Last night we had the good fortune to hear Carl Bernstein give a great talk about the importance of the free press. Bernstein is most famous for being an investigative journalist whose reporting on the Watergate scandal led to Nixon’s resignation. Bernstein is also the co-author of All the President’s Men, a fantastic American political thriller book and movie about the Watergate scandal. Bernstein shared his thoughts on the state of the media at the top of the Watergate hotel in Washington DC.

Bernstein’s thoughtful and motivating talk covered far ranging subjects but mostly focused on the importance and role of the press. The biggest takeaway of his talk was how the press is a public good whose goal should be to provide the most complete version of the truth. An ideal shared by Daily Pnut. In his talk he shared several other nuggets of wisdom:

• We face dangerous times in the United States right now, more so than the Watergate era, because of foreign interference in our elections
• Trump is a (of course) a legitimate president as vast amounts of Americans supported him
• Trump has dangerously targeted the press as fake news and dangerously labeled it as an “enemy of the people” at a time when the press is at a weakened state financially. Many papers over the past decade have shut down.
• Some press has focused too much on sensational news and celebrity worship as opposed to hard news (we will never do this)
• The need to provide facts with context
• The need for investigative journalism

North Korea Is Losing Its Friends In Africa: After its founding in 1948, North Korea sought international recognition and allies in the Cold War, supporting liberation movements in Zimbabwe and Angola. Since being placed under international sanctions in 2006, Pyongyang has depended on African nations for hard currency and other economic ties. Today, North Korea imports everything from frozen fish, vegetables, and scrap iron from Africa, while exporting refined petroleum, telephones, and packaged medicine. North Korean arms factories are located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Ethiopia, Madagascar, and Namibia. However, North Korea may soon be losing some of these allies. Eleven African countries are currently under investigation by the UN for violating sanctions and buying arms from Pyongyang. Sudan has reportedly cut ties with North Korea (the result of negotiations with the United States over lifting sanctions on Khartoum), Uganda announced the end of its relationship with Pyongyang last year, and Botswana cut ties in 2014, stating it could not support a government with such “total disregard for the human rights of its citizens.”

Trump To Nuke the Iran Nuclear Deal: President Trump plans to “decertify” the Iran nuclear deal sometime next week and declare that the deal negotiated by Obama does not serve US interests. On Thursday, Trump said that Iran has not “lived up” to the spirit of the deal, that it was imperative Iran not obtain nuclear weapons, and that the country was a supporter of terror and violence. Trump’s decision will stop short of completely nullifying the Iran deal. By decertifying the agreement, Trump passes the matter over to Congress, which would then have 60 days to determine a path forward. Trump will outline a broader strategy for confronting Iran, including its missile program and support for terror networks in the Middle East, when he unveils his decision on the Iran deal next week.

English Writer Kazuo Ishiguro Wins 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature: On Thursday, Kazuo Ishiguro, 62, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the literary world’s highest honor. Born in 1954 in Nagasaki, Japan, Ishiguro moved to Surrey, England, when he was 5 years old. After studying English and philosophy at the University of Kent, he spent a year writing fiction and then earned a Masters of Arts in creative writing. Ishiguro has published seven acclaimed novels, including “The Remains of the Day,” about a butler serving an English lord in the years leading up to World War II, and “Never Let Me Go,” a melancholic, dystopian love story set in a British boarding school. Some themes recur throughout his work, including the fallibility of memory, mortality, and the porous nature of time.

At a news conference at his London publisher’s office on Thursday, Ishiguro was “characteristically self-effacing,” saying that the award was a genuine shock: “If I had even a suspicion, I would have washed my hair this morning,” he said. He added that when he thinks of “all the great writers living at this time who haven’t won this prize, I feel slightly like an impostor.” The Nobel Prize in Literature is given in recognition of a writer’s entire body of work rather than a single title. Ishiguro is the rare (and lucky) writer who is both lauded by critics and scholars and commercially successful. His novels have sold more than 2.5 million copies in the US.

Elusive Author Of Damaging Dossier On Trump Met With Special Counsel Last Summer: CNN exclusive reporting says Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, investigating Trump-Russia connections stemming from the 2016 presidential campaign, had met this past summer with former British Intelligence Agent Christopher Steele, author of a controversial dossier very damaging to Donald Trump. The inflammatory dossier came to light publicly in January, but US intelligence agencies had been aware of the document since 2016 and apparently took it more seriously than previously thought.

President Trump and a number of Republican lawmakers have repeatedly attempted to discredit Steele, insisting the memos he produced were complete “works of fiction.” Trump told The New York Times this summer that the dossier “was totally made-up stuff.” In a series of tweets earlier this year, Trump said the memos were written by a “failed spy” who had relied on “totally made-up facts by sleazebag political operatives.” Richard Burr, Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee which is also investigating Russian interference in the US election, expressed frustration at a news conference just this week that his committee had been unable to interview Steele, concluding “The committee cannot really decide the credibility of the dossier….” However, parts of the dossier have previously been verified as factual, and it’s broad assertion that Russia waged a campaign to interfere in the election is accepted as fact by the US intelligence community.

Japanese Workers Who Say Their Job is Killing Them Are Not Kidding: Most workers in civilized countries around the world have probably complained at some time or other that their jobs were working them to death. But seldom did they literally mean it, unless the workers were Japanese. There’s even a word for it: karoshi (death from overwork). Again this week Japan has been forced to face it’s work culture when labor inspectors ruled that the death of a 31-year-old journalist at the country’s public broadcaster, NHK, had been caused by overwork. The young woman was a political reporter who had logged 159 hours of overtime covering the Tokyo assembly elections in June and July 2013. She took only two days off in the month leading up to her death from heart failure. A senior official at the NHK’s news department said he waited three years to make the young woman’s death public out of respect for her family.

One year ago a similar ruling was made in the 2015 death of a 24 year old female employee at Dentsu advertising agency who was working more than a 100 hours overtime in the months before her death. Weeks before she died on Christmas Day, she posted on social media: “I want to die.” Another message read: “I’m physically and mentally shattered.” That  case triggered a national debate about Japan’s work practices and forced the prime minister, Shinzō Abe, to address a workplace culture that assumes forcing employees to work long hours demonstrates their dedication. Japan’s first recognized case of karoshi-related suicide was another 24-year-old Dentsu employee who killed himself in 1991 after not having had a day off work for 17 months and sleeping less than two hours a night before his death.

In its first white paper on karoshi last year, the government documented more than 2,000 deaths  from work-related stress in the year to March 2016, while dozens of other victims died from heart attacks, strokes and other conditions brought on by spending too much time at work. It also said one in five employees were currently at risk of death from overwork. The government proposes to cap monthly overtime at 100 hours and introduce penalties for companies that allow their employees to exceed the limit, measures that critics say still put workers at risk.

Additional Read: The never ending debate about the efficacy of working from home (we believe that there is an inexorable trend towards remote working and that the benefits outweigh the costs for both employer and employee).

US Supreme Court Hears First Arguments Of Its New Term: This week the US Supreme Court started its 2017-2018 term with a full complement of nine justices for the first time since Antonin Scalia died in February 2016. President Trump’s nominee, Neil Gorsuch, was the ninth justice sworn in April 2017, 14 months after the vacancy arose. The Court had been forced to operate with only eight justices when the Republican-controlled senate refused to consider former president Barack Obama’s nominee to fill Scalia’s seat.

On Tuesday justices heard arguments for and against the major voting rights case out of Wisconsin dealing with partisan gerrymandering, a 205 year old practice of manipulating boundaries of legislative districts to benefit one political party over another. Wisconsin’s electoral map was redrawn after the 2010 US census in a way that enabled Republicans to win a sizable majority of Wisconsin legislative seats despite losing the popular vote statewide to Democrats. The state was sued, and a federal three-judge panel ruled 2-1 last November that Wisconsin’s redistricting plan violated the Constitution’s First Amendment right to freedom of expression and association and the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law because of the extent to which it marginalized Democratic voters. Wisconsin appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court.

The justices must first determine whether the challengers suing the state had ‘standing’, the legal term meaning a party’s ability to demonstrate sufficient connection to and harm from the law or action challenged to support the party’s participation in the case. The Court for decades  has been willing to invalidate state electoral maps on the grounds of racial discrimination, but never maps drawn solely for partisan advantage. A ruling is due by the end of June 2018. In the meantime, observe potential verbal fireworks within the Supreme Court to see how the justices really feel about a case and each other.

More Reads

• The West and the entire world still significantly underestimates Putin (The Guardian)
• Will Oprah run for President in 2020? 2 years ago this might seem implausible. Today, it’s very possible. (New York Magazine)
• Bannon’s secretive Breitbart goal of becoming “the platform for the alt-right” (BuzzFeed)
• Seattle’s Super Secret White Nationalist Convention (the Stranger)
• Anti-abortion Republican congressmen steps down after “reportedly encouraging a woman he was romantically involved with to terminate a pregnancy” (Politico)
• More about the Las Vegas massacre
  • Stephen Paddock was quite wealthy as he owned two planes, multiple homes, and “regularly dropped tens of thousands of dollars in Vegas casinos.” (Time)
  • Americans are divided, but perhaps nothing divides Americans more than views on gun control (NYT)
  • Paddock was so deadly because of his weapons, and inside look on his accessories (New Yorker)
  • Google and Facebook have failed us again (The Atlantic)
• Could artificial intelligence reveal who betrayed Anne Frank? (Stars & Stripes)
• Is Brexit and Catalonia just the tip of the iceberg, and is Europe becoming undone? (Bloomberg)
• Germany’s Hugh Hefner was a woman who created an entirely different sort of sex empire based off of “mutual pleasure built on communication and sexual education” (Quartz)
• A Danish inventor, torturer, and murder case that feels ripped from a Stieg Larsson book. (NPR)
• Marriage is a complex topic and institution. Tolstoy said it best: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
  • We expect way too much from our spouses and that is “why that’s made staying married harder” (The Atlantic)
  • A more quantitative analysis of the state of American marriages with a click baity title of “Rich Men With Extreme Politics Have the Happiest Marriages” (Bloomberg)
  • Meanwhile, the CDC estimates there are 110 million STD infections in the US. (NYT)

The Underwear Bomber Has Nothing On The Snake Sock Smuggler:  A Chinese national living in Canada pleaded guilty to violating wildlife regulations this week after he was caught trying to leave New York with three albino Western hog-nosed snakes he intended to mail to China hiding in his socks. Prosecutors with the US Attorney’s Office said earlier the same day the 28 year old man had mailed seven live ball pythons to Shanghai. The US Fish and Wildlife Service inspected the package and seized the snakes, which had an estimated value of $3,300. Sentencing is scheduled around Halloween.

Then there’s the California man who does his smuggling the old fashioned way – through the US Postal Service. He was arrested last July on federal smuggling charges after Customs and Border Protection personnel seized a package that arrived from Hong Kong containing three live king cobras hidden in potato chip canisters.

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