A regular Domino's Pizza customer's love for the fast-food chain recently helped saved his life.

Kirk Alexander of Salem, Oregon, has ordered a pizza from the chain almost everyday since 2009, according to the Huffington Post.

SEE ALSO: Pizza shop in hot water after posting controversial sign

Alexander is such a loyal customer that many of the location's employees know him well like general manager, Sarah Fuller.

"He orders every day, every other day," Fuller told KOIN. "His order pops up on the screen because he orders online. So we see it come across the screen and we're like, 'Oh, Kirk's order.'"

Related: See America's pizza styles:

Loyal customer's love for Domino's Pizza helps save his life

(Photo by Lawrence K. Ho/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

(Photo by Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

(Photo by Cyrus McCrimmon/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

(Photo By Brian Brainerd/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

(Photo by Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images)

But when Fuller's staff mentioned they hadn't seen his order come across the screen in a while she had a feeling something might be wrong.

She checked the restaurant's database and saw he hadn't ordered in 11 days, "which is not like him at all," she said.

Fuller sent one of her delivery drivers, Tracy Hamblen, to Alexander's house to check on him. When she arrived she heard Alexander screaming for help and called the police.

Alexander was rushed to the hospital where he was treated for a severe health issues.

Marion County Sheriff's Office thanked Hamblen for helping save Alexander's life.

But Fuller said it was just a part of the job.

"[Alexander is] just an important customer that's part of our family here at Domino's. He orders all the time so we know him. I think we were just doing our job checking in on someone we know who orders a lot. We felt like we needed to do something," she said.

More from AOL.com: Domino's workers credited with saving life of regular customer DJ Gazzo dishes about his rich musical history Search still on for 5-year-old who vanished after tornado 69 years ago

Summary: Kirk Alexander of Salem, Oregon, has ordered a pizza from the chain almost everyday since 2009, but recently something changed.


Blood testing company Theranos may be under federal investigation and its CEO banned from operating a lab for two years, but it still has at least one believer.

On Tuesday, Dr.William H. Foege, who is part of Theranos’ Scientific and Medical Advisory Board, published an op-ed on political news site TheHill.com outlining his reasons for joining and continuing to support the embattled company. Theranos announced its advisory board in April (check out the full board here), months after The Wall Street Journal started to publish reports that questioned the company’s technology.

“In my opinion, the very foundation of Theranos’ inventions—and its hundreds of patents—is incredible,” writes Foege. “The company’s intellectual property is clearly robust, and many potential partners still request meetings to learn more about the technologies,” he adds, despite pharmacy chain Walgreen’s recent decision to shut down the Theranos blood testing clinics in some of its stores.

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Foege says that his optimism and support for the company stems from his visit to Theranos’ headquarters and lab earlier this year. At the time, the company invited a group of scientists, who would eventually become its medical advisory board, to take a close look at its technology over the course of several visits.

“We met with Theranos scientists who demonstrated the company’s ability to accurately process small samples on a range of tests,” says Foege, adding that the group also took finger-stick blood tests using Theranos’ proprietary technology and received “reliable results.”

He adds: “Initially skeptical, that group of scientists came to realize the tremendous promise of Theranos’ technologies.”

Founded in 2003 by CEO Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos set out to develop technology that would make blood tests cheaper and reliable with just a few drops of blood, unlike the traditional venous blood draws. However, last October, the company’s technology came under fire after the Journal published a report saying its technology was unreliable. Since then, Theranos has been under regulatory scrutiny, its COO has resigned, and earlier this month, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it would revoke its operating license. Holmes will also be banned from operating a lab for two years.

Foege has previous served as the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a medical advisor for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for helping eradicate smallpox in the 1970s. And yet, despite all the attacks on Theranos, he remains convinced.

Perhaps the answers will become clearer in the near future. As Foege mentions in his op-ed, and a Theranos spokeswoman confirmed to Fortune, the company is planning to soon publish data in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Holmes is also still planning to present at the upcoming American Association for Clinical Chemistry conference on August 1.

Summary: Despite regulatory scrutiny, a well respected member of its medical board is defending the company.


Even with a round dozen films under their collective belt, Marvel Studios are still finding new ways to play within the confines of the comic-book genre. And in the case of Ant-Man, they’ve created something you really haven’t seen for a long time: a superhero who sweats the small stuff.

Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) doesn’t deal in ruined cities or plummeting spacecraft. He trains in his mentor’s back garden and fights his arch-nemesis in his seven-year-old daughter’s bedroom. Of course, when Scott shrinks to near-microscopic size, these ordinary locations turn into hyperreal landscapes alive with threat.

A lawn becomes a forest teeming with monstrous insects, while a room full of computer servers transforms into a neon-bright skyscraper district. And it’s fair to say that Thomas the Tank Engine’s saucer-eyed grin loses some of its bonhomie when he’s 3,000 times your weight and thundering headlong towards you.

But Ant-Man’s switches in scale aren’t just a colourful gimmick – although it should be said that on colourful gimmick grounds alone, they’re pretty wonderful. They’re part and parcel of a general shift from macro to micro. The three years Scott has just spent in prison for a Robin Hood-like burglary, and away from his daughter Cassie, feel enough like the end of the world that impending armageddon isn’t required to raise the stakes.

Scott just wants to prove to his wife (Judy Greer) and her new partner (Bobby Cannavale) that he’s still a fit father – although that takes money, the pursuit of which leads him to the house of maverick inventor Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and his business whizz daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly).

They need him to undertake some corporate espionage – or “break into a place and steal some s—t”, as Hank puts it – and retrieve a copy of his incredible shrinking suit technology, with the aid of the secret original prototype from the mid-Sixties, which Hank still keeps locked up in his basement. Scott accepts, though Hope clearly doesn’t think he’s up to the task, and she looks at him like he’s half an inch tall, even when he isn’t.

The Ant-Man suit itself is a thing of steampunkish beauty, with its worn black and red leather and helmet that looks like a curled-up robotic woodlouse. It belongs in the same world as Joe Johnson’s Second World War-set Captain America: The First Avenger – and there’ s something delightful about the idea, glimpsed here in a fun aside, that Douglas was romping around as a superhero himself during the Cold War and never got any credit.

It’s tempting to credit these throwaway coups to Edgar Wright, Ant-Man’s original director, and his writing partner Joe Cornish, who both toiled over the script for the best part of a decade only to unexpectedly part ways with it in May last year, mere weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin. (Wright has three conciliatory credits on Ant-Man: one for its story, shared with Cornish, another for its screenplay, shared with Cornish, Rudd and Adam McKay, and a third as executive producer.)

In its very best moments, the film zings with an Aardman-esque zaniness that feels like pure Wright, even if his replacement as director, Peyton Reed, wisely resists the temptation to mimic his predecessor's hyper-caffeinated visual style.

But Ant-Man’s troubled genesis barely registers in the finished product. The strain only tells in its unusually blocky structure, which more or less comprises a long, funny, inventive training montage followed by a long, funny, inventive heist. (Michael Peña, who’s uproariously goofy as a member of Scott’s cat-burgling crew, almost walks away with both.)

The one person Reed borrows some tricks from is Ant-Man himself. Plenty of sequences, both comedy and action, build towards climaxes that unexpectedly turn into anti-climaxes, and the sudden shrinking of the scene’s horizons has a disorienting effect that’s both funny and startling.

Perhaps that’s what makes Rudd so peculiarly well-suited to the role. In films like Wanderlust and I Love You, Man, his comic delivery has an endearing, half-fumbled quality, with the effect that he seems to end every scene a little shorter than he was at the start of it. In Ant-Man, he apologises to a certain cameoing B-list Avenger in the middle of beating them up. It makes you realise that the one thing the Marvel films have been missing until now is a very human unease with super-heroism.

What we’ve seen since the beginnings of the Marvel serial in 2008 is an ongoing stretching: bigger casts, grander set-pieces and more intricate interplay between characters, with no clear end in sight. Ant-Man scuttles off in the other direction. Brisk humour, keenly felt dramatic stakes, and invention over scale. You know: small pleasures.

Ant-Man is released on July 17

Summary: Marvel's inventive and zingy new film – which stars Paul Rudd as the most endearingly human superhero yet – makes the everyday extraordinary


Facebook Inc.’s mobile bet has shrunk the time it takes the social network to leap from one milestone to the next: On Wednesday, Facebook topped $2 billion in quarterly profit, six months after crossing the billion dollar mark for the first time.

The number of new users—and the ad dollars that follow them—surged in the second quarter.

Summary: Shares climb as both the top and bottom lines beat Wall Street’s estimates


The Home Office has started to pay out compensation - some £55,000 in nine cases so far - to foreign national prisoners who have been held beyond the end of their sentence while deportation was considered, it was disclosed yesterday.

The director-general of the immigration and nationality directorate, Lin Homer, told MPs that nine months after the foreign national prisoner crisis cost Charles Clarke his job only 163 of the 1,013 inmates freed without being considered for deportation had left the UK.

In an update to the Commons home affairs select committee, Ms Homer also revealed 28 of the 189 foreign offenders convicted of serious crimes and freed from prison without being considered for deportation are still at large. Opposition MPs criticised the lack of progress and feared hundreds of inmates would become eligible for compensation.

The nine cases in which compensation was won involved mistakes made while inmates were being held beyond their original term: "Typically compensation has been paid out in these cases due to technical deficiencies around serving the detainees with appropriate legal documents," Ms Homer said.

The shadow home secretary, David Davis, said: "At a time when our prisons are crying out for urgent extra resources it would be an insult for taxpayers' money to be spent this way as a result of the government's utter incompetence."

Ms Homer told MPs they had considered 675 individuals for deportation out of the original 1,013 foreign prisoners who had been freed without being considered for deportation. So far only 163 of them had been sent home. Officials decided not to proceed in 275 cases and the courts had overturned the deportation decision in a further 31 cases, often because of the length of time the individual had lived in Britain. In many remaining cases the offender is still in jail or on remand and cannot be considered for deportation until later in the sentence.

But Ms Homer did reveal that one of the original group of 1,013 freed before they were deported has, since the last update in December, been convicted of a serious offence against a member of their family.

She blamed delays on the fact 440 of those who faced deportation had appealed to the courts, which took greater account of the time they had lived in Britain. She claimed many had also used last-minute legal barriers to frustrate their removal.

Summary: The Home Office has started to pay out compensation - some £55,000 in nine cases so far - to foreign national prisoners who have been held beyond the end of their sentence while deportation was considered.


A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles.

260 pp. New York: Scribner. $24.

Anyone who has ever been a soldier, or spent time around them in an informal setting, knows that the unvarnished experience -- and the unvarnished language -- would take more than an army of punctilious editors to make presentable to polite society. Take a group of healthy, testosterone-drenched young men away from home, subject them to daily indignities, abuse and hardship; nurture their youthfully grandiose sense of omnipotence and invincibility and then arm them with terrifying modern weaponry (and teach them how to use it); move them from one remote place to another around the world (so old community and family ties are broken, and new ones outside their military unit have little chance to form); feed them a steady diet of macho conditioning and pornography and give them just enough money to get drunk, go forth and act out; immerse them in the astringent cynicism of the veteran grunt; thrust them into war zones where they must either kill or be killed; and you begin to understand the need for harsh codes of military justice.

The true voices of soldiers are rarely heard, particularly since, after Vietnam, the military stopped letting reporters live with frontline units in the field. What we usually get these days is a spruced-up, ready-for-prime-time version of events. In his terrific new memoir, ''Jarhead,'' the former Marine sniper Anthony Swofford tells the story of a visit paid to his platoon by reporters in the Saudi desert in the months before Operation Desert Storm. His sergeant preps the unit for the show by issuing what Swofford refers to as a ''gag order'':

''Listen up,'' the sergeant says. ''I've gone over this already. But the captain wants you to hear it again. Basically, don't get specific. Say you can shoot from far away. Say you are highly trained, that there are no better shooters in the world than marine snipers. Say you're excited to be here and you believe in the mission and that we'll annihilate the Iraqis. Take off your shirts and show your muscles.''

Years later, out of uniform or promoted to some more dignified rank, old soldiers clean up their memories. It is considered noblesse oblige. Reality gets filtered through a gauzy lens of patriotism, pride and the overall dignity of the cause.

Rare is the marine who is willing to share the raw experience, and rarer still is one like Swofford -- the marine who can really write. ''Jarhead'' is some kind of classic, a bracing memoir of the 1991 Persian Gulf war that will go down with the best books ever written about military life. It is certainly the most honest memoir I have read from a participant in any recent war. Swofford writes with humor, anger and great skill. His prose is alive with ideas and feeling, and at times soars like poetry. He captures the hilarity, tedium, horniness and loneliness of the long prewar desert deployment, and then powerfully records the experience of his war. As he moves through a nightmare landscape of exploding ordnance, raining petroleum, the threat of invisible killing gases, and death, his terror and his joy are one.

Violence, sex and male camaraderie are the big draw for many adolescent men who enlist. As a 14-year-old, Swofford was moved by pictures of the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1984: ''The marines were all sizes and all colors, all dirty and exhausted and hurt, and they were men, and I was a boy falling in love with manhood. I understood that manhood had to do with war, and war with manhood, and to no longer just be a son, I needed someday to fight.''

But the clincher comes three years later, from a Marine recruiter: ''He gleefully talked to me about buying sex in the Philippines and Italy and Sweden and Panama -- information my mother would never see in the brochures. The recruiter guaranteed me I could book a threesome for 40 American dollars in Olongapo. . . . I'd just turned 17. I'd had sex three times. . . . I was sold.'' Swofford also felt that he had a family tradition to uphold. His father served in Vietnam; his uncle died during peacetime in the Marines; his grandfather served in the Army Air Forces during World War II.

Swofford begins his story as an older man unable to fit back into his old desert cammies, and at the end he is again a sobered adult, fully civilian once more, no longer able to relate to his old marine buddies. ''Jarhead'' is a coming-of-age story, an account of a wild passage familiar to millions of young men but rarely so well revealed.

There are more than 150,000 American soldiers in the deserts around Iraq as these words are written. Swofford remembers back to August 1990, when his unit -- the Surveillance and Target Acquisition Platoon, scout/snipers, of the Second Battalion, Seventh Marines -- is put on standby for deployment to Saudi Arabia after Saddam Hussein's forces rumbled into Kuwait. As far as he and his buddies are concerned, the geopolitics of the situation boil down to fighting and dying for old white guys ''and others who have billions of dollars to gain or lose in the oil fields,'' but the perceived injustice is hardly a deterrent. They are gleeful. The news of their impending deployment prompts them to hold a drunken war-movie marathon. They particularly like Vietnam War movies, most of which are purportedly antiwar.

Summary: JARHEAD   A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles.   By Anthony Swofford.   260 pp. New York: Scribner. $24.


Mercedes-Benz has pulled a TV commercial off air after criticism that the ad misleadingly suggests its new 2017 E-Class car has more self-driving capabilities than it actually does.

“Is the world truly ready for a vehicle that can drive itself? Ready or not, the future is here,” says a voiceover in the ad, which features the 2017 E-Class car alongside the company’s totally self-driven F015 concept car.

The car does have some automated-driving features, including cruise control and automated steering. The ad shows a driver lifting his hands off the steering wheel as the car appears to steer and park itself.

It later includes a warning at the bottom of the screen: “Vehicle cannot drive itself, but has automated driving features. The system will remind the driver frequently to keep hands on the steering wheel. Always observe safe driving practices and obey all road traffic regulations.”

Read more: New Study Reveals We’re Utterly Conflicted About Driverless Cars

Consumer Reports and the Center for Auto Safety called for the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the ad, arguing that it provides consumers with “a false sense of security in the ability of the car to operate autonomously,” Forbes reports.

A Mercedes spokeswoman said the company pulled the TV spot and removed it from its official YouTube page to avoid confusion.

“The new 2017 E-Class is a technological tour de force and is a significant step towards achieving our vision of an accident-free future,” the spokeswoman said in an e-mail to Automotive News. “We do not want any confusion in the marketplace to detract from the giant step forward in vehicle safety the 2017 E-Class represents.”

Summary: The car has automated-driving features, but is not totally self-driven


The new analysis has unearthed evidence that, just like modern man, ancient Egyptians suffered from high cholesterol and agonising toothache. They even had tattoos.

CT scan 3D visualisation of the mummified remains of a Sudanese woman (Trustees of the British Museum)

The exhibition is likely to be one of the most successful ever staged by the British Museum and follows in a fine tradition of blockbuster displays based on archaeological finds from ancient Egypt. The Treasures of Tutankhamun, staged at the museum in 1972, attracted more than 1.6 million visitors.

The new exhibition looks at those living along the ancient Nile from royalty to more ordinary inhabitants.

Mummification, the curators are keen to point out, was not the sole preserve (pardon the pun) of pharaohs. Curators have deliberately chosen mummies from different eras and different backgrounds to cast them in a new light.

The oldest of the mummies to undergo scientific testing is more than 5,500 years old and dates back to 3,500 BC. The most recent example is a female aged between 20 and 35, who lived about 1,300 years ago.

CAT scanning of one the mummies (JULIAN SIMMONDS)

The mummies range in ages from two years at the moment of death to 50. Some were discovered by explorers more than 100 years ago while others were found as recently as 2005 on the banks of the Nile in what is now Sudan.

Over the course of several months, the mummies were taken at night to hospitals and subjected to scans normally reserved for living patients.

CAT scans – or computed tomography to give it its technical term – generate three-dimensional images of patients’ organs, bones and tissue using X-ray technology. Some of the mummies were so well preserved that the scans revealed parts of the brain and other vital organs still intact.

The CAT scan images of the mummies were then combined with other forensic detective work, such as infra-red “reflectography” and carbon dating, to build up a picture of ancient lives.

“What we are doing in the exhibition is investigating the lives of eight people from the past,” said John Taylor, head curator in the Ancient Egypt and Sudan department at the museum.

“We want to promote the idea these are not objects but real human beings. We want to capture the humanity of these people.”

Dr Taylor said: “We took the mummies to hospitals mainly around London. We used the facilities after hours. We used a sophisticated dual energy scanner that gave us X-rays of different layers.

“We captured some amazing images and discovered a lot about these mummies even though some of them have been here at the museum for 100 years or more. Most of the remains have never had the bandages taken off.”

CAT scans of the pelvic area enabled the team to age the corpses, based on wear and tear of the bones. The scans also showed how the ancient inhabitants of the Nile suffered from heart disease and toothache.

Displays at the British Museum (JULIAN SIMMONDS)

Two of the eight mummies appeared to have suffered from heart problems. The two mummies were found to have suffered from plaque in their legs. Plaque is made up of cholesterol, calcium and tissue and as it builds up arteries narrow.

Daniel Antoine, the museum’s curator of physical anthropology and curator of the coming exhibition, said: “The scans showed two of them with plaque in the leg.

“That is an indication of cardiovascular disease that can lead to a heart attack or stroke. This might have been caused by lifestyle which means a diet rich in fat or it might be genetic. The other major find was that the majority of adults had terrible dental health. They had huge abscesses.

“In some cases the mummies have such multiple abscesses that it might have contributed to the death. You can get such severe inflammation of the throat that can lead to asphyxiation.”

The ancient Egyptians ate a varied diet that included fish, a little meat, beer, bread and sugar-rich fruits such as dates.

The scientists at the British Museum even studied bread found with the remains of the mummies to see if it had a high content of abrasive sand that might have contributed to tooth decay – it didn’t.

One of the mummies, whose remains were found just seven years ago, was so well preserved that archaeologists could almost make out the tattoo on her skin on the inner thigh of her right leg with the naked eye. Infra-red technology helped define it more clearly.

The woman, aged between 20 and 35, had been buried wrapped in a linen and woollen cloth and her remains had mummified in the dry heat. The tattoo has been deciphered by curators and spells out in ancient Greek – M-I-X-A-H-A, or Michael.

The owner of the tattoo was a woman who died in about AD 700 and lived in a Christian community on the banks of the Nile.

A photograph, left, and an infra-red reflectography of the tattoo found on the mummified remains of a Sudanese woman (Trustees of the British Museum)

The tattoo represents the symbol of the Archangel Michael, who features in both the Old and New Testaments. The symbol has previously been found in ancient churches and on stone tablets, but never before in the form of a tattoo.

“You can see her tattoo really clearly using infra red reflectography,” said Dr Antoine, “The tattoo on her right inner thigh represents a monogram that spells Michael in ancient Greek.

“She is the first evidence of a tattoo from this period. This is a very rare find.”

The woman was about 5ft 2in tall and was found in 2005 on an archaeological dig in a cemetery in Sudan. Other ancient Egyptians who were mummified had their organs removed before being preserved.

“The scan of the Sudanese mummy showed her internal organs are remarkably well preserved,” said Dr Antoine. “We can only speculate why she had a tattoo. Perhaps for protection.”

The Sudanese mummy will go on public display for the first time in May. Each day thousands of people will see her tattoo.

It is not clear who did the tattoo in ancient Sudan, and whether it was visible to other natives.

High up on her inner thigh, it may or may not have been out of view. And for all its scientific expertise, the British Museum admits to being unclear as to what exactly was the fashionable length of skirt worn by an ordinary Nile dwelling female in AD 700.

* Ancient Lives: New Discoveries, sponsored by Julius Baer and technology partner Samsung, runs from May 22 until Nov 30.

Summary: Hospital scans help British Museum discover the secrets Egyptians took to   their grave, including one woman’s intimate tattoo


There’s more evidence that a plant-based diet has a host of health benefits; it’s linked to a lower risk of heart disease, diabetes and certain cancers, and some studies even suggest it may help contribute to longevity.

Most of the evidence for this plant benefit focused on the beneficial fats found in plants. They’re generally unsaturated, and therefore they don’t tend to build up in heart vessel walls and cause problems. But in a new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers investigated whether the proteins in plants can have different effects on health than animal proteins, even apart from the effects that fats can have.

Dr. Mingyang Song from Massachusetts General Hospital and his colleagues analyzed data from two large ongoing studies: the Nurses Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, which involve more than 170,000 people who have been followed for an average of 28 years. Based on what the people reported they ate, Song and his team calculated the amount of protein they were receiving from animal and plant source and found that people who consumed more plant proteins had a lower risk of dying during the study than people who ate more animal proteins.

That’s not surprising, since previous studies have shown the benefits of a plant-based diet. But what surprised Song was the fact that the benefits seemed to be greatest among people who had at least one risk factor for early death, such as smoking, being overweight or obese, drinking alcohol or being physically inactive. That suggests that plant proteins may be offsetting some of the adverse effects that some risk factors may have on health.

In addition, the group found that the type of protein also matters. People who ate mostly a certain type of animal protein—from fish and chicken—had a lower mortality rate than those who ate more red and processed meat. In fact, while their death rates were still slightly higher than those who ate mostly plant proteins, they still were closer to the rates of plant-eaters than those who ate more red meat.

Song says the findings hint that the benefits of eating plant proteins may go beyond simply sparing the body the influx of vessel-clogging fats. So based on the findings, “if you have a choice between animal and plant protein, we would say plant protein is preferred and a better source,” he says. “But if people have to choose between different animal protein sources, then fish and chicken are probably better sources compared to processed red meat.”

Summary: We know that fats from plants are better for your health than animal fats, but researchers now say the same may be true for proteins


The adventure that ensued over the next six months combined the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of handling a vast secret archive with the more mundane feat of sorting, searching and understanding a mountain of data. As if that were not complicated enough, the project also entailed a source who was elusive, manipulative and volatile (and ultimately openly hostile to The Times and The Guardian); an international cast of journalists; company lawyers committed to keeping us within the bounds of the law; and an array of government officials who sometimes seemed as if they couldn’t decide whether they wanted to engage us or arrest us. By the end of the year, the story of this wholesale security breach had outgrown the story of the actual contents of the secret documents and generated much breathless speculation that something — journalism, diplomacy, life as we know it — had profoundly changed forever.

Soon after Rusbridger’s call, we sent Eric Schmitt, from our Washington bureau, to London. Schmitt has covered military affairs expertly for years, has read his share of classified military dispatches and has excellent judgment and an unflappable demeanor. His main assignment was to get a sense of the material. Was it genuine? Was it of public interest? He would also report back on the proposed mechanics of our collaboration with The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel, which Assange invited as a third guest to his secret smorgasbord. Schmitt would also meet the WikiLeaks leader, who was known to a few Guardian journalists but not to us.

Schmitt’s first call back to The Times was encouraging. There was no question in his mind that the Afghanistan dispatches were genuine. They were fascinating — a diary of a troubled war from the ground up. And there were intimations of more to come, especially classified cables from the entire constellation of American diplomatic outposts. WikiLeaks was holding those back for now, presumably to see how this venture with the establishment media worked out. Over the next few days, Schmitt huddled in a discreet office at The Guardian, sampling the trove of war dispatches and discussing the complexities of this project: how to organize and study such a voluminous cache of information; how to securely transport, store and share it; how journalists from three very different publications would work together without compromising their independence; and how we would all assure an appropriate distance from Julian Assange. We regarded Assange throughout as a source, not as a partner or collaborator, but he was a man who clearly had his own agenda.

By the time of the meetings in London, WikiLeaks had already acquired a measure of international fame or, depending on your point of view, notoriety. Shortly before I got the call from The Guardian, The New Yorker published a rich and colorful profile of Assange, by Raffi Khatchadourian, who had embedded with the group. WikiLeaks’s biggest coup to that point was the release, last April, of video footage taken from one of two U.S. helicopters involved in firing down on a crowd and a building in Baghdad in 2007, killing at least 18 people. While some of the people in the video were armed, others gave no indication of menace; two were in fact journalists for the news agency Reuters. The video, with its soundtrack of callous banter, was horrifying to watch and was an embarrassment to the U.S. military. But in its zeal to make the video a work of antiwar propaganda, WikiLeaks also released a version that didn’t call attention to an Iraqi who was toting a rocket-propelled grenade and packaged the manipulated version under the tendentious rubric “Collateral Murder.” (See the edited and non-edited videos here.)

Throughout our dealings, Assange was coy about where he obtained his secret cache. But the suspected source of the video, as well as the military dispatches and the diplomatic cables to come, was a disillusioned U.S. Army private first class named Bradley Manning, who had been arrested and was being kept in solitary confinement.

On the fourth day of the London meeting, Assange slouched into The Guardian office, a day late. Schmitt took his first measure of the man who would be a large presence in our lives. “He’s tall — probably 6-foot-2 or 6-3 — and lanky, with pale skin, gray eyes and a shock of white hair that seizes your attention,” Schmitt wrote to me later. “He was alert but disheveled, like a bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, light-colored sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in days.”

Assange shrugged a huge backpack off his shoulders and pulled out a stockpile of laptops, cords, cellphones, thumb drives and memory sticks that held the WikiLeaks secrets.

The reporters had begun preliminary work on the Afghanistan field reports, using a large Excel spreadsheet to organize the material, then plugging in search terms and combing the documents for newsworthy content. They had run into a puzzling incongruity: Assange said the data included dispatches from the beginning of 2004 through the end of 2009, but the material on the spreadsheet ended abruptly in April 2009. A considerable amount of material was missing. Assange, slipping naturally into the role of office geek, explained that they had hit the limits of Excel. Open a second spreadsheet, he instructed. They did, and the rest of the data materialized — a total of 92,000 reports from the battlefields of Afghanistan.

The reporters came to think of Assange as smart and well educated, extremely adept technologically but arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial and oddly credulous. At lunch one day in The Guardian’s cafeteria, Assange recounted with an air of great conviction a story about the archive in Germany that contains the files of the former Communist secret police, the Stasi. This office, Assange asserted, was thoroughly infiltrated by former Stasi agents who were quietly destroying the documents they were entrusted with protecting. The Der Spiegel reporter in the group, John Goetz, who has reported extensively on the Stasi, listened in amazement. That’s utter nonsense, he said. Some former Stasi personnel were hired as security guards in the office, but the records were well protected.

Assange was openly contemptuous of the American government and certain that he was a hunted man. He told the reporters that he had prepared a kind of doomsday option. He had, he said, distributed highly encrypted copies of his entire secret archive to a multitude of supporters, and if WikiLeaks was shut down, or if he was arrested, he would disseminate the key to make the information public.

Schmitt told me that for all Assange’s bombast and dark conspiracy theories, he had a bit of Peter Pan in him. One night, when they were all walking down the street after dinner, Assange suddenly started skipping ahead of the group. Schmitt and Goetz stared, speechless. Then, just as suddenly, Assange stopped, got back in step with them and returned to the conversation he had interrupted.

For the rest of the week Schmitt worked with David Leigh, The Guardian’s investigations editor; Nick Davies, an investigative reporter for the paper; and Goetz, of Der Spiegel, to organize and sort the material. With help from two of The Times’s best computer minds — Andrew Lehren and Aron Pilhofer — they figured out how to assemble the material into a conveniently searchable and secure database.

Journalists are characteristically competitive, but the group worked well together. They brainstormed topics to explore and exchanged search results. Der Spiegel offered to check the logs against incident reports submitted by the German Army to its Parliament — partly as story research, partly as an additional check on authenticity.

Assange provided us the data on the condition that we not write about it before specific dates that WikiLeaks planned on posting the documents on a publicly accessible Web site. The Afghanistan documents would go first, after we had a few weeks to search the material and write our articles. The larger cache of Iraq-related documents would go later. Such embargoes — agreements not to publish information before a set date — are commonplace in journalism. Everything from studies in medical journals to the annual United States budget is released with embargoes. They are a constraint with benefits, the principal one being the chance to actually read and reflect on the material before publishing it into public view. As Assange surely knew, embargoes also tend to build suspense and amplify a story, especially when multiple news outlets broadcast it at once. The embargo was the only condition WikiLeaks would try to impose on us; what we wrote about the material was entirely up to us. Much later, some American news outlets reported that they were offered last-minute access to WikiLeaks documents if they signed contracts with financial penalties for early disclosure. The Times was never asked to sign anything or to pay anything. For WikiLeaks, at least in this first big venture, exposure was its own reward.

Back in New York we assembled a team of reporters, data experts and editors and quartered them in an out-of-the-way office. Andrew Lehren, of our computer-assisted-reporting unit, did the first cut, searching terms on his own or those suggested by other reporters, compiling batches of relevant documents and summarizing the contents. We assigned reporters to specific areas in which they had expertise and gave them password access to rummage in the data. This became the routine we would follow with subsequent archives.

An air of intrigue verging on paranoia permeated the project, perhaps understandably, given that we were dealing with a mass of classified material and a source who acted like a fugitive, changing crash pads, e-mail addresses and cellphones frequently. We used encrypted Web sites. Reporters exchanged notes via Skype, believing it to be somewhat less vulnerable to eavesdropping. On conference calls, we spoke in amateurish code. Assange was always “the source.” The latest data drop was “the package.” When I left New York for two weeks to visit bureaus in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where we assume that communications may be monitored, I was not to be copied on message traffic about the project. I never imagined that any of this would defeat a curious snoop from the National Security Agency or Pakistani intelligence. And I was never entirely sure whether that prospect made me more nervous than the cyberwiles of WikiLeaks itself. At a point when relations between the news organizations and WikiLeaks were rocky, at least three people associated with this project had inexplicable activity in their e-mail that suggested someone was hacking into their accounts.

From consultations with our lawyers, we were confident that reporting on the secret documents could be done within the law, but we speculated about what the government — or some other government — might do to impede our work or exact recriminations. And, the law aside, we felt an enormous moral and ethical obligation to use the material responsibly. While we assumed we had little or no ability to influence what WikiLeaks did, let alone what would happen once this material was loosed in the echo chamber of the blogosphere, that did not free us from the need to exercise care in our own journalism. From the beginning, we agreed that in our articles and in any documents we published from the secret archive, we would excise material that could put lives at risk.

Guided by reporters with extensive experience in the field, we redacted the names of ordinary citizens, local officials, activists, academics and others who had spoken to American soldiers or diplomats. We edited out any details that might reveal ongoing intelligence-gathering operations, military tactics or locations of material that could be used to fashion terrorist weapons. Three reporters with considerable experience of handling military secrets — Eric Schmitt, Michael Gordon and C. J. Chivers — went over the documents we considered posting. Chivers, an ex-Marine who has reported for us from several battlefields, brought a practiced eye and cautious judgment to the business of redaction. If a dispatch noted that Aircraft A left Location B at a certain time and arrived at Location C at a certain time, Chivers edited it out on the off chance that this could teach enemy forces something useful about the capabilities of that aircraft.

The ﬁrst articles in the project, which we called the War Logs, were scheduled to go up on the Web sites of The Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel on Sunday, July 25. We approached the White House days before that to get its reaction to the huge breach of secrecy as well as to specific articles we planned to write — including a major one about Pakistan’s ambiguous role as an American ally. On July 24, the day before the War Logs went live, I attended a farewell party for Roger Cohen, a columnist for The Times and The International Herald Tribune, that was given by Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. A voracious consumer of inside information, Holbrooke had a decent idea of what was coming, and he pulled me away from the crowd to show me the fusillade of cabinet-level e-mail ricocheting through his BlackBerry, thus demonstrating both the frantic anxiety in the administration and, not incidentally, the fact that he was very much in the loop. The Pakistan article, in particular, would complicate his life. But one of Holbrooke’s many gifts was his ability to make pretty good lemonade out of the bitterest lemons; he was already spinning the reports of Pakistani duplicity as leverage he could use to pull the Pakistanis back into closer alignment with American interests. Five months later, when Holbrooke — just 69, and seemingly indestructible — died of a torn aorta, I remembered that evening. And what I remembered best was that he was as excited to be on the cusp of a big story as I was.

We posted the articles on NYTimes.com the next day at 5 p.m. — a time picked to reconcile the different publishing schedules of the three publications. I was proud of what a crew of great journalists had done to fashion coherent and instructive reporting from a jumble of raw field reports, mostly composed in a clunky patois of military jargon and acronyms. The reporters supplied context, nuance and skepticism. There was much in that first round of articles worth reading, but my favorite single piece was one of the simplest. Chivers gathered all of the dispatches related to a single, remote, beleaguered American military outpost and stitched them together into a heartbreaking narrative. The dispatches from this outpost represent in miniature the audacious ambitions, gradual disillusionment and ultimate disappointment that Afghanistan has dealt to occupiers over the centuries.

If anyone doubted that the three publications operated independently, the articles we posted that day made it clear that we followed our separate muses. The Guardian, which is an openly left-leaning newspaper, used the first War Logs to emphasize civilian casualties in Afghanistan, claiming the documents disclosed that coalition forces killed “hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents,” underscoring the cost of what the paper called a “failing war.” Our reporters studied the same material but determined that all the major episodes of civilian deaths we found in the War Logs had been reported in The Times, many of them on the front page. (In fact, two of our journalists, Stephen Farrell and Sultan Munadi, were kidnapped by the Taliban while investigating one major episode near Kunduz. Munadi was killed during an ensuing rescue by British paratroopers.) The civilian deaths that had not been previously reported came in ones and twos and did not add up to anywhere near “hundreds.” Moreover, since several were either duplicated or missing from the reports, we concluded that an overall tally would be little better than a guess.

Another example: The Times gave prominence to the dispatches reflecting American suspicions that Pakistani intelligence was playing a double game in Afghanistan — nodding to American interests while abetting the Taliban. We buttressed the interesting anecdotal material of Pakistani double-dealing with additional reporting. The Guardian was unimpressed by those dispatches and treated them more dismissively.

Three months later, with the French daily Le Monde added to the group, we published Round 2, the Iraq War Logs, including articles on how the United States turned a blind eye to the torture of prisoners by Iraqi forces working with the U.S., how Iraq spawned an extraordinary American military reliance on private contractors and how extensively Iran had meddled in the conflict.

By this time, The Times’s relationship with our source had gone from wary to hostile. I talked to Assange by phone a few times and heard out his complaints. He was angry that we declined to link our online coverage of the War Logs to the WikiLeaks Web site, a decision we made because we feared — rightly, as it turned out — that its trove would contain the names of low-level informants and make them Taliban targets. “Where’s the respect?” he demanded. “Where’s the respect?” Another time he called to tell me how much he disliked our profile of Bradley Manning, the Army private suspected of being the source of WikiLeaks’s most startling revelations. The article traced Manning’s childhood as an outsider and his distress as a gay man in the military. Assange complained that we “psychologicalized” Manning and gave short shrift to his “political awakening.”

The final straw was a front-page profile of Assange by John Burns and Ravi Somaiya, published Oct. 24, that revealed fractures within WikiLeaks, attributed by Assange’s critics to his imperious management style. Assange denounced the article to me, and in various public forums, as “a smear.”

Assange was transformed by his outlaw celebrity. The derelict with the backpack and the sagging socks now wore his hair dyed and styled, and he favored fashionably skinny suits and ties. He became a kind of cult figure for the European young and leftish and was evidently a magnet for women. Two Swedish women filed police complaints claiming that Assange insisted on having sex without a condom; Sweden’s strict laws on nonconsensual sex categorize such behavior as rape, and a prosecutor issued a warrant to question Assange, who initially described it as a plot concocted to silence or discredit WikiLeaks.

I came to think of Julian Assange as a character from a Stieg Larsson thriller — a man who could figure either as hero or villain in one of the megaselling Swedish novels that mix hacker counterculture, high-level conspiracy and sex as both recreation and violation.

In October, WikiLeaks gave The Guardian its third archive, a quarter of a million communications between the U.S. State Department and its outposts around the globe. This time, Assange imposed a new condition: The Guardian was not to share the material with The New York Times. Indeed, he told Guardian journalists that he opened discussions with two other American news organizations — The Washington Post and the McClatchy chain — and intended to invite them in as replacements for The Times. He also enlarged his recipient list to include El País, the leading Spanish-language newspaper.

The Guardian was uncomfortable with Assange’s condition. By now the journalists from The Times and The Guardian had a good working relationship. The Times provided a large American audience for the revelations, as well as access to the U.S. government for comment and context. And given the potential legal issues and public reaction, it was good to have company in the trenches. Besides, we had come to believe that Assange was losing control of his stockpile of secrets. An independent journalist, Heather Brooke, had obtained material from a WikiLeaks dissident and joined in a loose alliance with The Guardian. Over the coming weeks, batches of cables would pop up in newspapers in Lebanon, Australia and Norway. David Leigh, The Guardian’s investigations editor, concluded that these rogue leaks released The Guardian from any pledge, and he gave us the cables.

On Nov. 1, Assange and two of his lawyers burst into Alan Rusbridger’s office, furious that The Guardian was asserting greater independence and suspicious that The Times might be in possession of the embassy cables. Over the course of an eight-hour meeting, Assange intermittently raged against The Times — especially over our front-page profile — while The Guardian journalists tried to calm him. In midstorm, Rusbridger called me to report on Assange’s grievances and relay his demand for a front-page apology in The Times. Rusbridger knew that this was a nonstarter, but he was buying time for the tantrum to subside. In the end, both he and Georg Mascolo, editor in chief of Der Spiegel, made clear that they intended to continue their collaboration with The Times; Assange could take it or leave it. Given that we already had all of the documents, Assange had little choice. Over the next two days, the news organizations agreed on a timetable for publication.

The following week, we sent Ian Fisher, a deputy foreign editor who was a principal coordinator on our processing of the embassy cables, to London to work out final details. The meeting went smoothly, even after Assange arrived. “Freakishly good behavior,” Fisher e-mailed me afterward. “No yelling or crazy mood swings.” But after dinner, as Fisher was leaving, Assange smirked and offered a parting threat: “Tell me, are you in contact with your legal counsel?” Fisher replied that he was. “You had better be,” Assange said.

Fisher left London with an understanding that we would continue to have access to the material. But just in case, we took out a competitive insurance policy. We had Scott Shane, a Washington correspondent, pull together a long, just-in-case article summing up highlights of the cables, which we could quickly post on our Web site. If WikiLeaks sprang another leak, we would be ready.

Because of the range of the material and the very nature of diplomacy, the embassy cables were bound to be more explosive than the War Logs. Dean Baquet, our Washington bureau chief, gave the White House an early warning on Nov. 19. The following Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving, Baquet and two colleagues were invited to a windowless room at the State Department, where they encountered an unsmiling crowd. Representatives from the White House, the State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency, the F.B.I. and the Pentagon gathered around a conference table. Others, who never identified themselves, lined the walls. A solitary note-taker tapped away on a computer.

The meeting was off the record, but it is fair to say the mood was tense. Scott Shane, one reporter who participated in the meeting, described “an undertone of suppressed outrage and frustration.”

Subsequent meetings, which soon gave way to daily conference calls, were more businesslike. Before each discussion, our Washington bureau sent over a batch of specific cables that we intended to use in the coming days. They were circulated to regional specialists, who funneled their reactions to a small group at State, who came to our daily conversations with a list of priorities and arguments to back them up. We relayed the government’s concerns, and our own decisions regarding them, to the other news outlets.

The administration’s concerns generally fell into three categories. First was the importance of protecting individuals who had spoken candidly to American diplomats in oppressive countries. We almost always agreed on those and were grateful to the government for pointing out some we overlooked.

“We were all aware of dire stakes for some of the people named in the cables if we failed to obscure their identities,” Shane wrote to me later, recalling the nature of the meetings. Like many of us, Shane has worked in countries where dissent can mean prison or worse. “That sometimes meant not just removing the name but also references to institutions that might give a clue to an identity and sometimes even the dates of conversations, which might be compared with surveillance tapes of an American Embassy to reveal who was visiting the diplomats that day.”

The second category included sensitive American programs, usually related to intelligence. We agreed to withhold some of this information, like a cable describing an intelligence-sharing program that took years to arrange and might be lost if exposed. In other cases, we went away convinced that publication would cause some embarrassment but no real harm.

The third category consisted of cables that disclosed candid comments by and about foreign officials, including heads of state. The State Department feared publication would strain relations with those countries. We were mostly unconvinced.

The embassy cables were a different kind of treasure from the War Logs. For one thing, they covered the entire globe — virtually every embassy, consulate and interest section that the United States maintains. They contained the makings of many dozens of stories: candid American appraisals of foreign leaders, narratives of complicated negotiations, allegations of corruption and duplicity, countless behind-the-scenes insights. Some of the material was of narrow local interest; some of it had global implications. Some provided authoritative versions of events not previously fully understood. Some consisted of rumor and flimsy speculation.

Unlike most of the military dispatches, the embassy cables were written in clear English, sometimes with wit, color and an ear for dialogue. (“Who knew,” one of our English colleagues marveled, “that American diplomats could write?”)

Even more than the military logs, the diplomatic cables called for context and analysis. It was important to know, for example, that cables sent from an embassy are routinely dispatched over the signature of the ambassador and those from the State Department are signed by the secretary of state, regardless of whether the ambassador or secretary had actually seen the material. It was important to know that much of the communication between Washington and its outposts is given even more restrictive classification — top secret or higher — and was thus missing from this trove. We searched in vain, for example, for military or diplomatic reports on the fate of Pat Tillman, the former football star and Army Ranger who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. We found no reports on how Osama bin Laden eluded American forces in the mountains of Tora Bora. (In fact, we found nothing but second- and thirdhand rumors about bin Laden.) If such cables exist, they were presumably classified top secret or higher.

And it was important to remember that diplomatic cables are versions of events. They can be speculative. They can be ambiguous. They can be wrong.

One of our first articles drawn from the diplomatic cables, for example, reported on a secret intelligence assessment that Iran had obtained a supply of advanced missiles from North Korea, missiles that could reach European capitals. Outside experts long suspected that Iran obtained missile parts but not the entire weapons, so this glimpse of the official view was revealing. The Washington Post fired back with a different take, casting doubt on whether the missile in question had been transferred to Iran or whether it was even a workable weapon. We went back to the cables — and the experts — and concluded in a subsequent article that the evidence presented “a murkier picture.”

The tension between a newspaper’s obligation to inform and the government’s responsibility to protect is hardly new. At least until this year, nothing The Times did on my watch caused nearly so much agitation as two articles we published about tactics employed by the Bush administration after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The first, which was published in 2005 and won a Pulitzer Prize, revealed that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping on domestic phone conversations and e-mail without the legal courtesy of a warrant. The other, published in 2006, described a vast Treasury Department program to screen international banking records.

I have vivid memories of sitting in the Oval Office as President George W. Bush tried to persuade me and the paper’s publisher to withhold the eavesdropping story, saying that if we published it, we should share the blame for the next terrorist attack. We were unconvinced by his argument and published the story, and the reaction from the government — and conservative commentators in particular — was vociferous.

This time around, the Obama administration’s reaction was different. It was, for the most part, sober and professional. The Obama White House, while strongly condemning WikiLeaks for making the documents public, did not seek an injunction to halt publication. There was no Oval Office lecture. On the contrary, in our discussions before publication of our articles, White House officials, while challenging some of the conclusions we drew from the material, thanked us for handling the documents with care. The secretaries of state and defense and the attorney general resisted the opportunity for a crowd-pleasing orgy of press bashing. There has been no serious official talk — unless you count an ambiguous hint by Senator Joseph Lieberman — of pursuing news organizations in the courts. Though the release of these documents was certainly embarrassing, the relevant government agencies actually engaged with us in an attempt to prevent the release of material genuinely damaging to innocent individuals or to the national interest.

The broader public reaction was mixed — more critical in the first days; more sympathetic as readers absorbed the articles and the sky did not fall; and more hostile to WikiLeaks in the U.S. than in Europe, where there is often a certain pleasure in seeing the last superpower taken down a peg.

In the days after we began our respective series based on the embassy cables, Alan Rusbridger and I went online to answer questions from readers. The Guardian, whose readership is more sympathetic to the guerrilla sensibilities of WikiLeaks, was attacked for being too fastidious about redacting the documents: How dare you censor this material? What are you hiding? Post everything now! The mail sent to The Times, at least in the first day or two, came from the opposite field. Many readers were indignant and alarmed: Who needs this? How dare you? What gives you the right?

Much of the concern reflected a genuine conviction that in perilous times the president needs extraordinary powers, unfettered by Congressional oversight, court meddling or the strictures of international law and certainly safe from nosy reporters. That is compounded by a popular sense that the elite media have become too big for their britches and by the fact that our national conversation has become more polarized and strident.

Although it is our aim to be impartial in our presentation of the news, our attitude toward these issues is far from indifferent. The journalists at The Times have a large and personal stake in the country’s security. We live and work in a city that has been tragically marked as a favorite terrorist target, and in the wake of 9/11 our journalists plunged into the ruins to tell the story of what happened here. Moreover, The Times has nine staff correspondents assigned to the two wars still being waged in the wake of that attack, plus a rotating cast of photographers, visiting writers and scores of local stringers and support staff. They work in this high-risk environment because, while there are many places you can go for opinions about the war, there are few places — and fewer by the day — where you can go to find honest, on-the-scene reporting about what is happening. We take extraordinary precautions to keep them safe, but we have had two of our Iraqi journalists murdered for doing their jobs. We have had four journalists held hostage by the Taliban — two of them for seven months. We had one Afghan journalist killed in a rescue attempt. Last October, while I was in Kabul, we got word that a photographer embedded for us with troops near Kandahar stepped on an improvised mine and lost both his legs.

We are invested in the struggle against murderous extremism in another sense. The virulent hatred espoused by terrorists, judging by their literature, is directed not just against our people and our buildings but also at our values and at our faith in the self-government of an informed electorate. If the freedom of the press makes some Americans uneasy, it is anathema to the ideologists of terror.

So we have no doubts about where our sympathies lie in this clash of values. And yet we cannot let those sympathies transform us into propagandists, even for a system we respect.

I’m the first to admit that news organizations, including this one, sometimes get things wrong. We can be overly credulous (as in some of the prewar reporting about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction) or overly cynical about official claims and motives. We may err on the side of keeping secrets (President Kennedy reportedly wished, after the fact, that The Times had published what it knew about the planned Bay of Pigs invasion, which possibly would have helped avert a bloody debacle) or on the side of exposing them. We make the best judgments we can. When we get things wrong, we try to correct the record. A free press in a democracy can be messy. But the alternative is to give the government a veto over what its citizens are allowed to know. Anyone who has worked in countries where the news diet is controlled by the government can sympathize with Thomas Jefferson’s oft-quoted remark that he would rather have newspapers without government than government without newspapers.

The intentions of our founders have rarely been as well articulated as they were by Justice Hugo Black 40 years ago, concurring with the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the Pentagon Papers: “The government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people.”

There is no neat formula for maintaining this balance. In practice, the tension between our obligation to inform and the government’s obligation to protect plays out in a set of rituals. As one of my predecessors, Max Frankel, then the Washington bureau chief, wrote in a wise affidavit filed during the Pentagon Papers case: “For the vast majority of ‘secrets,’ there has developed between the government and the press (and Congress) a rather simple rule of thumb: The government hides what it can, pleading necessity as long as it can, and the press pries out what it can, pleading a need and a right to know. Each side in this ‘game’ regularly ‘wins’ and ‘loses’ a round or two. Each fights with the weapons at its command. When the government loses a secret or two, it simply adjusts to a new reality.”

In fact, leaks of classified material — sometimes authorized — are part of the way business is conducted in Washington, as one wing of the bureaucracy tries to one-up another or officials try to shift blame or claim credit or advance or confound a particular policy. For further evidence that our government is highly selective in its approach to secrets, look no further than Bob Woodward’s all-but-authorized accounts of the innermost deliberations of our government.

The government surely cheapens secrecy by deploying it so promiscuously. According to the Pentagon, about 500,000 people have clearance to use the database from which the secret cables were pilfered. Weighing in on the WikiLeaks controversy in The Guardian, Max Frankel remarked that secrets shared with such a legion of “cleared” officials, including low-level army clerks, “are not secret.” Governments, he wrote, “must decide that the random rubber-stamping of millions of papers and computer files each year does not a security system make.”

Beyond the basic question of whether the press should publish secrets, criticism of the WikiLeaks documents generally fell into three themes: 1. That the documents were of dubious value, because they told us nothing we didn’t already know. 2. That the disclosures put lives at risk — either directly, by identifying confidential informants, or indirectly, by complicating our ability to build alliances against terror. 3. That by doing business with an organization like WikiLeaks, The Times and other news organizations compromised their impartiality and independence.

I’m a little puzzled by the complaint that most of the embassy traffic we disclosed did not profoundly change our understanding of how the world works. Ninety-nine percent of what we read or hear on the news does not profoundly change our understanding of how the world works. News mostly advances by inches and feet, not in great leaps. The value of these documents — and I believe they have immense value — is not that they expose some deep, unsuspected perfidy in high places or that they upend your whole view of the world. For those who pay close attention to foreign policy, these documents provide texture, nuance and drama. They deepen and correct your understanding of how things unfold; they raise or lower your estimation of world leaders. For those who do not follow these subjects as closely, the stories are an opportunity to learn more. If a project like this makes readers pay attention, think harder, understand more clearly what is being done in their name, then we have performed a public service. And that does not count the impact of these revelations on the people most touched by them. WikiLeaks cables in which American diplomats recount the extravagant corruption of Tunisia’s rulers helped fuel a popular uprising that has overthrown the government.

As for the risks posed by these releases, they are real. WikiLeaks’s first data dump, the publication of the Afghanistan War Logs, included the names of scores of Afghans that The Times and other news organizations had carefully purged from our own coverage. Several news organizations, including ours, reported this dangerous lapse, and months later a Taliban spokesman claimed that Afghan insurgents had been perusing the WikiLeaks site and making a list. I anticipate, with dread, the day we learn that someone identified in those documents has been killed.

WikiLeaks was roundly criticized for its seeming indifference to the safety of those informants, and in its subsequent postings it has largely followed the example of the news organizations and redacted material that could get people jailed or killed. Assange described it as a “harm minimization” policy. In the case of the Iraq war documents, WikiLeaks applied a kind of robo-redaction software that stripped away names (and rendered the documents almost illegible). With the embassy cables, WikiLeaks posted mostly documents that had already been redacted by The Times and its fellow news organizations. And there were instances in which WikiLeaks volunteers suggested measures to enhance the protection of innocents. For example, someone at WikiLeaks noticed that if the redaction of a phrase revealed the exact length of the words, an alert foreign security service might match the number of letters to a name and affiliation and thus identify the source. WikiLeaks advised everyone to substitute a dozen uppercase X’s for each redacted passage, no matter how long or short.

Whether WikiLeaks’s “harm minimization” is adequate, and whether it will continue, is beyond my power to predict or influence. WikiLeaks does not take guidance from The New York Times. In the end, I can answer only for what my own paper has done, and I believe we have behaved responsibly.

The idea that the mere publication of such a wholesale collection of secrets will make other countries less willing to do business with our diplomats seems to me questionable. Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates called this concern “overwrought.” Foreign governments cooperate with us, he pointed out, not because they necessarily love us, not because they trust us to keep their secrets, but because they need us. It may be that for a time diplomats will choose their words more carefully or circulate their views more narrowly, but WikiLeaks has not repealed the laws of self-interest. A few weeks after we began publishing articles about the embassy cables, David Sanger, our chief Washington correspondent, told me: “At least so far, the evidence that foreign leaders are no longer talking to American diplomats is scarce. I’ve heard about nervous jokes at the beginning of meetings, along the lines of ‘When will I be reading about this conversation?’ But the conversations are happening. . . . American diplomacy has hardly screeched to a halt.”

As for our relationship with WikiLeaks, Julian Assange has been heard to boast that he served as a kind of puppet master, recruiting several news organizations, forcing them to work in concert and choreographing their work. This is characteristic braggadocio — or, as my Guardian colleagues would say, bollocks. Throughout this experience we have treated Assange as a source. I will not say “a source, pure and simple,” because as any reporter or editor can attest, sources are rarely pure or simple, and Assange was no exception. But the relationship with sources is straightforward: you don’t necessarily endorse their agenda, echo their rhetoric, take anything they say at face value, applaud their methods or, most important, allow them to shape or censor your journalism. Your obligation, as an independent news organization, is to verify the material, to supply context, to exercise responsible judgment about what to publish and what not to publish and to make sense of it. That is what we did.

But while I do not regard Assange as a partner, and I would hesitate to describe what WikiLeaks does as journalism, it is chilling to contemplate the possible government prosecution of WikiLeaks for making secrets public, let alone the passage of new laws to punish the dissemination of classified information, as some have advocated. Taking legal recourse against a government official who violates his trust by divulging secrets he is sworn to protect is one thing. But criminalizing the publication of such secrets by someone who has no official obligation seems to me to run up against the First Amendment and the best traditions of this country. As one of my colleagues asks: If Assange were an understated professorial type rather than a character from a missing Stieg Larsson novel, and if WikiLeaks were not suffused with such glib antipathy toward the United States, would the reaction to the leaks be quite so ferocious? And would more Americans be speaking up against the threat of reprisals?

Whether the arrival of WikiLeaks has fundamentally changed the way journalism is made, I will leave to others and to history. Frankly, I think the impact of WikiLeaks on the culture has probably been overblown. Long before WikiLeaks was born, the Internet transformed the landscape of journalism, creating a wide-open and global market with easier access to audiences and sources, a quicker metabolism, a new infrastructure for sharing and vetting information and a diminished respect for notions of privacy and secrecy. Assange has claimed credit on several occasions for creating something he calls “scientific journalism,” meaning that readers are given the raw material to judge for themselves whether the journalistic write-ups are trustworthy. But newspapers have been publishing texts of documents almost as long as newspapers have existed — and ever since the Internet eliminated space restrictions, we have done so copiously.

Nor is it clear to me that WikiLeaks represents some kind of cosmic triumph of transparency. If the official allegations are to be believed, most of WikiLeaks’s great revelations came from a single anguished Army private — anguished enough to risk many years in prison. It’s possible that the creation of online information brokers like WikiLeaks and OpenLeaks, a breakaway site announced in December by a former Assange colleague named Daniel Domscheit-Berg, will be a lure for whistle-blowers and malcontents who fear being caught consorting directly with a news organization like mine. But I suspect we have not reached a state of information anarchy. At least not yet.

As 2010 wound down, The Times and its news partners held a conference call to discuss where we go from here. The initial surge of articles drawn from the secret cables was over. More would trickle out but without a fixed schedule. We agreed to continue the redaction process, and we agreed we would all urge WikiLeaks to do the same. But this period of intense collaboration, and of regular contact with our source, was coming to a close.

Just before Christmas, Ian Katz, The Guardian’s deputy editor, went to see Assange, who had been arrested in London on the Swedish warrant, briefly jailed and bailed out by wealthy admirers and was living under house arrest in a country manor in East Anglia while he fought Sweden’s attempt to extradite him. The flow of donations to WikiLeaks, which he claimed hit 100,000 euros a day at its peak, was curtailed when Visa, MasterCard and PayPal refused to be conduits for contributors — prompting a concerted assault on the Web sites of those companies by Assange’s hacker sympathizers. He would soon sign a lucrative book deal to finance his legal struggles.

The Guardian seemed to have joined The Times on Assange’s enemies list, first for sharing the diplomatic cables with us, then for obtaining and reporting on the unredacted record of the Swedish police complaints against Assange. (Live by the leak. . . .) In his fury at this perceived betrayal, Assange granted an interview to The Times of London, in which he vented his displeasure with our little media consortium. If he thought this would ingratiate him with The Guardian rival, he was naïve. The paper happily splashed its exclusive interview, then followed it with an editorial calling Assange a fool and a hypocrite.

At the mansion in East Anglia, Assange seated Katz before a roaring fire in the drawing room and ruminated for four hours about the Swedish case, his financial troubles and his plan for a next phase of releases. He talked vaguely about secrets still in his quiver, including what he regards as a damning cache of e-mail from inside an American bank.

He spun out an elaborate version of a U.S. Justice Department effort to exact punishment for his assault on American secrecy. If he was somehow extradited to the United States, he said, “I would still have a high chance of being killed in the U.S. prison system, Jack Ruby style, given the continual calls for my murder by senior and influential U.S. politicians.”

While Assange mused darkly in his exile, one of his lawyers sent out a mock Christmas card that suggested at least someone on the WikiLeaks team was not lacking a sense of the absurd.

Santa is Mum & Dad.

Bill Keller is the executive editor of The New York Times. This essay is adapted from his introduction to âOpen Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy: Complete and Expanded Coverage from The New York Times,â an ebook available for purchase at nytimes.com/opensecrets.

Bill Keller is the executive editor of The New York Times. This essay is adapted from his introduction to âOpen Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy: Complete and Expanded Coverage from The New York Times,â an ebook available for purchase at nytimes.com/opensecrets.

Summary: Is Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, a puppet master of the news media? He would like you to think so. But The Timesâs dealings with him reveal a different story.


After the Orlando nightclub shooting, Democrats criticized the routine sale of the type of semiautomatic rifle used by Omar Mateen. Hillary Clinton called them “weapons of war.” Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin said that if you used a gun like the AR-15 — or the similar Sig Sauer used in Orlando — to go hunting “you should stick to fishing.”

But many gun owners say they use semiautomatic rifles to hunt regularly.

In interviews with TIME, leaders of 15 state shooting groups said semiautomatic rifles are popular with hunters in their states. Hunters say they favor the gun for its versatility, accuracy and customizable features for shooting animals. The semiautomatic feature, which allows these guns to shoot up to 45 rounds a minute, is not always necessary, but useful in some situations, hunters say.

“It’s the most capable tool for the job at this time,” said Eric Mayer, who runs AR15hunter.com. “Bar none. Period. It is.”

Despite the criticism of semiautomatic rifles and their use in high profile mass shootings, gun control advocates say they are not focused on banning them, as they were during the 1994-2004 assault weapons ban. Stacey Radnor, spokeswoman for Everytown for Gun Safety, said that they are more focused on strengthening background checks and closing loopholes on sales than on banning specific guns.

TIME spoke with seven hunters who use semiautomatic guns like the AR-15.

Jay Perreira, Hawaii: Hunting feral goats

The jagged cliffs of Na Pali Coast State Park feature prominently at the beginning of the 1993 blockbuster film Jurassic Park. Rising out of the Pacific, the green slopes are home to more than the world’s image of reincarnated dinosaurs. Feral goats roam these mountains, and Jay Perreira often has them in the sight of his AR-15.

Perreira has lived on Kauai, the fourth-largest Hawaiian island, his entire life. For the last 15 years, the construction worker has hunted with the AR-15. Semiautomatic rifles have been used to hunt since the early 1900s. In 1963, a few years after the rifle was invented, Colt advertised the AR-15 as a “superb hunting partner.” (Colt confirmed to TIME the authenticity of this advertisement.) Today, Americans own at least a few million AR-15s and as many as eight million, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

The 45-year-old told TIME his favorite feature of the AR-15 is how easily it can be disassembled. The gun can be taken apart and carried several miles in a backpack through Kauai’s mountains to goat sanctuaries. “I know the rifle gets a really bad rap,” Perreira said. “But around here, I know a lot of guys that have them.”

Jonathan Owen, Texas: Hunting feral pigs

A west Texas pig sighting is not a cute barnyard encounter; it’s a reason to grab a rifle. Across the southern United States, wild pigs cause $1.5 billion in annual property damage. Boar can weigh up to 300 pounds, run up to 30 miles per hour and in Jonathan Owen’s experience, quickly turn violent.

“You do not have to hunt with an AR-15,” Owen, an Abilene, Texas resident who runs SHWAT.com, told TIME. “But the practical benefits of being able to engage a lot of pigs at a time, safely, is a big win.” The semiautomatic and large capacity magazine features allow Owen to take several shots at multiple pigs in a few seconds. When engaging a pack of wild pigs in west-Texas’ shrubbery, Owen says these features ensure his safety.

“Hog hunting can be the pursuit of dangerous game,” Owen said. “They can turn on you.”

Eric Mayer, Arizona: Hunting antelope jackrabbits

Antelope jackrabbits dart up to 30 miles per hour between bunches of upright dead sticks that could generously be called bushes. For skilled shooters, hunting these northern Arizona sprinters is a challenge. But Eric Mayer told TIME it’s nearly impossible without an AR-15.

The semiautomatic rifle can stay focused on a moving target between shots. Mayer, a Los Angeles resident who owns several outdoor recreation websites, says this is a huge advantage. “A semiauto changed my life,” Mayer said. “I’m able to make the (shot) because I don’t have to run the bolt (and) lose the target in my scope.”

In a bolt-action rifle, a metal bolt must be manually pulled back and pushed forward to load a new bullet after each shot. Bolt-action rifles have been used to hunt since the 1800s. While these rifles, as well as shotguns, remain popular with hunters, semiautomatic guns have become popular because they can take multiple shots without losing sight of an animal.

Gary Marbut, Montana: Hunting elk

A firearms instructor and longtime gun rights advocate, Gary Marbut hunts with the larger caliber cousin of the AR-15: the AR-10. Marbut’s rifle is still semiautomatic, but fires with more power. Many hunters say the standard caliber, or diameter of the bullet, of an AR-15 is preferable for hunting smaller animals. The average power of the shot can be less than a standard hunting shotgun. For Marbut to successfully hunt elk that weigh at least 500 pounds, the larger bullet is a must.

Marbut, 69, first used the AR-platform during three years he spent in the military. Adopted by the U.S. military in the 1960s, the M-16 is the fully automatic version of the AR. The military still uses a variant of the gun. The familiarity Marbut developed with the gun in the military prepared him to hunt with it when he returned home to Montana.

After stalking elk for hours through forested mountainous terrain in western Montana, Marbut says he needs a gun he can trust to hit its mark. That gun is his AR. “The last two elk I’ve taken, I took at about 300 yards,” he told TIME, a distance equivalent to three football fields. “They were both headshots.”

George Sodergren, Maine: Hunting coyotes

George Sodergren grew up around guns in southern Maine. He respects them and chooses his hunting firearms carefully. He does not believe a semi-automatic rifle is necessary for all animals. But for coyotes, he makes an exception.

After a heavy snowfall, Sodergren, a 49-year-old machinist, can track these skittish forest predators. Smaller than the typical golden retriever, a coyote combines its sense of smell with an ability to run up to 40 miles per hour to stay clear of threats. To kill one, Sodergren needs a versatile gun. “When you grab the (AR-15), it’s like shaking the hand of a good friend you haven’t seen in a long time,” he told TIME.

When Sodergren hunts coyotes, he positions himself downwind so they cannot smell him. Coyotes can approach in packs, so Sodergren says the AR-15 gives him the chance to land more than one shot. “I believe in one well-placed shot,” Sodergren said. “(But) if you’ve got multiple animals or you miss, you’ve got a quick follow-up shot.

Will Chambers, Michigan: Hunting deer

While the AR-15 is preferable for smaller game, Will Chambers makes the same gun work for animals of all sizes. To hunt deer, Chambers outfits his AR-15 with a larger caliber receiver — the long end of a gun that determines the size of the bullet the gun fires. He changes the bullet diameter from the standard .223 to .277 inches. That small difference can mean killing an adult deer in one shot or condemning the animal to a slow death. There are hundreds of ways to customize and accessorize the AR-15.

Ohio is one of several states that bans hunting deer with rifles. Chambers, a 34-year-old farmer from northwestern Ohio who also runs AR15hunter.com, heads to northern Michigan to hunt deer with his rifle. At dusk in January, Chambers shot 70 yards through a snowy forest with his AR-15 and killed a whitetail doe.

“These are not scary black rifles,” Chambers told TIME. “These are very useful tools for hunting.”

Kenny Gallahorn, Alaska: Hunting spotted seal

To be clear, Kenny Gallahorn does not hunt with an AR-15. His gun uses a smaller bullet. But his Ruger .22 gun is both semiautomatic and widely used by hunters.

In Kotzebue, Alaska, the Iñupiat tribe hunts seals and other animals to survive. Subsistence hunting among Alaskan Natives is popular across the state, but it is vital in the northwestern region with no roads that is roughly the size of Indiana. For an Iñupiaq like Gallahorn, hunting and gathering can make up to 50 percent of annual household food.

Seal hunting comes down to timing. As Gallahorn takes his boat into the Kotzebue Sound in the fall and spring, he watches the edges of floating ice. There, for only a second, seals emerge. “If I shoot and miss the first one, another one will pop up five feet away,” Gallahorn told TIME. “That’s the need for a semiautomatic.”

If he hits a seal the first time, Gallahorn says there is no need for a second shot. He floats over to the animal, spears it and pulls it into his boat. The spotted seals Gallahorn hunts are typically two- to four-feet long and weigh up to a couple hundred pounds. He eats them two-to-three times a month.

And when it comes to seal hunting, Gallahorn is not alone in his use of a semiautomatic. “The majority of people hunt with semiautomatics,” Gallahorn said.

Summary: TIME talked to hunters about why they use this controversial semiautomatic rifle.


That appeared at odds with the clauses in the contract for the deal, a copy of which was also sent to Mr Trump, stating that his consent would be needed for the deal to go ahead. An accountant, who did not want to be named for fear of being sued by Mr Trump, said it should have been clear from reviewing the documents that were sent to the Trump Organisation that something might be amiss.

Mr Garten refused to say whether the presidential candidate's lawyers identified flaws in the agreement. The court case is in part based on a complaint that was filed in 2010 by Mr Oberlander on behalf of Jody Kriss, his then client, who is the former finance director of Bayrock.

As well as alleging massive tax fraud committed through various deals, the complaint details how Felix Sater, a Russian former business associate of Mr Trump who helped source the FL deal, had previously been convicted of a mob-organised stock fraud heist of Wall Street.

Mr Sater's conviction was reportedly kept hidden when he became an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It is said he helped secure the arrest of some 19 colleagues to avoid prison time.

Mr Kriss’ lawsuit was suspended when a judge ruled Mr Oberlander's complaint be sealed for revealing Mr Sater's status as an informant. But last month a Manhattan judge reversed the ruling, allowing a version of the complaint to be made public.

The allegations in that complaint are now included in The People of the State of New York ex rel. the Bayrock Litigation Partnership v. Bayrock et al. which is being civilly prosecuted under New York’s qui tam law.

That authorises the state’s attorney general, after investigating a complaint, to assign the state’s claims to the whistleblowers. The case is now being brought forward by Mr Oberlander and Richard Lerner, his colleague.

Mr Lerner said: “Mr Trump gave his consent to the transaction after receiving a full set of documentation which made clear that without it the deal would not go through. The extent of his involvement and any culpability will become clear during the course of the case. At this time, it seems that he benefited indirectly as a partner alongside Sater and Bayrock.”

Bayrock described the allegations in the legal complaint by Jody Kriss, its former finance director, as “baseless”. The company said the deal was “vetted and approved by outside accountants and tax counsel". It claimed that the deal's “tax treatment” was subject to an “extensive field audit … conducted over many months” by the IRS, which “concluded that it was entirely appropriate”.

However, it refused to provide proof of the audit or answer a series of questions about what information had been made available to officials. Following publication, Bayrock said its reason for not providing "further comment" about the audit was that the former finance director's allegations about the FL deal are "a matter of ongoing litigation".

Summary: Donald Trump may be brought to court after a Telegraph investigation found the Republican presidential nominee signed off a deal designed to deprive the US Treasury of tens of millions of dollars in tax.


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TriStar Pictures has teamed up with the Mark Gordon Company, the C.S. Lewis Company and Entertainment One to bring "The Chronicles of Narnia" back to movie theaters with "The Silver Chair," the fourth published novel in Lewis' classic series.

According to TriStar parent Sony Pictures Entertainment, "Life of Pi" screenwriter David Magee will be in charge of adapting the novel for film. Gordon, Lewis' stepson Douglas Gresham, Vincent Sieber and Melvin Adams will serve as producers.

"Developing this project with The C.S. Lewis Company has been immensely exciting and a real joy," Gordon said in a statement. "We are so pleased to team up with our good friends at TriStar and our partners at eOne to introduce this new, magical chapter of the Narnia franchise to fans around the world, both old and new."

Also Read: 'Chronicles of Narnia' Fourth Film Planned Thanks to Deal With Mark Gordon

"It's been both fun and exciting to work with Mark Gordon and David Magee to develop the next Narnian movie, and now it's a thrill to welcome Tristar to our Narnia family," Gresham said in the statement. "I greatly look forward to plunging again into the joys and challenges of once more bringing Narnia to the screen, this time with the wonderful story of 'The Silver Chair.'"

The film adaptations of the first three "Narnia" novels, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," "Prince Caspian" and "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader," made a combined $1.6 billion worldwide. The first two were released by Disney, and "Dawn Treader" was a Fox film.

A movie based on "The Silver Chair" has been planned since Gordon partnered up with the C.S. Lewis Company in 2013, but that was without a studio partner.

Summary: The film adaptations of the first three 'Narnia' novels made a combined $1.6 billion worldwide.


If you are a woman in advertising, chances are you've faced workplace sexual harassment at one point or another.

That's the unnerving message of a forthcoming report from industry trade group 4A, which found that more than half of the nearly 400 women it surveyed said they had been subjected to harassment at least once.

One third said they had been passed over for an assignment because of perceived bias. Four in ten said it had led to their exclusion from a relevant decision-making process, and just over half admitted to feeling at least "somewhat vulnerable" to discrimination.

The survey was weighted heavily towards managerial workers with a relatively even split among middle management, senior management and other professionals — 43 percent, 33 percent and 24 percent respectively.

The group released a summary of its findings on Thursday in anticipation of the full report's publication sometime later this fall.

The revelation couldn't be more timely. A string of recent high-profile controversies have fueled an incendiary, industry-wide discussion on the gender gaps and sexism that still plague many workplaces in advertising.

Most recently, Saatchi & Saatchi executive chairman Kevin Roberts told Business Insider that the debate over gender equality is "all over" and suggested that the lack of women in leadership roles has to do with a dearth of "vertical ambition" among young people. The remarks set off an uproar that ended in his resignation.

Months before that, a lawsuit accused Gustavo Martinez, the since-ousted CEO of storied ad agency JWT, of repeatedly making inappropriate rape jokes and using sexist slurs, among other things.

Those incidents and others prompted 4A to release the data early in hopes of jolting forward the conversation while the issue remained fresh of mind.

"Given the amount of discourse generated in the past two weeks, some of which seemed to imply there were isolated incidents, we wanted to put any further denial to rest," 4A CEO Nancy Hill told Mashable in an email.

While the industry has made strides past the kind of casual misogyny famously portrayed in AMC's Mad Men, numbers show that women remain scarce in the executive suites and creative departments of Madison Avenue.

Hill says Roberts' comments are still representative of the attitudes of far too many ad execs when it comes to gender-related topics.

"There are industry leaders out there who brush off gender and diversity issues," she wrote in an op-ed accompanying the research. "Too many C-suite execs believe this issue is an isolated problem, one that doesn't exist in 'my house' or, remarkably, one that doesn't exist at all."

More from Mashable: We’ll never stop workplace sexual harassment as long as we ignore everyday sexism Google uses dogs playing poker to combat harassment in virtual reality This week on Twitter was all Harry Potter and cargo shorts

Summary: A recent report released by industry trade group 4A sent out an extremely unnerving message concerning harassment in the workplace.


In what onlookers compared to a scene from a zombie movie, a mass K2 overdose occurred on Tuesday in Brooklyn, New York.

Around 9:30 a.m. some 33 users had an near synchronized reaction to the drug in the public areas around Broadway and Myrtle Avenue, with some buckled to the sidewalk and others urinating and vomiting, according to DNA Info.

“It was a scene out of ‘The Walking Dead.’ People were stumbling all over the place,”neighbor Brian Arthur, 38 told DNA Info. “There was a couple of them trying to pick themselves up. One guy couldn’t move at all. They had to pick him up by his pants to put him in the ambulance.”

Emergency medical crews came to the scene and many of the 33 people treated were hospitalized and listed in serious condition afterwards.

K2, a drug referred to as synthetic marijuana, is made by spraying chemicals on dried leaves and is meant to mimic the effects of pot. It is often sold under different names, which makes it hard to assure the substance’s quality, according to the New York City Health Department.

Health Department officials warn that the drug, which was outlawed in October, can make users feel “extreme anxiety, confusion, paranoia, hallucinations, rapid heart rate, vomiting, seizures, fainting, kidney failure, and reduced blood supply to the heart.”

Summary: Those around the scene described it as looking like something out of a zombie movie