Photographer Seunggu Kim spent nearly a decade capturing the manufactured peaks of the city's apartment complexes.
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Wednesday, October 9, 2019
Amid perceived power vacuum, dozens vie to be Haiti’s leader
By DANICA COTO Associated Press
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — As the public appearances of President Jovenel Moïse fade with Haiti’s deepening political turmoil, dozens of people from political parties old and new are vying to become the country’s next leader as they seize on widespread discontent.
They range from a wealthy businessman with no political experience who owns a chain of grocery stores to veteran opposition leaders trying to gain a stronger foothold in Haiti’s politics.
Moïse still has more than two years left in his term after taking office in February 2017 and says he will not step down, but protesters seeking his resignation vow to continue with violent demonstrations that have shuttered businesses and kept 2 million children from going to school for nearly a month. Nearly 20 people have died and about 200 injured in protests fueled by anger over corruption, rising inflation and scarcity of basic goods including fuel.
“It’s a completely dysfunctional country,” said Benzico Pierre with the Center for the Promotion of Democracy and Participatory Education, a Haitian think tank. “There’s no trust in the institutions.”
It’s a concern that Carl Murat Cantave, president of Haiti’s Senate, acknowledged in a speech televised Tuesday as he warned that Haiti’s crisis is “rotting.”
He urged Moïse to launch a dialogue and said all options should be placed on the table.
“The country needs a genuine re-engineering so it can move forward because everyone is failing as a leader,” he said in Creole. “Only the people right now have legitimacy.”
Hours after Cantave’s speech, Moïse’s office issued a statement saying he has named seven people charged with leading discussions to find a solution to help end the crisis. Among them is former prime minister Evans Paul, who recently told The Associated Press that he believes Moïse has several options, including nominating an opposition-backed prime minister and shortening his mandate.
In her first public comments on Haiti’s current situation, U.S. Ambassador Michele Sison told the AP that the country needs a functioning government that can address people’s pressing needs. She urged all elected leaders, including Haiti’s president, senators and deputies, to work together to identify and agree on a peaceful way forward.
“We’re urging the various stakeholders to enter into dialogue in good faith, a dialogue launched and led by Haitians,” she said.
Moïse also called for dialogue and unity nearly two weeks ago during a televised speech broadcast at 2 a.m., further angering Haitians. He hasn’t spoken in public yet and only briefly appeared in front of a business called Nick’s Exterminating last Thursday to shake hands with a handful of vendors in the capital of Port-au-Prince before his convoy sped away.
Opposition leaders have rejected any suggestion of dialogue, saying they want Moïse to step down immediately.
Among those leading the protests is an opposition coalition called the Democratic and Popular Sector, whose members include attorney André Michel, who was one of 70 candidates in the 2015 presidential election. Also part of that coalition is Sen. Youri Latortue, who has denied corruption allegations that the U.S. made against him more than a decade ago and who once led a party allied with Moïse’s Tet Kale faction.
“The president has shown he is incapable of governing,” Latortue told AP.
He noted that a company once owned by Moïse was named in a Senate investigation that found that huge sums of money from a Venezuelan subsidized oil program were misspent during Haiti’s previous government. Moïse has denied any wrongdoing. The investigation also named several former top government officials from the administration of President Michel Martelly, who preceded Moïse in office and is an ally.
Opposition leaders have created a nine-person commission they say would be responsible for overseeing an orderly transition of power and help choose Haiti’s next leader, noting that the constitution calls for the head of the Supreme Court, who was appointed by Moïse earlier this year, to take over if a president resigns.
Among those vying to become president is well-known Haitian businessman Reginald Boulos, a former doctor. He echoed Latortue’s expressions and urged Moïse to resign as well.
“There is no way the president can ever recover his credibility, his legitimacy,” Boulos told AP, adding that his goals if elected include the redistribution of wealth and a greater investment in agriculture.
As protesters continue to clash with police, set up barricades and march through parts of Port-au-Prince and elsewhere in Haiti, many Haitians say they are eager to welcome a new leader but they also warn that they will keep an eye on them.
“They don’t work for those who are weakest,” said protester and activist Claude Toussaint.
Many demonstrators, such as entrepreneur Pascéus Juvensky St. Fleur, say the protests are not only about replacing a president, but changing a system that they say marginalizes many in a country of nearly 11 million people where 60% makes less than $2 a day and 25% make less than $1 a day.
St. Fleur tapped on a worn copy of Haiti’s constitution as he said that Article 35 guarantees freedom to work and that only all Haitians together can bring about change.
“It’s not one person, it’s not one regime, it’s not a president, it’s not the opposition, it’s not the bourgeoisie, but it’s us who should do it,” he said. “We dream of, and we want, a better Haiti.”
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‘How will we cover up this shame?’: The priest and the girl
By NICOLE WINFIELD and RODNEY MUHUMUZA Associated Press
SAMBURU, Kenya (AP) — When Sabina Losirkale went into labor, her sister Scolastica recalls, priests and religious sisters filled the delivery ward waiting to see the color of the baby’s skin — and if their worst fears had come to pass.
Scolastica and dozens of villagers peered in from behind the clinic fence, as well.
A nun screamed. The boy was white — “a mzungu child,” Scolastica said, using Kiswahili slang.
“How will we cover up this shame?” the sisters fretted, she recalled.
The shame that brought this baby into the world: An Italian missionary priest, her family alleges, impregnated this Kenyan girl when she was just 16. But the nuns need not have worried about the scandal spreading.
The priest — who to this day denies paternity — was transferred, and a Kenyan man was found for Sabina to marry. He would be listed as the father on the boy’s birth certificate.
The church’s efforts to conceal what is alleged to have happened here would stretch over three decades — a testament to the extraordinary ways in which church officials have dealt with accusations that priests in the developing world have had sex with girls and young women. Here, the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse crisis is just beginning to force a reckoning.
The boy who was born to Sabina Losirkale on that day in 1989 has been an outcast of sorts for all of his life. Tall and light-skinned, with wavy hair, Gerald Erebon, now 30, looks nothing like the dark-skinned Kenyan man who he was told was his father, or like his black mother and siblings.
“According to my birth certificate, it is like I am living a wrong life, a lie,” he said. “I just want to have my identity, my history.”
___
Amid the torrent of sex abuse accusations that have rocked the priesthood, little attention has been paid to the pregnancies resulting from those illicit acts. And nowhere is this a more glaring issue than in Africa.
While there are no official statistics, experts point to a “culture of silence and compromise” that has allowed abuses of all kinds to fester in African society, said Augusta Muthigani, in charge of education for the Kenyan bishops’ conference.
“Matters of sexuality are not discussed openly,” she said.
The continent has long lagged behind the United States, Europe and Australia in confronting the problem of priests having sex with children, given the church’s priorities here have focused on fighting poverty, conflict and traffickers who sell children off to war or work.
Recently, East African bishops established regional child protection standards and guidelines to prevent child sexual abuse. And in parts of Francophone West Africa, the Catholic Church has launched safeguarding programs for society at large.
Those initiatives, though, are relatively new, scattershot and underfunded. And eight months after Pope Francis summoned bishops from around the world for a summit to insist that clergy sexual abuse prevention be a priority for the universal church going forward, African bishops made no mention of it in their final declaration after a continent-wide assembly in July. All in a region where advocates say Catholic clergy routinely violate their vows of celibacy, including with children.
The Rev. Mario Lacchin encountered Sabina Losirkale when she was a student at the Gir Gir Primary School in Archer’s Post, a dusty town on the highway to Ethiopia. The school was established by the Consolata Missionaries religious order, which had come to Archer’s Post to spread the faith to the semi-nomadic tribes of Kenya’s northern Rift Valley.
Growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, the Losirkale girls and two cousins were often left on their own; their parents were poor shepherds and spent days away from home, seeking pasture in the bush for their animals.
Starting about a year before she turned 16, Sabina skipped afterschool sports to go to the priests’ quarters to do housework, cooking and cleaning for the parish priests. Scolastica recalls she would sometimes see Sabina and Lacchin hugging as they said goodbye.
Other times, Scolastica said, Sabina would come home from Lacchin’s house crying and asking for Scolastica to fetch water so she could bathe. Some nights she didn’t come home at all.
At the time, the priest was in his early 50s.
“I think Father Mario was taking advantage of my sister,” said the 45-year-old widow, looking through family photos in her one-bedroom, mud-brick home. “He bribed her with gifts, food, clothes. He was even buying us books. My sister used to come with books, pens, all we needed.”
One night, Sabina vomited. It was the first indication that she was pregnant.
Their parents were shocked and angry. They demanded to know who the father was.
Lacchin was quietly transferred to a nearby mission; his driver and a catechist at Archer’s Post, Benjamin Ekwam, was chosen to marry Sabina.
Nevertheless, people talked.
“You know, it was very shameful in the community,” Scolastica said. “If someone wanted a child, a girl, they just married. So this was just an embarrassment to the whole community.”
Sabina was just 16 when she gave birth March 12, 1989. She had conceived a few weeks after her 16th birthday. In Kenya, the legal age of consent was and is 18.
___
The Vatican doesn’t publish statistics about the number of priests who have fathered children. The Holy See only publicly admitted that it’s a problem this year, and only then because it was compelled to acknowledge that it had crafted internal guidelines to deal with it.
The man behind the disclosure was Vincent Doyle, an Irish psychotherapist and son of a priest who in 2014 launched an online resource, Coping International, to help children of priests.
Doyle has been a thorn in the side of the Vatican ever since, seeking to raise awareness through the media about the plight of these children, who often suffer emotionally and psychologically. He has also begun advocating for their mothers, some of whom were just girls when they conceived.
In recent months, he has forwarded three such cases to the Vatican: those of Erebon and of children born of a 17-year-old in Cameroon and a 15-year-old in the United Kingdom.
All told, Doyle believes priests’ children number in the thousands, given the 415,000 Catholic clergy alive today and church teaching that forbids artificial contraception and abortion. Doyle estimates that about 5% of these births are the result of sex between a priest and a minor, though he has only anecdotal evidence.
The Rev. Stephane Joulain, a leading expert in clergy sex abuse prevention in Africa, said the majority of cases of sexual abuse of minors in Africa involve foreign missionary priests. But he said there is a significant problem of local African priests fathering children, including to young mothers, because of cultural norms: “You become a man only when you have fathered children.”
Many priests cite this pressure from family or tribe to explain why they have had offspring. Other priests, Joulain said, rationalize their behavior by saying celibacy is an imported “Western” tradition that has no place in Africa, where girls are often considered adult once they reach puberty, irrespective of the law.
The flouting of celibacy vows among African clergy is no secret to the Vatican. Nearly every time a group of African bishops visited the Vatican during the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI, he would remind them of the need to train their priests to “embrace the gift of celibacy,” a reminder not often given to other bishops’ conferences, according to a review of his speeches to more than a dozen African bishops’ conferences.
Decades ago, as in Erebon’s case, it was common for bishops and religious superiors to relocate an offending priest and try to find a man who would accept the woman and child as his own, Joulain said. If the mother was lucky, the order would provide financially for them.
“Congregations were all dealing the same way with the same problem,” he said.
___
Gerald Erebon grew up devoted to the Consolata Missionaries who employed his mother and her husband and, along with an Italian order of nuns in Archer’s Post, paid for his education. An altar boy, he entered the minor seminary after graduating from Gir Gir Primary School, hoping to join the order as a priest.
He knew well he was different from his dark-skinned siblings and the rest of the Samburu and Turkana people of the region. His half-sister Lina Ben, 27, recalled her siblings teased Erebon mercilessly, as did the family of the man he knew as his father. They called him “bastard.” Even Erebon’s last name was different, belonging to his maternal grandfather.
When Lina was 14, she asked her mother why Gerald didn’t look like her other children, and why his friends often referred to him as “mtoto was padre” — “child of the priest.”
Her mother initially pushed her away, but eventually told her that “Dad to Gerald is a priest called Father Mario and he is not here.”
Scolastica said her sister finally told her the secret in 2012, two weeks before she died.
“Now that my days are over,” her sister told her, she could reveal all: “When Gerald will ask you who’s his father, just tell him: Father Mario.”
In fact, neighbors took Erebon’s heritage for granted. “The people of Archer’s knew it was Father Mario. The people knew that the priest was responsible. Because even the boy — he resembled the priest when he was born,” said Alfred-Edukan Loote, who taught Erebon in primary school.
Young Erebon often got into fights, raging at the children who teased him. He eventually was expelled from the minor seminary after he smashed a plate of hot food on the head of a boy who had called him son of a white man.
After his mother’s death, Erebon asked Scolastica the question he never had the courage to ask his mother. She remembers hearing him cry over the phone when she told him.
___
In mid-2013, Erebon reached out to Lacchin, sending him a series of emails over the span of two months, hoping to establish a relationship following his mother’s death. By now, the two men looked strikingly alike, tall and lanky with sharp cheekbones.
“Ever since I knew you as my real biological father, I could not stop asking myself questions as to why I was born the way I was born, which consequently had put hate in me against you,” Erebon wrote.
But he said he had since had a change of heart and now forgave him. “I love you father,” he wrote. “Let us not allow the past to affect our present and future.” He signed the email “Your son, Gerardo” — the Italian name that appears on his birth certificate.
After Erebon received no response, he said he tried to meet Lacchin in person in Marsabit, where Lacchin was working as a church administrator. Erebon said Lacchin brushed off his overture. Told by the priest to take his complaint to the bishop, he did not.
Five years later, Erebon — by then a student studying education at Catholic University of Eastern Africa, his tuition partially paid for by an anonymous donor — reached out to Doyle, the Irish psychotherapist.
Doyle immediately contacted the Rome-based superior of the Consolata Missionaries, the Rev. Stefano Camerlengo, who sent a top official to investigate. The order arranged three meetings over the past year between Erebon and Lacchin in Nairobi, in what Camerlengo told Doyle was an effort at facilitating dialogue between the two.
According to minutes of a Jan. 15 meeting prepared by a Consolata priest who attended, Lacchin denied paternity. He refused to take a DNA test “since it would mean that he is possibly the father, whereas he knows that he is not the father.”
The Rev. James Lengarin, the Consolata’s deputy superior who investigated the case and hails from a town not far from Archer’s Post, said the order felt it could not compel Lacchin to take the DNA test, and that a slow process of reconciliation was the best course.
“We didn’t feel that he should be constrained by obedience, by force of obedience, to do it,” Lengarin said, noting that Lacchin is now 83.
He added that there was no reference in the Consolata’s archives to any problem with Lacchin in Archer’s Post, though an official history of the order in Kenya makes a cryptic reference to him in an entry about scandals involving some missionaries.
After months of impasse, Doyle went directly to the Vatican and Interpol after acquiring the birth certificates of both Erebon and his mother, which showed that she had just turned 16 when she conceived.
There are no known criminal proceedings against Lacchin in Kenya as a result of Doyle’s report to Interpol.
While the birth certificates don’t prove a canonical crime of sexual assault of a minor — in 1988, the church’s internal code didn’t consider a 16-year-old a minor in sex abuse cases — Sabina’s sister and other villagers allege the two were engaged in a sexual relationship well before she turned 16.
In many countries nowadays, such documented information would lead to the immediate removal from ministry of the priest pending a canonical investigation that could result in defrocking. Lacchin has continued in ministry, preaching at the Resurrection Gardens church in Nairobi as recently as this summer.
Lengarin said the order had planned to continue its investigation and hoped Lacchin would be persuaded to accept a paternity test, but is now awaiting orders from the Vatican office that handles religious orders on how to proceed.
The Vatican confirmed the office is investigating Lacchin, but declined further comment.
Efforts to reach Lacchin for comment were unsuccessful. He didn’t respond to email, text message and phone calls. After witnessing him celebrate Mass at his Resurrection Gardens parish in July, the AP went back to the church and was told this week that he was visiting a sick sister in France and would take a period of leave at least through the end of October.
In an Aug. 2 reply to Doyle, the undersecretary at the congregation for religious orders, the Rev. Pier Luigi Nava, criticized Doyle and asked for further information, saying it wasn’t clear what Erebon wanted, or if he intended to launch a criminal case in Kenyan or church courts.
Erebon said he wants Lacchin’s help to obtain Italian citizenship for himself and his two children. But more than that, he wants a life that is based on the truth.
“They created something which is not my real identity,” he said. “I just want to have my identity, my history, so that my children can also have what they really are: their heritage, history and everything.”
___
Nicole Winfield reported from Rome. AP producer Khaled Kazziha contributed from Nairobi.
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Second suspect arrested for killing of Joshua Brown, key witness in Amber Guyger trial
A second suspect has been arrested in connection with the killing of Joshua Brown, a key witness in the Amber Guyger murder trial.
—Why fear that the slain Botham Jean case witness was targeted makes sense—
Police claim that Brown was involved in a drug deal gone wrong, despite reports that he was targeted for helping the prosecution convict Guyger for the murder of Botham Jean.
On Tuesday, a second man, Michael Mitchell, 32, was arrested, The Daily Mail reports. This follows the arrest of 20-year-old Jacquerious Mitchell, 20 who is in is critical from a gunshot wound.
Police Chief Avery Moore said those two suspects, along with Thaddeous Green, 22, are drove from Alexandria, Louisiana, to Dallas to purchase drugs from Brown.
According to Mitchell, Green had contacted Brown for the purchase. But what he described as a “physical altercation” begins between Green and Brown.
As Jacquerious gets out of his vehicle, Brown shot him in the chest, he told officers. Once he fell into the vehicle, he said he heard two gunshots, which were of Green shooting Brown in the lower body.
Green then took Brown’s backpack and the gun he used to fire at Jacquerious and the three sped off, with Michael Mitchell as the getaway driver. Jacquerious was dropped off by the two at a local hospital where he remains in police custody and in critical condition. Dallas police later issued warrants for the arrest of all three, who now face capital murder charges. Michael Mitchell and Green have not yet been apprehended.
Officials say 12 pounds of marijuana, 149 grams of THC cartridges, and about $4,000 in cash were found in Brown’s apartment in a search.
— Disturbing number of Black men connected to Ferguson protests found dead—
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund is urging state and federal authorities to step in and launch an independent investigation into the killing of Joshua Brown, a key witness in the Amber Guyger trial.
“The circumstances surrounding the murder of Mr. Brown cries out for answers,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in a statement on Sunday, The Dallas News reports. “Most importantly, it demands an independent investigation of how and why he was killed.”
Brown was slain Friday night outside his new apartment complex, about five miles away from where his then-neighbor Botham Jean was shot to death, according to various media reports.
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ESPN cuts to commercial after Stephen A. Smith starts political rant
Outspoken ESPN host Stephen A. Smith’s comments were cut short when he started to give his take of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Tuesday’s “First Take”.
—Show me the money! Stephen A. Smith on track to become ESPN’s highest-paid on-air personality—
The NBA is dealing with a barrage of criticism after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey caused outrage for throwing support behind Hong Kong in reference to the skirmish happening in an ongoing series of anti-government demonstrations.
ESPN clearly wants its hosts to steer clear of political commentary and when Smith started to air his views, co-host Molly Qerim cut to commercial.
“Before we close,” Smith said, “I would remind you that, throughout this world, one of the things that exists is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I don’t see folks outside of the Jewish community talking about that too often.”
“Let’s take a commercial break,” Qerim interjected. She added, “sometimes obviously our moral compass trumps business interests.”
Network president Jimmy Pitaro reportedly sent a memo out forbidding discussion about the Chinese conflict. The NBA and ESPN have financially invested billions in a broadcasting agreement and will that much money on the line, speaking against China have caused more financial problems, The NY Post reports.
Morey apologized and had deleted his tweet saying: “I was merely voicing one thought, based on one interpretation, of one complicated event. I have had a lot of opportunity since that tweet to hear and consider other perspectives.”
“1/ I did not intend my tweet to cause any offense to Rockets fans and friends of mine in China. I was merely voicing one thought, based on one interpretation, of one complicated event. I have had a lot of opportunity since that tweet to hear and consider other perspectives.”
—Film and documentary on Martin Luther King’s murder mystery in the works—
“2/ I have always appreciated the significant support our Chinese fans and sponsors have provided and I would hope that those who are upset will know that offending or misunderstanding them was not my intention. My tweets are my own and in no way represent the Rockets or the NBA.”
1/ I did not intend my tweet to cause any offense to Rockets fans and friends of mine in China. I was merely voicing one thought, based on one interpretation, of one complicated event. I have had a lot of opportunity since that tweet to hear and consider other perspectives.
— Daryl Morey (@dmorey) October 7, 2019
2/ I have always appreciated the significant support our Chinese fans and sponsors have provided and I would hope that those who are upset will know that offending or misunderstanding them was not my intention. My tweets are my own and in no way represent the Rockets or the NBA.
— Daryl Morey (@dmorey) October 7, 2019
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9 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Protect Their Business During a Recession
Though an imminent recession for America is not written in stone, there are red flags an economic downturn may come in the near future. That forecast could be daunting for entrepreneurs already battling to boost sales and trying to build sufficient capital to cover unforeseen contingencies.
Yet, there are actions small business owners can take to equip themselves for such a meltdown. Though some 80% of small business owners fear a potential recession, 44% have not taken steps to get ready for one and 36% are not planning any special actions to prepare within the next 12-24 months, a recent survey from small business lender BlueVine shows. But entrepreneurs may do well to apply such a strategy for multiple reasons.
In another report, some 69% of the economists surveyed by the National Association for Business Economics in September projected a U.S. recession will start by mid-2021, up from 60% in the June survey. A panel of 54 professional forecasters made projections.
The lingering trade war between America and China is a major reason why many investors are worried about a potential economic decline. Doubt about the aftermath of the U.S.-China trade war sparked volatile conditions to the stock market in recent weeks.
Further, how global monetary policy will pan out is raising some apprehension. The Federal Reserve Bank slashed interest rates for the first time in over 10 years in July amid worries about contraction in global growth and surging trade tensions. And other central banks worldwide have moved similarly by cutting rates.
For small business owners, the best time to prepare for potentially harder economic climates is when times are good. Here are nine actions entrepreneurs should consider to help offset any potential storms.
How to Protect Your Business in a Recession
1. Obtain working capital.
Observers say financial service providers such as lenders are more apt to provide funding before a recession arrives. They maintain the best time to pursue a loan or arrange for a line of credit is when your business and the economy are healthy. For instance, an apparel store and shoe store.
2. Boost your financial position.
Increase cash flow or financial reserves by adding more products and services that complement what you already sell. But analyze carefully how much it will cost to expand and make sure it doesn’t tarnish your firm’s notoriety or brand.
3. Increase your number of customers and upsell.
Instead of just focusing on gaining sales from your biggest clients, see if you can add some smaller clients as well. Ask yourself, “can my business survive if I lose my biggest client or clients during an economic slump?” By diversifying your firm to serve a larger variety of clients or even new industries, your reliance on generating sales just from larger clients will be less. Also, consider upselling products from your business to existing customers who are not currently using them. Perhaps offer a discount on unused goods or services they use since they are already buying from you.
4. Consider partnering with another business.
This option can offer many benefits, including expanding your footprint, sharing or cutting expenses, and generating new growth ideas. You can also share resources, contacts, customer lists, and marketing efforts.
5. Identify where you can cut costs.
Perhaps you can trim what you spend on office supplies, dining out, or travel. See if you can possibly lease space you’re not using to help offset the cost of bills you have to pay. See if you should cut gym memberships, subscriptions, or other discretionary items you’re no longer using.
6. Keep marketing your business.
This is an expense that many businesses chop during harder times. But be mindful that if consumers are not aware of your business, they might not conduct business with you or may look elsewhere for what they need. Tell clients what niche products you can offer to set your firm apart from rivals. Also, examine if social media or other Internet marketing options are less costly than other advertising channels. This approach might also bring you a broader mix of customers.
7. Erase credit card debt for your business.
It’s vital to pay down or get rid of business credit cards as quickly as possible. That’s especially true before a recession hits when it’s harder to make money. Consider merging credit cards into one credit card with a lower annual percentage rate, something that can also cut monthly expenses.
8. Create an emergency fund.
Fortify your business by establishing an emergency fund that could allow you to endure for a year or longer. That could be particularly important if your business suffers lower revenue generation during a downturn. Make sure the fund can cover key operating costs, including employee payroll.
9. Use online resources.
Check out online sites that offer tips to help you survive a recession. For instance, the Small Business Administration provides such information.
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Mariah Carey dishes about the fake rivalry with Whitney Houston
Mariah Carey is not just a songbird who can belt out high octaves, she’s also a powerhouse musician who is all about sisterhood in an industry that feeds off pitting powerful women against each other.
—Mariah Carey admits she’s ‘kind of a prude’, says her number of lovers is not many—
Carey, a five-time Grammy Award winning artist who is being honored in Variety’s Power of Women Issue, talked about how the industry worked to conjure up a feud between her and the legendary Whitney Houston.
“What has to change in our industry the most? One of the things is the pitting of women against each other,” Carey told Variety.
“There was the situation where, when I started, everyone was like, ‘Oh, her and Whitney [Houston], let’s put them against each other and blah, blah, blah,” she recalled. “We didn’t know each other! And she was one of the greatest of ALL TIME.”
“And then we finally did a duet together that won an Oscar, we had the best time working together. It was female camaraderie. We both got it.”
“We were like, ‘She doesn’t hate me…we’re actually having this great time together and laughing and this is more fun than I have working alone, ever’ So I think camaraderie with women that you respect is a huge deal.”
Carey and Houston teamed up to sing “When You Believe,” for the 1998 animated film “Prince of Egypt” which was co-written and produced by Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds.
—Rihanna’s luxe touch stretches even into coffee table books—
The two powerhouse stars had a mutual respect for one another and appeared at the 1998 Video Music Awards dressed in similar white gowns to show solidarity. The song won Best Original Song a year later at the 1999 Academy Awards.
Most infamously though, we need to know if Carey truly has beef with J Lo, Jennifer Lopez who she claimed at one point, “I don’t know her.”
Carey is gearing up for a holiday tour that kicks off in Vegas in November.
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A Controversial Plan to Encrypt More of the Internet
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Fikayo Tomori 'commits' to England after 'surprise' call-up
Using machine learning to hunt down cybercriminals
Hijacking IP addresses is an increasingly popular form of cyber-attack. This is done for a range of reasons, from sending spam and malware to stealing Bitcoin. It’s estimated that in 2017 alone, routing incidents such as IP hijacks affected more than 10 percent of all the world’s routing domains. There have been major incidents at Amazon and Google and even in nation-states — a study last year suggested that a Chinese telecom company used the approach to gather intelligence on western countries by rerouting their internet traffic through China.
Existing efforts to detect IP hijacks tend to look at specific cases when they’re already in process. But what if we could predict these incidents in advance by tracing things back to the hijackers themselves?
That’s the idea behind a new machine-learning system developed by researchers at MIT and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). By illuminating some of the common qualities of what they call “serial hijackers,” the team trained their system to be able to identify roughly 800 suspicious networks — and found that some of them had been hijacking IP addresses for years.
“Network operators normally have to handle such incidents reactively and on a case-by-case basis, making it easy for cybercriminals to continue to thrive,” says lead author Cecilia Testart, a graduate student at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) who will present the paper at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference in Amsterdam on Oct. 23. “This is a key first step in being able to shed light on serial hijackers’ behavior and proactively defend against their attacks.”
The paper is a collaboration between CSAIL and the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis at UCSD’s Supercomputer Center. The paper was written by Testart and David Clark, an MIT senior research scientist, alongside MIT postdoc Philipp Richter and data scientist Alistair King as well as research scientist Alberto Dainotti of UCSD.
The nature of nearby networks
IP hijackers exploit a key shortcoming in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), a routing mechanism that essentially allows different parts of the internet to talk to each other. Through BGP, networks exchange routing information so that data packets find their way to the correct destination.
In a BGP hijack, a malicious actor convinces nearby networks that the best path to reach a specific IP address is through their network. That’s unfortunately not very hard to do, since BGP itself doesn’t have any security procedures for validating that a message is actually coming from the place it says it’s coming from.
“It’s like a game of Telephone, where you know who your nearest neighbor is, but you don’t know the neighbors five or 10 nodes away,” says Testart.
In 1998 the U.S. Senate's first-ever cybersecurity hearing featured a team of hackers who claimed that they could use IP hijacking to take down the Internet in under 30 minutes. Dainotti says that, more than 20 years later, the lack of deployment of security mechanisms in BGP is still a serious concern.
To better pinpoint serial attacks, the group first pulled data from several years’ worth of network operator mailing lists, as well as historical BGP data taken every five minutes from the global routing table. From that, they observed particular qualities of malicious actors and then trained a machine-learning model to automatically identify such behaviors.
The system flagged networks that had several key characteristics, particularly with respect to the nature of the specific blocks of IP addresses they use:
- Volatile changes in activity: Hijackers’ address blocks seem to disappear much faster than those of legitimate networks. The average duration of a flagged network’s prefix was under 50 days, compared to almost two years for legitimate networks.
- Multiple address blocks: Serial hijackers tend to advertise many more blocks of IP addresses, also known as “network prefixes.”
- IP addresses in multiple countries: Most networks don’t have foreign IP addresses. In contrast, for the networks that serial hijackers advertised that they had, they were much more likely to be registered in different countries and continents.
Identifying false positives
Testart said that one challenge in developing the system was that events that look like IP hijacks can often be the result of human error, or otherwise legitimate. For example, a network operator might use BGP to defend against distributed denial-of-service attacks in which there’s huge amounts of traffic going to their network. Modifying the route is a legitimate way to shut down the attack, but it looks virtually identical to an actual hijack.
Because of this issue, the team often had to manually jump in to identify false positives, which accounted for roughly 20 percent of the cases identified by their classifier. Moving forward, the researchers are hopeful that future iterations will require minimal human supervision and could eventually be deployed in production environments.
“The authors' results show that past behaviors are clearly not being used to limit bad behaviors and prevent subsequent attacks,” says David Plonka, a senior research scientist at Akamai Technologies who was not involved in the work. “One implication of this work is that network operators can take a step back and examine global Internet routing across years, rather than just myopically focusing on individual incidents.”
As people increasingly rely on the Internet for critical transactions, Testart says that she expects IP hijacking’s potential for damage to only get worse. But she is also hopeful that it could be made more difficult by new security measures. In particular, large backbone networks such as AT&T have recently announced the adoption of resource public key infrastructure (RPKI), a mechanism that uses cryptographic certificates to ensure that a network announces only its legitimate IP addresses.
“This project could nicely complement the existing best solutions to prevent such abuse that include filtering, antispoofing, coordination via contact databases, and sharing routing policies so that other networks can validate it,” says Plonka. “It remains to be seen whether misbehaving networks will continue to be able to game their way to a good reputation. But this work is a great way to either validate or redirect the network operator community's efforts to put an end to these present dangers.”
The project was supported, in part, by the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Air Force Research Laboratory.
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