Shutdown, New York Sky, ‘Bandersnatch’: Your Friday Briefing

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Good morning,

We start today with the continuing government shutdown and an inside look at how Facebook monitors its users’ posts. And it’s Friday, so there’s also a new news quiz.

The spending impasse over President Trump’s border wall will await Democrats as soon as they assume control of the House next week, after hopes for resolving the partial government shutdown by the new year ended on Thursday.

The Democrats and their likely speaker, Representative Nancy Pelosi, are considering three options to end the shutdown, which has affected about a quarter of the federal government. None of those options include the $5 billion that Mr. Trump has demanded for the wall.

What’s next: About 800,000 federal workers have been furloughed or are working without pay, and the effects of the shutdown, which have been muted by the holidays, will grow.


President Trump’s decision last week to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria and half of those in Afghanistan has “short-circuited what many say is a much-needed national debate about the future of America’s wars,” one of our White House correspondents writes in a news analysis.

Military analysts, former officials and diplomats say there are arguments for withdrawing from both conflicts. But the abrupt announcement “seemed unlikely to provoke a serious debate over difficult questions like how best to combat terrorist threats in distant lands or the proper limits of America’s role as a global guarantor of security.”

Another angle: Mr. Trump’s jabs at Democrats during a surprise visit with U.S. troops abroad this week were criticized as politicizing the military. One Fox News contributor said the president used the visit “as a campaign rally.”

Yesterday: Iraqi politicians also criticized Mr. Trump’s visit, with some calling for a parliamentary debate on whether American forces should leave.


The social network says it’s doing everything it can to get rid of posts that sow division and violence, but it’s also determined to keep growing worldwide.

There are billions of posts a day on Facebook, in more than 100 languages. To monitor them, the company has a network of moderators who use PowerPoint slides detailing what’s forbidden. Those rules make Facebook a far more powerful arbiter of speech than has been publicly recognized or acknowledged by the company, a Times investigation has found.

The details: Our review of the company’s rule books revealed gaps, biases and outright errors, allowing extremist language to flourish in some countries while censoring mainstream speech in others. Here are five takeaways from our investigation.

How we know: The Times received more than 1,400 pages from the rule books from an employee who said he feared the company had too much power, with too little oversight, and was making too many mistakes.


Generation Identity is a far-right German youth movement being watched by several European intelligence agencies. The group aims to bring down liberalism and build a “fortress Europe” without non-European immigrants.

Better dressed, better educated and less angry than the skinheads of old, the “new right” has sought to distance itself from the “old right,” which in Germany means neo-Nazis.

Although the number of committed Generation Identity followers is estimated at only 400 to 500, officials say the number of sympathizers is far greater. There are worries that the group could act as a conduit between conservatism and extremism.

Voices: “The utopia of multiculturalism was an experiment, but it has failed,” said Martin Sellner, the 29-year-old Austrian leader of the movement. “Like communism, cosmopolitanism has failed.”

For-profit schools dominate cosmetology training. They reap money from taxpayers, students and salon customers, while miring students in debt.

Snapshot: Above, the sky over New York City turned an otherworldly blue Thursday night after an electrical transformer exploded in Queens. “No injuries, no fire, no evidence of extraterrestrial activity,” the New York Police Department reported on Twitter.

The lives they lived: In an annual remembrance, we look back at some of the artists, innovators and thinkers we lost this year.

Cook: Polenta with mushrooms. The recipe, from the founding editor of NYT Cooking, features a pleasing mix of butter and soy sauce.

Watch: “Bandersnatch,” a new episode of the dystopian technology series “Black Mirror,” arrives today on Netflix. In a twist, the show will let the viewer decide what happens next.

See: The Alvin Ailey troupe’s final performances of the season, featuring Solomon Dumas, the first dancer to go from AileyCamp to the main company. If you’re not in New York, stream a few highlights of the year.

Read: These eight books recommended by our editors this week, including “Nothing Is Lost: Selected Essays,” by Ingrid Sischy.


Smarter Living: One of our reporters combined two popular methods — from the books “The Bullet Journal Method” and “Getting Things Done” — to organize her to-do list. She ended up keeping several sublists, and breaking down projects into tasks to add to groupings like “Calls” or “Errands.”

We also have tips on working smarter, not harder, and a caution about medical illiteracy.

We often hear from readers asking why we use unidentified sources.

The reason is straightforward: Some people in sensitive positions will speak candidly only if their names aren’t published.

But we know our credibility is on the line. So we make sure to get the story right.

“Under our guidelines, anonymous sources should be used only for information that we think is newsworthy and credible, and that we are not able to report any other way,” our standards editor, Phil Corbett, explains in our series Understanding The Times.

“We have to be skeptical,” he adds. “How does the source know this information? Can we corroborate it? What’s the source’s motivation for telling us?”

And the reporter must tell an editor who the source is.

“Use of anonymous sourcing in any story must be approved by a high-ranking editor, usually a department head,” Mr. Corbett writes. “When it’s central to the story, it generally must be approved by an even higher-ranking editor.”


That’s it for this briefing. Have a good weekend.

— Chris


Thank you
To Aisha Harris for the cultural highlights, and Alan Henry and Kenneth R. Rosen for the tips on Smarter Living. Jennifer Krauss, from the Times Insider team, helped with today’s Back Story. You can reach us at briefing@nytimes.com.

P.S.
• We’re listening to “The Daily.” Today’s episode revisits a mother who asked her sons about their reactions to the accusations against Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
• Here’s today’s mini crossword puzzle, and a clue: Italian inventor of the battery (5 letters). You can find all our puzzles here.
• The Times has more than 200 journalists (including your Morning Briefing team) outside the U.S., in 31 bureaus.



Source : Nytimes