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Who Was Stephen Paddock? The Mystery of a Nondescript ‘Numbers Guy’
When it came to guns, Mr. Michel said, “he was not a novice.”
The son of a bank robber and a secretary, Mr. Paddock grew up lower middle class in Southern California in the 1960s. From an early age, he focused on gaining complete control over his life and not having to rely on anyone. He cycled through a series of jobs he thought would make him rich, Eric Paddock said.
“He went to work for the I.R.S. because he thought that’s where the money was, but it turned out the money wasn’t there,” the younger Mr. Paddock said. “He went to the aerospace industry but the money wasn’t there either. He went to real estate and that’s where the money was.”
Stephen Paddock began buying and refurbishing properties in economically depressed areas around Los Angeles, teaching himself how to put in plumbing and install air-conditioning. By the late 1980s, “we had cash flow,” said Eric Paddock, who added that he had given his life savings to his older brother to invest and eventually became a partner in his company, because “that’s the kind of guy he was. I knew he would succeed.”
“He helped make my mother and I affluent enough to be retired in comfort,” he said.
With success came a rigidity and uncompromising attitude, along with two failed marriages, both short and childless. Stephen Paddock started gambling. Some who met him described him as arrogant, with a strong sense of superiority. People in his life bent to his will, even his mother and brother. He went out of his way for no one.
“He acted like everybody worked for him and that he was above others,” said John Weinreich, 48, a former executive casino host at the Atlantis Casino Resort Spa in Reno, where he saw Mr. Paddock frequently from 2012 to 2014. When Mr. Paddock wanted food while he was gambling, he wanted it immediately and would order with more than one server if the meal did not arrive quickly enough.
Mr. Weinreich said he would get irritated and “uppity about it.”
Mr. Paddock was uncompromising but he was also smart.
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“I would liken him to a chess player: very analytical and a numbers guy,” Mr. Weinreich said. “He seemed to be working at a higher level mentally than most people I run into in gambling.”
Mr. Paddock cherished his solitude, his brother said. In 2003, he got his pilot’s license, eventually taking the extra step to get an instrument rating so that he could legally fly in cloudy conditions with limited visibility. He bought cookie-cutter houses in Texas and Nevada towns with small airports so that he could park his planes. He was utterly unremarkable.
“This guy paid on time every time and did not cause any problems at any time,” said Lt. Brian Parrish, the spokesman for the Police Department in Mesquite, Tex., where he rented a hangar for $285 a month from 2007 through 2009. He also stored planes at the small airport in Henderson, Nev., from 2002 to 2010, an airport spokesman said, though it is not clear he ever lived at the local addresses to which they had been registered.
Even in death, Mr. Paddock seemed to stay true to his ways. He remained in control, answerable to no one but himself. He was ensconced in a carpeted hotel suite. He was wearing gloves, as he often did to protect his sensitive skin. He shot himself before the police broke into his room. A piece of paper with numbers written on it lay on a table near his body.
“If Steve decided it was time for Steve to go, Steve got up and left,” Eric Paddock said. “He did what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.”
The ‘Most Boring’ Son
Mr. Paddock was the oldest, and least angry, of four boys growing up in the 1950s, said another brother, Patrick Benjamin Paddock II, 60, an engineer in Tucson. Stephen Paddock was born in Iowa, the home state of their mother, Irene Hudson.
“My brother was the most boring one in the family,” Patrick Paddock said. “He was the least violent one in the family, over a 30-year history, so it’s like, who?”
Their father, Patrick Benjamin Paddock, also known as Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, was mostly absent, living a life of crime even before the boys were born. A 1969 newspaper story described him as a “glib, smooth talking ‘confidence man,’ who is egotistic and arrogant.”
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His rap sheet was long and included writing bad checks, stealing cars and robbing banks. He was on the F.B.I.’s most wanted list. The agency described him as an avid bridge player, standing 6-foot-4 and weighing 245 pounds, who “has been diagnosed as being psychopathic, with possible suicidal tendencies.”
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Stephen Paddock learned resourcefulness and self-reliance from an early age. In 1960, when he was 7, his father went to prison for a series of bank robberies and the family moved to Southern California.
The boys’ mother raised them alone on a secretary’s salary, the younger Patrick Paddock said. The brothers would fight over who would get the whole milk. Powdered milk, less tasty but cheaper, was the norm. Their mother never explained where their father was.
“She kept that secret from the family,” Patrick Paddock said.
Stephen Paddock graduated from John H. Francis Polytechnic Senior High School in the Sun Valley neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1971, according to a Los Angeles Unified School District official. Richard Alarcon, a former Los Angeles city councilman, who lived near the Paddocks, said their neighborhood was working class, with a Japanese community center and tidy ranch houses bought with money from the G.I. Bill.
Mr. Alarcon took a science class with Mr. Paddock and remembered him as smart but with “a kind of irreverence. He didn’t always stay between the lines.”
He recalled a competition to build a bridge of balsa wood, without staples or glue. Mr. Paddock cheated, he said, using glue and extra wood.
“Everybody could see that he had cheated, but he just sort of laughed it off,” Mr. Alarcon said. “He had that funny quirky smile on his face like he didn’t care. He wanted to have the strongest bridge and he didn’t care what it took.”
A Knack for Making Money
Mr. Paddock spent his 20s and 30s trying to escape the unpredictability of poverty. He worked nights at an airport while going to the California State University, Northridge, his brother Eric said, and then at jobs with the Internal Revenue Service and as an auditor of defense contracts. But it was real estate that ultimately lifted Mr. Paddock to financial freedom.
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In 1987, he bought a 30-unit building at 1256 W. 29th Street in Los Angeles, near the University of Southern California, according to property records. His brother Eric Paddock said the buildings they bought were not “Taj Mahals, but they were nice safe places.”
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Crucially, they were excellent investments: Stephen Paddock more than doubled his money on his California holdings, which included at least six multifamily residences, according to property records. He made money in Texas, too. In 2012, he sold a 110-unit building in Mesquite, outside Dallas, for $8.3 million.
He was a good landlord. He kept the rents low, responded promptly to his tenants’ complaints, learned all their names and made sure they were happy. When one reliable tenant complained about a rent increase, he took half off the difference. He designed the ownership structure so his family would profit and installed his mother in a tidy house just behind the apartment complex in Mesquite, Tex.
Mr. Paddock had an apartment in the complex, but he mostly lived elsewhere. He had been married twice, but the apartment looked like a bachelor pad, said Todd Franks, a real estate broker with SVN Investment Sales Group in Dallas. “What you would expect from a 25-year-old single guy.”
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To Mr. Franks, Mr. Paddock stood out because it was unusual for the landlord of a property that size to pay such close attention to the day-to-day running of his complex.
“He was frustrated by people who did stupid things,” Mr. Franks said.
He was also willing to fight to defend what was his. During the riots in Los Angeles in the 1990s, he went to the roof of an apartment complex he owned in a flak jacket and armed with a gun, waiting for the rioters, Mr. Franks said.
Though Mr. Paddock might have adopted an accommodating attitude toward his tenants and dressed casually — Mr. Franks remembered him regularly wearing sandals and a sweatsuit — Mr. Paddock was focused and astute when he made deals.
“He was a tough negotiator,” Mr. Franks said. “He wanted his price. His terms. He was a very savvy businessman.”
The House Advantage
By the 2000s, with both of his marriages long over, casinos became Mr. Paddock’s habitat. He liked being waited on, seeing shows and eating good food.
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“He likes it when people go, ‘Oh, Mr. Paddock, can I get you a big bowl of the best shrimp anybody had ever eaten on the planet and a big glass of our best port?” Eric Paddock said.
Gambling made him feel important, if not social.
“You could tell that being in that high-limit gambling environment would lift him up,’’ said Mr. Weinreich, the Atlantis casino host in Reno. “He liked everyone doting on him.”
He sometimes called for company, inviting his brother Eric and his children for a free weekend in a luxury suite. But mostly he stayed alone.
A couple of years ago, Mr. Paddock stayed in one Las Vegas hotel gambling for four months straight, said a gaming industry analyst here who was briefed on Mr. Paddock’s gambling history.
The analyst described him as a midlevel high roller, capable of losing $100,000 in one session, which could extend over several days. He said Mr. Paddock may have lost that amount at the Red Rock Casino in Las Vegas within the last few months.
Playing a slot machine can be mindless and is usually a guaranteed win for the casino. That is not what Mr. Paddock played. His game, video poker, requires some skill. Players have to know the history of a particular machine. They can do that by reading a pay table, which tells them what each possible winning hand pays out.
One of the ways that video poker players get an advantage is to play casino promotions, which essentially pay out bonuses to winners, said Richard Munchkin, author of “Gambling Wizards: Conversations With the World’s Greatest Gamblers.” A gambler like Mr. Paddock will often “lock” a machine, meaning he or she monopolizes it and makes sure no one else uses it during a gambling session.
For one casino promotion, Mr. Paddock showed up two hours early, locked two machines and played them for 14 hours straight, Mr. Munchkin said, based on information he had compiled from other gamblers who were there at the time. The promotion lasted 12 hours, he said, “but he wanted to play for two hours before anybody got those machines. He knew they were the best machines based on pay tables.”
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Mr. Paddock “knew the house advantage down to a tenth of a percent,” he said.
As for the mystery of why Mr. Paddock would go on a shooting rampage at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino and then kill himself, most in the gambling industry do not believe it had anything to do with money.
He was in good standing with MGM Properties, the owner of the Mandalay and the Bellagio, according to a person familiar with his gambling history. He had a $100,000 credit limit, the person said, but never used the full amount.
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The Absent Neighbor
Mr. Paddock spent so much time in casinos that he was mostly a ghost in the neighborhoods where he had homes.
Colleen Maas, a neighbor of Mr. Paddock’s in Reno, said she had not seen him once in a year and a half, despite walking her dog three times a day and going to line dancing events with his girlfriend, Ms. Danley, at the community center.
He did travel. On his 60th birthday, April 9, 2013, he flew to the Philippines on Japan Airlines and stayed for five days, according to a spokeswoman for the Philippine Bureau of Immigration. The family of Ms. Danley, his girlfriend, lived there and she was visiting the country at the time. The couple went again for his birthday the following year.
When he did appear at his Reno home, he could be curt. Another neighbor, John McKay, recalled a day when he was hanging Christmas lights on a railing in his front yard when Mr. Paddock walked by. Mr. McKay said hello and yelled out, “Merry Christmas!” Mr. Paddock kept walking. “He said nothing,” Mr. McKay said. “Not a word. No eye contact.”
Even more baffling, when Mr. McKay tried to strike up a conversation with Mr. Paddock about Donald Trump during the election campaign, he got no response.
“Almost everyone has a reaction to Trump,” said Mr. McKay’s wife, Darlene.
Ms. McKay said that she would usually get up early each morning to watch the sunrise and, when Mr. Paddock was at his home, she would see him dressed in his gym clothes walking to the community center for a workout. Ms. McKay recalled something peculiar: “He always walked across the street and would never pass in front of our house.”
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Mr. McKay said that he rarely saw a window or a door open at the house. One day he saw Mr. Paddock’s garage door open, and noticed a large safe inside.
It is not clear what set Mr. Paddock on his path to destruction. As early as 2010, he could no longer fly his planes. His medical certificate expired, according to Federal Aviation Administration records, and there are no indications that he renewed it.
Mr. Paddock bought his last house in Mesquite, Nev., a retirement community of 18,000 people about 90 minutes from Las Vegas that attracts golfers and gamblers from around the country. He seems to have paid in cash, according to property records, and, as he did with other houses, spent very little time there.
His neighbors added personal touches to their yards — decorative pots, plants of all colors and sizes. Mr. Paddock’s house was unadorned. One of the few things neighbors remembered about him was the solid-panel fence he erected. The message was clear: Mr. Paddock was a man who did not want to be seen. On Thursday, investigators had left. A tiny paint-splattered easel, its brush drawer open and empty, stood in the back yard.
Ms. Danley worked in Mesquite. She took a job booking sports bets at a local casino called the Virgin River, where gamblers sat together in rows watching horse races and waitresses circled in tight black skirts.
Several days a week, she attended morning mass at a local Catholic church, said Leo McGinty, 80, a fellow parishioner who knew her from the casino.
Ms. Danley dressed smartly and modestly, he said. She usually sat alone.
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Hurricanes Harvey, Irma sink US payrolls in September
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. employment fell in September for the first time in seven years as Hurricanes Harvey and Irma left displaced workers temporarily unemployed and delayed hiring, the latest indication that the storms undercut economic activity in the third quarter.
The Labor Department said on Friday nonfarm payrolls decreased by 33,000 jobs last month amid a record drop in employment in the leisure and hospitality sector.
The decline in payrolls was the first since September 2010. The Department said its analysis suggested that the net effect of Harvey and Irma, which wreaked havoc in Texas and Florida in late August and early September, was to “reduce the estimate of total nonfarm payroll employment for September.”
“While nonfarm payrolls declined last month, investors will find solace in a whole host of other labor market indicators that reveal an underlying labor market that continues to show evidence of resilience and continued tightening,” said Scott Anderson, chief U.S. economist at Bank of the West in San Francisco.
Economists had forecast payrolls increasing by 90,000 jobs last month. Payrolls are calculated from a survey of employers, which treats any worker who was not paid for any part of the pay period that includes the 12th of the month as unemployed.
Many of the dislocated people will probably return to work. That, together with rebuilding and clean-up is expected to boost job growth in the coming months. Leisure and hospitality payrolls dived 111,000, the most since records started in 1939, after being unchanged in August.
There were also decreases in retail and manufacturing employment last month. Stripping out the effects of the hurricanes, the labor market remains strong. The government revised data for August to show 169,000 jobs created that month instead of the previously reported 156,000.
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Harvey and Irma did not have an impact on the unemployment rate, which fell two-tenths of a percentage point to 4.2 percent, the lowest since February 2001. The smaller survey of households from which the jobless rate is derived treats a person as employed regardless of whether they missed work during the reference week and were unpaid as result.
The decrease in the unemployment rate reflected a 906,000 surge in household employment, which offset a 575,000 increase in the labor force.
The dollar was trading higher against a basket of currencies after the data, while prices for U.S. Treasuries fell. Stocks on Wall Street fell marginally.
DISRUPTIONS BOOST WAGES
Underscoring the disruptive impact of the hurricanes, the household survey showed 1.5 million people stayed at home in September because of the bad weather, the most since January 1996. About 2.9 million people worked part-time, the largest number since February 2014.
The length of the average workweek was unchanged at 34.4 hours. With the hurricane-driven temporary unemployment concentrated in low-paying industries like retail and leisure and hospitality, average hourly earnings increased 12 cents or 0.5 percent in September after rising 0.2 percent in August.
That pushed the annual increase in wages to 2.9 percent, the largest gain since December 2016, from 2.7 percent in August.
The mixed employment report should not change views the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates in December. Fed Chair Janet Yellen cautioned last month that the hurricanes could “substantially” weigh on September job growth, but expected the effects would “unwind relatively quickly.”
“The Fed has been hyper-focused on wage growth, so the above-average increase will be a welcome relief, even if there is some storm impact embedded in the number,” said Marvin Loh, senior global markets strategist at BNY Mellon in Boston. “We think that the report strengthens the Fed’s December hike hand.”
The U.S. central bank said last month it expected “labor market conditions will strengthen somewhat further.” The Fed left interest rates unchanged in September, but signaled it expected one more hike by the end of the year. It has increased borrowing costs twice this year.
Annual wage growth of at least 3.0 percent is need to raise inflation to the Fed’s 2 percent target, analysts say.
The employment report added to August consumer spending, industrial production, homebuilding and home sales data in suggesting that the hurricanes will dent economic growth in the third quarter.
Economists estimate that the back-to-back storms, including Hurricane Maria which destroyed infrastructure in Puerto Rico last month, could shave at least six-tenths of a percentage point from third-quarter gross domestic product.
Growth estimates for the July-September period are as low as a 1.8 percent annualized rate. The economy grew at a 3.1 percent rate in the second quarter.
Private payrolls fell by 40,000 jobs, the biggest drop since February 2010. Manufacturing employment slipped by 1,000 jobs pulled down by declines at motor vehicle assembly and chemical plants as well as textile mills.
Retail employment fell by 2,900 jobs as food stores payrolls tumbled 6,900. There were also declines in employment at department stores. Construction payrolls rose 8,000 in September as a 3,900 drop in jobs at homebuilding sites was offset by increases elsewhere.
Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Andrea Ricci
The world has nearly 15000 nuclear weapons. This year’s Nobel Peace Prize honors the quest to abolish all of them.
BRUSSELS — An international group dedicated to eliminating nuclear weapons won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a recognition of efforts to avoid nuclear conflict at a time of greater atomic menace than any other period in recent memory.
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons was honored for its work to foster a global ban on the destructive weapons, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said. The scrappy civil society movement was behind a successful push this summer for a U.N. treaty that prohibits nuclear weapons. It promotes nuclear disarmament around the world.
The award comes amid rising global alarm about a potential nuclear conflagration. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has hurled threats of nuclear missile strikes against the United States, and President Trump has warned he could “totally destroy North Korea” if provoked. The barbed exchanges have raised fears among many global leaders of a miscalculation that could end in cataclysmic conflict.
Separately, Trump plans next week to “decertify” Iran’s compliance with an international agreement that limits its nuclear program, a step that European allies worry could lead to nuclear proliferation.
[Trump plans to declare Iran nuclear deal not in U.S. national interest]
“The risk of nuclear war has grown exceptionally in the last few years, and that’s why it makes this treaty and us receiving this award so important,” Beatrice Fihn, the Swedish executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, said in a telephone interview. “We do not have to accept this [risk]. We do not have to live with the kind of fear that Donald Trump could start a nuclear war that would destroy all of us. We should not base our security on whether or not his finger is on the trigger.”
ICAN recognizes that nuclear weapons will not disappear any time soon. But Fihn said a ban is still a realistic long-term goal, similar to the way an international taboo was created around the use of chemical weapons.
“Keeping nuclear weapons legal isn’t going to help things,” she said.
The decade-old Geneva-based coalition, which was modeled on international efforts to ban land mines, has branches in more than 100 countries.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was approved by two-thirds of U.N. members in July, but it has not attracted support from any of the world’s nine nuclear powers, which together possess nearly 15,000 atomic weapons. The United States and others boycotted the U.N. discussions that led to the treaty.
Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said at the time that “we have to be realistic” about the nuclear threat of rogue nations such as North Korea, and she warned that the ban could actually increase the risk of nuclear war, not reduce it.
Nuclear powers around the world repeated their opposition to efforts to ban the weapons following the Nobel announcement Friday.
“The Nuclear Ban Treaty does not move us closer to the goal of a world without nuclear weapons,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in a statement. “In fact, it risks undermining the progress we have made over the years in disarmament and non-proliferation.”
The White House and leaders of other nuclear powers have instead endorsed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which limits but does not ban the powerful weapons. Russia and the United States hold the world’s largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
Signatories to the prohibition treaty would be banned from developing, testing and possessing nuclear weapons, as well as threatening to use them. The treaty will go into effect once 50 nations ratify it. Guyana, Thailand and the Vatican are the first three to do so.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee recognized ICAN for “its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its groundbreaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons,” chairwoman Berit Reiss-Andersen of Norway said as she announced the prize in Oslo.
“There is a popular belief among people all over the world that the world has become more dangerous, and that there is a tendency where we experience that the threats of nuclear conflict have come closer,” Reiss-Andersen said. The group has been successful in “engaging people in the world who are scared of the fact that they are supposed to be protected by atomic weapons,” she said.
[Trump’s decision on Iran deal could cause major breach with Europe]
The Nobel committee said it chose to honor ICAN because of the group’s concrete success in pushing the treaty forward. The idea of a nuclear-free world is broader, and an aging group of U.S. hawks gave it a prominent kick-start.
George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry and Sam Nunn, a bipartisan quartet of former U.S. officials with deep national security credentials, made headlines in 2007 when they endorsed ridding the world of nuclear weapons. Their ideas helped launch the anti-nuclear Global Zero movement.
Anti-nuclear campaigners say they recognize the challenge of persuading nuclear powers to agree to give up their weapons.
But the advocates believe that the treaty creates an international norm that will eventually pressure nuclear-armed countries into compliance, even if they never formally sign on, said Rebecca Johnson, executive director of Britain’s Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy.
“Nuclear weapons became a tool for weak leaders to take shortcuts instead of providing their own people with safety, security and food,” said Johnson, a founding co-chairwoman of ICAN. “We have to take that value away in order to pull down numbers to zero.”
She said nuclear tensions between Washington and North Korea represent a setback to world peace.
“That has to be done with diplomacy and politics, and definitely not nuclear saber-rattling between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un,” she said. “They are very dangerous leaders that think they are exercising nuclear deterrence but in their irrationality are actually risking nuclear war.”
The Nobel Committee said the award was not intended as a slap at any particular country or leader, but rather was meant to encourage all nations to give up their nuclear weapons in the name of a safer world.
[North Korea now making missile-ready nuclear weapons, analysts say]
Indeed, world peace seems especially fragile now. North Korea in recent months has embarked on a series of ambitious tests of nuclear weapons technology and has threatened to strike the mainland United States.
Meanwhile, Trump is poised next week to decertify Iran’s compliance with a deal limiting its nuclear program. Under the 2015 accord, Iran pledged that “under no circumstances” would it “ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons” and said its aim was only to make progress on “an exclusively peaceful” nuclear energy program.
Separately, the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi, has come under fire for failing to stop or condemn the ethnic cleansing of her nation’s Rohingya Muslim minority in recent months.
William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.
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Bergdahl expected to plead guilty, avoid trial
Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was held captive by the Taliban for half a decade after abandoning his Afghanistan post, is expected to plead guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, two individuals with knowledge of the case said.
Bergdahl’s decision to plead guilty rather than face trial marks another twist in an eight-year drama that caused the nation to wrestle with difficult questions of loyalty, negotiating with hostage takers and America’s commitment not to leave its troops behind. President Donald Trump has called Bergdahl a “no-good traitor” who “should have been executed.”
The decision by the 31-year-old Idaho native leaves open whether he will return to captivity for years — this time in a U.S. prison — or receive a lesser sentence that reflects the time the Taliban held him under brutal conditions. He says he had been caged, kept in darkness, beaten and chained to a bed.
Bergdahl could face up to five years on the desertion charge and a life sentence for misbehavior.
Freed three years ago, Bergdahl had been scheduled for trial in late October. He had opted to let a judge rather than a military jury decide his fate, but a guilty plea later this month will spare the need for a trial.
Sentencing will start on Oct. 23, according to the individuals with knowledge of the case. They weren’t authorized to discuss the case and demanded anonymity. During sentencing, U.S. troops who were seriously wounded searching for Bergdahl in Afghanistan are expected to testify, the individuals said.
It was unclear whether prosecutors and Bergdahl’s defense team had reached any agreement ahead of sentencing about how severe a penalty prosecutors will recommend.
An attorney for Bergdahl, Eugene Fidell, declined to comment on Friday. Maj. Justin Oshana, who is prosecuting the case, referred questions to the U.S. Army, which declined to discuss whether Bergdahl had agreed to plead guilty.
“We continue to maintain careful respect for the military-judicial process, the rights of the accused and ensuring the case’s fairness and impartiality during this ongoing legal case,” said Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman.
Bergdahl was a 23-year-old private first class in June 2009 when, after five months in Afghanistan, he disappeared from his remote infantry post near the Pakistan border, triggering a massive search operation.
Videos soon emerged showing Bergdahl in captivity by the Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan in the years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and harbored al-Qaida leaders including Osama bin Laden as they plotted against America. For years, the U.S. kept tabs on Bergdahl with drones, spies and satellites as behind-the-scenes negotiations played out in fits and starts.
In May 2014, he was handed over to U.S. special forces in a swap for five Taliban detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison, fueling an emotional U.S. debate about whether Bergdahl was a hero or a deserter.
As critics questioned whether the trade was worth it, President Barack Obama stood with Bergdahl’s parents in the White House Rose Garden and defended the swap. The United States does not “leave our men or women in uniform behind,” Obama declared, regardless of how Bergdahl came to be captured. The Taliban detainees were sent to Qatar.
“Whatever those circumstances may turn out to be, we still get an American soldier back if he’s held in captivity,” Obama said. “Period. Full stop.”
Trump, as a presidential candidate, was unforgiving of Bergdahl, who has been assigned to desk duty at a Texas Army base pending the outcome of his case. At campaign events, Trump declared that Bergdahl “would have been shot” in another era, even pantomiming the pulling of the trigger.
“We’re tired of Sgt. Bergdahl, who’s a traitor, a no-good traitor, who should have been executed,” Trump said at a Las Vegas rally in 2015.
Bergdahl’s guilty plea will follow several pretrial rulings against him that had complicated his defense. Army Col. Jeffery R. Nance, the judge, decided in June that testimony from troops wounded as they searched for him would be allowed during sentencing, a decision that strengthened prosecutors’ leverage to pursue stiffer punishment.
Some of Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers want him held responsible for any harm suffered by those who went looking for him. The judge ruled a Navy SEAL and an Army National Guard sergeant wouldn’t have found themselves in separate firefights if they hadn’t been searching.
The defense separately argued Trump’s scathing criticism unfairly swayed the case. The judge ruled otherwise. Nance wrote in February that Trump’s comments were “disturbing and disappointing” but didn’t constitute unlawful command influence by the soon-to-be commander in chief.
Bergdahl’s lawyers also contended that misbehavior before the enemy, the more serious charge, was legally inappropriate and too severe. They were rebuffed again. The judge said a soldier who leaves his post alone and without authorization should know he could face punishment. The misbehavior charge has rarely been used in recent decades, though there were hundreds of cases during World War II.
Defense attorneys don’t dispute that Bergdahl walked off his base without authorization. Bergdahl himself told a general during a preliminary investigation that he left intending to cause alarm and draw attention to what he saw as problems with his unit. An Army Sanity Board Evaluation concluded he suffered from schizotypal personality disorder.
The defense team has argued that Bergdahl can’t be held responsible for a long chain of events that included decisions by others about how to retrieve him that were far beyond his control.
———
Associated Press writer Jonathan Drew in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed to this report.
Trump suggests Senate Intelligence Committee investigate media companies
Why Isn’t the Senate Intel Committee looking into the Fake News Networks in OUR country to see why so much of our news is just made up-FAKE!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2017
Google’s new Clips camera is invasive, creepy, and perfect for a parent like me
At least a half-dozen times every week, I reach into my pocket and pull out my smartphone in an attempt to take a photo or video of something my kids are doing. As a dad, I’m eager to capture those magic, fleeting moments when my two boys are playing, not fighting. When one of them is nice to the dog for a change. When a kid is lost in their own world, building a universe around a set of blocks or a cardboard box.
More often than not, however, the act of trying to capture that moment breaks the spell. The kid looks up and stops focusing on his fantasy. The boys stop playing and start asking to see the phone. I’ve deleted dozens of photos and videos that capture them in the act of walking over to me, hand outstretched, asking with sudden urgency, “Can I see? Can I see?”
So I was intrigued by Google Clips, the new AI-driven camera the company showed off yesterday at its hardware event. It’s a little unit you can set on a table or bookshelf, or clip to a fence or shirt. Turn it on, and it starts watching its surroundings. It uses AI to learn which faces are important to you, then starts automatically capturing photos and videos. I was similarly excited by early promotional videos of parents in Google Glass playing with their young kids, capturing photos and videos in a hands-free way that didn’t interrupt the moment.
A lot of people don’t feel this way, though. Many have responded to this device by calling it creepy and invasive. This is a similar reaction to the one that tanked Google Glass. People don’t like the idea of an always-on camera watching them, doubly so if it’s powered by artificial intelligence and created by a company that makes its money by collecting your personal data and allowing advertisers to target you.
Those are all valid concerns, but I think they miss some crucial details of how the product was designed, and the use cases that Google is smartly pushing.
First, the camera doesn’t share data or images with any of Google’s cloud-connected services. The AI system is localized to the hardware, and the photos and videos it takes are also stored on the device. You can review them using an app, and transfer them to your phone over Wi-Fi. Everything is encrypted, and nothing gets shared to the web or social media unless you decide to do that.
Do I trust Google to actually respect my privacy? Yeah, I do. Secretly exfiltrating intimate photos of its customers and their families doesn’t help Google sell more ads, and it most definitely will be a huge PR nightmare if discovered. Google Photos is, with customers’ explicit permission, already getting hundreds of millions of images to study. Google understands that, when it comes to hardware, privacy can be a strong selling point.
Will some clever hacker figure out a way to tap into a Clips camera and make off with the images? Maybe. But what would photos of me and my family futzing around in our living room be worth? I’m personally a lot more worried about credit rating agencies and health care providers leaking everything from my Social Security number to my driver’s license.
Now, I wouldn’t wear Clips on me when going to public places. I also wouldn’t attach it to the jungle gym at the local park and assume it will only capture shots of my kids, or that other parents won’t be justifiably freaked out. A device like this seems appropriate only in a private space where everyone has given their consent. The fact that Google put a heavy emphasis on privacy and security while introducing the device makes me think it learned from the Google Glass fiasco.
(Quick aside: you could argue I’m using these gadgets to craft a mom-and-pop surveillance state for my kids. That’s one of the weird things about being a parent in this day and age. I’m my kids’ legal guardian for the next 18 years or so, and so I get to make most of their life decisions. But if they told me they didn’t want a photo or video shared publicly, I wouldn’t. And as they get older, they will need more privacy. I don’t plan on keeping a video camera in a teenager’s room.)
So, that gets back to whether Clips will be worth using, and whether it can deliver some value. For parents of young children, I’m going to guess it will, and I think I have some evidence. Strangely enough, one of my favorite apps to use recently is the one that comes with my home security camera from Logi (formerly Logitech). It has a feature called Daily Brief that shows you a high-speed capture of the last 24 hours. It slows down when it detects a lot of motion and records sparingly when no one is around. It’s making decisions, in other words, about what’s worth recording.
I keep the camera in my kids’ room so I can hear and see them at night. It helps when they decide it would be fun to scale a bookshelf, or when I want to know if they are actually asleep before turning on the TV in the living room. It’s been in there long enough that we don’t pay attention to it, so it captures the glorious, mundane activity of our lives in a completely candid way.
The video quality isn’t great and it’s very sped up, but it’s still fun to peek at the little moments you might otherwise miss. Sometimes one of my boys will wake in the middle of the night, find something to do, then fall back asleep. Sometimes they play together in the morning for a while before rousing their sleepy parents by jumping on their heads. There are tantrums and bedtime stories and everything in between.
I’ll have to spend some time with Clips before I can judge if it actually learns to capture interesting moments and properly safeguards that data. But as a parent, I understand immediately the pain point a device like this could solve, and am eager to see if it can deliver on the promise of an ambient camera that can live in my home and make intelligent choices about what memories to preserve.
Catalonia Separatism Revives a Long-Dormant Spanish Nationalism
Catalan separatism has been fueled by economic complaints. But Catalan grievances also touch on Spain’s relative suppression of regional diversity, such as rules that prohibit lawmakers from speaking in their own languages in the Spanish Parliament.
The sense of rejection has helped fuel Catalonia’s independence drive, even as the rejection of Spain has, in turn, revived interest in a Spanish identity.
“When I saw that they wanted to leave, my identity started to feel more Spanish,” said María García, the 60-year-old caretaker of a Madrid apartment block festooned with several large flags. “I felt upset and hurt that they wanted to leave.”
While some are reveling in their Spanishness, others are searching for a singular national identity nonetheless embraces regional differences.
“Spain is more than the interpretation of the right wing,” said Pablo Iglesias, the leader of Podemos, whose left-wing vision of a pluralistic Spain would also involve the abolition of the monarchy.
“Spain has different identities,” Mr. Iglesias said. “It’s more than the Spanish flag. Spain is the Spanish people, and the Spanish people are very plural and very diverse.”
On Sunday, the day of the Catalan referendum, a group of right-wingers waved Spanish flags in Puerta del Sol, a main square in Madrid. But they were outnumbered by a far larger group that sought to simultaneously condemn the assault on Catalan voters and express support for a unified Spain.
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Unlike the hard-line nationalists, this larger group carried flags from different regions. At one point, they even chanted in Catalan to show that they supported Catalonia’s right to self-determination, even as they hoped the Catalans would decide to remain.
In the process, some attendees said they were trying to break the right-wing monopoly on patriotism — building on ideas promoted by Podemos.
“Currently the idea of a patriot is someone who says that Spanish is the only language we can use,” said José Antonio Bautiste, an editor at La Marea, a left-wing political magazine. He said that Spaniards needed to understand that “diversity is strength.”
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Tropical depression expected to develop today and head toward Gulf Coast
The National Hurricane Center on Wednesday again increased the chances that the next tropical depression of the season will form — possibly later today — and it is forecast to move into the Gulf of Mexico.
The system, called Invest 90L for now, was a broad area of low pressure in the southwest Caribbean as of Wednesday morning.
In addition to Invest 90L, there is another tropical wave near Florida that is not expected to develop. (NHC)
It continues to show signs of getting more organized, and forecasters said a tropical depression is likely to develop as soon as today.
The Air Force Reserve’s Hurricane Hunters are scheduled to take a closer look at the system this afternoon.
Invest 90L is forecast to move slowly northwestward near or across parts of Honduras and Nicaragua, then into the northwest Caribbean and into the southern Gulf by Saturday, the hurricane center said.
After that it’s highly uncertain where it could go — except north.
Computer forecast models show potential landfall points from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle.
Hurricanes that Alabama may never forget
The National Weather Service office in Mobile is also watching the system and said it’s still far too early to say where it will go — and how strong it will be when it gets here.
Forecasters said an area of strong high pressure over the western Atlantic and Southeast will influence the system’s path.
For Invest 90L to move northward toward the northern Gulf Coast there will need to be a weakness in that ridge.
That weakness could come from another tropical wave that was located near southern Florida on Wednesday morning.
Forecasters will be closely watching that wave’s path, because it could affect where Invest 90L eventually goes.
Computer models are not of one mind on where the weaker wave will end up.
It could track west, which could produce a weakness in the central Gulf, and Invest 90L could track northward toward the central Gulf Coast, the weather service said.
If the weaker wave moves north over the Florida peninsula, Invest 90L could take a more northeasterly track into the eastern Gulf, forecasters said.
“The more westerly track would provide us with strengthening onshore flow and wet weather over the weekend, while the eastern track would provide us with more of an offshore flow and dry weather,” the weather service said.
Data from the Hurricane Hunters will be important to pinpoint the center of the system and gauge its strength. That information will also be fed into computer models as they plot its track.
The next name on the storm list is Nate.
Theresa May, Coughing and Caught by a Prankster, Endures a Speech to Forget
Then, toward the end of the address, letters began to fall from the slogan behind her onstage.
Few problems with the set as Theresa May gives her speech! Watch behind the PM… #CPC17 pic.twitter.com/8kVC3lqDIO
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BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight)
Oct. 4, 2017
The speech highlighted the problems confronting Mrs. May — her battle to complete it seeming to some like a metaphor for her struggling premiership, the set of mishaps overshadowing the messages she hoped would dominate the news.
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The four-day conference in Manchester is the first since Mrs. May gambled by calling a general election in June, in which her Conservative Party lost its majority after an unexpectedly strong performance from the opposition Labour Party, destroying much of her authority in the process.
Under the left-wing leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s anti-austerity message struck a chord, particularly with younger voters, who turned out in greater numbers than usual, leaving many Conservative activists in Manchester wondering how to compete.
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As the debate about the Conservative Party’s future has unfolded at the conference center and beyond, Mrs. May’s potential successors have had a chance to grab the limelight, and none took that opportunity more ruthlessly than the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, who has made two interventions undermining Mrs. May’s strategy for negotiating Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, known as Brexit.
On Wednesday, Mrs. May promised more homes would be built to tackle the country’s housing crisis, detailed a cap on energy prices and promised to forge a British version of the American dream.
She apologized also to Conservative Party members for an election campaign that was “too scripted, too presidential.”
But, Mrs. May was soon interrupted by a prankster, who handed her a P45 — a form that is sent to Britons who lose their jobs — saying “Boris asked me to give you this,” before being ejected from the hall.
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