Showing 1-10 of 33 results
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Underdogs survive 'Super Tuesday'
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 03/03/2016
» East High School in Denver, Colorado, home to 14 precincts for the Democratic caucuses, was a mob scene on Tuesday night. It was hard to judge the turnout, but one of the organisers told me there were about 5,000 people there, and I believed him: Rooms designated for caucusing were overflowing, and several precincts gave up and held their votes in the stairwell or outside the building.
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Defining 'greatness' at core of 2016 presidential race
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 23/03/2016
» In two months on the road covering the 2016 presidential primaries, I've seen the US going through something of an identity crisis, after decades of dominance. The candidates are talking about what the voters are thinking about: What does it mean for the US to be great?
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Politicians should be keeping their money at home
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 07/04/2016
» Ramon Fonseca, a founding partner of Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian offshore incorporator that has suffered the biggest leak of privileged information in history, has told Financial Times that the investigations stemming from the leak are an attack on the basic human right to privacy. Dmitri Peskov, spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, described them as an attack on his boss ahead of the 2018 presidential election. The investigative journalists themselves see their effort as a strike against corruption and money-laundering. So what purpose do the Panama Papers investigations really serve?
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Panama Papers blame-game hides the real issue
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 18/04/2016
» Last week, a respected Russia scholar in the US speculated that the Kremlin might be behind the so-called Panama Papers, the big dump of data about offshore accounts that has implicated several countries' officials in shady dealings. And on Thursday, President Vladimir Putin of Russia blamed the US for the leak.
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If you expect it, it's not a 'Black Swan'
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 11/05/2016
» It's the bread and butter of pundits to speculate what the world might look like after a relatively improbable but potentially disruptive event, like the UK's exit from the European Union or a Donald Trump victory in the US presidential election. The perceived probability of these "black swan" events is pretty high, after all, and contingency plans may be in order. It's useful, however, to remember how the author of The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb, framed it in his 2007 book:
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US-EU trade negotiations getting hung up on politics
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 31/08/2016
» Germany's vice-chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, says talks about a major trade deal between the European Union and the US have failed, though "nobody is really admitting it". That statement should be taken with a grain of salt, but the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) appears to be doomed, at least until after elections in the US and major European countries.
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Anti-Trump protests are detrimental
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 17/11/2016
» The footage of the anti-Donald Trump marches and the belligerent tweets criticising the US president-elect fill me with ambivalence. On the one hand, Mr Trump's victory hardly makes me happy; then again, as someone who has seen, and taken part in, both successful and failed mass protests, I believe the liberal cause would be better served if the demonstrators stayed home.
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US intelligence got the wrong cyber bear
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 04/01/2017
» The "Russian hacking" story in the US has gone too far. That it's not based on any solid public evidence, and that reports of it are often so overblown as to miss the mark, is only a problem to those who worry about disinformation campaigns, propaganda and journalistic standards -- a small segment of the general public. But the recent US government report that purports to substantiate technical details of recent hacks by Russian intelligence is off the mark and has the potential to do real damage to far more people and organisations.
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Putin sees himself as world's 'chess grandmaster'
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 09/01/2017
» Russian President Vladimir Putin is on a roll. The catalog of his alarming moves is well-known: aggression in Ukraine, interference in Syria on the side of President Bashar al-Assad, stepped-up intelligence efforts that may include a hybrid operation to discredit Hillary Clinton, a slick, prolific propaganda machine, support for nationalist and populist movements in Europe. But why is Mr Putin doing all this?
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Deeper malicious intent seen in 'public' cyberwar
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 16/01/2017
» Compared with the alleged Russian hacks of the Democratic National Committee and other US targets, another important cyber theft that has also been tentatively attributed to Russia is getting far less attention. The revelations are much less titillating than those that have made headlines recently -- they aren't even understandable to most people -- but they may be part of the same cyberwar, one whose rules seem to be changing.
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