The cocaine kingpin on the soccer field
It's Free for All Friday!
It’s Free for ALL Friday!
What a week it's been. As somebody said, you could rewrite Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire and include only events from the last little while. (Credit: Casey Dolan on Twitter.)
Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (100% legal) hocus-pocus.
With one exception I'm staying away from politics since that's dominating everything else right now. Let’s go!
How Kamala Harris took command of the Democratic Party in 48 hours
Let’s get the political one out of the way. I know we have readers all over the political map, but from a pure behind-the-scenes perspective, this was very interesting to me.
Late on Sunday morning, Vice President Kamala Harris summoned a small clutch of her closest advisers and allies to the Naval Observatory, where she lives and works, with little notice and even less information.
President Biden had informed Ms. Harris earlier that morning that he was withdrawing from the race. The vice president had assembled her team so that the exact moment Mr. Biden formally quit, at 1:46 p.m. — one minute after the president had informed his own senior staff — they were ready to go.
Time was of the essence. A sprawling call list of the most important Democrats to reach had been prepared in advance, according to two people with knowledge of the situation. The vice president, in sneakers and a sweatshirt, began methodically dialing Democratic power brokers.
“I wasn’t going to let this day go by without you hearing from me,” Ms. Harris had said over and over, as day turned to night, according to five people who received her calls or were briefed on them.
…
Mr. Biden had reportedly made 20 calls to congressional Democrats in the first 10 or so days after the debate, while his candidacy hung in the balance. Ms. Harris made 100 calls in 10 hours.
Take A Seat: The Long Table Is An Antidote To Loneliness
While some consider the long, shared dining table outdated or inconvenient, it is actually a powerful social tool.
Modern institutions make a host of mistakes when they plan out their common spaces. This is especially true of dining halls, cafeterias, canteens – anywhere groups of people who are not quite friends and not quite strangers are going to have to get comfortable enough to eat together.
Chief among these sins are the little tables. Modern dining spaces commonly offer small, round or rectangular tables, often with four or six chairs. This is done – at least according to the architect’s notes and institutional press releases I have read – in the name of ‘intimacy’ or ‘privacy’ or ‘approachability.’ I do not know where this perception came from, but I do know that it is wrong.
This might seem a trivial matter to get worked up over, but it is not. We live in an era of burgeoning social isolation that harms the mental and spiritual wellbeing of individuals and undermines the harmonious functioning of institutions.
Too many of us do not know or empathise with the people whom we need to know and empathise with. And dining areas provide one of the best opportunities to do this regularly.
Traveling this summer? Maybe don’t let the airport scan your face.
You have the right to opt out of facial recognition tech. Here’s how.
Here’s something I’m embarrassed to admit: Even though I’ve been reporting on the problems with facial recognition for half a dozen years, I have allowed my face to be scanned at airports. Not once. Not twice. Many times.
There are lots of reasons for that. For one thing, traveling is stressful. I feel time pressure to make it to my gate quickly and social pressure not to hold up long lines. (This alone makes it feel like I’m not truly consenting to the face scans so much as being coerced into them.) Plus, I’m always getting “randomly selected” for additional screenings, maybe because of my Middle Eastern background. So I get nervous about doing anything that might lead to extra delays or interrogations.
But the main reason I haven’t declined airport face scans is actually very simple: I had no idea I could opt out.
It turns out that saying no is not only doable, but surprisingly easy.
A double life: The cocaine kingpin who hid as a professional soccer player
ASUNCIÓN, Paraguay — The midfielder stepped up to take the penalty kick. It was a steamy, bright morning at Erico Galeano Stadium. In the stands, fans wearing yellow and blue stood up, squinting into the sun, focusing on the man with the number 10 on his back. On the sidelines, coaches crossed themselves as he ran toward the ball.
His name was Sebastián Marset. He had arrived at Deportivo Capiatá — a hardscrabble professional soccer team — out of nowhere. He drove a Lamborghini. He was square-jawed and handsome, covered in gold jewelry, Rolexes and ornate tattoos that ran down his right arm.
Marset was a mediocre player, with the skills of someone whose career peaked in high school. But when Capiatá’s coach, Jorge Nuñez, kept him on the bench, the players encircled Nuñez and told him that Marset needed to play.
“I kept wondering, ‘Who is this guy?’” Nuñez said in an interview.
Over the next two years, the reasons would become clear. Sebastián Marset, it turned out, was among the most important drug traffickers in South America, and he had used his fortune to purchase and sponsor soccer teams across Latin America and in Europe. U.S.
Marset, now 33, deployed his power and wealth to fulfill a boyhood dream: He inserted himself into the starting lineups.
From wiretapping to geolocation data collection: The Paris Olympics draws privacy concerns
Globally, critics claim that France is using the Olympics as a surveillance power grab and that the government will use this ‘exceptional’ surveillance justification to normalize society-wide state surveillance.
The 2024 Paris Olympics is drawing the eyes of the world as thousands of athletes and support personnel and hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the globe converge in France. It’s not just the eyes of the world that will be watching. Artificial intelligence systems will be watching, too.
Government and private companies will be using advanced AI tools and other surveillance tech to conduct pervasive and persistent surveillance before, during, and after the Games. The Olympic world stage and international crowds pose increased security risks so significant that in recent years authorities and critics have described the Olympics as the “world’s largest security operations outside of war.”
As doctors leave Puerto Rico in droves, a rapper tries to fill the gaps
She came to the US with a dream. Using platforms like Uber, Instacart, and DoorDash, she built a business empire up from nothing. There was just one problem.
On a recent morning in an Afro-Caribbean community in northeast Puerto Rico, Dr. Pedro Juan Vázquez went door-to-door as part of his medical rounds. He greeted the elderly residents the town with a cheerful “Good afternoon!” and a smile and casually asked if they’d like their vitals taken.
Many were surprised at being approached with an offer of medical care. A man in a gray tank top opened his screen door and said, “Of course,” and took a seat on his porch to be checked out.
Though a physician, Vázquez is better known in Puerto Rico as a rapper who uses the stage name PJ Sin Suela.
The 34-year-old is trying to fulfill his passion for music while helping those in need — and raise awareness about a health crisis on the island of 3.2 million residents. The U.S. territory is facing power outages as well as a shortage of medical professionals, with many having fled to the U.S. mainland for better wages.
“We have a huge exodus of young people,” Vázquez told The Associated Press. “In Puerto Rico, we have a crisis much bigger than people think.”
Ahead of the Olympics, all eyes are on Tahiti’s mythic wave
In a tiny fishing village in Tahiti, Olympic surfers will ride the world-famous Teahupo'o swell and compete for gold, but at what cost—to the environment and community?
Surfing as we know it today traces its roots to the peoples of ancient Polynesia, so in a certain light, Teahupo’o is a fitting venue for the competition. But standing in the rain-damp, coconut-strewn village—where the only accommodations are family-run homestays, and there’s exactly one restaurant—it’s hard to imagine executing an Olympic-scale event here.
“At the very beginning? We felt lucky. Everyone thought it was going to be a copy-and-paste of the contest we have every year,” says Matahi Drollet, a champion local surfer who lives within eyesight of the wave, referring to the annual Tahiti Pro. “Then we started to hear about the big budget and big changes they wanted to make.”
okie dokie, gonna do politics, so will share what's going thru my head, Simon & Garfunkel's Mrs. Robinson
Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon
Going to the candidates debate
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you've got to choose
Every way you look at this, you lose
I didn’t read the political bit as US politics are not of interest to me.
Nor is eating at communal tables. It’s enough that I have to listen to family members chew or talk with their mouth full of half-chewed food. Why on earth would I want to listen to strangers. Nor do I need strangers looking at my order and critiquing what I ordered. Or listen to some blowhole monopolize the meal with boring stories. I hope that restaurants who go for communal tables leave a few individual ones for those of us who don’t feel the need to break bread with strangers.