India shoots down own satellite with missile

India has officially upped the space race ante. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on Wednesday that Indian scientists had shot down one of their own satellites in space with an anti-satellite missile (ASAT). 

Modi said the country’s first test of such technology is a major breakthrough that establishes India as a space power. It becomes the fourth country to have used an ASAT, after the US, Russia, and China. The successful anti-satellite test, conducted from an island off India’s east coast, will allow the country to protect its assets in space from foreign attacks. A statement from the foreign ministry read: “The capability achieved…provides credible deterrence against threats to our growing space-based assets from long-range missiles, and proliferation in the types and numbers of missiles.”

The US ran the first anti-satellite test in 1959, when satellites themselves were rare and new. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the Soviet Union tested a weapon that would be launched into orbit, approach enemy satellites and destroy them with an explosive charge. In 1985 the US destroyed one of its satellites with the ASM-135A, launched from an F-15 fighter jet. There were no more tests until 2007, when China jumped in, destroying a satellite and creating the largest orbital debris cloud in history with more than 3,000 objects.

All you need to know about Anti-Satellite Weapons

The anti-satellite weapon capability demonstrated by India was first developed by the US in 1959, primarily to counter the erstwhile Soviet Union.

What is an ASAT?

ASATs (Anti-Satellite Weapons) are aimed at destroying or disabling space assets, whether military or civilian, offensive or defensive, according to a document of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR).

They are generally of two types: kinetic and non-kinetic.

Kinetic ASATs: They must physically strike an object in order to destroy it. Examples of kinetic ASATs include ballistic missiles, drones that drag an object out of orbit or detonate explosives in proximity to the object, or any item launched to coincide with the passage of a target satellite. This means any space asset, even a communications satellite, could become an ASAT if it is used to physically destroy another space object.

Non-kinetic ASATs: A variety of nonphysical means can be used to disable or destroy a space object. These include frequency jamming, blinding lasers or cyberattacks. These methods can also render an object useless without causing the target to break up and fragment absent additional forces intervening.

Guidelines suggested for ASAT tests: In 2018, the UNIDIR proposed three ASAT test guidelines. Under the 'No Debris' guideline, if an actor wishes to test ASAT capabilities, they should not create debris.

If an actor must create debris during an ASAT test, it should be carried out at an altitude sufficiently low that the debris will not be long-lived. It also suggested that actors testing ASATs should notify others of their activities (even if they are not completely transparent on the motivation behind the test) to avoid misperceptions or misinterpretations. However, there is no consensus among the space-faring nations on the guidelines. "We are working on different measures, but nothing has been formally adopted," Daniel Porras, Space Security Fellow at UNIDIR, said.

Anti-Satellite technology will be deterrent in event of space war: Experts
PTI

The anti-satellite missile capability demonstrated by India on Wednesday will be a deterrent in the event of a war where space may be the theatre of action with countries seeking to down enemy satellites, experts explained. "The message goes strong and loud that if any of our satellites is harmed, we possess the capability of destroying yours (the adversary)," said Ajay Lele, senior fellow with the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA).

The former Air Force officer and other experts said India has possessed the anti-missile technology for several years but needed the political go-ahead to actually test it in live conditions. They said the Defence Research Development Organisation (DRDO) received the green signal to prepare for the test two years ago, which came to fruition on Wednesday. In 2012, India conducted simulated tests, establishing the capability but the then Manmohan Singh-led UPA government had not given permission for a live test, likely over concerns that a destroyed satellite would result in debris that would damage satellites of other countries.

Daniel Porras, Space Security Fellow, United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), Geneva, said Wednesday's test destroyed a satellite at an altitude of 300 km. "It was not a good sign for LEO (low earth orbit)... which has telecommunication and earth observation satellites and also the International Space Station", which cruises at a height of 400 km, he said.

"The test was done at 300 km, so pretty low, meaning most of the debris will slowly come down. However, lots of objects near that altitude... Not a good sign for all those LEO constellations. Also, if any debris damages other objects, India will be liable under the Liability Convention (if attribution is established)," Porras tweeted. Former ISRO chairperson G Madhavan Nair, who was also secretary, Department of Space, from 2003 to 2009, said the DRDO had anti-missile technology, including the algorithms required for setting the trajectory to hit the moving target.

"Marrying the two technologies (of ISRO and DRDO) was required which happened over the last few years," Nair, who joined the BJP in October 2018, told PTI. He said it would have taken about two years for scientists to perfect the missile launch once the go-ahead for the test was given by the government.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday announced that the test, named Mission Shakti, was not directed against any country and the disused Indian owned satellite was a pre-determined target. In an address to the nation, Modi also said India has not breached any international law or treaty.

India is only the fourth country to acquire such a specialised and modern capability after the US, Russia and China.

There has been no instance of a space war but the countries have demonstrated their capabilities by testing on their own satellites, like India did on Wednesday. The UNIDIR defines ASAT (Anti-Satellite) as "any capabilities aimed at destroying or disabling space assets for any reason, whether military or civilian, offensive or defensive".

Lele of IDSA said India had already developed Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) technology and along with it came the know-how behind ASAT. "Testing the Anti-Satellite missile at LEO at 300 kilometres was only to demonstrate capacity. This is also a deterrence mechanism in the event of a space war, similar to what India has developed in the nuclear domain," he said.

Lele added that a political decision was required as conducting anti-satellite missiles tests could attract international criticism over issues of adding to debris in space and accusations of militarising space. In an era where defence forces rely on satellites for different aspects of security, including intelligence gathering, having ASAT missile capability sends a strong signal to adversaries, he said.

Rajeshwari Pillai Rajagopalan, senior fellow and head of the Nuclear and Space Initiative, Observer Researcher Foundation (ORF), said Wednesday's development reflects India's desire to not make the mistake it did in 1974 when it conducted its first nuclear test in Pokhran. The tests were conducted four years after the Nuclear Proliferation Test (NPT) Treaty came into force in 1970. There is no similar international treaty for space.

"The successful test also acts as a deterrent in event of a space war. The technology was available, so it was high time India tested it. Political will was also needed behind taking the decision," Rajagopalan said, referring to the possibility of an international backlash. In 2007, China destroyed its FengYun 1C weather satellite with an SC-19 missile, leaving behind space debris consisting of 3,280 pieces of trackable debris, as well as up to 32,000 pieces that are non-trackable.

The following year, during Operation Burnt Frost, the US destroyed its own satellite, USA-193, with an SM-3 interceptor creating 174 pieces of trackable debris, plus non-trackable shards. Now, the spectre of space war has spilled over from the realm of Hollywood fiction into Indian reality.
= = =
Debris from Indian A-SAT weapons test expected to eventually burn up: US

Acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said on Thursday he expected debris from an Indian anti-satellite weapons test to eventually burn up in the atmosphere instead of creating a lasting debris field that poses a threat to other satellites. Asked about comments by India's top defense scientist that the debris would burn up in 45 days, Shanahan told reporters traveling with him in Florida: "I don't know about the particular time frame there but in terms of threats to other objects, that's consistent with what I've heard."

Pioneers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) receive Turing Award

The concept of nueral networks was behind the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI)...

The Godfathers of the AI Boom Win Computing’s Highest Honor

Tom Simonite

(from left to right) Yann LeCun, Geoff Hinton, and Yoshua Bengio

In the late 1980s, Canadian master’s student Yoshua Bengio became captivated by an unfashionable idea. A handful of artificial intelligence researchers were trying to craft software that loosely mimicked how networks of neurons process data in the brain, despite scant evidence it would work. “I fell in love with the idea that we could both understand the principles of how the brain works and also construct AI,” says Bengio, now a professor at the University of Montreal.

More than 20 years later, the tech industry fell in love with that idea too. Neural networks are behind the recent bloom of progress in AI that has enabled projects such as self-driving cars and phone bots practically indistinguishable from people.

On Wednesday, Bengio, 55, and two other protagonists of that revolution won the highest honor in computer science, the ACM Turing Award, known as the Nobel Prize of computing. The other winners are Google researcher Geoff Hinton, 71, and NYU professor and Facebook chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, 58, who wrote some of the papers that seduced Bengio into working on neural networks.

The trio’s journey is a parable of scientific grit and a case study in the economic value of new forms of computing. Through decades of careful research out of the limelight, they transformed an old-fashioned, marginalized idea into the hottest thing in computer science. The technology they championed is central to every large tech company’s strategy for the future. It’s how software in testing at Google reads medical scans, how Tesla’s Autopilot reads road markings, and how Facebook automatically removes some hate speech.

Asked what winning the Turing Award means, Hinton expresses mock surprise. “I guess neural networks are now respectable computer science,” he says. The joke is that in computer science, there isn’t anything more respectable than a Turing Award. It has been awarded annually since 1966 and is named after Alan Turing, the British mathematician who laid some of the early foundations for computing and AI in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.

Pedros Domingos, a professor at the University of Washington who leads machine learning research at hedge fund DE Shaw, says it’s beyond time that deep learning was recognized. “This was long overdue,” he says. Domingos’ 2015 book The Master Algorithm surveyed five “tribes” taking different approaches to AI, including the “connectionists” working on neural networks.

Awarding the Turing to that tribe acknowledges a shift in how computer scientists solve problems, he says. “This is not just a Turing Award for these particular people. It’s recognition that machine learning has become a central field in computer science,” says Domingos.

The discipline has a long tradition of valuing mathematically proven solutions for problems. But machine learning algorithms get things done in a messier way, following statistical trails in data to find methods that work well in practice, even if it’s not clear exactly how. “Computer science is a form of engineering, and what really matters is whether you get results,” Domingos says.

The idea of a “neural network” is one of the oldest approaches to artificial intelligence, dating back to the emergence of the field in the late 1950s. Researchers adapted simple models of brain cells created by neuroscientists into mathematical networks that could learn to sort data into categories by filtering it through a series of simple nodes, which were likened (rather superficially) to neurons.

Early successes included the room-filling Perceptron, which could learn to distinguish shapes on a screen. But it was unclear how to train large networks with many layers of neurons, to allow the technique to go beyond toy tasks.

Hinton showed the solution to training so-called deep networks. He coauthored a seminal 1986 paper on a learning algorithm called back-propagation. That algorithm, known as backprop, is at the heart of deep learning today, but back then the technology wouldn’t quite come together. “There was a blackout period between the mid-’90s and the mid-2000s where essentially nobody but a few crazy people like us were working on neural nets,” says LeCun.

His contributions included convnets, invented neural network designs well suited to images; he proved the concept by creating check-reading software for ATMs at Bell Labs. Bengio pioneered methods to apply deep learning to sequences, such as speech, and understanding text. But the wider world only caught on to deep learning early in this decade, after researchers figured out how to harness the power of graphics processors, or GPUs.

One crucial moment took place in 2012, when Hinton, then at the University of Toronto, and two grad students surprisingly won an annual contest for software that identifies objects in photos. Their triumph left the field’s favored methods in the dust, correctly sorting more than 100,000 photos into 1,000 categories within five guesses with 85 percent accuracy, more than 10 percentage points better than the runner-up. Google acquired a startup founded by the trio early in 2013, and Hinton has worked for the company ever since. Facebook hired LeCun later that year.

“You can look back on what happened and think science worked the way it's meant to work,” Hinton says. That is, “until we could produce results that were clearly better than the current state of the art, people were very skeptical.”

Hinton says he and his collaborators stuck with their unfashionable ideas for so long because they are mavericks at heart. All three are now part of the academic and tech industry mainstream. Hinton and LeCun are vice presidents at two of the world’s most influential companies. Bengio has not joined a tech giant, but he is an adviser to Microsoft and has worked with startups adapting deep learning to tasks such as drug discovery and helping victims of sexual harassment.

The three have gone in different directions, but they remain collaborators and friends. Asked whether they will deliver the traditional Turing Award lecture together, Hinton raises chuckles by suggesting Bengio and LeCun go first so he can give his own lecture about what they got wrong. Does that joke reflect the trio’s typical working dynamic? Hinton says no at the same time LeCun good-naturedly answers yes.

Despite deep learning’s many practical successes, there’s still much it can’t do. Neural networks are brain-inspired but not much like the brain. The intelligence that deep learning gives computers can be exceptional at narrowly defined tasks—play this particular game, recognize these particular sounds—but isn’t adaptable and versatile like human intelligence.

Hinton and LeCun say they would like to end the dependence of today’s systems on explicit and extensive training by people. Deep learning projects depend on an abundant supply of data labeled to explain the task at hand—a major limitation in areas such as medicine. Bengio highlights how, despite successes such as better translation tools, the technology is not able to actually understand language.

None of the trio claim to know how to solve those challenges. They advise anyone hoping to make the next Turing-winning breakthrough in AI to emulate their own willingness to ignore mainstream ideas. “They should not follow the trend—which right now is deep learning,” Bengio says.

How the Press Sold the Iraq War Story & Got Away With It

In an excerpt from his new book Hate Inc., Matt Taibbi looks back at how the media built new lies to cover their early ones.

16 Years Later, How the Press That Sold the Iraq War Got Away With It

Matt Taibbi

Excerpted from Hate Inc., which can be found in serial form at Taibbi.substack.com.

Sixteen years ago this week, the United States invaded Iraq. We went in on an unconvincing excuse, articulated by George W. Bush in a speech days before invasion:

“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq’s neighbors and against Iraq’s people.”

To the lie about the possession of WMDs, Bush added a few more: that Hussein “trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al-Qaeda.” Moreover, left unchecked, those Saddam-supplied terrorists could “kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country.”

The disaster that followed cost over a hundred-thousand lives just in Iraq and drained north of $2 trillion from the budget. Once we were in and the “most lethal weapons ever devised” were not discovered, it quickly became obvious that large numbers of people at the highest levels of society had either lied, screwed up, or both.

The news media appropriately caught a huge chunk of the blame. But a public that had been fooled once was not prepared for the multiple rounds of post-invasion deceptions that followed, issued by many of the same pols and press actors. These were designed to rewrite history in real time, creating new legends that have now lasted 16 years.

These have allowed people like Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer — through whose mouth many of the chief lies of the era flowed — to come out this week and claim it was a “myth” that “Bush lied, people died.”

The myths had enormous utility to the working press, whose gargantuan errors have been re-cast as honest mistakes of judgment. A lot of the people who made those mistakes are still occupying prominent positions, their credibility undamaged thanks to a new legend best articulated by New Yorker editor David Remnick, who later scoffed, “Nobody got that story completely right.”

Nobody except the record number of people who marched against the war on February 15, 2003 — conservative estimates placed it between six and ten million worldwide (I marched in D.C.). Every one of those people was way ahead of Remnick.

None were marching because they disbelieved the WMD claims. Most marched because they saw the WMD issue as irrelevant at best, an insultingly thin excuse for a wrong war that had some other, darker, still-unreleased explanation.

In my forthcoming book Hate Inc. (which I’ve been publishing in serial form here), I’ve been looking at the major media deceptions of this century. WMD became the archetype of a modern propaganda campaign, a key component of which is the rewarding of the people who sell the lie.

This was accomplished after Iraq via a series of deceptions tweaked over and over, myths piled atop myths. In order, the biggest surviving Iraq lies:

Only a small portion of the industry screwed up.

In the popular imagination, the case for war was driven by a bunch of Republicans and one over-caffeinated New York Times reporter named Judith Miller. Even the attempts to make comprehensive lists of Iraq cheerleaders post-invasion inevitably focus on usual suspects like Fleischer, current Trump official John Bolton, neoconservatives like Max Boot, David Frum, and Bill Kristol, and winger goons like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. But we expect the worst from such people.

It’s been forgotten this was actually a business-wide consensus, which included the enthusiastic participation of a blue-state intelligentsia. The New Yorker of Remnick, who himself wrote a piece called “Making the Case,” was a source of many of the most ferocious pro-invasion pieces, including a pair written by current Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, one of a number of WMD hawks who failed up after the war case fell apart. Other prominent Democrat voices like Ezra Klein, Jonathan Chait, and even quasi-skeptic Nick Kristof (who denounced war critics for calling Bush a liar) were on board, as a Full Metal Jacket character put it, “for the big win.”

The Washington Post and New York Times were key editorial-page drivers of the conflict; MSNBC unhired Phil Donahue and Jesse Ventura over their war skepticism; CNN flooded the airwaves with generals and ex-Pentagon stoolies, and broadcast outlets ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS stacked the deck even worse: In a two-week period before the invasion, the networks had just one American guest out of 267 who questioned the war, according to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

Exactly one major news organization refused to pick up pom-poms, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain. All the other major outlets, whether they ostensibly catered to Republican or Democratic audiences, sold the war lie. The bipartisan nature of the deception has been obscured in history by a second legend:

The war was about WMDs.

We now know, from leaks like Britain’s Downing Street memos and the U.K.’s later Chilcot report, that the WMD issue was a concoction, designed for the narrow purpose of giving Tony Blair political cover to support Bush’s real reason for war, “regime change.”

Few in the media noticed at the time that key neoconservatives close to the Bush administration like Kristol and Robert Kagan (who are still more than welcome on cable today), had been articulating a goofball global domination plan called “benevolent hegemony” in public dating back to the mid- and late-1990s.

The idea was, now that the Soviets were gone, the U.S. should be more aggressive, not less. We should bail on the “peace dividend” Bill Clinton touted in the early nineties. We should also, neoconservatives said, resist the nationalist version of the “peace dividend,” the urge to concentrate “energies at home” in policies like Pat Buchanan’s “America First” plan.

Instead, we should secure a “preponderance of influence” over all countries, having a plan for “change of regime” for any country not under our control, from Cuba to Iran to China.

How to justify this dressed-up version of “pre-emptive war”? We know from Bush speechwriter David Frum’s bootlicking account of having served that administration, The Right Man, that the “Axis of Evil” concept was something Frum found flipping through history books about World War II.

There, he came up with the idea that America’s enemies were so crazy with hatred for us, they couldn’t be trusted to behave rationally even if threatened with annihilation. “If deterrence worked,” he noted, “there would never be a Pearl Harbor.”

Tony Blair was fine with regime change, but felt he couldn’t sell the concept politically. In 2009 he admitted this and said he’d have “deployed” different arguments without WMD if he had it to do over. From the Chilcot inquiry we know his foreign policy advisor David Manning had dinner with Condoleezza Rice in March of 2002, and afterward wrote a damning memo to Blair.

“I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change,” he wrote. “But you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was very different.”

So they cooked up the idea of invading Iraq as a response to longstanding violations of a UN inspections regime, a reason that they hoped would provide Blair with the fig leaf of UN Security Council approval.

Later, British intelligence officials like Sir John Scarlett worried the public would not buy a case for war against Iraq because Iraq wasn’t “exceptional” even compared to other states like Libya, Iran, and North Korea.

This means all the marchers were right to ask all those obvious questions about the war from the start.

Why were we invading a country with no connection to 9/11? If this had something to do with supporting terrorists, why were we invading a state ruled by a secular Baathist dictator, a type hated by religious extremists like bin Laden almost as much as the United States is hated? If rogue states with weapons were the problem, why Iraq and not Iran, Libya, or especially North Korea? If WMD were the issue, why not wait until inspections were finished?

Millions of ordinary people, without intelligence sources or experiences traveling in the Middle East or access to satellite photos, identified the key questions long before we went to war. One of the most damning revelations of the Chilcot report is that British officials were extremely worried the case was so thin, journalists would see right through it.

An assistant to Blair spokesman Alistair Campbell named Phillip Bassett wrote on September 11, 2002: “Think we’re in trouble with this.” Foreign Office communications chief John Williams suggested he and his colleagues target “people, as opposed to journalists,” because the latter would surely see “There is no ‘killer fact… that proves Saddam must be taken on now.”

They had it backwards. Large portions of the public were skeptical from the start.

Only reporters were dumb enough, or dishonest enough, to eat the bait about WMDs. Moreover, American reporters on their own volition rallied to the idea that Saddam was a Hitler-Satan whose “exceptional” evil needed immediate extinguishing.

Goldberg: “Saddam Hussein is a figure of singular repugnance, and singular danger… No one else comes close… to matching his extraordinary and variegated record of malevolence…” Chait: “He’s in league with a Stalin in terms of internal repression.” Remnick said he was a “modern Nebuchadnezzar II” who’d vowed to “vanquish the United States, and rule over a united Arab world.”

But even that wasn’t the worst issue:

The deception wasn’t about WMDs or Iraq at all, but about domestic attitudes.

After we invaded, and the WMD hunt turned out to be a crock, nearly all of our professional chin-scratchers found ways to address their errors. Most followed a script: I was young (Ezra Klein literally said, “I was young”), I believed the intel, and on the narrow point of WMDs being in Iraq, I screwed up.

None walked back the rest of the propaganda, which is why even as the case for invading Iraq fell apart, our presence in the Mideast expanded. While Judith Miller became a national punchline, the “continuing exertion of American influence” became conventional wisdom.

Defense budgets exploded. NATO expanded. The concept of a “peace dividend” faded to the point where few remember it ever existed. We now maintain a vast global archipelago of secret prisons, routinely cross borders in violation of international law using drones, and today have military bases in 80 countries, to support active combat operations in at least seven nations (most Americans don’t even know which ones).

The WMD episode is remembered as a grotesque journalistic failure, one that led to disastrous war that spawned ISIS. But none of the press actors who sold the invasion seem sorry about the revolutionary new policies that error willed into being. They are specifically not regretful about helping create a continually-expanding Fortress America with bases everywhere that topples regimes left and right, with or without congressional or UN approval.

They’re sorry about Iraq, maybe, but as Chait later said, “Libya was not Iraq.” This he said to “liberal anti-interventionists,” in explaining why “I have not embraced their worldview.”

We had successfully “contained” the much more powerful Soviet Union for ages, to say nothing of smaller, weaker countries subject to flyover regimes like Iraq. To start the war, Americans had to be talked out of the idea that these policies were still viable.

To this end, people like Remnick told us “a return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most dangerous option of all.” Fred Hiatt’s Washington Post editorial page warned “not poking the hornet’s nest” was a “strategy of accommodation, half-measures and wishful thinking.”

Today we mostly laugh about serial word-strangler columnist Thomas Friedman of the Times, but he was a key voice. His infamous “Chicken a l’Iraq” editorial insisted America couldn’t risk containment and had to be willing to be as unpredictable as rogue enemies – that in a game of realpolitik chicken, we had to throw out our steering wheel and be “ready to invade Iraq tomorrow, alone.”

The first rule of modern commercial media is you’re allowed to screw up, in concert. There’s no risk in being wrong within a prevailing narrative. That’s why the chief offenders kept perches or failed up. The job isn’t about getting facts right, it’s about getting narratives right, and being willing to eat errors discovered in service of pushing the right subtext.

Failure to self-audit after Iraq led the media business to mangle of a series of subsequent stories. From the still-misreported financial crisis of 2008 to the failure to take the rise of Donald Trump as an electoral phenomenon seriously to the increasingly sloppy coverage of our hyper-aggressive foreign policies, we’ve gotten very loose with facts and data, knowing there’s no downside to certain kinds of misses.

A British non-profit called Reprieve years ago even discovered journalists were routinely repeating government assertions that certain terror suspects had been killed in drone strikes, failing to notice the same suspects had been reported killed years before or in different countries, sometimes not even twice but three or four times.

We’re particularly bad when it comes to regime-change stories, and have seen this just recently.

Multiple news organizations, including the New York Times, reported forces loyal to Venezuela’s Maduro (our latest regime change target) burned food aid sent by Western humanitarian convoys. It turned out the opposition burned the cargo. A CNN reporter said it was a “classic case of how misinformation spreads… from an unconfirmed rumor… to the mass media,” failing to realize the screwup started when a CNN crew claimed they saw the burning episode.

This slapstick idiocy was like something out of Evelyn Waugh. It was so bad the Onion ran a story called, “New York Times Corrects Story By Admitting They Burned Venezuelan Aid Convoy.”

The press in the wake of the WMD affair assumed the safety-in-numbers instincts of herd animals: like wildebeest, the instant 51% of the pack decides to run in a direction, they all run that way, even if it means bounding off a factual cliff. That the landscape is currently split into two different sets of wildebeest is not much of a comfort. Reporting these days is more a matter of manufactured, behind-the-scenes consensus building than an individuated process of following facts wherever they lead, no matter how inconvenient.

The damage this story did to our collective reputations is still poorly understood in the business. In fact, “Why do they hate us?” stories are one of an increasing number of feature ideas we routinely botch. We’ll never get rid of the scarlet letter from those years until we face how bad it was, and it was so much worse than we’re admitting, even now.

Only 10 companies control food & beverage in the world!

Only 10 companies control almost every large food and beverage brand in the world.

These companies — Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg's, Mars, Associated British Foods, and Mondelez — each employ thousands and make billions of dollars in revenue every year.

Kellogg's
2016 revenue: $13 billion
Forget Froot Loops and Frosted Flakes — Kellogg's also owns noncereal brands including Eggo, Pringles, and Cheez-It.

Associated British Foods
2016 revenue: $16.8 billion
This British company owns brands such as Dorset Cereals and Twinings tea, as well as the retailer Primark.

General Mills
2016 revenue: $16.6 billion
General Mills is best known for cereals like Cheerios and Chex, but it also owns brands like Yoplait, Hamburger Helper, Haagen-Dazs, and Betty Crocker.

Danone
2016 revenue: $23.7 billion
Best known for yogurts like Activa, Yocrunch, and Oikos, Danone also sells medical nutrition products and bottled water.

Mondelez
2016 revenue: $25.9 billion
This snack-centric company's brands include Oreo, Trident gum, and Sour Patch Kids.

Mars
2016 revenue: $35 billion
Mars is best known for its chocolate brands, such as M&M, but it also owns Uncle Ben's rice, Starburst, and Orbit gum.

Coca-Cola
2016 revenue: $41.9 billion
Coca-Cola is moving beyond soda, with beverage brands including Dasani, Fuze, and Honest Tea.

Unilever
2016 revenue: $48.3 billion
Unilever's diverse list of brands includes Axe body spray, Lipton tea, Magnum ice cream, and Hellmann's mayonnaise.

PepsiCo
2016 revenue: $62.8 billion
In addition to Pepsi and other sodas, PepsiCo also owns brands such as Quaker Oatmeal, Cheetos, and Tropicana.

Nestlé
2016 revenue: $90.2 billion
Brands you may not have known that Nestlé owns include Gerber baby food, Perrier, DiGiorno, and Hot Pockets — plus, of course, candy brands including Butterfinger and KitKat.

Who Rules America?

Who Rules America?
By Paul Craig Roberts
15 May, 2009
Countercurrents.org

What do you suppose it is like to be elected president of the United States only to find that your power is restricted to the service of powerful interest groups?

A president who does a good job for the ruling interest groups is paid off with remunerative corporate directorships, outrageous speaking fees, and a lucrative book contract. If he is young when he assumes office, like Bill Clinton and Obama, it means a long life of luxurious leisure.

Fighting the special interests doesn’t pay and doesn’t succeed. On April 30 the primacy of special over public interests was demonstrated yet again. The Democrats’ bill to prevent 1.7 million mortgage foreclosures and, thus, preserve $300 billion in home equity by permitting homeowners to renegotiate their mortgages, was defeated in the Senate, despite the 60-vote majority of the Democrats. The banksters were able to defeat the bill 51 to 45.

These are the same financial gangsters whose unbridled greed and utter irresponsibility have wiped out half of Americans’ retirement savings, sent the economy into a deep hole, and threatened the US dollar’s reserve currency role. It is difficult to imagine an interest group with a more damaged reputation. Yet, a majority of “the people’s representatives” voted as the discredited banksters instructed.

Hundreds of billions of public dollars have gone to bail out the banksters, but when some Democrats tried to get the Senate to do a mite for homeowners, the US Senate stuck with the banks. The Senate’s motto is: “Hundreds of billions for the banksters, not a dime for homeowners.”

If Obama was naive about well-intentioned change before the vote, he no longer has this political handicap.

Democratic Majority Whip Dick Durbin acknowledged the voters’ defeat by the discredited banksters. The banks, Durbin said, “frankly own the place.”

It is not difficult to understand why. Among those who defeated the homeowners bill are senators Jon Tester (Mont), Max Baucus (Mont), Blanche Lincoln (Ark), Ben Nelson (Neb), Many Landrieu (La), Tim Johnson (SD), and Arlan Specter (Pa). According to reports, the banksters have poured a half million dollars into Tester’s campaign funds. Baucus has received $3.5 million; Lincoln $1.3 million; Nelson $1.4 million; Landrieu $2 million; Johnson $2.5 million; Specter $4.5 million.

The same Congress that can’t find a dime for homeowners or health care appropriates hundreds of billions of dollars for the military/security complex. The week after the Senate foreclosed on American homeowners, the Obama “change” administration asked Congress for an additional $61 billion dollars for the neoconservatives’ war in Iraq and $65 billion more for the neoconservatives’ war in Afghanistan. Congress greeted this request with a rousing “Yes we can!”

The additional $126 billion comes on top of the $533.7 billion “defense” budget for this year. The $660 billion--probably a low-ball number--is ten times the military spending of China, the second most powerful country in the world.

How is it possible that “the world’s only superpower” is threatened by the likes of Iraq and Afghanistan? How can the US be a superpower if it is threatened by countries that have no military capability other than a guerilla capability to resist invaders?

These “wars” are a hoax designed to enrich the US armaments industry and to infuse the “security forces” with police powers over American citizenry.

Not a dime to prevent millions of Americans from losing their homes, but hundreds of billions of dollars to murder Muslim women and children and to create millions of refugees, many of whom will either sign up with insurgents or end up as the next wave of immigrants into America.

This is the way the American government works. And it thinks it is a “city on the hill, a light unto the world.”

Americans elected Obama because he said he would end the gratuitous criminal wars of the Bush brownshirts, wars that have destroyed America’s reputation and financial solvency and serve no public interest. But once in office Obama found that he was ruled by the military/security complex. War is not being ended, merely transferred from the unpopular war in Iraq to the more popular war in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Obama, in violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty, continues to attack “targets” in Pakistan. In place of a war in Iraq, the military/security complex now has two wars going in much more difficult circumstances.

Viewing the promotion gravy train that results from decades of warfare, the US officer corps has responded to the “challenge to American security” from the Taliban. “We have to kill them over there before they come over here.” No member of the US government or its numerous well-paid agents has ever explained how the Taliban, which is focused on Afghanistan, could ever get to America. Yet this hyped fear is sufficient for the public to support the continuing enrichment of the military/security complex, while American homes are foreclosed by the banksters who have destroyed the retirement prospects of the US population..

According to Pentagon budget documents, by next year the cost of the war against Afghanistan will exceed the cost of the war against Iraq. According to a Nobel prize-winning economist and a budget expert at Harvard University, the war against Iraq has cost the American taxpayers $3 trillion, that is, $3,000 billion in out-of-pocket and already incurred future costs, such as caring for veterans.

If the Pentagon is correct, then by next year the US government will have squandered $6 trillion dollars on two wars, the only purpose of which is to enrich the munitions manufacturers and the “security” bureaucracy.

The human and social costs are dramatic as well and not only for the Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani populations ravaged by American bombs. Dahr Jamail reports that US Army psychiatrists have concluded that by their third deployment, 30 percent of American troops are mental wrecks. Among the costs that reverberate across generations of Americans are elevated rates of suicide, unemployment, divorce, child and spousal abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness and incarceration. http://www.truthout.org/051209J?n

In the Afghan “desert of death” the Obama administration is constructing a giant military base. Why? What does the internal politics of Afghanistan have to do with the US?

What is this enormous waste of resources that America does not have accomplishing besides enriching the American munitions industry?

China and to some extent India are the rising powers in the world. Russia, the largest country on earth, is armed with a nuclear arsenal as terrifying as the American one. The US dollar’s role as reserve currency, the most important source of American power, is undermined by the budget deficits that result from the munition corporations’ wars and the bankster bailouts.

Why is the US making itself impotent fighting wars that have nothing whatsoever to do with its security, wars that are, in fact, threatening its security?

The answer is that the military/security lobby, the financial gangsters, and AIPAC rule. The American people be damned.

Russian meddling into US Election 2016 finally disproved!!

Much ado about nothing after two years of intense investigation (call it, witch hunt) by Mueller!!!

2 years of 24/7 propaganda onslaught and all they have to show for it is a hoard of hysterical, deranged and mentally damaged histrionics.

2 years of wasted time, money and effort instead of going back to the proverbial drawing board and trying to figure out why Trump cleaned their clocks in 2016, why people didn't vote for them and what needs to be done. Ridiculous and dumb!

So, there was no election meddling by Russia back in 2016 and we knew about it all along; the defeated DemoncRATs had to concoct something to keep up the pressure on Trump.

But the defeated party and their subservient media are not going to call it a quit yet; they will, Trump has warned, now employ various "below the belt" attacks in the run up to the 2020 election.

American public loves to be lied to. As long as it maintains their living standards, everything is allowed. They never care for truth or facts. That is the reason why this Russiagate is not going to end with the Mueller report.

Attorney General William Barr released his much-anticipated summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Sunday. In his four-page summary Barr wrote that Mueller did not find that Donald Trump’s campaign or associates conspired with Russia; the evidence was “not sufficient” to support a prosecution of the President for obstruction of justice; and Mueller’s team has no plans to issue any new indictments. It should be noted that Mueller did not make the decision himself on whether to prosecute the President on obstruction; the attorney general and Deputy Attorney General
Rod Rosenstein made the determination that the evidence was “not sufficient.”

“This was an illegal takedown that failed and hopefully somebody’s going to be looking at the other side,” Trump said.

After nearly two years of being under the cloud of the Russia investigation, Trump’s presidency is no longer directly under threat from the special counsel probe. He can now focus on his 2020 reelection campaign, although he may still face the specter of more legal and congressional action from the other investigations that remain ongoing. And others remind us that the controversy over the Mueller report could obscure something inherently more dangerous— the basic issues of Trump’s competence and character.

= = =

‘One of the greatest hoaxes in US history’: Russiagate narrative’s peddlers to be held accountable?
RT : 24 Mar, 2019

The Democrats and mass media should be held accountable for weaponizing the Mueller probe against Trump, ruining US-Russia ties and the lives of many Americans, ‘collusion skeptics’ tell RT, after suffering years of vilification.

“All of us were also exonerated, not just the president,” Daniel McAdams, Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute, told RT, after Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow during the 2016 US election.

“It was a witch hunt. [Trump] knew it was a witch hunt... perhaps one of the greatest hoaxes in US history,” McAdams said, stressing that all Trump supporters suffered greatly for their criticism of the two-year-long probe.

“We were demonized, we were vilified for two years, called all manner of names,” while the Democrats and most of America’s mass media were engaged in pushing a false narrative about Trump's conspiracy with Russia.

    At the end of the day, there should be a real reckoning from this.

“Now that these people have pushed this false narrative, and have damaged lives, and have damaged careers – is this where it's going to end? Are they going to have to pay for their crimes?”

‘Death row for US mass media’

The American establishment and mass media not only wasted millions of taxpayers’ dollars “fomenting and stoking tensions” between world nuclear superpowers, but also undermining any remaining trust in them, political analyst Charles Ortel told RT. Americans will have to be looking elsewhere for alternative news sources to avoid being duped any further by the chorus of disinformation from the mainstream media, he added.

“Any of these outlets that have been subjecting the world to all this... this is going to mark a death row for a lot of traditional media complexes, and magazines, and newspapers, etc,” he said. “Many Americans are sick and tired of this baloney. And we’re going to tune it out, we’re going to be rejecting them. We’re going to be looking for our news in a different way.”

    Whoever decided to take us down this rat hole cannot be allowed to escape without intense scrutiny.

A weapon for political civil war in 2020?

Trump will likely use the conclusions of the probe to “disarm” the Democrats going into the 2020 presidential race, Patrick Henningsen, an American writer and global affairs analyst, told RT, concurring with McAdams that US media is implicated in having created the “biggest political hoax” in US history.

“What the president is going to do now is to take this result –or the lack of a result– and use it as a stick to perpetually beat the opposition with, right through the 2020 election cycle,” Henningsen predicted. “This will allow the president to fuel his attacks on the press [because it] vindicated his accusations of the fake news by CNN and others.”

While he is currently reluctant to do this, if Trump were to follow through on his earlier threats to “look at the other side” and investigate the Russiagate conspiracy peddlers, it could potentially erupt into a political civil war, Henningsen warned.

“There is a lot of aspects about this which haven’t actually got cleared up yet and I think there is a chance that they might investigate that side of things and, if they do, this could trigger a political civil war during the 2020 elections,” he warned.

= = =

US media suffers panic attack after Mueller fails to deliver on much-anticipated Trump indictment
RT : 23 Mar, 2019

Important pundits and news networks have served up an impressive display of denials, evasions and on-air strokes after learning that Robert Mueller has ended his probe without issuing a single collusion-related indictment.

The Special Counsel delivered his final report to Attorney General William Barr for review on Friday, with the Justice Department confirming that there will be no further indictments related to the probe. The news dealt a devastating blow to the sensational prophesies of journalists, analysts and entire news networks, who for nearly two years reported ad nauseam that President Donald Trump and his inner circle were just days away from being carted off to prison for conspiring with the Kremlin to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

Some journalists and television anchors took to Twitter and the airwaves on Friday night to acknowledge that the media severely misreported Donald Trump's alleged ties to Russia, as well as what Mueller's probe was likely to find.

"How could they let Trump off the hook?" an inconsolable Chris Matthews asked NBC reporter Ken Dilanian during a segment on MSNBC's 'Hardball'.

Dilanian tried to comfort the MSNBC host with some of his signature punditry.

"My only conclusion is that the president transmitted to Mueller that he would take the Fifth. He would never talk to him and therefore, Mueller decided it wasn't worth the subpoena fight," he expertly mused.

Actually, there were several journalists who conjured up a reason why Mueller didn't throw the book at Trump, even though the president is clearly a Putin puppet.

"It's certainly possible that Trump may emerge from this better than many anticipated. However! Consensus has been that Mueller would follow DOJ rules and not indict a sitting president. I.e. it's also possible his report could be very bad for Trump, despite 'no more indictments,'" concluded Mark Follman, national affairs editor at Mother Jones, who presumably, and very sadly, was not being facetious.

Revered news organizations were quick to artfully modify their expectations regarding Mueller's findings.

"What is collusion and why is Robert Mueller unlikely to mention it in his report on Trump and Russia?" a Newsweek headline asked following Friday's announcement.

Three months earlier, Newsweek had meticulously documented all the terrible "collusion" committed by Donald Trump and his inner circle.

But perhaps the most sobering reactions to the no-indictment news came from those who seemed completely unfazed by the fact that Mueller's investigation, aimed at uncovering a criminal conspiracy between Trump and the Kremlin, ended without digging up a single case of "collusion."

The denials, evasions and bizarre hot takes are made even more poignant by the fact that just days ago, there was still serious talk about Trump's entire family being hauled off to prison.

"You can't blame MSNBC viewers for being confused. They largely kept dissenters from their Trump/Russia spy tale off the air for 2 years. As recently as 2 weeks ago, they had @JohnBrennan strongly suggesting Mueller would indict Trump family members on collusion as his last act," journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted.

While the Mueller report has yet to be released to the public, the lack of indictments makes it clear that whatever was found, nothing came close to the vast criminal conspiracy alleged by virtually the entire American media establishment.

"You have been lied to for 2 years by the MSM. No Russian collusion by Trump or anyone else. Who lied? Head of the CIA, NSA,FBI,DOJ, every pundit every anchor. All lies," wrote conservative activist Chuck Woolery.

Kim Dotcom was more blunt, but said it all: "Mueller – The name that ended all mainstream media credibility."

Trump's Golan Heights gift to Israel condemned

The US government fight harder for Israel's sovereignty than they do their own.

US backs Israel’s ‘sovereignty’ over Golan Heights, proving sovereignty is not something it respects
Danielle Ryan
RT : 26 Mar, 2019

The US’s “recognition” of the Golan Heights as Israeli territory is brazen – but it’s no surprise. Washington itself violates the sovereignty of other countries with such regularity that it barely even raises eyebrows anymore.

US President Donald Trump signed a declaration on Monday recognizing Israeli “sovereignty” over the disputed, strategically important and (surprise!) resource-rich region. In a joint press conference with Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the declaration “historic justice.”

Back in reality, the Golan Heights is recognized as Syrian territory in international law, having been seized by Israel in a land grab during the Six-Day War in 1967 and later officially annexed in a 1981 Israeli law.

The New York Times editorial board called Trump’s move a “pointless provocation” and said it had “more to do with Israeli politics than American interests.” It also just so happens that there are some great big oil reserves in the area and, well, you can do the math. The NYT is 100 percent correct, but the newspaper hardly deserves high praise for taking such a stance, having been a cheerleader for illegal US military interventions all over the world during the last two decades.

But American journalists don’t seem to do irony, having just spent the better part of three years accusing Russia of “meddling” in a US election, while diligently ignoring the blatant fact that the US has been the world’s meddler extraordinaire for decades. Only, the Washington meddlers don’t do it with Facebook memes and Twitter trolls, they engineer violent coups, overthrow democratically elected governments and install military dictatorships, all while preaching ad nauseam about democracy and human rights.

Violating international law is as American as apple pie. While there is always the outright invasion (Iraq and Afghanistan) or the “humanitarian intervention” (Libya), Washington uses various creative methods to violate the national sovereignty of other nations on a regular basis.

Take Ukraine, where, in 2013, the Obama administration manipulated and exploited societal and political divisions and helped to engineer a violent coup, which led to civil war in the country's eastern regions and propelled the rapid growth and influence of Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups – all, essentially, because Washington, 5,000 miles away, was worried that Moscow had too much influence over its next-door neighbor.

In Iran, the Trump administration restored the US sanctions that were finally lifted by the Obama administration under the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal. This in itself is a violation of Iran’s sovereignty, by preventing it from engaging in normal business relations with other countries and attempting to cripple its economy from the outside. Economic sanctions are regularly used by the US as a bat to beat their adversaries into submission, yet pundits talk about these measures as though they are some kind of gentle, arm-twisting method of achieving US goals without full-on military
force. How generous.

Back in Syria, it’s hardly just Trump’s declaration of the Golan Heights as Israeli territory that deserves a mention.

The US has de-facto occupied parts of Syria itself, too. Not only have US troops violated Syrian territory (not to mention Trump’s illegal bombing of Syrian government forces), they have also trained and funded anti-government rebel forces who are deeply intertwined with Al Qaeda terrorists, prolonging a devastating war in an effort to further its own geostrategic aims in the region. So much for human rights.

Venezuela is one of the latest examples of Washington’s blatant breaches of another country’s national sovereignty. The Trump administration brazenly declared an unelected (and, at the time, almost unknown) opposition politician to be the rightful president of Venezuela, while calling for the immediate overthrow of the country’s current president, Nicolas Maduro. But again, there should be no surprise here. Latin America has been Washington’s regime-change playground for decades. The US engineered coups in Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973 and Argentina in 1976, to name just a few.

On the other side of the world, Bill Clinton launched a NATO bombing campaign in the former Yugoslavia in 1999, without UN approval (what’s new?), purportedly to end human rights abuses against ethnic Albanians, ultimately later recognizing Kosovo as independent from Serbia. The operation left hundreds dead, many more injured and civilian infrastructure in ruins. NATO forces even bombed the headquarters of Radio Television of Serbia, killing 16 employees – and not by mistake, either. Tony Blair later declared that the TV station was a “propaganda machine” and therefore a “legitimate target.”

With a record like this, it is truly laughable for the US to sermonize about democracy or to pontificate about a “rules-based international order” as it legitimizes Israel’s theft of the Golan Heights.

The superpower continues to flout international law at every hand’s turn and is consistently given a pass by the valiant “watchdogs” of US media – who, just like the warmongers in Washington, are nearly always up for a good old regime-change war or humanitarian intervention – and woe betide those who dare question them.

Trump's Golan gift to Israel condemned by UN, Gulf & European allies
RT : 26 Mar, 2019

Donald Trump's decision to recognize Israel's annexation of the Syrian Golan has been met with condemnation by the international community, with the UN and Washington's Gulf and European allies slamming the move.

The US president signed a declaration on Monday recognizing Israel's sovereignty over the disputed Golan Heights.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was present at the signing ceremony, praised Trump's unilateral move, comparing the president to biblical and Zionist heroes. But reactions among the international community – including Washington's closest Gulf and European allies – were considerably less enthusiastic.

The United Nations, which has long maintained that Israel's occupation of the Golan is illegal under international law, signaled that its position had not changed. A UN spokesman said that Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will continue to honor a December 1981 resolution which called Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights "null and void and without international legal effect."

The declaration was similarly unpopular among nations which normally follow Washington's foreign policy lead. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait – Washington's accommodating Gulf allies which host US military bases – have criticized Trump's move.

"It will have significant negative effects on the peace process in the Middle East and the security and stability of the region," a statement on Saudi Arabia's state news agency SPA said. Saudi Parliament Speaker Mishaal bin Fahm al-Salami reaffirmed Riyadh's "principled position" that the Golan Heights is Syrian land.

NATO ally Turkey also lashed out at Washington. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that the US has "ignored international law" by recognizing Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Washington's northern neighbor Canada echoed similar concerns.

In a statement, Ottawa said that it "does not recognize permanent Israeli control over the Golan Heights."

Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne went so far as to take a subtle jab at US foreign policy.

"The Golan Heights is a matter for Israel and Syria to determine through negotiations in the context of a comprehensive peace settlement," she said.

"US policy positions are a matter for the US government."

Trump's declaration will also likely exacerbate already strained relations with Washington's European allies. Both Germany and France issued statements last week in an attempt to pre-empt the president's Golan decision.

"If national borders should be changed it must be done through peaceful means between all those involved," a German government spokesman said.

The French Foreign Ministry tweeted about its opposition to the move, describing it as "contrary to international law."

Trump's declaration will also likely exacerbate already strained relations with Washington's European allies. Both Germany and France issued statements last week in an attempt to pre-empt the president's Golan decision.

"If national borders should be changed it must be done through peaceful means between all those involved," a German government spokesman said.

The French Foreign Ministry tweeted about its opposition to the move, describing it as "contrary to international law."

Not surprisingly, Trump's Golan resolution received an equally chilly reception from nations with less cordial relations with Washington.

Syria's government said the decision was a "slap" to the international community, claiming that Trump's Golan resolution makes Washington "the main enemy" of Arabs.

Following suit, Lebanon's Foreign Ministry insisted the Golan Heights are "Syrian Arab" territory and that "no country can falsify history" by seizing land from another nation.

Tehran expressed bafflement over Trump's "unprecedented" move.

"No one could imagine that a person in America comes and gives land of a nation to another occupying country, against international laws and conventions... Such action is unprecedented in the current century," Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was quoted as saying by state news agency IRNA. He added:

For its part, Moscow said that Trump's decision marks yet another unilateral violation of international law.

"This decision will definitely have negative consequences both for the Middle East settlement process and the entire atmosphere in the Syrian political settlement. No one doubts this," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

Similar to Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, his Golan resolution will likely face a vote in the UN General Assembly. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has already promised to bring the issue before the international body.

The December 2017 resolution condemning Trump's Jerusalem decision was supported by 128 nations – almost two thirds of the UN's 193 member states. Only nine countries backed Trump's position.

Boeing 737 Max 8 crisis

Everything we know about the Boeing 737 Max 8 crisis

By Nicolas RiveroMarch 22, 2019

Just three years after its first flight, the Boeing 737 Max 8 jet has already been implicated in two fatal accidents: the Oct. 29 Lion Air crash that claimed 189 lives near Jakarta, Indonesia and the March 10 Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed 157 just outside Addis Ababa. No other commercial aircraft has been implicated in as many fatalities so rapidly since 1966.

Since the second crash, countries around the world have grounded the plane. Investigators have sought clues to what went wrong. And intense media scrutiny has altered our perceptions of flight safety while uncovering the cozy relationship between Boeing and US regulators.

The definitive causes of the crashes have yet to be determined. Here is a look at what we’ve learned so far about the planes and what may have brought them down:

What the crashes had in common

Black-box data shows “clear similarities” between Ethiopian and Lion Air crashes

• Both planes hit trouble just after takeoff.
• Pilots reported flight control challenges.
• Controllers observed erratic, up and down flight patterns.

What looks to have gone wrong

A string of missteps may have made the 737 Max crash-prone

• Evidence suggests a safety feature called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) sent both planes into their fatal dives as pilots struggled to keep aloft.
• The MCAS automatically nudges the nose of the plane down if sensors detect an imminent stall. A faulty sensor can send the plane into a dive again and again.
• Boeing installed the software on planes without fully informing regulators or pilots about how it works.

A cockpit warning light for a mechanical fault was an optional add-on

• The Lion Air plane did not have an optional safety feature installed in the aircraft.
• Boeing will now provide the warning light as a standard feature, Reuters reports. Airlines have had to pay extra to have it installed.
• The feature would have alerted crew that flight-angle readings were erroneous and likely to trigger the MCAS unnecessarily.

Pilots trained to fly the 737 Max with “an iPad lesson for an hour”

• The FAA deemed the 737 Max 8 a variant of the 737-800, so pilots who were already certified to fly the older plane only had to complete one additional hour of training.
• Neither the lesson nor the flight manuals mentioned the MCAS, which was a new feature on the Max 8.
• Pilots say they only learned about the system after the Lion Air crash.

How the groundings played out

A global satellite network convinced the FAA to ground Boeing’s 737 Max

• Dozens of countries banned the Boeing 737 Max from their airspace shortly after the Ethiopian Airlines crash.
• The US Federal Aviation Administration waited three days, saying there were “no systemic performance issues” that its experts could identify.
• US regulators were finally convinced by satellite data from Aireon, which monitors airplanes in remote locations where there are no ground sensors. The company recorded similarities in the flight paths for both downed planes.

Donald Trump put himself at the center of the Boeing Max crisis

• After making a flurry of phone calls to regulators and Boeing executives, the US president beat his own FAA to the news that the US was grounding the 737 Max 8 and 9.
• On March 13, Trump told reporters: “We didn’t have to make this decision today. We could have delayed it. We maybe didn’t have to make it at all. But I felt it was important both psychologically and in a lot of other ways.”
• That same day, acting FAA administrator Dan Elwell later clarified that the decision was “fact-based” and due to “new satellite data available this morning.”

How cozy Boeing is with DC

The flow of money and influence between the US government and Boeing

• The US government’s handling of the Boeing Max situation “raises the question whether the decision was made based on what’s in the public interest, or based off of relationships and influence,” said Brendan Fischer of watchdog group Campaign Legal Center.
• Boeing “has a strong interest in government policy and contracting, and seeks to exert influence over government officials in any way possible,” he told Quartz.
• The FAA’s initial inaction came as Donald Trump was told on March 12 by Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg that plane was safe, one of multiple conversations they had, people familiar with the calls told Quartz.

A promised fix was once delayed

Boeing will release a software update to make the 737 Max safer

• Boeing plans to release a software patch in April that will limit the number of times the MCAS can nudge down the nose of a plane
• The fix will be designed to make it simpler for pilots to troubleshoot problems with the flight-control system.
• Software upgrades, originally expected in January, were delayed, the Wall Street Journal reported Feb. 10, because of “engineering challenges,” “differences of opinion” between federal and Boeing officials, and the 35-day government shutdown.

How we see air safety now

Where the Boeing 737 Max 8 stands among the world’s most fatal commercial aircraft

• No other commercial aircraft has been implicated in as many fatalities so rapidly since 1966, according  to a list of 46 other models flown in commercial fleets compiled by DVB Bank, according to a Quartz analysis of Aviation Safety Network data.
• Overall, the 3,065 fatalities onboard the Russian Tupolev Tu-154 are more than any of the 47 aircraft models Quartz analyzed.
• Commercial staples from Boeing, the 737-200 and 747-200, rank second and third on the list.

These crashes are changing our perception of airline safety

• The statistical likelihood of any individual being involved in a plane crash may not have changed meaningfully this month.
• Still, the glimpse into the workings of commercial aviation that the 737 Max saga offers highlights how prone to human error the systems, authorities, and protocols meant to keep us safe really are.
• The cascade of international groundings, as Washington Post columnist Joe Davidson put it, undermined faith in the FAA as a leader in air safety, exposing it instead as “but a distant follower.”

The business impact

What will happen to Boeing now?

• Since the Ethiopian Airlines crash, Boeing has lost tens of billions of dollars in market value. Boeing may also face regulatory fines and class-action lawsuits.
• Boeing has been riding high on a wave of 737 Max orders. Now, an oversaturated market, airlines’ losses from grounded flights, and scrutiny of the jets’ safety might slow business. Indonesian airline Garuda says it’s canceling a multibillion-dollar order. “Our passengers have lost confidence to fly with the Max 8,” Garuda spokesperson Ikhsan Rosan told CNN.
• The company recovered from massive fines and a PR meltdown in 2006, when it was accused of corporate espionage and a too-cozy relationship with a Pentagon official.

Boeing’s share price has a strangely large impact on the Dow

• Boeing has the capacity to make the Dow Jones Industrial Average swing wildly.
• Boeing’s share price is many multiples of almost every other company in the stock index, with volume outstripped by only Apple and Microsoft.
• This is why it has an outsized influence on the Dow, with a percentage weighting of over 11%.

It would be tough for fast-growing Ethiopian Airlines to break up with Boeing

• The business relationship between Boeing and Ethiopia Airlines goes back 60 years, helping transform the carrier into Africa’s largest and most successful airline, with one of the newest major fleets in the world.
• The crash has brought renewed attention to its regional and global aspirations and its plans to open itself up for private investment.
• Although Ethiopian Airlines also buys planes from rival manufacturer Airbus, it is unlikely to switch its longstanding allegiance from Boeing.

The impact on the 1%

What’s a private 737 Max owner to do?

• There were 21 private orders for the now-grounded Boeing 737 Max in the sales pipeline, with price tags starting at $74 million.
• Two were already delivered to completion facilities for finishing. The first is expected to be ready for its unnamed US owner by the end of the year.
• Until governments lift the bans on flying the 737 Max, no one can use them.

There’s a word for all of this

“Kludge” comes up when pilots and engineers discuss the 737 Max

• Merriam-Webster defines kludge—sometimes spelled kluge—as “a haphazard or makeshift solution to a problem and especially to a computer or programming problem.”
• Oxford’s definition: “A machine, system, or program that has been badly put together, especially a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem.”
• Used in a sentence: “The MCAS, a software patched together to make up for the fact that the 737 Max is particularly prone to stall at high speeds, turned out to be a disastrous kludge.”