New Republic

To be a parent in the 1950s was to know that your child would at some point contract measles, a highly contagious virus characterized by fever and rash. When it happened, most parents needed only to plan for a few days of care. But about 500 every year planned funerals.

The first measles vaccine in the U.S. was introduced in 1963, and the disease was officially eliminated in 2000. Since 2008, however, it has been creeping back. Nearly 350 measles cases were diagnosed in the country last year, the second-highest number since its eradication. Just one month into 2019, it seems certain that this year will be even worse.

At least 35 people, mostly children, have been diagnosed with measles in Washington state since January 1, prompting the state’s governor, Jay Inslee, to declare a state of emergency. Around 40 more have been diagnosed in New York this month, part of an outbreak there that’s seen at least 186 cases since October. Public health officials expect the outbreaks to spread further, and attribute both of them to the same problem: An increasing number of parents are refusing vaccinations for their kids.

Across the United States, children are required to be immunized from life-threatening diseases before they’re allowed to enter school or daycare. This not only protects the child from disease, but ensures that schools are safe places for immune-compromised kids and adults, as well as kids and adults who are medically unable to get vaccines. Vulnerable groups such as these rely on herd immunity, which is achieved when around 90 to 95 percent of the population is vaccinated.

The majority of parents who reject these requirements today, however, aren’t from vulnerable groups. They’re opting out for their own religious or personal beliefs. Parents aren’t legally allowed to do that in every state, but can in the two states experiencing major measles outbreaks. Religious exemptions are permitted in New York, where the outbreak is primarily affecting the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. Both personal and religious exemptions are allowed in Washington, which according to one infectious disease researcher has become “a major anti-vaccine hot spot due to non-medical vaccine exemptions that have nothing to do with religion.”

Routine childhood vaccination programs have been shown to prevent approximately 42,000 early deaths and 20 million cases of disease per year, saving $13.5 billion in direct costs. That’s why non-medical exemption laws are opposed by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Infectious Diseases Society of America—basically every reputable medical organization out there. But nearly every state has them in some form. There is also “tremendous variability in the rigor with which such beliefs must be proved or documented,” according to the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society (PIDS). In some states, “parents simply need to state that ‘their religion’ is against vaccination to be granted an exemption, even though no major religions specifically discourage vaccination.”

These problems are being compounded by the growth of the anti-vaccine movement, which argues that vaccines are more dangerous than the government and medical community claim, and thus no vaccines should be mandatory. Neither their facts nor their logic holds up. “Parents cannot be exempted from placing infants in car seats simply because they do not ‘believe’ in them,” argues PIDS. States also don’t allow belief exemptions for laws intended to protect other people, like driving a car without a license. “Whether or not children should be vaccinated before childcare or school entry ought not be a matter of ‘belief,’” the group argues. “Rather, it should be a matter of public policy based on the best available scientific evidence, and in this case the science is definitive: vaccines are safe and they save lives.”

So why doesn’t Congress just pass a vaccination law outlawing non-medical exemptions? “We would love it if they could do something at the federal level,” said Rich Greenaway, the director of operations for the advocacy group Vaccinate Your Family. “We’d be 100 percent behind it.” But it’s not clear that Congress has that legal authority. According to the Congressional Research Service, “the preservation of the public health has been the primary responsibility of state and local governments, and the authority to enact laws relevant to the protection of the public health derives from the state’s general police powers.” Creating a federal vaccination law would turn that historical precedent on its head.

A federal vaccination law would also set the stage for a fierce legal battle with vaccine opponents that would almost certainly make its way to the Supreme Court. The risk of losing that battle, while providing a major platform for anti-vaxxers, might not be worth it. Besides, the state’s authority to set vaccination requirements was already confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court over 100 years ago, and federal lawmakers also don’t have much interest in taking that authority away, Greenaway said. “The legislators at the federal level, they kind of know that their states want to handle this and they step back from it.”

But there are other ways the federal government can influence vaccination policy. The feds provide most of the funding for state public health agencies, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides states with nearly all their funding to buy vaccines for children whose parents don’t have medical insurance to cover the costs. They could put restrictions on the money—say that they won’t provide funding to states if their vaccine programs allow personal belief exemptions—but that’s a risky approach. What if states accuse of the government of overreach and reject funding instead of comply? Would they then have no vaccine program at all?

The best approach, Greenaway says, is to provide states with bigger rewards for success in preventing the spread of diseases. “In a perfect world, we’d love to see more incentives, where a state might get a higher percentage of federal funding when they do well so they can continue to work toward getting the numbers even higher,” he said. The CDC could also offer grants to private health insurance companies or doctors who demonstrate that they’ve kept a high percentage of their patients up to date on vaccinations. The Department of Education could offer financial incentives to schools that consistently demonstrate a highly vaccinated population.

But for the most part, Greenaway thinks vaccination is an area where the federal government is doing nearly everything it can. “The CDC works really hard on this,” he said. “They’re constantly coming up with public information campaigns, and trying to put in money into research to see whether or not certain things work.”

It will be up to individual states, then, to do more to prevent outbreaks—and perhaps the surest way of accomplishing that is by tightening exemptions. The California legislature eliminated personal belief exemptions in 2015 after an outbreak that originated at Disneyland infected at least 111 people, nearly half of whom were unvaccinated. Since then, vaccination rates among kindergartners increased by nearly 5 percent—though so have medical exemptions.

Paul Harris, a state representative in Washington, is hoping for the same outcome in his state. This week, he introduced a bill that would eliminate the personal exemption. It won’t be an easy sell, even though it preserves the religious exemption and comes amid a measles outbreak. A similar bill in 2015, prompted by the Disneyland outbreak and supported by Inslee, failed in the state House. Less than four months later, Washington was home to the first measles death in America in a dozen years.

The New York Times

Mr. Talaska was not outside the norm. Of the public defenders in Louisiana handling felony caseloads at that time, there were two dozen with even more clients. One had 413.

The numbers alone might seem to violate the Constitution. Poor defendants in the United States have the right to a competent lawyer, and hundreds of thousands of defendants rest their hopes on someone like Mr. Talaska.

But there has never been any guarantee that those lawyers would have enough time to handle their cases. That’s why the study cited above, which looked at the workloads of public defenders, is significant.

Right now, courts allow an individual to claim, after they lose, that they received an ineffective defense. But the bar is high. Some judges have ruled that taking illegal drugs, driving to court drunk or briefly falling asleep at the defense table — even during critical testimony — did not make a lawyer inadequate.

It is even harder to make the argument that the sheer size of lawyers’ caseloads makes it impossible for them to provide what the Constitution requires: a reasonably effective defense. That is partly because there has never been a reliable standard for how much time is enough.

Now, reformers are using data in a novel attempt to create such a standard. The studies they have produced so far, in four states, say that public defenders have two to almost five times as many cases as they should.

The bottom line: Mr. Talaska would have needed almost 10,000 hours, or five work-years, to handle the 194 felony cases he had on that April day alone, not to mention the dozens more he would be assigned that year. (The analysis did not include one death-penalty case on his roster, the most time-consuming type of case.)

“The workload can be overwhelming even under the best circumstances, and most offices never experience the best circumstances,” said Mr. Talaska, 30, who agreed to talk only because he was no longer working as a public defender. “Most offices don't have paralegals, law clerks, or full-time investigators.” Lawyers are expected to do it all.

In Providence, R.I., the scene in Courtroom 4C is the same on many mornings. The newly arrested — accused of theft, drug possession, drunk driving, battery and other crimes — are taken from local jails, chained at the wrist two-by-two, and brought before a judge or magistrate, who either sets bail or orders them either released or detained in jail until further hearings.

Some days there are more than 50 new defendants. But in recent years most of them shared one lawyer: Bob Marro.

Handed a thick roster of new defendants just minutes before court started, Mr. Marro, a public defender who recently retired after 33 years, shuffled through stacks of pastel arrest reports, prioritizing cases like a triage doctor. Assisted by social workers, he focused on those most likely to be locked up without bail.

Counseling his new clients for the first time as they faced the magistrate or judge, Mr. Marro raised a manila folder for privacy as he whispered into their ear details of what was happening, and what they should say. The lucky ones got five minutes of his time. Others might have gotten a minute.

This type of system is not the exception in this country. Roughly four out of five criminal defendants are too poor to hire a lawyer and use public defenders or court-appointed lawyers.

The contrast between services for those who can pay and for those who cannot was on display in 4C. While Mr. Marro scrambled, a few private lawyers waited comfortably in the gallery for their cases, having had time to focus solely on their clients.

Some days the courtroom is so full that defendants overflow into an additional courtroom, where there is no public defender. Those arrestees sometimes agree, without any legal advice, to plea deals that can have a profound impact on their lives.

Many advocates say that paying for an adequate defense system would make the system fairer and, ultimately, less costly.

Stephen Hanlon thinks he has a new solution to this problem: better data, and a lot of it.

One of the leading voices in public interest law for decades, Mr. Hanlon was a partner at a large national law firm, and is now general counsel of the National Association for Public Defense.

His goal is to complete studies in a dozen states to create a new standard that will help judges and policy makers determine how many cases public defenders can ethically handle before their clients’ rights are violated. The studies are conducted by the American Bar Association and major accounting firms.

Mr. Hanlon said he was not seeking a Cadillac-level standard, only one that meets the constitutional requirement: reasonably effective counsel.

Using a rigorous survey method developed for the military by the Rand Corporation, Mr. Hanlon and his allies asked private lawyers and public defenders how much time it should take to represent different types of criminal cases, including hours spent analyzing the relevant law, the prosecution’s evidence and the potential consequences of going to trial.

Next, accounting and consulting firms compared those findings with how much time public defenders actually spend on cases, calculated from time diaries and other records.

The results were eye-opening. In Colorado, Missouri and Rhode Island, they found that the typical public defender had two to three times the workload they should in order to provide an adequate defense. In Louisiana, defenders have almost five times the workload they should.

In Texas, where Mr. Hanlon consulted on a separate, similar study, the defense spent an average of about two hours investigating the accounts of police officers and witnesses and other evidence in serious felony cases — a quarter of what the study called for.

More studies are already underway in Indiana, New Mexico and Oregon.

Public defenders are having to carry “outlandish, excessive workloads” that make “a mockery of the constitutional right to counsel,” the American Bar Association said after the Missouri study.

Clients have little recourse. And an accumulation of rulings has dissuaded federal judges from interceding even when rights are trampled.

In 2017, James J. Brady, a federal district judge in Louisiana, wrote that the state was “failing miserably at upholding its obligations under Gideon,” the Supreme Court ruling that requires the state to provide a lawyer to defendants who cannot afford one. “Budget shortages are no excuse to violate the United States Constitution.”

But Judge Brady declined to intervene, saying that doing so would make his court “the overseer of the Orleans Parish criminal court system, a result explicitly condemned by the United States Supreme Court.”

Mr. Hanlon and other reformers hope that their results will do at least two things: persuade judges to take a more active role and give public defenders more justification to limit their caseloads.

The crisis has already come to a head in Missouri. Some public defenders who had tried to set limits on their caseloads were threatened with contempt of court. Another lawyer, who was carrying more than 100 cases and had been repeatedly hospitalized for serious health problems, said he simply had too many clients to handle. The State Supreme Court sanctioned him for missing a handful of deadlines.

But then, last year, the Missouri State Public Defender office scored a victory: A state trial court judge, relying in part on the Missouri study, found that 16 public defenders in St. Louis County had provided clear reasons why their large caseloads would prevent them from providing adequate representation to all of their clients. The case is now on appeal, but defenders hope it will eventually allow them to stop taking on new clients without fear of contempt citations.

Mr. Hanlon expects similar lawsuits to follow, armed with a weapon previous attempts have not had: rigorous data.

The reformers say decriminalizing more offenses related to homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness would also free up public defenders to spend more time on serious cases.

Some prosecutors have criticized the studies, saying defense lawyers have an incentive to overstate the time needed. Yet many prosecutors don’t dispute that public defenders are understaffed.

“My guys will tell you that public defenders are overworked, but so are prosecutors,” said Pete Adams, who has spent the past 40 years as executive director of the Louisiana District Attorneys Association.

The time shortage also means that public defenders almost never take a case to a trial. Across the country, 94 percent of convictions in state courts are from plea bargains, according to a 2012 Supreme Court ruling that confirmed defendants’ rights to be represented by competent counsel not just at trial but also during plea negotiations.

Many plea deals, of course, are good for defendants, ending in lesser sentences than they would have faced at trial. But at least one in 10 felony cases — and as many as two in 10, depending on the type of felony — handled by public defenders should go to trial, according to the Texas study.

How many did? Only one in 40.

“When obstetricians have five times as much work as they can handle competently, terrible things happen,” Mr. Hanlon said. “When public defenders have five times as much work as they can competently handle, terrible things happen, too.”

The Atlantic

Between a sidewalk and a cinder-block wall grew seven mushrooms, each half the size of a doorknob. Their silver-green caps were barely coming up, only a few proud of the ground. Most lay slightly underground, bulging up like land mines. Magnolia bushes provided cover. An abandoned syringe lay on the ground nearby, along with a light assortment of suburban litter.

Paul Kroeger, a wizard of a man with a long, copious, well-combed beard, knelt and dug under one of the sickly colored caps. With a short, curved knife, he pried up the mushroom and pulled it out whole. It was a mushroom known as the death cap, Amanita Fal-loy-e-dees. If ingested, severe illness can start as soon as six hours later, but tends to take longer, 36 hours or more. Severe liver damage is usually apparent after 72 hours. Fatality can occur after a week or longer. “Long and slow is a frightening aspect of this type of poisoning,” Kroeger said.

He and I were in a quiet neighborhood of East Vancouver, British Columbia. Across the street, behind St. Patrick Elementary School, kids were playing basketball, and their voices echoed between the occasional passing cars. Kroeger likes kids. As we’d hunted mushrooms from the sidewalk earlier that day, he had cooed at every stroller, then stopped the parents to warn them about the death caps in the neighborhood.

As he shook the mushroom free of its soil and added it to the others he’d lined up on a sheet of wax paper, he surveyed the collection and said, “Enough here to kill an entire Catholic school.”

The death caps were slightly domed, with white gills and faintly greenish stems. At the bottom of each stem was a silky slipper, called the volva, which was a purer white than the rest of the mushroom. The Amanita Fal-loy-e-dees species accounts for more than 90 percent of mushroom-related poisonings and fatalities worldwide.

Kroeger, who studied the biochemistry of medicinal mushrooms while working as a lab assistant and technician at the University of British Columbia, is a founding member and the former president of the Vancouver Mycological Society, and the go-to authority on mushroom poisonings in western Canada. When Amanita Fal-loy-e-dees first appeared in British Columbia in 1997, he took careful note. It had never before been seen in Canada. The single reported specimen was found among imported European sweet chestnut trees near the town of Mission, an hour east of Vancouver.

The species appeared again a year later, under a large, ornamental European beech tree on the grounds of a government building in the provincial capital, Victoria, on southern Vancouver Island. Ten years later, death caps began to appear in Vancouver, in a neighborhood shaded with mature European hornbeam trees. Kroeger recruited volunteers to search neighborhoods, and put out the word to mushroom hunters. During the first year, they documented about 50 locations in Vancouver. Kroeger wanted to know where the mushrooms were coming from, and where they’d turn up next. Sooner or later, he feared, they would have deadly consequences.

The first serious poisoning in British Columbia was reported in 2003, and another occurred in 2008. Both victims survived. Then, in 2016, a 3-year-old boy from Victoria died after eating mushrooms found outside an apartment complex. Kroeger thought he had anticipated the worst, but he was not prepared, he said, “for a wee child to die.”

Without fail, Kroeger noted, death caps appeared in urban neighborhoods, not in deep woods or city parks. They showed up most often in the strip of grass between sidewalks and streets.

For the past few years, Kroeger and his network of fungiphiles have been putting up posters in infected neighborhoods. The BC Centre for Disease Control sends out his warnings in press releases, and he sets up a booth at street events in order to warn anyone willing to listen that death caps should be left alone. When I joined him in East Vancouver, most of the people he stopped on the sidewalk—parents with strollers and passersby with groceries—had already heard of the invader. A man in a tool belt coming off a house remodel said he’d seen death caps a few blocks away in East Vancouver, and Kroeger scribbled down the address. I asked the man why he was so interested in mushrooms; he said he just liked to know what was growing in the neighborhood.

The first death cap Kroeger found that day had been in front of a house decorated for Halloween, which was two weeks away. He dug into the leafy ground cover, revealing several more greenish domes. Like a leaping gnome, he jumped across the sidewalk, grabbed a plastic human skull off a post, and brought it back to his find. Nestling the skull into a nest of purple periwinkle beside the emergent death caps, he laughed to himself and took a picture. Sometimes, he almost seems to side with the death caps. He appreciates their mysterious tenacity. He greets each one with an excited smile, talking to it: “There you are.”

By the end of the day, Kroeger had collected a couple of dozen death caps, each placed in wrinkled wax paper and then into one of the plastic boxes he carried in a faded, bucket-style day pack. They’d be dried and stored at the university. Most were from new locations. Before rolling a thin cigarette for himself, he fished out a damp cloth to clean his hands. He explained that he couldn’t use a moist towelette with alcohol because it could facilitate the passage of toxins through the skin. While he thought the mushrooms could usually be handled safely, a whole day of repeated touching was risky, since it was always possible to forget and touch one’s face, nose, or lips. “Just to be safe,” he said, wiping his hands and offering the cloth to me.

Dr. kathy vo, a medical toxicologist in San Francisco, publishes case studies on rare or unusual poisonings. Amanita Fal-loy-e-dees poisonings, she told me, are some of the worst. “When the liver starts to fail, you see bleeding disorders, brain swelling, multi-organ failure. It’s very, very rough,” she said.

The levels of fluid loss, Vo said, are some of the most dramatic she’s seen. The body flushes everything it has. “There’s not an antidote,” she said. “That’s what makes this particularly deadly. We institute a variety of therapies, but there’s not an A, B, C, D. It’s not always the same. The best bet for the patient is fluid, fluid, fluid; keep watching the liver, and if the liver is failing, go for a transplant.”

On average, one person a year has died in North America from ingesting death caps, though that number is rising as the mushroom spreads. More than 30 death-cap poisonings were reported in 2012, including three fatalities, while 2013 saw five cases and no deaths. In 2014, one person died of death-cap poisoning in Michigan; two in California; and one in Vancouver, after a Canadian man traveled to California, ate the mushrooms as part of a meal, and returned to Vancouver, where he became ill and died.

Amanita Fal-loy-e-dees are said to be quite tasty, and a person who eats one could feel fine for a day or two before illness sets in. The poison is taken up by the liver cells, where it inhibits an enzyme responsible for protein synthesis; without protein, the cells begin to die, and the patient may start to experience nausea and diarrhea—symptoms that can easily be attributed to general food poisoning or other ailments. “If the patient doesn’t realize the connection, doesn’t see the illness as a result of eating a mushroom a day or two earlier, it’s a hard diagnosis,” said Vo.

The first death caps to appear on the West Coast hit Northern California in 1938. Since then, Amanita Fal-loy-e-dees has been a constant menace to people in the Bay Area. Vo said that an outbreak of poisonings typically follows a rainy season; in November of 2016, after a long spell of warm weather and copious rain, the Bay Area Mycological Society got in touch with the California Poison Control System hotline, warning that death caps were sprouting up. “Five days after that, we started getting calls,” she said.

As part of a cluster of 14 poisonings in the fall of 2016, a Bay Area family grilled wild mushrooms gathered by a friend, not knowing they were death caps. They were eaten by the young mother and father, their 18-month-old daughter, and two other adults. The parents and a third adult underwent aggressive fluid treatments and were released from the hospital after a couple of days, while the fourth adult and the child required liver transplants. In the process, the little girl, who reportedly ate half a mushroom cap, suffered what Vo described as permanent neurological impairment, and is no longer able to feed herself or follow commands.

The first death caps in North America were identified on the East Coast in the early 1900s. The first in California were spotted on the grounds of the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey in 1938, growing from the roots of a planted, ornamental tree. After that, the species landed hard in the Bay Area, where it is now common, having spread into wild oaks; it is becoming more abundant in California than in its native European habitat. After the Bay Area, it was reported in a string of Pacific Northwest cities, each one farther up the coast.

The species wasn’t just spreading from tree to tree, gradually expanding its range. Instead, it landed like an isolated bomb, colonizing outward from each impact. While this pattern suggests that the mushrooms in British Columbia may have started in California, Kroeger began to suspect that they represented a separate invasion.

When Kroeger put together maps of the first death-cap outbreaks in Vancouver, he had no problem seeing the pattern. They were showing up in neighborhoods built in the 1960s and ’70s, growing under broadleaf trees that had started off in nurseries.

Most mushrooms propagate in the form of spores that fly into the air and land like seeds. Death-cap spores are especially fragile; they degrade in sunlight, and don’t travel far or well. By any measure, the species should have remained a rare European endemic, but somehow, it successfully hitched a ride all the way to North America—not once but many times.

Most of any mushroom is underground, invisible. The majority of its biomass consists of mycelia, a network of living threads that send up occasional fruiting bodies in the form of mushrooms. Death-cap mycelia live only in tree roots. They form a symbiotic bond with certain trees, growing into a web that dramatically extends the reach of their roots.

Death caps appear in these neighborhoods decades after planting, because the mushroom lies dormant for that long. Its mycelia live in the roots of a host tree until the tree reaches maturity—when it stops pouring energy into growth and starts storing sugars. For these European imports, that’s about half a century. When surplus sugars enter the fungal web, the first fruiting bodies emerge.

Shadowing Kroeger along streets pillared with old broadleaf trees is like pursuing a fox, not a creature of sidewalks. The matrix he follows is underground. Cutting between parked cars, smoking one of his thin cigarettes as he traveled, he seemed to know every grassy back way, every portage around apartment complexes and medical facilities.

The death caps were lurkers. They had to be searched for. Rooting around in a strip of vines and flowers in front of a house where he’d found new specimens, Kroeger looked up as a woman cracked open the front door.

“What are you doing in my garden?”

Kroeger stammered that he was a professional mycologist. He clearly enjoyed talking to mushrooms more than to people. He stood upright and lifted a death cap in his hand like a freshly removed appendix. Did she know that deadly mushrooms were growing in her garden? When she didn’t answer, Kroeger said in his gentle, earthy voice, “I’m just here to collect these.”

“Okay,” she said. “But stay out of my garden.”

He waited a moment after the door slammed, making sure she was gone, then reached into the base of a shrub, using his curved knife to pry up another silver-green mushroom.

As we packed up and moved on, he said, “The development style of the city set the stage for their introduction and proliferation. They will never go away, not, at least, through any known human decision.”

Once a fungus is in the ground, even killing the host tree won’t stop it. A proposal was put before the city to chop down every hornbeam, the major source of death caps. “But then you have to cut the lindens, sweet chestnuts, red oaks, English oaks. That’s a lot of the city, and you still won’t get rid of [the death caps],” Kroeger said.

Across from the Catholic school where Kroeger had collected death caps a few hours earlier, a mature hornbeam tree towered over the neighborhood, its deciduous canopy shading both sides of the street. The house of the woman who had scolded him stood 30 feet from another stately hornbeam. Kroeger has maps of land use over the century, detailing development block by block. To him, they are maps of present and future death-cap distribution. Decade by decade, like an underground echo, more and more appear. Kroeger wonders how long it takes people to learn how to avoid a common and deadly mushroom. It is not common yet, but he knows that it likely will be, and that the first fatality in British Columbia from a local death cap, in 2016, will not be the last.

The Atlantic

A new court filing submitted on Wednesday by Special Counsel Robert Mueller revealed that a Russian troll farm currently locked in a legal battle over its alleged interference in the 2016 election appeared to wage yet another disinformation campaign late last year—this time targeting Mueller himself.

According to the filing, the special counsel’s office turned over 1 million pages of evidence to lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting as part of the discovery process. The firm is accused of funding the troll farm, known as the Internet Research Agency. But someone connected to Concord allegedly manipulated the documents and leaked them to reporters, hoping the documents would make people think that Mueller’s evidence against the troll farm and its owners was flimsy. The tactic didn’t seem to convince anyone, but it appeared to mark yet another example of Russia exploiting the U.S. justice system to undercut its rivals abroad.

Last year, I detailed how Russia has figured out how to use the U.S. immigration courts and so-called red notices issued by Interpol to harass and even detain its enemies. But it doesn’t end there. Experts say Kremlin proxies have targeted their rivals and other disfavored individuals by exploiting U.S. courts to pursue bogus claims via “superficially legitimate lawsuits,” Anders Aslund, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said in a recent report. He worked as an economic adviser to the Russian government from 1991 to 1994. The Kremlin proxies have done so not only to perpetuate global harassment campaigns against their perceived enemies, Aslund argued, but also to “enrich themselves through bad faith claims made possible by the Russian state’s abuse of disfavored individuals and their businesses.”

When Mueller indicted Concord in February 2018, along with two other corporate entities and 13 Russian nationals allegedly connected to the Internet Research Agency, it seemed highly unlikely that the indictment would result in a trial, because Russians cannot be extradited to the United States. But Concord unexpectedly hired the well-connected American law firm Reed Smith to fight Mueller, arguing that the charges should be dropped because the special counsel was illegally appointed. The judge in the case, Dabney Friedrich, has twice refused to dismiss the case and recently lambasted Concord’s American lawyers for submitting “unprofessional, inappropriate and ineffective” court filings, and the legal battle has raged on.

Now, according to the Mueller filing this week, unidentified actors working out of Russia appear to have weaponized the U.S. discovery process to Concord’s benefit. More than 1,000 files on the website that hosted the leaked documents “match those produced in discovery,” the special counsel said. The documents were published from a computer with a Russian IP address, according to Mueller, and whoever released them clearly “had access to at least some of the non-sensitive discovery produced by the government.” But forged documents were mixed into the trove, too, apparently in an attempt to accuse Mueller of characterizing American websites and Facebook pages such as Occupy Democrats as Russian disinformation operations. The website also inserted irrelevant documents into folders with unique names—known only to those with access to the discovery materials—and characterized them as the sum total of Mueller’s evidence “in an apparent effort to discredit the investigation,” the special counsel said.

In a statement issued on Thursday, Reed Smith denied responsibility for the breach, claiming that the data at issue were hosted by a third-party vendor working for Concord and were never stored on Reed Smith’s internal computer systems. “Reed Smith and its lawyers have at all times complied with the protective order in this case,” the firm said. A Reed Smith attorney representing Concord didn’t return a request for comment.

In October, legal and national-security experts expressed concern to ABC News that, in the Concord case specifically, the Russian government may be trying to use the discovery process in a “graymail” strategy designed to make Mueller drop the case in order to prevent sensitive U.S. national-security information from being made public. Mark Zaid, an attorney based in Washington, D.C., who focuses on national-security law, said he viewed the latest incident involving Concord and the hoax website “as part of a consistent strategy by the Russians to hinder, obstruct, and derail” Mueller’s probe. “One wonders whether pursuing the criminal charges against the Russians was worth the difficulty and these current problems,” Zaid said, “particularly given the odds of ever gaining custody of any individual is unlikely.”

But the Concord case is just one example of this phenomenon—and it “helps expose the deliberate efforts of the Russians to continually attack our democratic systems,” he added.

In 2017, the Russian state-owned Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA) filed two applications for judicial assistance from the federal courts in New York and Massachusetts to obtain discovery on two former shareholders of the privately owned Pro-business-bank, Sergey Leon-tiev and Alexander Zhel-ez-nyak. Leontiev and Zhel-ez-nyak had fled to the United States by that point, but that didn’t stop the DIA from pursuing them through the U.S. courts. Leontiev had run afoul of Vladimir Putin when one of the bank’s subsidiaries attempted to launch the “Navalny card”—a debit card that would donate a percentage of transactions to an anti-corruption organization led by the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. The Central Bank of Russia revoked Probusinessbank’s operating license shortly thereafter and forced the company into bankruptcy, despite having deemed the bank financially sound just two months prior. The DIA immediately began dividing up Probusinessbank’s assets to Kremlin-friendly institutions such as B&N Bank after being appointed its temporary administrator and liquidator in 2015.

When Leontiev moved to quash a federal-court subpoena against him in 2017—arguing that it had been orchestrated by two Russian agents sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act, Andrey Pavlov and Victor Grin—the court denied his motion. The court wrote that it was “not blind to Leontiev’s claims that the discovery sought here is intended for other proceedings or impermissible purposes” and had its own concerns “about the legitimacy of these requests,” which were “heightened by the involvement of two sanctioned individuals.” Despite all of those reservations, the court ruled against Leontiev on the narrow grounds that it was only helping provide discovery in “underlying litigation … before a foreign tribunal.” When Leontiev’s lawyers asked that the discovery documents not be provided to any entity that Pavlov was associated with, the DIA’s lawyers refused. “The same cast of Russian operatives sanctioned by the U.S. government for their participation in the Magnitsky Affair now attempt to exploit Western institutions, including the U.S. judicial system and Interpol, to further their corrupt pursuit of Mr. Leontiev and others using the cover of legitimate courts and institutions,” Bob Weigel, Leontiev’s lead outside counsel in the case, said in a statement.

Michelle Estlund, a criminal-defense attorney who focuses on international criminal prosecutions and politically motivated prosecutions, told me last year that the problem is that while the U.S. courts operate in good faith to assist Russian authorities, the Russian courts frequently do not. “Our courts act like, and think that, they are operating on the same type of playing field as the Russians,” Estlund said. “But they’re not. The system there is completely different from here. And when the courts are properly responding to what appears to be a legally authorized request for assistance with discovery, often what they’re doing is assisting with an extremely corrupt court proceeding.” Another lawyer who follows this phenomenon closely and requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press echoed Estlund’s assessment. “The Russians have figured out how to weaponize this,” he said. “We have this tremendous system of justice here, which isn’t equipped to address nonjudicial questions like ‘Is this litigant seeking to abuse our entire judicial system?’ ”

The issue arose again just last month, when the Southern District of New York unsealed an indictment against the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. According to prosecutors, Veselnitskaya had tried to obstruct an investigation into her client Prevezon, a company founded by a Kremlin ally that was accused of laundering millions of stolen Russian taxpayer dollars through Manhattan real estate. Veselnitskaya had secretly worked with the Russian government to draft a document purporting to be an independent assessment made by Russian prosecutors saying that Prevezon was innocent of laundering funds, the indictment said. That document was then filed in federal court in an attempt “to affect the outcome” of a lawsuit filed against Prevezon by federal prosecutors, according to Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. The scheme threatened “the ability of our courts and our government to ensure that justice is done,” he said. And it worked: The court decided to deny the U.S. government’s motion for summary judgment against Prevezon based on the fraudulent document, according to the indictment.

Mueller, for his part, appears to have foreseen how the Russians connected to Concord (it is owned by Yev-geny Prig-gozhin, who is often referred to as “Putin’s chef”) might try to exploit the legal process: In June 2018, he asked Friedrich, the judge, for a protective order that would prevent Concord’s lawyers from sharing any discovery documents with the Russians named in the troll-farm indictment, as well as with other foreigners, such as lawyers outside the United States. If the data were to be distributed outside of American law firms, Mueller said, “foreign individuals may try to use that avenue as a way to obtain sensitive materials as part of an intelligence collection effort.” The hoax website aimed at discrediting his investigation largely failed, but seemed to prove Mueller’s prescience, beyond any doubt.

The New York Times

Pamela Paul - New York Times Op-Ed

BOREDOM TEACHES US THAT LIFE ISN’T A PARADE OF AMUSEMENTS. MORE IMPORTANT, IT SPAWNS CREATIVITY AND SELF-SUFFICIENCY.

“I’m bored.” It’s a puny little phrase, yet it has the power to fill parents with a cascade of dread, annoyance and guilt. If someone around here is bored, someone else must have failed to enlighten or enrich or divert. And how can anyone — child or adult — claim boredom when there’s so much that can and should be done? Immediately.

But boredom is something to experience rather than hastily swipe away. And not as some kind of cruel Victorian conditioning, recommended because it’s awful and toughens you up. Despite the lesson most adults learned growing up — boredom is for boring people — boredom is useful. It’s good for you.

If kids don’t figure this out early on, they’re in for a nasty surprise. School, let’s face it, can be dull, and it isn’t actually the teacher’s job to entertain as well as educate. Life isn’t meant to be an endless parade of amusements. “That’s right,” a mother says to her daughter in Maria Semple’s 2012 novel, “Where’d You Go, Bernadette.” “You are bored. And I’m going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it’s boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it’s on you to make life interesting, the better off you’ll be.”

People used to accept that much of life was boring. Memoirs of pre-21st-century life are rife with tedium. When not idling in drawing rooms, members of the leisured class took long walks and stared at trees. They went motoring and stared at more trees. Those who had to work had it a lot harder. Agricultural and industrial jobs were often mind-numbing; few people were looking to be fulfilled by paid labor. Children could expect those kinds of futures and they got used to the idea from an early age, left unattended with nothing but bookshelves and tree branches, and later, bad afternoon television.

Only a few short decades ago, during the lost age of underparenting, grown-ups thought a certain amount of boredom was appropriate. And children came to appreciate their empty agendas. In an interview with GQ magazine, Lin-Manuel Miranda credited his unattended afternoons with fostering inspiration. “Because there is nothing better to spur creativity than a blank page or an empty bedroom,” he said.

Nowadays, subjecting a child to such inactivity is viewed as a dereliction of parental duty. In a much-read story in The New York Times, “The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting,” Claire Cain Miller cited a recent study that found that regardless of class, income or race, parents believed that “children who were bored after school should be enrolled in extracurricular activities, and that parents who were busy should stop their task and draw with their children if asked.”

Every spare moment is to be optimized, maximized, driven toward a goal.

When not being uberparented, kids today are left to their own devices — their own digital devices, that is. Parents preparing for a long car ride or airplane trip are like Army officers plotting a complicated land maneuver. Which movies to load onto the iPad? Should we start a new family-friendly podcast? Is this an OK time to let the kids play Fortnite until their brains melt into the back seat? What did parents in the ‘70s do when kids were bored in the way-back? Nothing! They let them breathe in gas fumes. Torture their siblings. And since it wasn’t actually for wearing, play with the broken seatbelt.

If you complained about being bored back then, you were really asking for it. “Go outside,” you might get, or worse, “Clean your room.” Was this fun? No. Was it helpful? Yes.

Because things happen when you’re bored. Some of the most boring jobs I’ve had were also the most creative. Working at an import factory after school, I pasted photos of ugly Peruvian sweaters onto sales sheets. My hands became encrusted with glue as the sweaters blurred into a clumpy sameness. For some reason, everything smelled like molasses. My mind had no choice but to drift into an elaborate fantasy realm. It’s when you are bored that stories set in. Checking out groceries at the supermarket, I invented narratives around people’s purchases. The man buying eggplant and a six-pack of Bud at 9 p.m.: Which was the must-get item and which the impulse purchase? How did my former fifth-grade teacher feel about my observing her weekly purchase of Nutter Butters?

Once you’ve truly settled into the anesthetizing effects of boredom, you find yourself en route to discovery. With monotony, small differences begin to emerge, between those trees, those sweaters. This is why so many useful ideas occur in the shower, when you’re held captive to a mundane activity. You let your mind wander and follow it where it goes.

Of course, it’s not really the boredom itself that’s important; it’s what we do with it. When you reach your breaking point, boredom teaches you to respond constructively, to make something happen for yourself. But unless we are faced with a steady diet of stultifying boredom, we never learn how.

The idea isn’t that you suffer through crushing tedium indefinitely like Neville (“N is for Neville who died of ennui”) of “The Gashlycrumb Tinies.” It’s that you learn how to vanquish it. This may come in several forms: You might turn inward and use the time to think. You might reach for a book. You might imagine your way to a better job. Boredom leads to flights of fancy. But ultimately, to self-discipline. To resourcefulness.

The ability to handle boredom, not surprisingly, is correlated with the ability to focus and to self-regulate. Research has shown that people with attention disorders are particularly prone to boredom. It makes sense that in a hyperstimulating world, what at first seems captivating now feels less so; what was once mildly diverting may now be flat-out dull.

It’s especially important that kids get bored — and be allowed to stay bored — when they’re young. That it not be considered “a problem” to be avoided or eradicated by the higher-ups, but instead something kids grapple with on their own.

We’ve stopped training children to do this. Rather than teach them to absorb material that is slower, duller and decidedly two-dimensional, like a lot of worthwhile information is, schools cave in to what they say children expect: fun. Teachers spend more time concocting ways to “engage” students through visuals and “interactive learning” (read: screens, games) tailored to their Candy Crushed attention spans. Kids won’t listen to long lectures, goes the argument, so it’s on us to serve up learning in easier-to-swallow portions.

But surely teaching children to endure boredom rather than ratcheting up the entertainment will prepare them for a more realistic future, one that doesn’t raise false expectations of what work or life itself actually entails. One day, even in a job they otherwise love, our kids may have to spend an entire day answering Friday’s leftover email. They may have to check spreadsheets. Or assist robots at a vast internet-ready warehouse.

This sounds boring, you might conclude. It sounds like work, and it sounds like life. Perhaps we should get used to it again, and use it to our benefit. Perhaps in an incessant, up-the-ante world, we could do with a little less excitement.

Snopes has pulled out of its fact-checking partnership with Facebook. The storied myth-debunking site was one of dozens of groups the social network enlisted to help combat misinformation after the 2016 election. According to Snopes, Facebook paid it $100,000 in 2017 for this work.

Snopes is not the only factchecking group to pull out, either. An AP spokesperson confirmed to The Atlantic that the “AP is not currently doing fact-checking work for Facebook,” although they remain in “ongoing conversations with Facebook.”

Facebook includes 51 fact-checking organizations (including Snopes) in what must be an outdated list on its website. The contracts are signed on an annual basis, however, and a Facebook spokesperson told me there are now 34 organizations doing this work.

The note the Snopes team posted announcing the end of the partnership was circumspect about why the organization had pulled out, explicitly leaving open the possibility of working with Facebook again: “At this time we are evaluating the ramifications and costs of providing third-party fact-checking services, and we want to determine with certainty that our efforts to aid any particular platform are a net positive for our online community, publication, and staff,” the note says. “To be clear, we have not ruled out working with Facebook or any other platforms in the future.”

Facebook struck a conciliatory tone about Snopes leaving the fold. “We value the work that Snopes has done, and respect their decision as an independent business,” a spokesperson emailed me. “Fighting misinformation takes a multi-pronged approach from across the industry. We are committed to fighting this through many tactics, and the work that third-party fact-checkers do is a valued and important piece of this effort.”

Step back from the immediate news, though, and consider the broader question. What is fact-checking actually worth to Facebook?

Poynter has reported that other organizations received $100,000 like Snopes did. A more in-depth report from Columbia Journalism Review found that some organizations turned down the money.

The amount that Facebook has paid out has increased, but also become more variable. Fact-checkers get paid per factcheck, but only up to a certain amount per month. The amount of money that’s flowing to all of Facebook’s 34 fact-checkers probably remains in the single-digit millions.

For perspective, Facebook generated $16.9 billion in revenue just last quarter. That same quarter, the company’s average revenue per user reached $7.37, so the money coming in from a million or two users over the course of just three months would be enough to cover the global factchecking costs for the year.

Perhaps the fact-checking organizations like Snopes, the AP, and others have parted ways with Facebook for a variety of reasons, but it’s not hard to imagine that paying them substantially more might keep a larger number in the fold and engaged in making a dent in the problem of misinformation on Facebook.

Which is to say: Facebook is willing to spend more than nothing on fact-checking, but not much more than nothing.

Telegraph

hey are often an unwanted visitor to gardens, thanks to their reputation for raiding bird feeders and stripping trees of bark.

But grey squirrels are finding a warmer welcome to the dining table, as chefs and retailers report increasing interest in eating the furry rodent.

The rise in popularity is believed to stem from diners’ growing interest in sustainable, cruelty-free food, which sees them turn to “wild meat” from animals which would have been culled anyway.

The grey squirrel is one such animal, classed as an invasive pest which has few predators in the wild and out competes the endangered red squirrel. To reduce waste, chefs are using the carcasses of culled squirrels in pancakes, croquettes and even lasagne.

Ivan Tisdall-Downes, who runs the restaurant Native in London’s Borough Market, makes a squirrel ragu by slow cooking the meat from its hind legs. His wild boar supplier happens to help with grey squirrel culling, and sends the carcasses down to the restaurant.

He said that customers are increasingly interested in eating cruelty-free wild meat and minimising their carbon footprint, which makes squirrel a popular choice.

He told The Sunday Telegraph: “Squirrel is one of the most sustainable proteins you can cook really. It is almost exactly the same in taste as rabbit.

“It's tasty, it's not as gamey as rabbit, it's nice white meat. It's good to cook down slowly and make stews from and ragus for lasagne.

"It's very good for you, it's quite lean.

"There are 5 million gray squirrels and only about 150,000 red squirrels at the moment, a record low. Because there aren't really any predators left for the gray squirrels the population is booming and they are taking over the red squirrel habitat.

"I think sustainable eating is becoming more popular now. More and more people are more conscious of their carbon footprint and the damaging additives that get put in their food. I grew up in South East London and hadn't heard of wild food. Now wild food is everywhere.”

Kevin Tickle, who runs Michelin-starred restaurant The Forest Side in Cumbria, uses the fact he is in a red squirrel conservation area to his advantage.

He has had a “critter fritter”, a grey squirrel croquette, on his acclaimed tasting menu since the restaurant opened in 2016.

He told The Telegraph: “They're a pest, we are stuck bang in the middle of a red squirrel conservation area.

“I also enjoy shooting, I shoot quite a lot of greys so it make sense to put it on the menu - if we shoot them we should cook with them.”

Mr Tickle said customers enjoy the unusual option, adding: “95 per cent of people go for it, it's on every menu. They find it quite exciting.”

Suppliers are also reporting that the meat is becoming more popular. Robert Gooch, director and owner of the Wild Meat company, said squirrel has risen in popularity over the past five year and is now their third biggest seller after venison and pheasant.

One squirrel, which feeds one, costs just under £5 on on the company’s website, with the best meat being found on the hind legs.

Mr Gooch said; "It's our third best seller at the moment. Consumers are very concerned about the stress that farmed animals go through in their lives so are more interested in wild meat.

“Eating meat from animals that are killed or culled anyway is sustainable otherwise it would be waste.

“Game meat is also very popular in the paleo diet.”

Pro Publica

Not content with billions of dollars in profits from the potent painkiller OxyContin, its maker explored expanding into an “attractive market” fueled by the drug’s popularity — treatment of opioid addiction, according to previously secret passages in a court document filed by the state of Massachusetts.

In internal correspondence beginning in 2014, Purdue Pharma executives discussed how the sale of opioids and the treatment of opioid addiction are “naturally linked” and that the company should expand across “the pain and addiction spectrum,” according to redacted sections of the lawsuit by the Massachusetts attorney general. A member of the billionaire Sackler family, which founded and controls the privately held company, joined in those discussions and urged staff in an email to give “immediate attention” to this business opportunity, the complaint alleges.

ProPublica reviewed the scores of redacted paragraphs in Massachusetts’ 274-page civil complaint against Purdue, eight Sackler family members, company directors and current and former executives, which alleges that they created the opioid epidemic through illegal deceit. These passages remain blacked out at the company’s request after the rest of the complaint was made public on Jan. 15. A Massachusetts Superior Court judge on Monday ordered that the entire document be released, but the judge gave Purdue until Friday to seek a further stay of the ruling.

The sections of the complaint already made public contend that the Sacklers pushed for higher doses of OxyContin, guided efforts to mislead doctors and the public about the drug’s addictive capacity, and blamed misuse on patients.

Citing extensive emails and internal company documents, the redacted sections allege that Purdue and the Sackler family went to extreme lengths to boost OxyContin sales and burnish the drug’s reputation in the face of increased regulation and growing public awareness of its addictive nature. Concerns about doctors improperly prescribing the drug, and patients becoming addicted, were swept aside in an aggressive effort to drive OxyContin sales ever higher, the complaint alleges.

Among the allegations: Purdue paid two executives convicted of fraudulently marketing OxyContin millions of dollars to assure their loyalty, concealed information about doctors suspected of inappropriately prescribing the opioid, and was advised by global consulting firm McKinsey & Co. on strategies to boost the drug’s sales and burnish its image, including how to “counter the emotional messages” of mothers whose children overdosed. Since 2007, the Sackler family has received more than $4 billion in payouts from Purdue, according to a redacted paragraph in the complaint.

“The payments were the motivation for the Sacklers’ misconduct,” the complaint says. “And the payments were deliberate decisions to benefit from deception in Massachusetts, at great cost to patients and families.”

In 1998, two years after OxyContin was launched, Dr. Richard Sackler, a son of Purdue co-founder Raymond Sackler, instructed executives in an email that its tablets were not merely “therapeutic” but also “enhance personal performance,” like Viagra. Fifteen years later, he complained in another email that a Google alert he set up for OxyContin news was giving him too much information about the drug’s dangers.

“Why are all the alerts about negatives and not one about the positives of OxyContin tablets?” he asked a company vice president. Staff immediately offered to replace Sackler’s alert with a service that supplied more flattering stories, according to the complaint.

The redacted paragraphs leave little doubt about the dominant role of the Sackler family in Purdue’s management. The five Purdue directors who are not Sacklers always voted with the family, according to the complaint. The family-controlled board approves everything from the number of sales staff to be hired to details of their bonus incentives, which have been tied to sales volume, the complaint says. In May 2017, when longtime employee Craig Landau was seeking to become Purdue’s chief executive, he wrote that the board acted as “de-facto CEO.” He was named CEO a few weeks later.

In a statement today in response to questions about the redacted material, the company said that Massachusetts “seeks to publicly vilify Purdue, its executives, employees and directors by taking out of context snippets from tens of millions of documents and grossly distorting their meaning. The complaint is riddled with demonstrably inaccurate allegations.”

Purdue acknowledged in the statement that it was considering acquiring the rights to sell drugs that combat addiction or reverse the effects of an overdose. It criticized the state for “casting in a negative light” the company’s exploration of a potential acquisition of an addiction treatment that was already on the market, “even though the company never actually made the acquisition.”

Purdue also pointed out that OxyContin is approved by the Food and Drug Administration. It said that most opioid overdoses “now result from heroin and illicit fentanyl.”

The Sackler family was once best known for its philanthropy. Its name is engraved on museums and university buildings across the world. A group of activists has called on organizations to stop accepting Sackler donations and for the family name to be stripped from some institutions. Aggressive marketing of OxyContin is blamed by some analysts for propelling the crisis that has resulted in 200,000 overdose deaths related to prescription opioids since 1999.

After its 1996 launch, OxyContin rapidly became a top seller. But reports of patients abusing the drug soon followed. OxyContin contained more pain relief medication than older drugs, and crushing and snorting it was a simple way to get high fast. In 2007, Purdue pleaded guilty to federal charges of understating the risk of addiction and agreed to pay $600 million in fines and penalties. Still, the company argued publicly that OxyContin has “done far more good than harm,” and it sought to place responsibility for the bad acts on “certain of its supervisors and employees.”

Privately, the complaint suggests, the Sacklers were concerned about alienating two executives, then-CEO Michael Friedman and then-legal counsel Howard Udell. Friedman and Udell each pleaded guilty in 2007 in U.S. District Court in Abingdon, Virginia, to a misdemeanor charge of misbranding OxyContin, as did a former executive. The board signed off on the three executives’ decisions to plead guilty. No member of the Sackler family pleaded guilty.

Purdue paid $5 million to Udell in November 2008, and up to $1 million in November 2009, the complaint states. In February 2008, the company paid $3 million to Friedman. The complaint doesn’t mention any payments to the former executive.

“The Sacklers spent millions to keep the loyalty of people who knew the truth,” the complaint alleges.

Udell died in 2013. A person answering a phone number listed to Friedman declined comment.

The plea deals did little to hinder OxyContin sales or the Sacklers’ hands-on management. At the direction of the board, Purdue repeatedly increased its sales force, which pushed doctors to prescribe higher opioid doses.

In 2008, the same year that Purdue paid Udell and Friedman, Richard Sackler advised other family members that it was important to select a new chief executive who was loyal to the family. “People who will shift their loyalties rapidly under stress and temptation can become a liability from the owners’ viewpoint,” he allegedly wrote. A defendant in the Massachusetts lawsuit, Richard Sackler served in a number of different positions at the company before being named president in 1999 and then co-chairman of the board in 2003.

The company did install five new, non-family board members in the wake of the federal investigation. But in hundreds of board votes, the new directors never opposed the family, according to the complaint. Although Purdue does not operate outside the U.S., board meetings took place at a castle in Ireland as well as in Bermuda, London, Portugal and Switzerland.

When sales results disappointed, Sackler family members didn’t hesitate to intervene. In late 2010, Purdue told the family that sales of the highest dose and most profitable opioids were lower than expected, according to the complaint. That meant an expected quarter-end payout to the family of $320 million was at risk of being reduced to $260 million and would have to be made in two installments in December instead of one in November.

That news prompted a sharp email question from Mortimer D.A. Sackler, whose late father, also named Mortimer, was a Purdue co-founder. “Why are you BOTH reducing the amount of the distribution and delaying it and splitting it in two?” he asked. “Just a few weeks ago you agreed to distribute the full 320 [million dollars] in November.” The complaint doesn’t say how much was ultimately paid.

From 2009 until at least 2014, McKinsey helped Purdue shape its message for selling OxyContin and overcoming concerns about addiction and overdoses, according to redacted passages. The consultant told Purdue in a slide presentation that it could increase prescriptions by convincing doctors that opioids provide “freedom” and “peace of mind” and give patients “the best possible chance to live a full and active life.”

Purdue staff, according to the complaint, told the Sacklers that McKinsey would study “patient pushback” to encourage hesitant doctors to prescribe opioids. In a meeting with Purdue executives, McKinsey planned how to “counter the emotional messages from mothers with teenagers that overdosed in [sic] OxyContin" by recruiting pain patients to talk about the need for the drugs.

In a 2013 report, McKinsey recommended directing sales representatives to focus on the most prolific opioid prescribers because that group writes “25 times as many OxyContin scripts” as less prolific prescribers. Because prescription rates rose in tandem with visits from sales reps to doctors, McKinsey recommended increasing each salesperson’s quota from 1,400 visits a year to closer to 1,700. McKinsey estimated that targeting the most frequent prescribers could boost OxyContin sales by hundreds of millions of dollars. The quotas rose, as did total visits, the complaint states. Purdue said it planned to decrease visits relating to opioid products, and any increase was due to promoting a laxative.

McKinsey also recommended Purdue fight back against efforts by a major pharmacy chain, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and the U.S. Department of Justice to stop illegal opioid prescribing, the complaint states. These new rules were cutting into sales of the highest doses, which were also the most profitable, it says. The complaint doesn’t say if Purdue followed McKinsey’s recommendation. Purdue said the recommendations “actually relate to ensuring continued access to pain medicines for appropriate patients.”

A McKinsey spokesman declined comment.

In September 2014, Purdue embarked on a secret project to join an industry that was booming thanks in part to OxyContin abuse: addiction treatment medication. Code-named Project Tango, it involved Purdue executives and staff as well as Dr. Kathe Sackler, a daughter of the company co-founder Mortimer Sackler and a defendant in the Massachusetts lawsuit. She participated in phone calls and told staff that the project required their “immediate attention,” according to the complaint.

Internally, Purdue touted the growth of an industry that its aggressive marketing had done so much to foster.

“It is an attractive market,” the team working on the project wrote in a presentation. “Large unmet need for vulnerable, underserved and stigmatized patient population suffering from substance abuse, dependence and addiction.”

While OxyContin sales were declining, the internal team at Purdue touted the fact that the addiction treatment marketplace was expanding.

“Opioid addiction (other than heroin) has grown by ~20%” annually from 2000 to 2010, the company noted. Although Richard Sackler had blamed OxyContin abuse in an email on “reckless criminals,” the Purdue staff exploring the new business opportunity described in far more sympathetic terms the patients whom it now planned to treat.

“This can happen to any-one – from a 50 year old woman with chronic lower back pain to a 18 year old boy with a sports injury, from the very wealthy to the very poor,” it said.

Company documents recommended becoming an “end-to-end pain provider.” Initially, Purdue intended to sell one such medication, Suboxone, which is commonly retailed as a film that melts in the mouth. When Kathe Sackler asked staff members to look into reports that children might be swallowing the film, they reassured her. They responded, according to the complaint, that youngsters were overdosing on pills, but not the films, “which is a positive for Tango.”

In 2015, Purdue turned its attention to another potential product, the overdose reversing agent known as Narcan, calling it a “strategic fit.” Purdue executives discussed how its sales force could promote Narcan to the same doctors who prescribed the most opioids. Purdue said in the statement Wednesday that it decided against acquiring the rights to sell Suboxone and Narcan.

While those initiatives appear to have stalled or ended, Richard Sackler received a patent last year for a drug to treat addiction, according to the complaint. The patent application states that opioids are addictive and refers to people who suffer from substance use disorders as “junkies.”

Besides being a defendant in the Massachusetts case, Richard Sackler was deposed in a lawsuit against Purdue in Kentucky, which the company settled. It’s believed to be the only time a member of the family has been questioned under oath about OxyContin and its addictive properties. The Kentucky Court of Appeals has ordered the release of his deposition, in response to a motion by STAT, but Purdue is asking the state Supreme Court to review the ruling. Hundreds of other lawsuits filed by states, cities, counties and tribes against Purdue have been consolidated in a pending case in federal court in Ohio.

The Massachusetts complaint cites multiple incidents of Purdue allegedly sitting on information, sometimes for years, about doctors it had reason to believe were inappropriately prescribing OxyContin. In 2012, a Purdue employee appealed to the company’s head of sales to alert health insurers to data the company collected about doctors suspected of abusing or illegally prescribing OxyContin. The list of doctors was code-named Project Zero.

“At a basic level, it just seems like the right and ethical thing to do,” the employee wrote. “Doing so could help those companies identify those physicians that may be of a concern, not just with respect to our products, but also other” pai...

Colonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth's climate.

That's the conclusion of scientists from University College London, UK.

The team says the disruption that followed European settlement led to a huge swathe of abandoned agricultural land being reclaimed by fast-growing trees and other vegetation.

This pulled down enough carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere to eventually chill the planet.

It's a cooling period often referred to in the history books as the "Little Ice Age" - a time when winters in Europe would see the Thames in London regularly freeze over.

"The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas led to the abandonment of enough cleared land that the resulting terrestrial carbon uptake had a detectable impact on both atmospheric CO₂ and global surface air temperatures," Alexander Koch and colleagues write in their paper published in Quaternary Science Reviews.

The team reviewed all the population data it could find on how many people were living in the Americas prior to first contact with Europeans in 1492.

It then assessed how the numbers changed in following decades as the continents were ravaged by introduced disease (smallpox, measles, etc), warfare, slavery and societal collapse.

It's the UCL group's estimate that 60 million people were living across the Americas at the end of the 15th Century (about 10% of the world's total population), and that this was reduced to just five or six million within a hundred years.

The scientists calculated how much land previously cultivated by indigenous civilisations would have fallen into disuse, and what the impact would be if this ground was then repossessed by forest and savannah.

The area is in the order of 56 million hectares, close in size to a modern country like France.

This scale of regrowth is figured to have drawn down sufficient CO₂ that the concentration of the gas in the atmosphere eventually fell by 7-10ppm (that is 7-10 molecules of CO₂ in every one million molecules in the air).

"To put that in the modern context - we basically burn (fossil fuels) and produce about 3ppm per year. So, we're talking a large amount of carbon that's being sucked out of the atmosphere," explained co-author Prof Mark Maslin.

"There is a marked cooling around that time (1500s/1600s) which is called the Little Ice Age, and what's interesting is that we can see natural processes giving a little bit of cooling, but actually to get the full cooling - double the natural processes - you have to have this genocide-generated drop in CO₂."

Where's the support for the connection?

The drop in CO₂ at the time of the Great Dying is evident in the ice core records from Antarctica.

Air bubbles trapped in these frozen samples show a fall in their concentration of carbon dioxide.

The atomic composition of the gas also suggests strongly that the decline is being driven by land processes somewhere on Earth.

In addition, the UCL team says the story fits with the records of charcoal and pollen deposits in the Americas.

These show the sort of perturbation expected from a decline in the use of fire to manage land, and a big grow-back of natural vegetation.

Ed Hawkins, professor of climate science at Reading University, was not involved in the study. He commented: "Scientists understand that the so-called Little Ice Age was caused by several factors - a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, a series of large volcanic eruptions, changes in land use and a temporary decline in solar activity.

"This new study demonstrates that the drop in CO₂ is itself partly due the settlement of the Americas and resulting collapse of the indigenous population, allowing regrowth of natural vegetation. It demonstrates that human activities affected the climate well before the industrial revolution began."

Are there lessons for modern climate policy?

Co-author Dr Chris Brierley believes there is. He said the fall-out from the terrible population crash and re-wilding of the Americas illustrated the challenge faced by some global warming solutions.

"There is a lot of talk around 'negative emissions' approaches and using tree-planting to take CO₂ out of the atmosphere to mitigate climate change," he told BBC News.

"And what we see from this study is the scale of what's required, because the Great Dying resulted in an area the size of France being reforested and that gave us only a few ppm. This is useful; it shows us what reforestation can do. But at the same, that kind of reduction is worth perhaps just two years of fossil fuel emissions at the present rate."

The study also has a bearing on discussions about the creation of a new label to describe humanity's time - and impacts - on Earth.

This epoch would be called the Anthropocene, and there is currently a lively debate over how it should be recognised in the geological record.

Some researchers say it would be most obvious in deposits that record the great acceleration in industrial activity from the 1950s onwards.

But the UCL team argues that the Great Dying in the Americas shows there are significant human interactions that left a deep and indelible mark on the planet long before the mid-20th Century.

Quartz

If we don’t know the dangers that the future brings, how can we prepare for them?

The End of the World is a podcast that explores existential risks, those organic and man-made catastrophes that could bring about the extinction of humanity. The series begins with the origin of life and goes on to list all of the ways Homo sapiens could be snuffed out by nature, before focusing on all the ways we might do it ourselves. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, physics experiments, nanobots—we may have an odd 5 billion years before we get swallowed up by the sun, but at the rate we’re innovating, it’ll be a wonder if we see another century.

Sound bleak? Well, yes, it is. But the podcast comes at a particularly dark time in human history. Never before have we been haphazardly equipped with the tools to bring about our own demise. We’re recklessly building AIs and algorithms that have no empathy for their human creators. Pandemic-level pathogens escape their labs on a shockingly regular basis. And we’re only a decade or two away from a climate-change point of no return; global warming’s own event horizon. Yet we don’t seem to be in any great rush to course correct. (The Doomsday Clock currently has us at two minutes to midnight, for what it’s worth.)

Host Josh Clark takes the stance of the more you know, the more you can do about it. And he knows a lot of stuff. The co-host of the Stuff You Should Know podcast and a former senior writer at How Stuff Works, an educational website, Clark has made a living of making sense of the world and teaching it to others. Through all of his research, he thankfully doesn’t think we’re doomed—not yet, at least. We just have to make it through the next couple of years alive.

Clark walks us through the various ways we could potentially send the species into a tailspin, and how we can avoid that terrible fate.

For a long time, we thought that nuclear war or even catastrophic climate change could do it. And those would be really bad for humanity! If the kind of climate change that we’re going to start facing in 12 years happens, a lot of people are going to die, and a lot of people will be displaced. It’ll be a terrible period of adaption for humanity. But we will adapt. There will be people left to rebuild.

But with these new risks, there won’t be anyone left to rebuild. There are no chances left. If one existential risk befalls one person, that’s it! Humanity is done. We tend to think because we’ve made it this far, we’ll be okay. But we’ve never been exposed to anything that could take out all of humanity. Nothing’s had the goods. But the technology we’ve started to develop now does.

We could make it to a utopian, post-biological society. But there’s a big catch: To make it there, we have to safely get through this period beforehand, which is the most dangerous that society has ever lived through.Our moral trajectory is on an upward climb. It goes up and down—and sometimes it goes backward and it’s ugly and messy—but overall, it’s still moving upward. Take how we treat animals, for instance. In the last 50 years we went from animals having the same rights as the toaster in your house to prosecuting humans who mistreat animals. We now recognize that us humans—the most amazing creatures on Earth—don’t have the right to violate these animals’ natural rights. Once you open that door and step through, our view of other animals is going to become more harmonious and friendly. Maybe all humans will soon be on a vegan diet, eating in-vitro meat, and all of the animals’ habitats will be preserved. And I can’t believe that won’t be expanded to all life.

But we can’t do that if we all die—to commit omnicide, as Bostrom puts it. If we take humans out of the equation, we also take out the possibility that we could make the world better for all life. As the most intelligent life on Earth, we could see it as our responsibility to make life better for the rest rather than take take take take take. That’s my hope.

Even if we can bumble though our next million years on Earth with this level of technological maturity, we still run into a natural risk eventually. Maybe it’s an asteroid. Maybe it’s a horrible super-volcanic eruption. It could be anything. But in a billion or so years, the sun will grow hotter and brighter and will actually deplete the CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere, messing up the climate and making photosynthesis impossible. So life would basically cease here. That means there’s a 1.1 to 1.2 billion-year expiration date ahead of humanity, if we can just stick around on Earth for the next billion years.