Latest news with #Weiner
New York Post
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Rock band frontman blasts music festival for canceling show for ‘political reasons'
Low Cut Connie, a Philadelphia-based rock band, is claiming its scheduled performance at a music festival this week was canceled because of politics. Frontman Adam Weiner posted a message to fans on social media on Monday saying the band had been pulled from the lineup for the 'Rocking the River' festival in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on Friday. Advertisement 'For the first time ever, my show has been canceled for 'political' reasons,' Weiner wrote to the band's Facebook page. 'The promoters in Luzerne County, PA feel that this weekend's Low Cut Connie show in Wilkes-Barre will be too controversial and polarizing —Low Cut Connie shows are quite the opposite!!' The annual summer concert series is advertised as a free event open to all ages. An AC/DC cover band has replaced Low Cut Connie for the July 25 lineup. In a video message, the musician called the county's decision 'so disappointing and upsetting.' 5 The annual summer concert series is advertised as a free event open to all ages. Penske Media via Getty Images Advertisement 5 Weiner said he believes diversity is one of America's strengths, and he wouldn't 'apologize' for using the terms. 'Why did they cancel the show?' he asked. 'They won't tell us, but they have indicated they are canceling my show for political reasons. Now, let me give you a little bit of context. If you've been to a Low Cut Connie Show, you know that onstage, I speak about diversity.' Weiner said he believes diversity is one of America's strengths, and he wouldn't 'apologize' for using the terms. Advertisement 'People don't like the word, but I will continue to use it because everyone is welcome at a Low Cut Connie show. 'Diversity' and 'inclusion' should not be dirty words,' he said. Weiner also suggested the band's protest song called 'Livin' in the USA' could've factored into the decision. 5 Weiner also suggested the band's protest song called 'Livin' in the USA' could've factored into the decision. The song, released in May, addresses the 'terror, the unease, the fear that so many people are experiencing right now in the United States.' Advertisement 'Because of these ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids that are absolutely inhumane and anti-American,' Weiner said. He called the show promoter's decision to cancel the performance 'cowardly.' 'We could have had a beautiful show this Friday,' he said, before comparing his experience to that of late-night host Stephen Colbert's, whose late-night comedy show was canceled last week. Colbert is an outspoken progressive. 5 Frontman Adam Weiner posted a message to fans on social media on Monday saying the band had been pulled from the lineup for the 'Rocking the River' festival in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on Friday. 5 He called the show promoter's decision to cancel the performance 'cowardly.' 'Artists like myself are losing work because of our principles, just like Stephen Colbert,' he said. A Luzerne County spokesperson told Fox News Digital, 'Our goal is to have a place where we can enjoy music, food, promote our community, have fun, be safe and free of politics and propaganda.' Low Cut Connie also pulled out of a scheduled Kennedy Center show in March in protest of President Donald Trump's takeover of the venue.
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Business Standard
3 days ago
- Politics
- Business Standard
The Mission: Tim Weiner's book explains how the CIA lost its way
Throughout The Mission, Weiner hammers on an agency that seems to be repeatedly blinded by its sense of American supremacy NYT THE MISSION: CIA in the 21st Century by Tim Weiner Published by Mariner 452 pages $35 On June 21, President Trump took to the airwaves to announce that his secret directive for the bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities had just been carried out. 'Tonight,' he proclaimed, 'I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success,' with those facilities 'completely and totally obliterated.' Trump's triumphalist tone was swiftly undercut by a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analysis that found the airstrikes were likely to set back Iran's nuclear capabilities by a mere few months. The furious president not only doubled down on his 'obliterated' claim but insisted that further analysis would confirm it. Sure enough, his Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director, John Ratcliffe, soon scurried forward to cast doubt on the DIA's assessment and to insist that 'new intelligence' from an unidentified source confirmed the sites had been 'severely damaged,' not quite Trump's adverb of choice, but close. Nothing on the ground is any clearer now, but to many observers one thing is: These events served as yet another example of the rank politicisation of America's pre-eminent intelligence agency. As Tim Weiner demonstrates in The Mission, this trend is likely only to accelerate with Trump in the White House. Both as a one-time reporter for The New York Times and as a book author, Weiner has made tracking the fluctuating fortunes of the American intelligence community his life's work. His masterly 'Legacy of Ashes,' detailing the CIA's first half-century, won a National Book Award in 2007. The Mission picks up where that book left off, narrating the agency's history beyond the fall of communism. It is exhaustive and prodigiously researched, but also curiously ungainly. The story begins in the 1990s. Grasping for a new mission in the wake of the Cold War, the CIA played a supporting role in the war on drugs, and then, after the 9/11 attacks, the war on terror. Agents hunted for the Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and tortured high-value prisoners in hopes of gaining information on future attacks. Much of the testimony, Weiner writes, was gathered by a quickly raised army of often inexperienced interrogators. At the same time, Weiner notes, intelligence officers often felt their intelligence was beside the point. As one former CIA Iraq operations chief insists, 'These guys would have gone to war if Saddam had a rubber band and a paper clip.' Throughout The Mission, Weiner hammers on an agency that seems to be repeatedly blinded by its sense of American supremacy. In the past decade and a half, the CIA has been caught off guard again and again, including in China, where the country's intelligence services apparently excel at rooting out and killing American assets. The agency was also back-footed by the onset of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2010, Weiner writes, because US spies depended on the accuracy of information coming from aging counterparts within the dictatorial regimes that were about to crumble in the unrest. Weiner saves his greatest scorn, however, for the first Trump administration, detailing both the vast web of contacts between his campaign staff and Russian intelligence officials as well as Trump's subsequent efforts to bring the CIA to heel, even as he leaned on his intelligence advisers to vet his rash proposals. 'How would we do,' Trump's first CIA director, Mike Pompeo, later recalled the president musing, 'if we went to war with Mexico?' There is something simultaneously illuminating and saddening in contemplating the course the CIA has travelled during the past quarter-century. In this regard, one episode Weiner recounts stands out. In 2007, the CIA gathered compelling evidence that Syria, no friend of the US, was well on its way to building a nuclear weapon. The news set off a spirited debate within the Bush administration over whether it should launch a pre-emptive strike to eliminate the site. The idea was vehemently opposed by one of Bush's closest advisers — 'We don't do Pearl Harbors' — and the bombing scheme was shelved (though it was taken over by a country willing to do the job: Israel). Compare that with Trump's 'Pearl Harbor' assault on Iran's nuclear facilities even though the CIA and almost every other Western intelligence agency had concluded that Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon. The attack starkly underscored just how shamelessly the American intelligence community has already succumbed to Trump's will. In this regard, Weiner's warnings about the peril facing both the CIA and the US seem prophetic.
New York Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
7 New Books We Love This Week
Every week, critics and editors at The New York Times Book Review pick the most interesting and notable new releases, from literary fiction and serious nonfiction to thrillers, romance novels, mysteries and everything in between. You can save the books you're most excited to read on a personal reading list, and find even more recommendations from our book experts. psychological Thriller A Beautiful Family A hum of low-grade unease accompanies a couple and their two young daughters on a New Zealand seaside vacation in 1985. Thrilled, at least in the abstract, by the tale of a girl who disappeared two years before and is presumed drowned, 10-year-old Alix and a boy she meets embark on a mission to find the body. Then someone else goes missing. Read our review. spicy heist novel The Payback Three down-on-their-luck mall workers, on the lam from a draconian new force known as the Debt Police, hatch a plan to live many a millennial's dream: an 'Ocean's Eleven'-esque heist of their student loan company to erase their debts and exact revenge. Read our review. history The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century In 2007, Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, rankled U.S. spy organizations with 'Legacy of Ashes,' a chronicle of the C.I.A.'s 20th-century failings that won a National Book Award. He's back with the story of the agency's evolution since Sept. 11 — a period when American covert services took an increasingly militaristic role in the Middle East and, Weiner contends, pushed the business of war deeper into the dark. Read our review. biography The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon In this double biography, Shapiro illustrates the unlikely partnership — business and personal — of the flamboyant publishing impresario George Putnam and the earnest young social worker and part-time pilot, Amelia Earhart, whom he recruited in 1928 to be the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. As her manager/husband, Putnam pushed Earhart's career in ever-riskier directions; the result was a tragic mystery that lingers today. Read our review. locked-room mystery The House on Buzzards Bay Old college friends are vacationing together at a house on the southern coast of Massachusetts when things start to go wrong: They begin to have nightmares, and then one of them disappears. Is this a 'Big Chill'-esque story? A novel about a haunted house in a malevolent town that doesn't much like outsiders? A murder mystery? Maybe it's all those things. Read our review. Literary Fiction Bonding 'Bonding' is the story of Mary, who is solitary, in her early 30s and tenuously employed in marketing for companies with names like Healthify. Our critic Dwight Garner wrote that the novel, which is 'about next-level dating apps, existential pharmacology, mass psychology and the marketing of the libidinal economy' may sound 'kinky and futuristic — and it is those things. But … Franklin's most salient gifts are old-fashioned ones. She's a confident storyteller with reserves of judgment and discrimination. You know from the first pages that you're reading the work of a novelist, not just someone who has written a novel.' Read our review. Horror House of Beth A literary agent's assistant leaves New York City and her girlfriend to move back to her New Jersey hometown, where she reconnects with — and marries — her childhood best friend, now a young widower and father. This novel is less a small-town rom-com than a queer, Gothic ghost story. Read our review.
Hamilton Spectator
14-07-2025
- Politics
- Hamilton Spectator
Book Review: ‘The Mission' reveals troubling political meddling in CIA after 9/11
The meeting place of facts, ego, ignorance and politics typically is a messy arena as Tim Weiner illustrates over and over in this powerful account of the Central Intelligence Agency actions since the 9/11 attacks. The title, 'The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century,' would seem to suggest a tidy, academic-style analysis. Instead, it's a riveting account of a vital institution that descended into turmoil with agents after 9/11 sometimes creating diabolical tortures and units operating seemingly on their own. The author details an agency that buckled under pressure from the younger President Bush to find evidence that Saddam Hussein had developed chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Compelling evidence was not to be found but Bush pressed on anyway with a military campaign to topple Hussein, killing 4,492 American service members in the process. Weiner leaves no doubt as to who is responsible in every misdeed and operational failure he describes — everyone in this 392-page narrative is identified by name. How Weiner persuaded so many people to talk on the record is a journalistic feat that should make this book impossible to dismiss. If 'The Mission' has a fault, it's that it is light on prescription — how do we insure that the CIA remains faithful — without political meddling — to its mission gathering the intelligence needed to keep America safe ? The CIA must reclaim its original mission, Weiner writes: 'Know thy enemies.' To do that work, the CIA has since its inception attracted some of America's brightest and most dedicated, willing to risk their lives to get the information the nation's top political and military leaders need. Consider counterterrorism expert Michael D'Andrea, for example. Weiner writes that D'Andrea worked 100 hours per week, obsessively pursuing al-Qaeda. How he managed that pace as a chain smoker is unexplored. Perhaps his vegetarian diet helped. Half of the book details how the CIA swerved far out of its intelligence-gathering lane after the 9/11 attacks and morphed into a paramilitary organization, calling its torture tactics 'enhanced interrogation techniques' and killing many thought to be terrorists absent the oversight that governs the military services. For example, one agent let a prisoner freeze to death in a dungeon-like 'fetid hellhole' at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. In the agent's defense, the post 9/11 months and years were a time of pervasive fear of another attack and relentless pressure on the CIA to prevent that. Some notable successes followed; agents penetrated both the Kremlin and Saddam Hussein's government. Knowledge is the essential tool of national security and peace and 'The Mission' makes it clear we let the CIA go off track at our peril. 'A new cold war is slowly escalating toward existential danger,' the author writes. 'Only good intelligence can prevent a surprise attack, a fatal miscalculation, a futile war.' ___ AP book reviews:
Winnipeg Free Press
14-07-2025
- Politics
- Winnipeg Free Press
Book Review: ‘The Mission' reveals troubling political meddling in CIA after 9/11
The meeting place of facts, ego, ignorance and politics typically is a messy arena as Tim Weiner illustrates over and over in this powerful account of the Central Intelligence Agency actions since the 9/11 attacks. The title, 'The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century,' would seem to suggest a tidy, academic-style analysis. Instead, it's a riveting account of a vital institution that descended into turmoil with agents after 9/11 sometimes creating diabolical tortures and units operating seemingly on their own. The author details an agency that buckled under pressure from the younger President Bush to find evidence that Saddam Hussein had developed chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Compelling evidence was not to be found but Bush pressed on anyway with a military campaign to topple Hussein, killing 4,492 American service members in the process. Weiner leaves no doubt as to who is responsible in every misdeed and operational failure he describes — everyone in this 392-page narrative is identified by name. How Weiner persuaded so many people to talk on the record is a journalistic feat that should make this book impossible to dismiss. If 'The Mission' has a fault, it's that it is light on prescription — how do we insure that the CIA remains faithful — without political meddling — to its mission gathering the intelligence needed to keep America safe ? The CIA must reclaim its original mission, Weiner writes: 'Know thy enemies.' To do that work, the CIA has since its inception attracted some of America's brightest and most dedicated, willing to risk their lives to get the information the nation's top political and military leaders need. Consider counterterrorism expert Michael D'Andrea, for example. Weiner writes that D'Andrea worked 100 hours per week, obsessively pursuing al-Qaeda. How he managed that pace as a chain smoker is unexplored. Perhaps his vegetarian diet helped. Half of the book details how the CIA swerved far out of its intelligence-gathering lane after the 9/11 attacks and morphed into a paramilitary organization, calling its torture tactics 'enhanced interrogation techniques' and killing many thought to be terrorists absent the oversight that governs the military services. For example, one agent let a prisoner freeze to death in a dungeon-like 'fetid hellhole' at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. In the agent's defense, the post 9/11 months and years were a time of pervasive fear of another attack and relentless pressure on the CIA to prevent that. Some notable successes followed; agents penetrated both the Kremlin and Saddam Hussein's government. Knowledge is the essential tool of national security and peace and 'The Mission' makes it clear we let the CIA go off track at our peril. 'A new cold war is slowly escalating toward existential danger,' the author writes. 'Only good intelligence can prevent a surprise attack, a fatal miscalculation, a futile war.' ___ AP book reviews:
