VICE: Here's What Will Happen After a Huge Earthquake Inevitably Hits California

The San Andreas is the most notorious of these faults. It runs roughly 800 miles long and produces quakes so catastrophic that there’s a 2015 action movie about it starring The Rock. The southern section of the fault generates earthquakes every 150 years on average, and considering some parts of it haven’t ruptured in more than 200 years, Southern California is overdue for a major shaking, otherwise known as “the Big One.” [...]

Scientists don’t know exactly where the Big One will hit or how large it will be when it does, but they do have some ideas: One of the most likely scenarios, according to a 2008 federal study, is a 7.8 magnitude earthquake starting at the Salton Sea and running up through Lake Hughes, on a 200 mile long section of the fault that, in parts, hasn't ruptured since 1680—almost two centuries before California became part of the United States and long before it had any major infrastructure. [...]

The death toll probably won’t be as bad as movies like San Andreas—which Benthien calls “Hollywood fantasy”—make it out to be. Scientists predict that a magnitude 7.8 earthquake along the southern San Andreas would likely kill about 2,000 people—or less than .1 percent of Southern California’s population of more than 22 million. [...]

The estimated total impact of just building damage is $33 billion, not counting the costs following a potential quake-induced fire. It’s a hefty price tag, especially considering that most Californians don’t have earthquake insurance, which is rarely included in homeowners or renters’ insurance. Just over 14 percent of homeowners and 5 percent of renters with residential insurance have an earthquake policy, which typically covers damage to belongings and personal property like furniture and the cost of relocating to either new or temporary housing, according to 2016 data from the California Earthquake Authority. (The state agency, which supplies most of the state’s earthquake insurance, doesn’t keep statistics on how many Californians don’t have residential insurance.) 

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The Atlantic: The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News

The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories. [...]

Though the study is written in the clinical language of statistics, it offers a methodical indictment of the accuracy of information that spreads on these platforms. A false story is much more likely to go viral than a real story, the authors find. A false story reaches 1,500 people six times quicker, on average, than a true story does. And while false stories outperform the truth on every subject—including business, terrorism and war, science and technology, and entertainment—fake news about politics regularly does best. [...]

And blame for this problem cannot be laid with our robotic brethren. From 2006 to 2016, Twitter bots amplified true stories as much as they amplified false ones, the study found. Fake news prospers, the authors write, “because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.” [...]

Second, fake news evokes much more emotion than the average tweet. The researchers created a database of the words that Twitter users used to reply to the 126,000 contested tweets, then analyzed it with a state-of-the-art sentiment-analysis tool. Fake tweets tended to elicit words associated with surprise and disgust, while accurate tweets summoned words associated with sadness and trust, they found.

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The New York Review of Books: Israel and Annexation by Lawfare

This epic transformation is taking place after close to fifty years of occupation. During that time, Israel made profound changes to both the landscape and the demography of the territory it conquered. Palestinians were subjected to a military government that denied them participation in the political process that shaped the rules applied to them and determined their future. Israel used the authoritarian powers that international law gives an occupying force to exploit the territory in a way never envisaged by the framers of those laws. It unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem, a move that was widely condemned abroad. The international community does not recognize the unified city as Israel’s capital; even Trump’s declaration on moving the US embassy to Jerusalem stops short of acknowledging the annexation of the city’s eastern parts. [...]

What the government is embarking on amounts to both de jure annexation and the crime of apartheid. In recent months, the expansion of de jure annexation has been staggering. Lawyers for the Ministry of Justice recently drafted a bill to give the Jerusalem district court, rather than the High Court of Justice (which is a bench of the Supreme Court), the power of judicial review over the military government in the Occupied Territories. This shift away from the High Court represents a move to designate the West Bank as a district within Israel. In addition, the attorney general has directed the government’s legal advisers that when drafting bills, they should take into account the need to find a legal mechanism to apply those bills to Israeli settlers as well.

At the same time, the ruling parliamentary coalition has put its lawyers to work drafting numerous annexationist bills. Their latest accomplishments include a law, enacted last year, which instructs the army to confiscate private Palestinian land and assign it to the intruding Israelis who have put up settlements there. This law is not only a naked sanction of land theft; it is also an unprecedented imposition of Knesset legislation on Palestinians who have no parliamentary representation. Another law that passed the legislative process a few weeks ago gives the state’s Council for Higher Education authority over Israel’s academic institutions in the West Bank, normalizing their presence and operation there. One bill currently making its way through the legislature would extend Israel’s law and administration to the municipal areas of Jewish settlements; another proposes the establishment of a Greater Jerusalem Council, which would include nearby settlement blocs. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even bragged recently that these annexation plans are coordinated with the US administration—a claim he had to retract after a strong denial from the White House.

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VICE: How Putin Is Using The Orthodox Church To Build His Power (HBO)

Vladimir Putin's victory in last week's Russian presidential elections came as no surprise. Putin has spent much of the past two decades building an enduring and loyal following in Russia, and alliances with some of the country's most powerful institutions — none, perhaps, more important that the Russian Orthodox Church, which has fully embraced his leadership.

It's all part of a dramatic turnaround for the Church, which just 30 years ago was only a marginal force in Russian society. The Soviets had sought to stamp out organized faith, stripping religion from education, arresting clergymen, and ordering the destruction of many of Russia's grand cathedrals, including one, Christ the Savior, that was demolished to make room for a public pool.

But under Putin, the Church has been making a comeback. More than 70% of Russians today identify as Russian Orthodox, up from 30% at the end of the Soviet Union. And huge swaths of land have been transferred back to religious ownership, with thousands of new churches being built or restored -- at a rate of almost three a day, by church figures. And Putin, by building loyalty among the leaders of a cherished institution, has arguably been the greatest beneficiary of this largesse. 

VICE News Tonight went to Moscow to ask Church leaders, and experts on the role of religion in society, how the church's resurrection has played into Putin's gambit for everlasting power. 

Quartz: Why do we still call it capitalism?

At a speech in London last month, the economist and scholar John Kay used Apple, the largest company in the world in terms of market capitalization, as a typical example of a fast-moving modern business: The company has very few assets and a full-time global labor force of only 123,000—i.e. not that many, given its market reach and influence. It is what Kay calls a “hallow” corporation, and one in which the only thing that shareholders actually own is the stock certificate itself. “I wish we could stop calling it Capitalism,” he said, continuing:

“…and what of Apple’s $800 billion market capitalization? So wedded are we to the idea that capital is critical to business, so much in thrall to the word, that we have invented new concepts such as social and intellectual capital to try to explain phenomena that are perhaps more clearly and certainly more simply described in ordinary language.”

For stocks that dominate the market today—Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix, and Microsoft—the capital deployed to actually produce the product does so at a great remove from the company. If there is real estate involved, it might be owned by a sovereign wealth fund located on a different continent. Employees who touch the product, if the company manufactures at all, are contractors in an equally remote location.  The need for fresh capital is modest to non-existent. Companies that go public today, like Spotify, are doing it for one basic reason: to allow the venture capitalists and early round investors to exit.

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Spiegel: What Orbán's Third Win Could Mean for Europe

Overall, the election results show the extent to which the election conditions were tailored to Orbán's Fidesz, Hungary's only large political party. Of the party's 199 members of parliament, 106 were elected in single-member constituencies based on the first-past-the-post system. In many constituencies, Fidesz candidates only won with a relative majority, with the combined outcomes for the opposition candidates significantly higher in come cases. But the parties would have had to join forces and put up a single joint candidate in order to beat Fidesz -- and they were unable to reach such an agreement in many electoral constituencies.

Overall, the election results show the extent to which the election conditions were tailored to Orbán's Fidesz, Hungary's only large political party. Of the party's 199 members of parliament, 106 were elected in single-member constituencies based on the first-past-the-post system. In many constituencies, Fidesz candidates only won with a relative majority, with the combined outcomes for the opposition candidates significantly higher in come cases. But the parties would have had to join forces and put up a single joint candidate in order to beat Fidesz -- and they were unable to reach such an agreement in many electoral constituencies.  For some observers, including G.M. Tam, a leftist philosopher in Budapest and former anti-communist civil rights activist, Orbán's landslide victory didn't come as a surprise. "In recent years, elections all over Europe have been decided based on the so-called immigration question," Tamás told DER SPIEGEL. He says that consensus over a common well-being and common interest is disappearing all over Europe and that an increasing number of groups in society are placing their own interest over those of minorities like foreign citizens or refugees. "Orbán is a strong and talented representative of this trend," Tamás says. "That's why he wins elections. Everyone in Hungary knows that he's corrupt and that he governs poorly, and yet many people still vote for him because they consider it important that he protects them from immigrants and minorities like the Roma." [...]

All of which makes his reserved appearance on election night seem disingenuous at best. Particularly since Orbán explicitly said a few weeks ago that he planned to deal rigorously with his opponents and critics -- including nongovernmental organizations. In his speech on the Hungarian national holiday on March 15, Orbán said: "After the election, we will of course seek amends -- moral, political and legal amends."

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The New Yorker: How Paul Ryan Got It Wrong

The Tea Party has been a major force in American politics for nearly a decade now, stretching back to the victories that it brought Republicans in the midterm elections in 2010. Ryan did not create the movement, but he did more than any other sitting politician in Washington to welcome it into the Republican fold, to insist that it shared with the G.O.P. establishment an ideological core: that its fury was just atmosphere, and that at its essence was the same stringent set of beliefs—about small government and low taxes—that Ryan himself had grown powerful professing. When the acrimony between the upstarts and the old guard split the House caucus and deposed Boehner, Ryan was the one figure who could repair the breach—who could look at the Tea Party and see his own image—and so he became Speaker of the House. With the rise of Donald Trump, he tried to repeat this maneuver. The new President was bestowed a chief of staff (Reince Priebus) and a press secretary (Sean Spicer) selected from the ranks of Ryan’s Wisconsin allies. And Ryan began insisting to the public that this new regime was headed not toward serial, incandescent feuds but toward tax reform, Obamacare repeal, and entitlement reform—that the order was regular, that the Republican Party was not materially changed. [...]

The country will be better off now that Ryan has less influence. The major accomplishment he claimed on Wednesday morning was the tax bill that he and his colleagues passed last year, a piece of legislation loaded with giveaways to corporations and the wealthy, and which will only escalate the country’s profound inequalities. Whether his party will be better without him is not as clear. In Washington, insiders believe the next Speaker will be either the transactional House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy, of California, or the more stringent conservative Whip, Steve Scalise, of Louisiana, who last year was shot in an assassination attempt at a congressional baseball practice. Ryan was adept at finding euphemisms for his party’s aims, even as many members of his caucus devoted themselves to making a cult of victimized white men. They now find themselves under pressure—facing protests and electoral challenges—from coalitions organized largely by high-achieving women.

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Vox: Paul Ryan is leaving because he lost the fight for the Republican soul

Nehlen was never a threat to beat Ryan. Ryan walloped him in 2016 and was never in serious danger of losing to him in 2018, as far as anyone could tell. But Nehlen’s existence was fundamentally a reminder that a large part of the party Ryan was trying to lead didn’t trust him and didn’t agree with him about what the Republican Party should be. And even if that faction wasn’t going to unseat him in his own district, it’s won the party. [...]

But even though Ryan was the only mainstream Republican the Freedom Caucus trusted even a little, they didn’t trust him unreservedly. Conservatives were deeply worried about his past support for comprehensive immigration reform, including legalization for unauthorized immigrants currently in the US. To become speaker, Ryan promised the Freedom Caucus that he wouldn’t make any sudden moves on immigration by aligning with Democrats over conservatives — that he’d adhere to the Hastert Rule (only bringing bills to the floor if they’re supported by a majority of Republicans) on any immigration bills. [...]

The answer to the question of “What is the Republican Party?” has changed. It’s no longer a political organization dedicated to shrinking government and protecting the free market. It’s now one side of an ongoing culture war — for immigration agents and against immigrants, for police officers and against disruptive (black) protesters, for the White House and against the “deep state.” It’s not exclusively a white identity politics, but without race, it’s hard to imagine the bonds that tie Donald Trump to the Republican base.

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Deutsche Welle: The Iraq War: In the beginning was the lie

Most sources estimate the number of dead at anything from 150,000 to half a million. Some reliable investigations have concluded that the number was actually far higher. As early as 2006, the respected medical journal The Lancet calculated that there had been more than 650,000 "additional deaths." As well as from direct violence, this figure also takes into account the consequences of the bombed-out infrastructure and the collapse of the health system. [...]

Despite other, more explicit warnings about the veracity of Curveball's testimony, it became the centerpiece of Powell's war propaganda. Ray McGovern is certain: "They didn't care whether Curveball knew what he was talking about. What they had was something they could put on the record, that they could give to these very imaginative and very professional graphics people working for the CIA, and they in turn could render drawings of these nonexistent mobile chemical weapons labs, which of course they did and which Colin Powell featured during his speech."[...]

And Attorney General Goldsmith is on record as saying that "the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action." None of these reservations, however, stopped Blair from going to war in the interests of the "special relationship" between the US and the UK.

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