Putin’s Russia: Don’t Walk, Don’t Eat, and Don’t Drink
BY MASHA GESSEN

Last Saturday, on a beautiful, sunny afternoon, a friend and I were in Moscow discussing precautions. I confessed to a fear of apartment-building entryways because two people I knew, the parliament member Galina Starovoitova and the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, had been shot dead on their way up to their apartments. “Ever since Nemtsov was killed,” my friend said, referring to the February shooting of a Putin opponent, “I don’t know anything about precautions anymore. What are you supposed not to do now—walk the streets?”

It would also be prudent now to stop eating and drinking. On Wednesday, Vladimir Kara-Murza, a thirty-three-year-old opposition journalist, was hospitalized in critical condition after he collapsed at his office in Moscow. He was diagnosed with renal failure that had resulted from acute intoxication. Put more simply, the problem was poison.

It is not clear when and how Kara-Murza may have been poisoned, but Russian activists and journalists who get enough death threats and take them sufficiently seriously to hire bodyguards are also usually careful about what they ingest. Soon after the chess champion Garry Kasparov quit the sport to go into politics full time, in 2004, he hired a team of eight bodyguards, who not only accompanied him everywhere but also carried drinking water and food for Kasparov to eat at meals shared in public. Three years ago, Kasparov told me that what he liked most about foreign travel was being able to shed his bodyguards for a while. A year after that, threats drove him to leave Russia permanently.

Attacks by poisoning are possibly even more common in Russia than assassinations by gunfire. Most famously, Alexander Litvinenko, a secret-police whistle-blower, was killed by polonium in London, in 2006. Last week, British newspapers reported that a Russian businessman who dropped dead while jogging in a London suburb in 2012 had been killed by a rare plant poison. He had been a key witness in a money-laundering case that had originally been exposed by the Moscow accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who was tortured to death, in 2009, in a Russian jail.

At this point, I should be used to seeing backlash against Emma Sulkowicz, but I still wasn’t fully prepared for what came this week: endless tittering of people around me in real life and in my social feeds saying they “weren’t sure” about Emma’s choice to carry her mattress to Columbia’s graduation; the insistence that Emma’s alleged assailant Paul Nungesser had been “proven innocent” by Columbia and exonerated by the NYPD; the posters someone put up around Columbia with Emma’s picture on them, calling her a “PRETTY LITTLE LIAR.”

Every time I read another version of this narrative—that Nungesser merely “picked the wrong friends,” that the complaints against him were a calculated vendetta—my stomach flopped. Don’t forget: before he appealed away the conviction, Paul Nungesser was found responsible for sexually assaulting a woman at Columbia. And I’m writing this because that woman was me.

When I filed the complaint against Paul, I didn’t know it would turn into a national event. It was over a year before Emma started carrying that weight, months before what happened at Columbia helped sparked a national dialogue about rape on college campus. I was just trying to do the right thing.

The incident happened my junior year at Columbia, when Paul followed me upstairs at a party, came into a room with me uninvited, closed the door behind us, and grabbed me. I politely said, “Hey, no, come on, let’s go back downstairs.” He didn’t listen. He held me close to him as I said no, and continued to pull me against him. I pushed him off and left the room quickly. I told a few friends and my boyfriend at the time how creepy and weird it was. I tried to find excuses for his behavior. I did a decent job of pushing it out of my mind.
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Facebook Tells Vendors to Pay Workers at Least $15/Hour

Workplace benefits at Silicon Valley's biggest names including Google and Apple are the stuff of legend. Now tech powerhouse Facebook is entering the minimum wage fight, implementing new standards on benefits for its contractors and vendors.

Vendors or contractors in the U.S. who do a "substantial amount of work" with the social media company will be required to pay their workers at least $15 an hour. Other requirements include offering at least 15 paid days off for vacation, sick pay and holidays.

Additionally, individuals who do not currently receive parental leave will be offered $4,000 in "new child" benefits, according to a blog posted on Facebook by COO Sheryl Sandberg.

While other tech companies have boosted benefits for some security guards and shuttle drivers, Facebook is among the first tech giants to publicly take a stance on the minimum wage. The federal minimum wage stands at $7.25 an hour.

I endorse Cruz for 2016. The media is going to try to use this against him. But they have been thoroughly discredited in the past week. They are aligned with our enemies.

Get behind Cruz. I know its early — but the truth is, it’s late in the fight. I have been considering this for some time and will write a more comprehensive post when time permits, but Cruz is the best candidate in the field. Bar none.

The conquered media is viciously enforcing the sharia in their attacks on me. But I believe it does more to expose them than damage our fight for freedom. My email box is crashing with emails of support — tens of thousands of letters.

The media has been outed. If we had a responsible media, they would report more of the positive developments in light of the terror attack. The jihadists were the end of the line. By drawing them out, we exposed their network. We were able to expose the network without getting anyone killed. The FBI are now going after the sources. They are gleaning intel from their computers as we speak. We smoked out a terror structure.
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