philosophy seems to be based on situational ethics. He walks a fine balance between intentional and unintentional harm. I am thinking of one character whom he accidentally throws to the wolves, and then purposefully injures in the hope of saving him. What appealed to you about creating a character who acts in context rather than from a place of moral certainty?

That is an interesting one. I could say that as a product of a moral philosophy university course taught in the early ’80s, it is programmed in me to see context as a huge factor in moral decisions. Maybe I am just a child of my time. But I would imagine in the realpolitik of a job that involves making decisions about the rightness or wrongness of people’s behavior, the decisions made have to be somewhat contextual.

McCoy believes in what he does, he tries to do what he thinks is the right thing, it’s important to him. His background has taught him the institutions that are supposed to be “right” — the church, the institutions of child care — very often are not. He has no real reason to believe in a given set of moral certainties. Why would he after the childhood he has lived?

At one point in Bloody January, McCoy punches a man: “It was a little victory in a situation where he was never going to get the big one.” This statement captures the book’s refusal to stick with black and white: bad guy caught, bad guy punished, The End. Instead, there are layers of justice. How would McCoy define justice, and does he even believe justice is possible?

I think he would define justice as what he can get. He knows the world is an unequal and unfair place. He is realistic enough to know he will never change that, but he believes small victories are possible and worthwhile. That may not be ideal, but it is enough to keep him going. These small victories are as valuable to his own sense of worth as they are to the people they may help.

As they say at the end of the best film ever made about the moral dimensions of crime, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

In an article in Scotland’s Sunday Herald, you said that when you returned to Glasgow from living in London about five years ago, you took night classes on the city’s 20th-century history. You also visited parts of the city you hadn’t been to since you were a child, only to discover that much of what you had known was gone. You wanted to write about the lost city, but instead of a history book, you wrote Bloody January. Given the accessibility of fiction, and especially genre fiction, what role do you feel novels can play in preserving history, and how much of a role do you want this series to play?

I think novels and films and TV programs are great at showing a kind of social history, not so great at illuminating huge historical shifts. I would love the series of books to be a chronicle of the changes in Glasgow throughout the ’70s. The small things as well as the big things. The clothes, the way people spoke, the things they bought, what the city looked like. A hope would be that they would eventually read them as a kind of guide to life in Glasgow at the time.

When the actor who reads the audiobook asked me how he thought McCoy should speak, I suggested he watched Just Another Saturday, a TV play about a day in a young guy’s life in Glasgow made in 1975. It was written by Peter McDougall, a dramatist who I think has the best ear of anyone for the way Glaswegian people speak. The program is a kind of dialect time capsule. While I don’t think these books will ever be as accurate as that, that is definitely the benchmark.

Philip Kerr’s March Violets trilogy is also a great example of how crime novels can give you a vivid and evocative insight into a particular time, in this case late-’30s Berlin. The crime story is embedded in the social history of the period. Little details in the book, like people being so poor they gather tiny bits of coal that have fallen off lorries, illuminate their social situation much more clearly than a strict historical account of their circumstances would. It’s that kind of historical insight that I think novels do best.

Bloody January feels like a local story, with one exception. One of the “bad guys” is a follower of the teachings of the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley. When this is discovered, parallels are drawn between what is happening in Glasgow and the Manson murders in the United States. Why did you choose to bring in comparisons to such a well-known “outside” event like this? Was it used as part of the framework to hold the time period in place, or did you have something less obvious in mind?

The reference is in there for a couple of reasons. As you said it helps cement the time period. Everyone knows when and what the Manson murders were.

Aleister Crowley, like Manson, also seems very redolent of the ’60s dream going haywire. The benevolent interest in the I Ching, runes, astrology, and alternative philosophies somehow — popular culture-wise anyway — ended up with Altamont and Manson and Anton LaVey and a lot of damaged people.

Aleister Crowley’s famous dictum, “Do as thou wilt as the whole of the law,” became a kind of a get-out clause for people like one of the book’s heavies, Jamie Gibbs. If he believed that, how could anything he wanted to do be wrong? Jamie isn’t interested in philosophy; he’s interested in drugs and fucking teenagers. To him, Aleister Crowley et al are just weapons in his arsenal of seduction. The dream of an alternative lifestyle ends up as a seduction technique for a middle-aged sleazeball. Just like the dream of Hells Angels as some kind of avatar of freedom ended up with the beating to death of Meredith Hunter.

Let’s discuss heroin. McCoy regularly sleeps with a prostitute, and when he is told that she’s hooked on heroin, he says, “She’s not intae that. Besides, you can’t get the bloody stuff in Glasgow.” Because McCoy is not naïve, this means Glasgow is on the verge of something new when it comes to drugs. By the end of the book, the city’s heroin deaths are described as “a plague.” Bloody January feels balanced on a moment between before and after. Is that after going to play a significant part in the series? And what else is up next for McCoy?

It does play a part in the new book. McCoy’s best friend, Stevie Cooper, manages to get a strong and stable heroin connection via Hong Kong. It’s part of his bid to expand his empire. If he is the sole supplier of large quantities of heroin to Glasgow, he is pretty much made.

This reflects what happened in reality. Primary income for people like Cooper started to shift from money lending and protection rackets to the supply of drugs. The drug trade was vastly more profitable, especially in socially deprived places like Glasgow. This too is part of the social change in Glasgow through the ’70s. Junkies went from being rich bohemians to 17-year-old working-class kids. From the novelist Alexander Trocchi to the cult film Trainspotting.

McCoy has a lot to deal with in the next book. A particularly nasty underworld enforcer goes rogue and starts to kill for his own twisted reasons. A terrifying part of McCoy and Cooper’s past comes back to haunt them. And McCoy tries to come to terms with what happened to him at the end of Bloody January and starts to question whether he should even be a detective any longer.

At one point in Bloody January you write, “Driving through the north of Glasgow, a place [McCoy had] known since he was a boy, was like driving through a different city now. All the landmarks were gone, couldn’t find his way anymore.” This description feels very much like a metaphor for McCoy. Did you deliberately set out to create a setting that paralleled your main character, and what function do you feel the wrecking balls and half-demolished tenements play in shaping McCoy?

Glasgow in the ’70s was in many ways a very strange place. The city that had existed before was effectively being destroyed. Vast swathes were demolished, manufacturing jobs disappeared, factories crumbled, people were moved out to vast housing estates in the suburbs. It looked like a city during a war. Meanwhile the German performance artist Joseph Beuys was staging events in the city, Ziggy Stardust was playing, the council was buying Dalí paintings, nationalists were setting off bombs, Billy Connolly was changing comedy forever. The city was in flux.

That, to some extent, reflects what is happening with McCoy. He is a man with one foot in the future and one in the past. He’s a policeman who takes drugs. A moral man whose best friend is a murdering gang boss. Like the city itself he is caught between two worlds, changing, trying to keep his balance in the shifting sands.

Kim Fay is the author of The Map of Lost Memories.

The post Small Victories appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2J6NZV3

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Sam’s Dream