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PG&E waffles on California blackouts, fueling confusion; six die as Bolivian protests continue.

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The blackouts that never came

• A portion of the areas Pacific Gas and Electric Company scheduled for a wildfire-prevention blackout never had the lights go out on Wednesday. [San Francisco Chronicle / Carolyn Said]
• In a fourth round of blackouts scheduled by PG&E, only around 48,000 customers of the notified 300,000 were without power beginning Wednesday morning. The majority of the power outages occur within Napa and Sonoma counties. [Wall Street Journal / Talal Ansari and Jim Carlton]
• Many residents were angered by the blackouts, as well as cancellations. “Ultimately, PG&E is putting the responsibility for their infrastructure on their customers,” said Troy Steinbach, a parent who stayed home with his child as he was unable to find childcare with many temporary school closures during the planned blackout. [Sacramento Bee / Michael McGough and Ryan Sabalow]
• Throughout the series of blackouts, around 1,600 cell towers shut down and one county alone suffered up to $70 million in economic losses during the October blackouts. [Mother Jones / Marisa Endicott]
• The fire prevention techniques often didn’t work. New brushfires were still sparked, and older ones raged on in the darkness. [Vox / Umair Irfan]
• PG&E isn’t the only player at fault for the bungled attempts to control the fires. AP reports that California’s wildfire management infrastructure has built a system that fails to address causes or create a safer power supply network. [AP News / Jonathan J. Cooper]
• Other Western states might soon face similar problems as California looks to export its energy infrastructure to its neighbors. [Forbes / Chuck DeVore]
• Vox’s David Roberts writes that a rapid and deep reworking of California’s energy network is needed, before it’s too late. [Vox / David Roberts]

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Unrest continues in Bolivia

• Protesters are not satisfied by Bolivia’s interim president’s promises for a new election, amid deadly clashes with military forces. [BBC]
• After protests initially broke out amid accusations of vote fixing in the most recent presidential election, President Evo Morales stepped down on November 10 and shortly thereafter fled to Mexico. [Vox / Riley Beggin]
• Just a little over a week after Morales’s resignation, at least six people were killed in violence related to demonstrations. In the protests before Morales departed for Mexico, the death toll was thought to be around 30. [NPR / Laurel Wamsley]
• Interim President Jeanine Áñez, a political rival to the right of Morales, is seen by many of his supporters as having deposed him in a coup. [NPR / Laurel Wamsley]
• But it’s more complicated than that. The Washington Post published a piece focused on dispelling myths about the protests in Bolivia. [Washington Post / Carew Boulding, Raymond Foxworth, Calla Hummel, Jami Nelson Nuñez and V. Ximena Velasco-Guachalla]
• In light of the most recent developments in Bolivia, Nicaragua is facing its own barrage of unrest. [Reuters / Drazen Jorgic]

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Miscellaneous

• A wall might have saved Venice from the devastation of its recent floods, but lack of support led to the project not being finished in time. [Wall Street Journal / Margherita Stancati and Eric Sylvers]
• NPR’s international podcast Rough Translation takes a look at what it’s like to be in Ukraine during the impeachment scandal and the global misunderstanding of corruption. [NPR]
• Massachusetts passed a strict ban on the sale of flavored tobacco and vape products, as well as requiring insurance to cover treatments to stop smoking. [Boston Globe / Matt Stout and Victoria McGrane]
• 2019 celebrated an abundance of incredible female rappers. Hardly any of them are up for Grammys. [Billboard / J’na Jefferson]
• Israel’s Justice Ministry announced it will indict Prime Minister Netanyahu on fraud, breach of trust, and bribery. It’s an unprecedented move. [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

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Verbatim

“These aren’t debates. These are one-minute assertions. And I don’t think there’s anybody who hasn’t been taking shots at me, which is okay. I’m a big boy, don’t get me wrong.” [Joe Biden on his lifelong battle with a speech impediment and how it’s impacted his run for president in 2020]

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Watch this: The destruction of the Amazon rainforest

This year, international media outlets ran headlines about the imminent danger of the Amazon fires. That was only the beginning of it. [YouTube / Sam Ellis and Ana Terra Athayde]

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Read more

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Congress passes bill to avert another government shutdown — for now

The Pete Buttigieg surge, explained

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Iran imposed a nationwide internet outage after citizens flooded the streets to protest the government’s hike in oil prices. At least five people were killed in the demonstrations, which show no sign of subsiding. | ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images

After protesters railed against increased fuel prices, connectivity fell to just 5 percent. The Reset podcast investigates.

Iran’s government announced on November 15, 2019, that it had plans to increase the price of fuel by at least 50 percent. The next day, Iranians took to the streets in protest. And the Iranian government reacted to its citizens organizing by shutting down the internet for the whole country.

The shutdown persisted for five days with practically every Iranian citizen lacking internet access or wireless data service. Finally, on the fifth day, Iran began restoring access in Tehran as well as in a number of provinces.

How is it even possible to shut down the internet for an entire country?

Lily Hay Newman, a senior security reporter at Wired magazine, explains on this episode of the Reset podcast that in order to get the internet to go down in the first place, the government had to get around a number of fail-safes.

“With this Iranian shutdown, which is so far beyond anything the government had done before, they likely grappled with these protective mechanisms. They would take down a portion of the network and then the network would automatically reroute around that dead portion to keep providing service. And then they would have to kind of do a whack-a-mole type situation to get it all under control.”

The “whack-a-mole situation,” as Newman describes to host Arielle Duhaime-Ross, “involves the government coordinating with internet service providers, telecoms, and infrastructure providers to actually make all of this happen.”

What this means for Iranians is that their government didn’t face a lot of resistance when it asked private companies to turn off internet access for their paying customers.

Alp Toker, the executive director of Netblocks, an NGO that monitors the governance of the internet, tells Duhaime-Ross quite frankly that he’s never seen such a “complex shutdown” before.

“We’ve been tracking a lot of shutdowns, and they are done for a lot of different reasons around the world. We always try to take the governments on good faith [and] see what they’ve done, whether there might be a justification. But, to be honest, in each case, it’s caused more harm than [good]. If it’s a protest or even a riot, switching off the Internet makes people more angry.”

Another alarming fact is that Iran might further isolate its citizens from the rest of the world through its own intranet, which the government has been developing in order to give the regime more control over what content and services people can access in the country.

According to Toker, a sovereign internet — like the one Russia was planning on building — leads to parallel internets and the loss of global connectivity.

But Newman argues that there might be an unintended benefit to the oppressive government’s total blackout. “Perhaps it could fuel even more people in the streets, going outside and saying, ‘The only way I can get information is to go talk to my neighbors [and] going to a protest.’”

Listen to the entire conversation here. Below, we’ve also shared a lightly edited transcript of Toker’s conversation with Duhaime-Ross.

This episode of the Reset podcast was published on November 21, 2019. Events may have changed.

Listen and subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

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Arielle Duhaime-Ross

So the internet’s out in Iran. And that means reporting on what’s going on within the country is a lot harder.

It’s actually in these moments that I personally realize how screwed journalists around the world would be without the web.

But there are some people out there who devote themselves to keeping track of these kinds of shutdowns — and they are a little bit more accustomed to navigating these communication obstacles and interpreting them.

One of those people is Alp Toker, the executive director of Netblocks, an NGO that monitors the governance of the internet. He’s based in London, and I asked him if he’s seen an internet shutdown like this before.

Alp Toker

Well, in short, we haven’t.

It’s been extraordinary. It’s been a complex shutdown. It’s had many facets to it. It’s also impacted a lot of people at a time of crisis in various ways. It’s just unique.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

This shutdown was actually sort of gradual. The government initially just slowed down the internet for tons of people and then actually spent 24 hours just systematically trying to shut down the internet. What does that tell us about how the government is viewing these protests? Because this was a response to the protests.

Alp Toker

Well, it stands to reason that the authorities are worried, given how extreme this measure is. It’s not something that Iran does. This is about severing connectivity at the core.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Is there a link between the intranet project Iran is reportedly working on and the protests?

Please note: This is a developing situation, so I want to be clear here that while other news organizations have reported on what Alp is about to say, it’s still really hard to know exactly what’s going on in Iran.

Alp Toker

So researchers knew that some kind of national intranet was coming. But there was no clear timeline. Would it be next year or a decade from now? And what wasn’t expected was that we might start seeing signs of the intranet during an internet shutdown that’s targeting protests.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Are we actually seeing signs of it being booted up now?

Alp Toker

All indications are that this system has been booted up. And that’s what we see from the data, from the reports, from all sources. What’s happened is: first this shutdown, but then you’ve got this network coming back online. But without the rest of the world there. So you’ve got a parallel intranet being formed in front of our eyes, where the people want to reach out but they can’t.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

This feels like big news, that Iran’s intranet is essentially its mode of communication. What we think of as the internet is essentially changing completely. That’s what you’re telling me?

Alp Toker

Right. Because now you’ve got to ask, which is a real internet? What if you have one of these or two of these? Is it the one inside Iran? Is it the one outside? What if Russia also does the same thing? Russia’s had some plans to [create] a sovereign internet and then you start developing parallel internets and you lose this global connectivity, this achievement of humanity, which has brought good but has also brought some perhaps less desirable things to the world. But that’s something we’ve all taken for granted until now. It looks like that’s changing.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Do you think the government planned things this way? Was this premeditated?

Alp Toker

It’s difficult to believe that this could be orchestrated. These protests were organic. They were caused by a specific trigger as the fuel prices rose.

A very cynical look at it might say that there was some planning. But honestly, it looks like the internet was cut. And then there was the realization that this is not good for the economy, this is not good for the situation of the country.

And [separately] there was this intranet that was being developed and it looks like that might have been switched ahead of schedule and might have enabled at scale.

So it remains to be seen how and why this is happening now. But it’s happened.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Has this happened before in a country? Is there a country that has this kind of an intranet in operation and countrywide?

Alp Toker

The only similar high-profile country that has a system like this is North Korea.

Not much is known about the network that North Korea operates, but it doesn’t have many users. It’s specifically for those privileged [few] who can access this kind of network. And it isn’t connected to the global internet. Because it’s so isolated, it’s difficult to say how similar it is to what’s happening now.

But you can look at Russia, which has been making plans for it but hasn’t activated this kind of system on a national scale.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Have other countries in other parts of the world been affected by a government-controlled internet shutdown and communications blackout like this before?

Alp Toker

A recent case is Iraq that has been cut off. First they switch off social media, then they switch off the internet completely.

And the human rights organizations are still stumped as to how many people have lost their lives. It’s created an information black hole that’s going to take years and there may not be an answer for. So that’s just one example.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Is there ever an instance where shutting down the internet is acceptable?

Back in April when Sri Lanka suffered some terrorist attacks, the government decided to shut down its internet to stop the spread of misinformation. And actually the country got a lot of praise for that.

So is it ever okay to do this kind of thing and shut down the internet?

Alp Toker

We’ve been tracking a lot of extended shutdowns, and they are done for a lot of different reasons around the world. We always try to take the governments on good faith to begin with. We try to see what they’ve done, whether there might be a justification. But to be honest, in each case, it’s caused more harm than any problem it’s aimed to solve. If it’s a protest or even a riot, switching off the internet makes people more angry.

Let’s look at the situation in Sri Lanka. There you have these devastating terror attacks. Massive loss of life. And in the aftermath, there are disputes, groups that are blaming each other. And authorities introduce a blackout. They say it will prevent these attacks. They say it will stop these attacks. The problem is there is no evidence at all that it actually stops these attacks, because at the end of the day, people still know where to go if they want to attack a group of the minority. The problem is, it just stops the reporting. So nobody knows that it’s happening. And the problem is when you need it, when that press is really there when people are dying, then you’ve already lost the only recourse you have.

Before we set up Netblocks, there were efforts to track internet shutdowns by hand or using various data sources. But a lot of this was missing — the information about how long it has lasted, what kind of disruption it’s been.

The truth is, we don’t know. We read stories, we read claims in archives that there was an internet cut. But that could have affected one city. It could have affected one street. And because the data wasn’t there. And that is lost to history.

Because you think if a country is shut down, the whole country, the world would know. But by its nature, there’s no way to record it. You don’t know if your neighbor’s offline. You don’t know if the next city is offline. You’re just out of information.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

This is actually the situation of if there’s a tree that falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Alp Toker

Absolutely. This is the technical implementation of the falling tree in the woods.

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Listen to the full episode and subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Barack Obama raised millions of dollars for the Democratic Party. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

“I don’t care” if it’s not “your perfect candidate.”

Barack Obama exhorted some of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest Democratic donors to “chill” in their debate over the party’s candidates, seeking to ease the tensions among tech billionaires who have broken into separate camps backing Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and — most surprisingly — Elizabeth Warren.

Even if the nominee is not “your perfect candidate,” Obama said, “I don’t care.”

At a high-dollar fundraiser on Thursday nestled across the street from hiking trails winding through the Los Altos Hills in California, the former US president downplayed 2020 candidates’ differences as merely disagreements over “tactics” — even as he reiterated concerns about his party possibly going too far to the left.

“Everybody needs to chill out about the candidates,” Obama said. “But gin up about the prospect of rallying behind whoever emerges from this process and making sure that we’re hitting the ground running.”

Obama’s remarks were some of his most direct and candid of the entire Democratic campaign so far. Over hors d’oeuvres that included tea-smoked duck and red curry cornbread, Obama told about 100 donors — some of whom paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend — to put to rest any internecine party battles once the primary concluded.

“The choice is so stark and the stakes are so high that you cannot afford to be ambivalent in this race,” he said.

Obama has gingerly handled the 2020 race up until recently, when he has seemed to offer some veiled criticism of the further-left candidates, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Obama said last week that most voters don’t want to “tear down the system.”

And though he was calling for unity, Obama reiterated some of that message on Thursday.

“When you listen to the average voter — even ones who are stalwart Democrats, are more independent or low-information voters — they don’t feel that things are working well but they’re also nervous about changes that might take away what little they have,” he said. “So there’s always a balance in politics between hope and fear.”

The event — which featured a top-ticket price of $355,000 — is expected to raise over $3 million for the Democratic National Committee. The event was hosted at the home of Karla Jurvetson, an ascendant Democratic megadonor in Silicon Valley politics. Other key fundraisers for the event included former Twitter executive Katie Jacobs Stanton and former Obama ambassador Denise Bauer.

Stephen Curry, the star point guard of the Golden State Warriors, also attended alongside his wife Ayesha, who spoke at the event.

Obama’s speech followed a call to arms by Democratic powerhouse fundraiser Amy Rao, who called on the 100 donors gathered in a cavernous living room to “give so much that it hurts.”

Obama echoed that sentiment at the conclusion of his remarks.

“If you’ve got a lot of money, give some more money. You can afford it. I know because I can afford it,” Obama said. “I see what’s happening with your companies. You can do more.”

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The fifth Democratic presidential primary debate took place in Atlanta, Georgia on November 20, 2019. | Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Vox’s Today, Explained podcast covers what we learned from the November Democratic debate.

The fifth Democratic debate in the 2020 election cycle came after multiple days of public hearings in the impeachment inquiry. So, naturally, the moderators kicked off the night with the topic. Beyond impeachment, the debate didn’t feature too many robust policy conversations. But we did learn more about some of the candidates through questions about income inequality, the environment, and race. Vox’s Ella Nilsen joins host Sean Rameswaram on this episode of Today, Explained, Vox’s daily explainer podcast, to break it down.

The debate also proved that the top tier of candidates is fluid. Polling has remained steady with Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders consistently in the lead. Recently, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg has joined the list of candidates pulling ahead of the pack.

To understand what’s behind the Pete Buttigieg surge, here’s a lightly edited transcript of Matthew Yglesias’s conversation with Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram.

Subscribe to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and ART19.

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Matthew Yglesias

A lot of the other main candidates in this race, they were sort of very well-known before the primaries started. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden. Those were sort of big heavyweight celebrities. Pete has really sort of had to bootstrap a campaign, like literally nobody knew who he was when he started. It seemed like a joke candidacy.

But he was incredibly available to the media, he went on all kinds of podcasts everywhere. He went on The Weeds. Then he became quite popular with donors. He raised a ton of money. And now he is running TV ads strategically in the early states. And the ads seem to be working. You know, he’s still behind, obviously, but it’s been a real kind of success story out of a very big field.

Sean Rameswaram

What’s Mayor Pete’s appeal?

Matthew Yglesias

I think something that Pete appeals to is people who like the idea of a more moderate Democrat, somebody who will not frighten the voters with radical positions, but who is still something of an outsider, something of a fresh face, right? That, you know, there’s a sense that you need somebody who is not part of this system and not part of the establishment, but also isn’t a frightening radical. At the same time, you hear incredible hostility to him from, like, members of Congress, right? Democratic Party elected officials really see him as a guy who’s like jumping in line. It offends their sensibilities as professional politicians to see somebody that young with that thin a resumé. Something on top of the polls for Iowa caucuses.

Sean Rameswaram

Is his resumé that thin? I mean, he’s a veteran. He is an elected official. He speaks more languages than your average American. Is he unqualified?

Matthew Yglesias

It’s an impressive resume, right? I mean, if you were talking about a candidate for statewide run, right? If you were talking about governor or senator, you’d say this is great. This is a young guy with a great resume. For somebody in his mid 30s, right?

But as a resumé for a president, it’s very unusual. I mean, South Bend, Indiana, is a small city, right? It’s the fourth-largest city in Indiana. And the idea of making the leap from there to the presidency with nothing in between is very unusual. Trump has obviously changed the rules of the game, but to people who have made careers in politics, right, Amy Klobuchar was district attorney and now she’s been a senator for a long time and now she’s running for president. And there’s this guy who has been mayor of a city of 100,000 people. And now he’s like, “I’m going to be president.” And it rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

Sean Rameswaram

What is he actually running on?

Matthew Yglesias

He early on made a big deal out of political reform. He talked a lot about the importance of changing the filibuster, of looking at changing how the judicial system works and really emphasizing the need to democratize the political process.

Then on policy substance. You know, he’s offering what would have been considered a very progressive agenda 10 years ago but looks moderate today. And that’s a big sort of public option plan. He calls it Medicare For All Who Want It, some increased funding for college and other educational subsidies. He’s got a sort of what he calls a Douglass plan for black America. I’d say it addresses redlining, a lot of issues like that. It’s not shocking stuff, right? He’s very much from the center of the Democratic Party today. What was distinctive about him in his early presentation was really that emphasis on political reform, which he has emphasized a little bit less more recently and instead has drawn the contrast on health care with Sanders and Warren.

Sean Rameswaram

And just for the fun of it, how do you think someone like Mayor Pete matches up against Trump in a potential general election?

Matthew Yglesias

In some ways he cuts an appealing contrast with Trump, right? He’s young. He actually served in the military. He’s like a physically vigorous guy against this oldster. He’s very good, very quick on his feet. You know, good at answering extemporaneous questions. He seems knowledgeable in a way that Trump isn’t. At the same time, you know, if you’re thinking about Trump’s key electoral wins with white working-class voters in the northern Midwest, Buttigieg, you know, he will emphasize his Midwestern ties and the fact that South Bend is a post-industrial city.

But really, he’s the mayor of a college town, right? And his whole biography is in sort of elite professional circles. Right. Harvard, McKinsey. He goes back to his hometown. But he didn’t grow up there because his dad was a retired auto worker. His dad was a college professor. And you’ve got to wonder, right, does Pete have the connection with the right kind of voters to come and win? He’s he’s very weak in the primary with African Americans. And he doesn’t seem to have the persona to sort of get those white working class Obama-to-Trump switchers. At least, that would be my concern about him, more than, you know, can he go toe to toe verbally with Donald Trump? I think absolutely.

Sean Rameswaram

That being said, he is doing well in Iowa with a lot of middle-class voters.

Matthew Yglesias

In the early states where he’s advertised, he’s doing very, very well. In national polls, you know, he does well with sort of white college graduates, right. That’s sort of his core base of support. So, you know, that works in an Iowa caucus. It works potentially in a New Hampshire primary. And the question for him is going to be, can he broaden that base of support, right? If he wins in Iowa, he will get a surge of positive coverage that should give him a boost elsewhere. But how big of a boost and, in particular, can he make any kind of headway with African American voters? Because you see polls like of South Carolina where he’s getting zero percent of the black vote. And that’s not a winning strategy in a Democratic primary.

Sean Rameswaram

That being said, he’s come a long way. He’s doing well in Iowa, which is like, what, two-and-a-half months away at this point. Is there a chance that, you know, a surge in Iowa could mean that Mayor Pete’s gonna be a lot more prominent player in this race?

Matthew Yglesias

You never want to discount the guy who’s leading in the early states. That’s a big deal. It means something. It means other candidates will go after him. You know, at the same time, to keep it in perspective, right? What you really have here is a fascinating story. This guy nobody had heard of, this small city mayor getting into the conversation is much more interesting than the former Vice President kind of hanging out at 30 percent for months, but still 8 percent is not 30 percent.

Joe Biden is the guy who’s in first place. He’s been in first place. Warren and Sanders are nipping at his heels. Pete is way behind, right. The odds of him winning still seem pretty low to me. But it is the most interesting political story; how has this guy gone from nowhere to somewhere? But then the question is, can he go from somewhere to actually winning? That’s still a very uphill battle.

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