The church at Ntarama, a 45-minute drive south of Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, is a red-brick building about 20 metres long by 5 metres wide. Inside are features seen in Catholic churches around the world: pews for congregation members, an altar, stained-glass windows and a cross adorning the entrance. Then there are the scars of the unimaginable: piles of blood-stained clothing hanging along the walls and glass cabinets containing more than 260 human skulls, many fractured or shattered, some with rusted weapons still penetrating them. Nearby, wooden sticks and roughly carved clubs lean against the altar.
Ntarama is the site of one of the many massacres that occurred during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda — one of the worst atrocities of the late twentieth century. Starting on 7 April that year, in 100 days of horrifying violence, members of the Hutu ethnic group systematically killed an estimated 800,000 Tutsi — or more than one million, according to the Rwandan government and other sources. The killers ranged from militias to ordinary citizens, with neighbours turning on neighbours. Many moderate Hutu and some of the Twa minority group were also killed.
More than 5,000 Tutsi were murdered at Ntarama, among them babies, children and pregnant women, many of whom were raped before they were killed, says Evode Ngombwa, site manager at the Ntarama Genocide Memorial, one of six sites in Rwanda that commemorate the atrocity. “People used money to bribe the perpetrators so that they could choose the way of being eliminated. Instead of killing them with machetes, they could choose to be shot,” says Ngombwa as he walks me through the church. With more remains being found each year, about 6,000 people are now buried there in mass graves.
This month, Rwanda and the world begin commemorations to mark 30 years since the start of this atrocity. The genocide is now one of the most studied of its kind. Researchers from social and political scientists to mental-health specialists, geneticists and neuroscientists have investigated the event and its aftermath in a way that hadn’t been possible for previous atrocities.
This work is especially important now in light of violent crises in several parts of the world, including in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Although there is debate about whether these conflicts meet the definition of genocide, some share similar characteristics. Research conducted into atrocities such as the genocide in Rwanda can help to inform responses and longer-term approaches to healing.
Despite the difficulties of these studies, researchers say that they are working towards developing a theory of genocide and the conditions that spur mass violence. They are providing guidance for first responders, as well as those involved in peacebuilding and supporting survivors of other systematic mass murders and of war. Some of their approaches have been used in other conflicts. And the research on Rwanda is offering lessons for how scholars can improve studies of similar events.
“Genocide studies are important,” says Phil Clark, an international-politics researcher at SOAS, part of the University of London, who has studied Rwanda for more than two decades. “If we can start to understand why and how genocides happen, and especially if we can compare genocides across the world, we should ideally be able to build a general theory of how these terrible events are even possible.”
One of the lessons emerging from Rwanda is the importance of involving — and supporting — local researchers, whose work, language skills and access to traumatized communities can be essential for understanding the roots of violence and the best techniques for reconciliation. This can be difficult — in Rwanda’s case because the genocide wiped out almost its entire academic community. Now, through programmes aimed at elevating local scholars’ voices, their work is finally reaching a wider audience.
Virginia Commonwealth University has one. So do the University of Richmond and the University of Virginia. St. Catherine’s, St. Christopher’s and Collegiate schools have one each. Harvard University has one big enough to buy 5,000 large private islands in the Caribbean.
What they all have in common is an endowment fund, which is “a collection of financial assets that a school can periodically pull from to cover an array of costs while intentionally growing funds over time,” according to U.S. News & World Report.
Endowment funds are financial staples for public and private colleges and private preparatory schools but are rarely used in funding public school systems. That’s about to change in Richmond, where two entrepreneurs, Michael Bor and Chris Bossola, have created The Endowment Project, a startup with the lofty goal “to eventually create a $65 million endowment for every public high school in the country,” Bor says.
Hitting that ambitious mark will take time, Bor admits, but The Endowment Project is already successful after launching in May 2023 with 12 pilot projects in Richmond-area schools.
The first high school, Douglas S. Freeman, has raised “almost $100,000 so far,” Bor says. The school used the funds to award two first-generation college scholarships, refurbish a concession stand and buy furniture for a flex learning room. “We have received some innovative, flexible furniture,” says Douglas S. Freeman Principal John Marshall. “We are transforming some common space inside the building into a 21st-century learning area.”
The goal for 2024, Bor says, “is to significantly expand and to ultimately include all of Virginia as our first test state. Education is the second-largest destination for philanthropy behind religion, but it all goes to colleges and private schools. Not many people currently give to public high schools.”
Inspiration
While public school endowments are rare, there are a few successful programs. Boston Latin School in Massachusetts, the country’s oldest school and largest of the Boston Public School System, has a $75 million endowment (see story below). The money is raised through the Boston Latin School Association, which is independent from the school. In 2018, Peter Kelly, president and CEO of the BLSA, led the Boston Latin School Prima Perpetua Campaign to $54 million, the largest known campaign on behalf of a single public school in U.S. history.
“It has really developed over the last 30 years,” Kelly says. “There was an ascendence of the notion of private philanthropy supporting public good.”
“It’s a really interesting idea,” Marshall says. “This model works for higher ed, so I think there is a model for that. I support anything that gives more funds to public education. There are a lot of public schools, and a lot of need in our schools, so anybody who is working to support public schools is someone I’m excited about.”
Bor, a graduate of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, says his private school had a $1.5 billion endowment. “Teachers were supported. International programs were offered. It was a fantastic place.”
In 2021, when Bor and his then business partner Will Boland took their startup, CarLotz, public, Bor got a phone call from his old prep school seeking a donation. Boland, who went to Douglas S. Freeman, got no such call. “That started a conversation around fundraising in high schools and how it just doesn’t exist in the public system as it does in the private system,” Bor says. “I realized that there were no gifts because there was no infrastructure for it, no donor platform, no 501(c)(3), no annual report on what happened with your gift and what impact it made. We need to start by building the infrastructure to enable and encourage that level of giving.”
Two years later, Bor resigned from CarLotz and started The Endowment Project LLC with Chris Bossola, a fellow entrepreneur and founder of Need Supply Co., to build the infrastructure to make charitable giving to public high schools easy and focused while ensuring accountability.
Infrastructure
Since then, The Endowment Project has built the technological infrastructure to allow individual schools to set up their own funds, created a database of prospective donors, templated marketing campaigns and established an accountable and transparent way to disburse the funds.
“There is no real setting up that the school has to do,” Bor says. “Everything we are doing is — I don’t want to say independent of the school because we do need them to tell us how to spend the money — but we don’t really ask anything of the school, and that’s key for this model. We are not adding work to the principal or the administration, we don’t have a contract with the schools. We view our customer as the alumni and the school as the beneficiary.”
He continues, “We are building a database of where everyone went to high school and how to reach them today. It’s relatively difficult and expensive technology. We are also building a giving platform so when alumni find out about what we are doing, they are able to give online [and] with Apple Pay or Google Pay.”
A typical public high school has 400 graduates each year, Bor says. “Most people live about 60 years on average after they graduate, so there are about 24,000 graduates per school. Our systems today can probably figure out a third of those immediately, just through technology. We hope to get to half or more over time.”
Douglas Freeman has “a proud, supportive Freeman community and alumni, and strong alumni base,” Marshall says. “There are almost 70 years of history here. There are a lot of folks who have a lot of interest in making sure we continue a tradition that is really rich and impactful for a lot of years. We have an active [parent-teacher-student association], a very active, wonderful athletic booster program, and several other booster programs. If you have a student here, you might be part of our PTSA. If you have student athlete here, you might be part of our booster program.
The Endowment Project “is for trying to reach those alumni who live outside of the area, like California, or don’t have school-age kids but are still willing to give back,” he continues. “We have a lot of alumni out there, a lot of successful folks that [The Endowment Project] thought they could tap into to help support the school as it is now. Ultimately [The Endowment Project] is a separate organization who are making some donations to this school on behalf of the alumni who have donated to them. They were working with a group we weren’t readily accessing.”
It has become almost impossible to separate the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences. Reality is parsed through glowing screens, unending data feeds, biometric feedback loops, digital protheses and expanding networks that link our virtual selves to satellite arrays in geostationary orbit. Wristwatches interpret our physical condition by counting steps and heartbeats. Phones track how we spend our time online, map the geographic location of the places we visit and record our histories in digital archives. Social media platforms forge alliances and create new political possibilities. And vast wireless networks – connecting satellites, drones and ‘smart’ weapons – determine how the wars of our era are being waged. Our experiences of the world are soaked with digital technologies.
But for the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, one of the earliest and foremost theorists of our digital age, understanding the world requires us to move beyond the standard view of technology. Stiegler believed that technology is not just about the effects of digital tools and the ways that they impact our lives. It is not just about how devices are created and wielded by powerful organisations, nation-states or individuals. Our relationship with technology is about something deeper and more fundamental. It is about technics.
According to Stiegler, technics – the making and use of technology, in the broadest sense – is what makes us human. Our unique way of existing in the world, as distinct from other species, is defined by the experiences and knowledge our tools make possible, whether that is a state-of-the-art brain-computer interface such as Neuralink, or a prehistoric flint axe used to clear a forest. But don’t be mistaken: ‘technics’ is not simply another word for ‘technology’. As Martin Heidegger wrote in his essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954), which used the German term Technik instead of Technologie in the original title: the ‘essence of technology is by no means anything technological.’ This aligns with the history of the word: the etymology of ‘technics’ leads us back to something like the ancient Greek term for art – technē. The essence of technology, then, is not found in a device, such as the one you are using to read this essay. It is an open-ended creative process, a relationship with our tools and the world.
This is Stiegler’s legacy. Throughout his life, he took this idea of technics, first explored while he was imprisoned for armed robbery, further than anyone else. But his ideas have often been overlooked and misunderstood, even before he died in 2020. Today, they are more necessary than ever. How else can we learn to disentangle the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences? How else can we begin to grasp the history of our strange reality?
Stiegler’s path to becoming the pre-eminent philosopher of our digital age was anything but straightforward. He was born in Villebon-sur-Yvette, south of Paris, in 1952, during a period of affluence and rejuvenation in France that followed the devastation of the Second World War. By the time he was 16, Stiegler participated in the revolutionary wave of 1968 (he would later become a member of the Communist Party), when a radical uprising of students and workers forced the president Charles de Gaulle to seek temporary refuge across the border in West Germany. However, after a new election was called and the barricades were dismantled, Stiegler became disenchanted with traditional Marxism, as well as the political trends circulating in France at the time. The Left in France seemed helplessly torn between the postwar existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the anti-humanism of Louis Althusser. While Sartre insisted on humans’ creative capacity to shape their own destiny, Althusser argued that the pervasiveness of ideology in capitalist society had left us helplessly entrenched in systems of power beyond our control. Neither of these options satisfied Stiegler because neither could account for the rapid rise of a new historical force: electronic technology. By the 1970s and ’80s, Stiegler sensed that this new technology was redefining our relationship to ourselves, to the world, and to each other. To account for these new conditions, he believed the history of philosophy would have to be rewritten from the ground up, from the perspective of technics. Neither existentialism nor Marxism nor any other school of philosophy had come close to acknowledging the fundamental link between human existence and the evolutionary history of tools.
In the decade after 1968, Stiegler opened a jazz club in Toulouse that was shut down by the police a few years later for illegal prostitution. Desperate to make ends meet, Stiegler turned to robbing banks to pay off his debts and feed his family. In 1978, he was arrested for armed robbery and sentenced to five years in prison. A high-school dropout who was never comfortable in institutional settings, Stiegler requested his own cell when he first arrived in prison, and went on a hunger strike until it was granted. After the warden finally acquiesced, Stiegler began taking note of how his relationship to the outside world was mediated through reading and writing. This would be a crucial realisation. Through books, paper and pencils, he was able to interface with people and places beyond the prison walls.
It was during his time behind bars that Stiegler began to study philosophy more intently, devouring any books he could get his hands on. In his philosophical memoir Acting Out (2009), Stiegler describes his time in prison as one of radical self-exploration and philosophical experimentation. He read classic works of Greek philosophy, studied English and memorised modern poetry, but the book that really drew his attention was Plato’s Phaedrus. In this dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus, Plato outlines his concept of anamnesis, a theory of learning that states the acquisition of new knowledge is just a process of remembering what we once knew in a previous life. Caught in an endless cycle of death and rebirth, we forget what we know each time we are reborn. For Stiegler, this idea of learning as recollection would become less spiritual and more material: learning and memory are tied inextricably to technics. Through the tools we use – including books, writing, archives – we can store and preserve vast amounts of knowledge.
After an initial attempt at writing fiction in prison, Stiegler enrolled in a philosophy programme designed for inmates. While still serving his sentence, he finished a degree in philosophy and corresponded with prominent intellectuals such as the philosopher and translator Gérard Granel, who was a well-connected professor at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail (later known as the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès). Granel introduced Stiegler to some of the most prominent figures in philosophy at the time, including Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. Lyotard would oversee Stiegler’s master’s thesis after his eventual release; Derrida would supervise his doctoral dissertation, completed in 1993, which was reworked and published a year later as the first volume in his Technics and Time series. With the help of these philosophers and their novel ideals, Stiegler began to reshape his earlier political commitment to Marxist materialism, seeking to account for the ways that new technologies shape the world.
Major League Baseball has launched an investigation into the gambling allegations surrounding Ippei Mizuhara, Shohei Ohtani’s longtime interpreter and close confidant, the league announced Friday.
MLB issued the following statement:
“Major League Baseball has been gathering information since we learned about the allegations involving Shohei Ohtani and Ippei Mizuhara from the news media. Earlier today, our Department of Investigations (DOI) began their formal process investigating the matter.”
The Dodgers fired Mizuhara Wednesday after he was accused of committing a “massive theft” against the Dodgers superstar in relation to an illegal bookmaking operation.
Per the Los Angeles Times report, Mizuhara was accused of using "millions of dollars” of Ohtani’s money – ESPN has reported the sum being at least $4.5 million – in order to pay off bets with an allegedly illegal bookmaker who is currently under federal investigation.
Ohtani’s name had surfaced in the investigation of Mathew Bowyer, the Times reported, prompting Ohtani’s attorneys to make the claim against Mizuhara.
“In the course of responding to recent media inquiries, we discovered that Shohei has been the victim of a massive theft and we are turning the matter over to the authorities,” said the law firm Berk Brettler in a statement to the newspaper.
According to ESPN’s sources, neither the California Bureau of Investigation nor the FBI was working on the case. The Los Angeles Police Department and district attorney's offices in Los Angeles and Orange counties also told ESPN they were not investigating the matter, indicating it “was most likely a federal matter.” The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California declined to comment to ESPN.
According to the Times’ sources, Mizuhara placed bets with Bowyer, then lied to the Dodgers when asked about the Times’ inquiries into the matter. Mizuhara was in Seoul translating for Ohtani during the Dodgers’ season-opening series, but he was fired after the reports surfaced on Wednesday.
The Dodgers issued the following statement on Wednesday:
"The Dodgers are aware of media reports and are gathering information. The team can confirm that interpreter Ippei Mizuhara has been terminated. The team has no further comment at this time."
Bowyer’s attorney, Diane Bass, told the Times that her client has not been charged with a crime, though the paper reported that his home had been raided by federal agents last year as part of an investigation. Bass also told the Times that Bowyer never had any contact with Ohtani.
“Mathew Bowyer never met, spoke with, or texted, or had contact in any way with Shohei Ohtani,” Bass said. In an interview with ESPN, a day after providing a different version of events, Mizuhara emphasized that point on Wednesday.
“I want everyone to know Shohei had zero involvement in betting,” Mizuhara told ESPN. “I want people to know I did not know this was illegal. I learned my lesson the hard way. I will never do sports betting ever again."
Mizuhara also said: “I never bet on baseball, that's 100%. I knew that rule ... We have a meeting about that in Spring Training.”
Major League Baseball’s Rule 21 (d)(3) states that “Any player, umpire, or Club or League official or employee who places bets with illegal book makers, or agents for illegal book makers, shall be subject to such penalty as the Commissioner deems appropriate in light of the facts and circumstances of the conduct.”
In 2015, Marlins pitcher Jarred Cosart was fined and not suspended by MLB for violating Rule 21 (d)(3), though after it was determined by the league that Cosart had not bet on baseball.
When thousands of security researchers descend on Las Vegas every August for what's come to be known as “hacker summer camp,” the back-to-back Black Hat and Defcon hacker conferences, it's a given that some of them will experiment with hacking the infrastructure of Vegas itself, the city's elaborate array of casino and hospitality technology. But at one private event in 2022, a select group of researchers were actually invited to hack a Vegas hotel room, competing in a suite crowded with their laptops and cans of Red Bull to find digital vulnerabilities in every one of the room's gadgets, from its TV to its bedside VoIP phone.
One team of hackers spent those days focused on the lock on the room's door, perhaps its most sensitive piece of technology of all. Now, more than a year and a half later, they're finally bringing to light the results of that work: a technique they discovered that would allow an intruder to open any of millions of hotel rooms worldwide in seconds, with just two taps.
Today, Ian Carroll, Lennert Wouters, and a team of other security researchers are revealing a hotel keycard hacking technique they call Unsaflok. The technique is a collection of security vulnerabilities that would allow a hacker to almost instantly open several models of Saflok-brand RFID-based keycard locks sold by the Swiss lock maker Dormakaba. The Saflok systems are installed on 3 million doors worldwide, inside 13,000 properties in 131 countries.
By exploiting weaknesses in both Dormakaba's encryption and the underlying RFID system Dormakaba uses, known as MIFARE Classic, Carroll and Wouters have demonstrated just how easily they can open a Saflok keycard lock. Their technique starts with obtaining any keycard from a target hotel—say, by booking a room there or grabbing a keycard out of a box of used ones—then reading a certain code from that card with a $300 RFID read-write device, and finally writing two keycards of their own. When they merely tap those two cards on a lock, the first rewrites a certain piece of the lock's data, and the second opens it.
“Two quick taps and we open the door,” says Wouters, a researcher in the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography group at the KU Leuven University in Belgium. “And that works on every door in the hotel.”
Wouters and Carroll, an independent security researcher and founder of travel website Seats.aero, shared the full technical details of their hacking technique with Dormakaba in November 2022. Dormakaba says that it's been working since early last year to make hotels that use Saflok aware of their security flaws and to help them fix or replace the vulnerable locks. For many of the Saflok systems sold in the last eight years, there's no hardware replacement necessary for each individual lock. Instead, hotels will only need to update or replace the front desk management system and have a technician carry out a relatively quick reprogramming of each lock, door by door.
Wouters and Carroll say they were nonetheless told by Dormakaba that, as of this month, only 36 percent of installed Safloks have been updated. Given that the locks aren't connected to the internet and some older locks will still need a hardware upgrade, they say the full fix will still likely take months longer to roll out, at the very least. Some older installations may take years.
“We have worked closely with our partners to identify and implement an immediate mitigation for this vulnerability, along with a longer-term solution,” Dormakaba wrote to WIRED in a statement, though it declined to detail what that “immediate mitigation” might be. “Our customers and partners all take security very seriously, and we are confident all reasonable steps will be taken to address this matter in a responsible way.”
The technique to hack Dormakaba's locks that Wouters and Carroll's research group discovered involves two distinct kinds of vulnerabilities: One that allows them to write to its keycards, and one that allows them to know what data to write to the cards to successfully trick a Saflok lock into opening. When they analyzed Saflok keycards, they saw that they use the MIFARE Classic RFID system, which has been known for more than a decade to have vulnerabilities that allow hackers to write to keycards, though the brute-force process can take as long as 20 seconds. They then cracked a part of Dormakaba's own encryption system, its so-called key derivation function, which allowed them to write to its cards far faster. With either of those tricks, the researchers could then copy a Saflok keycard at will, but still not generate one for a different room.
The researchers' more crucial step required them to obtain one of the lock programming devices that Dormakaba distributes to hotels, as well as a copy of its front desk software for managing keycards. By reverse engineering that software, they were able to understand all the data stored on the cards, pulling out a hotel property code as well as a code for each individual room, then create their own values and encrypt them just as Dormakaba's system would, allowing them to spoof a working master key that opens any room on the property. “You can make a card that really looks as if it was created by the software from Dormakaba, essentially,” says Wouters.
And how did Carroll and Wouters obtain Dormakaba's front desk software? “We nicely asked a few people,” Wouters says. “Manufacturers assume that no one will sell their equipment on eBay, and that no one will make a copy of their software, and those assumptions, I think everyone knows, are not really valid.”
A program that will sell city-owned vacant homes for $1 was approved Wednesday by the Baltimore Board of Estimates over objections from City Council President Nick Mosby who said the policy “deeply concerned” him.
The new pricing structure, which was approved by a vote of 4-1, would sell a small group of city-owned homes listed on the Buy Into Bmore website for rates starting at $1.
Mosby voted against the item. The Democratic council president proposed his own program to offer houses for $1 in 2021, but it stalled in committee in 2022.
Mosby pushed for a deferral of the new policy during the board’s previous meeting and maintained his objections Wednesday, arguing Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration had not done enough to spell out in writing guardrails to ensure city residents are given first rights to buy properties and not forced out when neighborhoods improve.
Mosby also said he wanted written protections to ensure sales would fit into a “whole block” approach of development that tackles vacancy for an entire area rather than a single property.
“If affordability and affordable home ownership and equity and all of the nice words we like to use are really at the core competency as it relates to property disposition, this is a really bad policy,” Mosby said. “This is a bad policy because it doesn’t protect or prioritize the rights of folks in these communities.”
City housing officials have insisted there are guardrails in place, including a 90-day window in which city residents will be given priority to buy properties if they want to renovate them and use them as their primary residence. The Department of Housing and Community Development also plans to offer a form for residents to fill out if they are interested in buying any vacant property, city-owned or otherwise. Alice Kennedy, the city’s housing commissioner, said the city will work with interested residents to prepare them financially to buy the house.
Kennedy said Wednesday that the pricing policy is part of the city’s property disposition strategy. There are other programs to help residents and developers financially when they buy properties to rehab.
“The affordability part comes in on the money side,” she said. “This is the disposition side.”
Vacant homes are a widespread problem in Baltimore, where more than 13,000 sit unoccupied. The new price structure, however, would apply to very few of those homes. Fewer than 1,000 of the city’s total vacant properties are city-owned. And not all of those are listed on the Buy Into Bmore website. City officials said Tuesday that just over 200 are currently in the program. Numerous others that could fit into existing redevelopment efforts in particular neighborhoods have been set aside, Kennedy told the board.
City housing officials told The Baltimore Sun that the new pricing structure will apply to vacant homes and lots in city neighborhoods with the most “stressed” housing markets, featuring lower sales prices, and higher rates of foreclosure and vacancy. For the most part, those lie in East and West Baltimore.
The $1 price point would be available only for individual buyers and community land trusts. Developers would have to pay $3,000, and so would large nonprofits with 51 or more employees. Nonprofits with fewer employees could pay $1,000.
The policy also would cover vacant lots, which would range in price from a dollar to $1,000, based on a similar structure.
The Scott administration’s plan, as well as Mosby’s former plan, evoke the city’s “dollar house” program of the 1970s, which offered homes for a dollar to residents willing to fix them up and live in them. That program included low-interest rate renovation loans for buyers. Scott’s approach does not.
Kennedy argued previously that the pricing is just one piece of a larger plan to deal with the thousands of vacant homes and lots in the city. Late last year, Scott unveiled a $3 billion plan that calls for a mix of public and private funding to be spent over 15 years to touch 35,000 homes. Included in that plan are down payment and closing cost assistance.
Nneka N’namdi, a Baltimore housing advocate, told the spending board Wednesday that she would support the fixed pricing policy if conditions are put in place that prioritize existing residents and bar slumlords and land speculators from participating. The city also needs to offer financial assistance to buyers to help them rehabilitate properties, she said.
“We support this model because it is simple. It is clear. It is transparent,” she said. “But we need it to be equitable.”
In response to N’namdi, Scott said the city will develop an anti-displacement and equity policy and create a public-facing tracking tool to publicize “whole block” development. Scott, a Democrat, also said quarterly reports will be made to the city council on the demographics of buyers, and an annual review will be conducted on the program’s effectiveness.
Mosby argued N’namdi’s demands were not being met by the city’s current policies that govern the $1 sales.
“We can’t afford — whether it’s 200 properties, 300 properties, 500 properties — not to ensure that the policy is in place,” he said.
A new lawsuit in the ongoing saga surrounding late Boeing whistleblowerJohn Barnett is spotlighting the deep emotional stress the maverick quality inspector experienced from what he blasted as the planemaker’s campaign to muzzle him from exposing drastic production gaffes. The complaint also spotlights Barnett’s final thoughts as he contemplated taking his own life after locking himself inside his pickup truck overnight during a torrential rainstorm—a testament of righteous rage expressed in an extraordinarily tortured suicide note.
On March 19, Barnett’s estate filed a “wrongful death” action in the United States District Court in South Carolina, Charleston District, seeking damages on behalf of his mother and three surviving brothers. Joining the family’s longstanding counsels Rob Turkewitz and Brian Knowles is legendary litigator David Boies, along with Boris, Schiller managing partner Sigrid McCawley. Since 2017, Turkewitz and Knowles have been pursuing Boeing for allegedly violating the OSHA rules making it unlawful to retaliate against a whistleblower. Following Barnett’s death, the duo continued that regulatory lawsuit on behalf of the Barnett’s estate, and Boies joined the team. The wrongful death civil action states that “John’s PTSD, depression, anxiety and panic attacks, all caused by Boeing’s wrongful conduct, caused him to take his own life, which he would not have done but for being subjected to Boeing’s hostile work environment and its continuing retaliatory conduct.”
Fortune was first to report news of the wrongful death suit, and Boies’ involvement. When asked for comment Boeing told Fortune: “We are saddened by John Barnett’s death and extend our condolences to his family.”
The new complaint contains a copy of the suicide note, and the annexes present the full police report concluding that he died by his own hand. In conversations with Fortune, Turkewitz added further details on his client’s last hours. In the evening of March 8th last year, Barnett left the law offices of Boeing’s outside counsel in Charleston after testifying for two days in the OSHA case. Barnett was giving his account of how Boeing violated its own policies and procedures, and FAA rules, during his seven years as a quality inspector at the North Charleston plant that assembles the 787 Dreamliner. He’d delayed a trip back to his home in Louisiana to finish his deposition the next day, a Saturday. Videos cited in the police report show Barnett leaving the hotel around 8:30 PM, and getting in his Clemson orange, Dodge truck.
When Barnett failed to show by the 10 AM starting time for his final round of testimony, Turkewitz called the Holiday Inn to conduct a “welfare check.” A hotel employee saw Barnett slumped in the front seat of his vehicle. The Charleston police arrived to discover that the Dodge’s door was locked, and summoned a fire department officer who opened it with a “slim jim.” A barefoot Barnett was clutching a silver, Smith and Wesson pistol in his right hand, hair and blood showing at the end of the barrel. His right temple showed an apparent bullet entry wound, and an exit wound appeared in the back of his head.
A hotel employee working outside told the police he’d heard a “pop” just before 9:30 AM, but related that the driving rainstorm, one of the worst in Charleston’s history, muffled the sound. It’s clear from the reports included in the complaint’s annex that Barnett had spent the entire time since 8:30 PM in the truck. That’s a span of almost thirteen hours. Turkewitz added a detail not in the police accounts: Barnett had been running the engine all-night, and by the time the police arrived, the gas tank was empty; it’s also likely that the battery was dead.
Barnett’s tragic suicide note
On the seat next to Barnett’s body lay a message, written on a single page of a red-covered notebook. It was released with the police report in May, but its full contents weren’t widely noted. The sentences and phrases go in all direction, in script ranging from billboard-big to tiny. It seems that Barnett kept rotating the page by quarter turns as he added new thoughts in neat capital letters. Any of the four ways you orient the note, a lot of what he wrote appears upside-down or off to the sides. You need to keep turning the missive to read everything.
Barnett wrote a central section where held one way, you can read half the writing, and the other half’s jottings go in the opposite direction. He adds asides on both borders that run at a 90 degree angle to the middle part. The turmoil in Barnett’s writings reflect the fragmented form. You struggle to assemble the parts the way you’d puzzle over a cubist painting.
The missive comprises 94 words, 11 sentences, and 20 exclamation marks. Half of the middle section reads, “America come together or die!!! Pray that the motherfk…ers who destroyed my life pay!!! I pray that Boeing pays!!! Bury me face down so that Boeing and their lying ass leaders can kiss my ass.”
Navigate 180 degrees, and the following cascades from the middle of the page: “I can’t do this any longer!!! F-k Boeing!!! Family and friends, I love you’ll.” Then the writing spills further downwards concluding, “To my family and friends, I found my purpose! I am at peace! I love you more John/Mitch Barnett aka Swampy Fununcle Mitch.” (“Swampy” was Barnett’s nickname bestowed by his hot rod racing buddies from his time in working at the giant Boeing facility in Everett, Washington; Funcle was short for “Fun Uncle,” the moniker his beloved nieces gave the figure they cherished for his zany humor.)
In one side border, he adds, “The entire system for whistleblower protection is f-k’ed up too!!!” On the opposite fringe comes a touch of dark humor in another single sentence, “And I wasn’t stoned when I wrote this really.”
The Frida Kahlo Corporation has initiated legal proceedings against online vendors for unauthorized use of the artist's likeness and art. The corporation, holding the trademark, is seeking to halt the reproduction of Kahlo's works without permission.
In the lawsuits filed on March 4, the corporation demanded that Amazon sellers either surrender profits from the alleged counterfeit products or pay $2 million for each infringement of the trademark. The company asserts that the defendants' products are nearly identical or substantially similar to Kahlo's works, violating U.S. trademark law.
Following Kahlo's death in 1954 without a will, her property rights passed to her niece, Isolda Pinedo Kahlo. Isolda's daughter, Maria Cristina Romeo Pinedo, received power of attorney over these rights in 2003. The Frida Kahlo Corporation was established the following year in Panama City to manage the licensing and commercialization of the "Frida Kahlo" brand worldwide. The corporation now controls over two dozen trademarks associated with Kahlo.
The lawsuits claim that the online merchants used fictitious names to sell products on Amazon and other platforms, obtaining them from a common source. The corporation also alleges that the defendants communicate and collaborate to evade detection and discuss pending litigation and potential lawsuits.
This is not the first legal dispute involving Kahlo's brand. In 2018, the Frida Kahlo Corporation filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for Southern Florida against Kahlo's great-niece and her daughter, accusing them of trademark infringement. The conflict escalated following Mattel's release of a Barbie doll in Kahlo's likeness, with Kahlo's relatives contesting the corporation's licensing rights. A Mexican court ruled in favor of the relatives, ordering the doll's discontinuation in Mexican stores. Mattel claimed to have obtained permission from the Frida Kahlo Corporation.
These legal battles are complicated by Kahlo's political legacy. Inspired by the Mexican Revolution and later aligned with Communist and anti-imperialist causes, Kahlo was critical of capitalist systems in the United States and Europe. Her political beliefs add depth to the legal disputes over her image and legacy.
In conclusion, the Frida Kahlo Corporation's legal actions highlight the ongoing efforts to protect Kahlo's legacy and intellectual property rights. The lawsuits against Amazon sellers underscore the corporation's commitment to preserving the integrity of Kahlo's work and image.
In 2023, global emissions hit a record high, with a significant portion of the blame falling on hydropower. Droughts around the world led to a drop in generation from hydroelectric plants, forcing a reliance on fossil fuels to fill the gap.
Hydropower, a key source of renewable electricity, faced unprecedented challenges due to weather conditions last year. The decrease in hydropower generation contributed to a 1.1% rise in total energy-related emissions in 2023, with hydropower accounting for 40% of that increase, according to a report from the International Energy Agency.
Hydroelectric power plants use dams to create reservoirs, allowing water to flow through the power plant as needed to generate electricity. This flexibility is valuable for the grid, especially compared to less controllable renewables like wind and solar. However, hydropower is still dependent on weather patterns for reservoir filling, making it vulnerable to droughts.
The world added approximately 20 gigawatts of hydropower capacity in 2023. However, weather conditions caused a decrease in the overall electricity generated from hydropower. China and North America were particularly affected by droughts, leading to increased reliance on fossil fuels to meet energy demands.
Climate change is expected to further impact hydropower generation. Rising temperatures will lead to more frequent and severe droughts, while warmer winters will reduce snowpack and ice that fill reservoirs. More variability in precipitation patterns will also affect hydropower generation, with extreme rainfall events causing flooding instead of storing water for later use.
While hydropower is not expected to disappear, the future grid will need to be resilient to weather variations. A diverse range of electricity sources, combined with robust transmission infrastructure, will help mitigate the impacts of climate change on energy generation.
In conclusion, the challenges faced by hydropower in 2023 highlight the need for a flexible and diverse energy mix to meet climate goals in the face of a changing climate.
Apple Inc. invested nearly $1 billion annually over the past decade in a quest to develop a revolutionary self-driving car, only to announce its decision to abandon the project. The ambitious venture, known internally as Project Titan, faced numerous challenges and changes in direction, ultimately culminating in its discontinuation.
The project's origins can be traced back to Steve Jobs, who envisioned Apple expanding into the automotive industry to complement its presence in consumer electronics. In 2014, under the leadership of CEO Tim Cook, Apple explored acquiring Tesla but ultimately decided against it due to concerns about the automotive industry's low profit margins.
Instead, Apple launched Project Titan, assembling a team of hundreds of engineers from the automotive industry. The project aimed to create a car with Level 5 autonomy, capable of driving entirely on its own. However, internal disagreements and technical challenges led to multiple redesigns and delays.
The project's head, Doug Field, proposed scaling back the self-driving goals to Level 3, which requires human intervention. Still, Apple's leadership insisted on pursuing Level 5 autonomy, highlighting the internal struggles and indecision that plagued the project.
Despite the ambitious designs, including a microbus-inspired prototype and discussions with various automakers for partnerships, Apple never progressed beyond testing on private tracks. The company explored partnerships with Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and others, but these efforts did not materialize into tangible outcomes.
In 2016, Bob Mansfield, a respected figure at Apple, took over Project Titan and shifted the focus to autonomous software rather than building a car. This decision led to significant layoffs and a reevaluation of the project's direction.
Under Mansfield's leadership, Apple continued to explore partnerships and considered producing a self-driving shuttle with Volkswagen for its employees. However, this initiative was also abandoned, signaling the ongoing challenges and setbacks faced by the project.
In 2024, Apple finally announced the end of Project Titan, citing a shift in focus to other areas. The decision resulted in the reorganization of the Special Projects Group, with some employees transitioning to other divisions within Apple, while others were laid off.
Despite the substantial investments and efforts, Apple's foray into the automotive industry ultimately ended without a tangible product. The project's demise serves as a cautionary tale of the challenges of entering new industries and the importance of strategic decision-making in product development.
The legacy of Project Titan will be remembered as a bold but unsuccessful endeavor that pushed the boundaries of innovation but ultimately failed to deliver a groundbreaking product.
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