LinkedIn hacker indicted, hackers cause worldwide Internet outages, European experimental Mars lander may have exploded in crash landing, and more from across the United States and around the world.
—A federal grand jury indicted a Russian man for the 2012 hack of LinkedIn, where 117 million passwords were stolen. More here
—Domain name server company Dyn said hackers targeted them three times Friday with a distributed denial of service attack, causing internet outages across the globe. More here
—The European Space Agency (ESA) said Friday its experimental Mars lander, Schiaparelli, may have exploded in a crash landing on the planet’s surface. More here
—We’re live-blogging the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4).
Russian Man Indicted for Hacking 117 Million LinkedIn Passwords
Eric Risberg / AP
A federal grand jury indicted a Russian man this week in connection with hacking LinkedIn and stealing 117 million passwords.
Czech police arrested Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikulin, 29, Wednesday in Prague. Nikulin allegedly hacked LinkedIn in March 2012. Prosecutors also alleged Nikulin hacked social media site Formspring and file sharing site Dropbox. He now faces nine criminal counts after his Thursday indictment.
In court papers, federal agents aren't clear about what exactly Nikulin stole -- or how he planned to profit from their sale online. But the government claims Nikulin worked with at least two others in the attempt to make the business deals.
His arrest is the latest chapter in growing cyber tensions between the U.S. and Russia. While there is no indication that these hacks were sanctioned by the Russian government, federal authorities have pinned other hacks on the Kremlin.
NFL Kicker Placed on Paid Leave After Abuse Revelation
(Matt Rourke / AP)
Josh Brown, the New York Giants kicker who admitted to domestic abuse against his then-wife, has been placed on paid leave by the NFL.
While the league investigates these recent revelations, the NFL put Brown on the commissioner’s exempt list, ESPN reports. Brown cannot play or attend games but, with the team’s permission, he is allowed to work out and receive treatment at the team’s facility. A player may be on the exempt list indefinitely.
In a letter sent Friday, Adolpho Birch, a senior vice president for the NFL, told Brown the league will investigate documents released earlier this week from the King County Sheriff’s Office in Washington, which revealed a history of domestic violence and details surrounding a 2015 arrest.
In those documents, Brown referred to himself as a “physically, mentally, emotionally and verbally... repulsive man.” In one entry, he said that he viewed himself as “God” and his then-wife, Molly, as “my slave.”
Brown’s tenure with the Giants is likely over, and it’s unclear if any teams will sign him in the future. The Giants signed another kicker, Robbie Gould, to fill the current void left by Brown.
In the meantime, Giants head coach Ben McAdoo offered his support to Brown, saying Friday, “We’re not going to turn our back on Josh.”
Facebook says it’s relaxing its rules on explicit posts after feedback from our community and partners.
Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global public policy, and Justin Osofsky, the company’s vice president of global operations and media partnerships, wrote in a blog post that in “the weeks ahead, we’re going to begin allowing more items that people find newsworthy, significant, or important to the public interest—even if they might otherwise violate our standards.”
The move follows two recent controversies about posts that Facebook pulled because they apparently violated its Community Standards. One of those posts was Nick Ut’s iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning black-and-white photograph of a naked girl, wailing in pain in the aftermath of a napalm attack during the Vietnam War. Then this week, a video posted by the Swedish Cancer Society to promote breast-cancer awareness didn’t make it past Facebook’s censors. The company apologized and reversed itself in both cases.
Canada’s Prospects of a Trade Deal With the EU Appear Dead
Canada's International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland (Chris Wattie / Reuters)
Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s trade minister, walked out of talks Friday in Belgium, declaring the European Union incapable of ratifying a long-discussed trans-Atlantic free-trade deal.
All 28 EU governments support the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), but the agreement was held up because one of Belgium’s five subdivisions has not signed off. Without French-speaking Wallonia’s affirmation, Belgium cannot give assent to CETA. Walloon lawmakers are concerned that CETA, and a stalled plan for a similar deal with the United States, risk degrading consumer, labor, and environmental protections, while granting excessive power to multinational corporations. But supporters say the agreement could increase trade by 20 percent.
“Canada has worked, and I personally have worked, very hard,” Freeland, who was a visibly distraught after the talks, said. “But it is now evident to me, evident to Canada, that the European Union is incapable of reaching an agreement.”
CETA was set to be signed at an EU-Canada summit next Thursday in the presence of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
This issue could serve as an ominous forecast for future EU economic deals, including with the UK, which voted over the summer to leave the bloc and is still unsure about the shape of trade relations with it.
Chemical Spill at Kansas Food Plant Sends 54 to Hospital
The fog in the air is believed to contain chemicals from the spill (Reuters)
Updated at 4:06 p.m. ET
A chemical spill Friday at an Atchison, Kansas, food-processing plant sent a thick fog into the air and a chlorine-like smell, spurring evacuations and warnings from emergency officials.
Fifty-four people have been admitted to Atchison Hospital for upper-respiratory discomfort, including one into the intensive-care unit, TC Roberts, the hospital’s marketing and public relations director, said in an interview. Two of the women were pregnant and being monitored, Roberts said. The hospital was following poison-control protocol.
The spill occurred at 8:02 a.m. at MGP Ingredients, a food-and-alcohol plant, Atchison City Manager Trey Cocking said. Citing city officials, the Kansas CIty Star reports the reaction was caused after two chemicals were inadvertently mixed together.
The Kansas Department of Transportation confirmed that the two chemicals were sodium hypochlorite—a salt-based chemical mainly used for bleaching—and sulphuric acid, according to public-affairs manager, Kimberly Qualls. Exposure to sodium hypochlorite can cause upper respiratory issues due to the corrosive effects of chlorine. The city would not confirm which chemicals were mixed.
Atchison city officials said shortly before 11 a.m. that the situation was under control and all-clear was being given.
Shortly after the spill, Atchison County emergency officials urged people to stay out of town.
Residents of Atchison who live north of the plant were being told to stay inside with their doors and windows shut.
Atchison is located in northeast Kansas, about 40 miles from Kansas City.
Images from social media showed a thick gray plume clouding the air.
Images of Schiaparelli’s expected landing site taken on October 20, 2016, by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (European Space Agency)
The European Space Agency (ESA) said Friday its experimental Mars lander, Schiaparelli, may have exploded in a crash landing on the planet’s surface.
“Estimates are that Schiaparelli dropped from a height of between 2 and 4 kilometres, therefore impacting at a considerable speed, greater than 300 km/h,” the ESA said in a statement. “It is also possible that the lander exploded on impact, as its thruster propellant tanks were likely still full. These preliminary interpretations will be refined following further analysis.”
As my colleague Marina Koren previously reported, Schiaparelli was scheduled to touch down on the red planet Wednesday after a seven-month journey. The mission, conducted jointly between the ESA and Russian space agency Roscosmos, lost contact with the lander shortly after it began its descent. Now, the ESA believes the lander suffered issues during the last 50 seconds of its descent through Mars’s atmosphere, prompting the possible crash.
The Wall Street Journal is offering buyouts to “a substantial number of employees,” Gerard Baker, its editor in chief, told the newspaper’s staff in a memo Friday.
As I told you earlier this week, we have begun an extensive review of operations as part of a broader transformation program. There will be, unfortunately, an impact on news department staff in this process. In order to limit the number of involuntary layoffs, we will be offering all news employees around the world - management and non-management - the option to elect to take an enhanced voluntary severance benefit. The terms are described in the attached FAQ.
We are seeking a substantial number of employees to elect this benefit, but we reserve the right to reject a volunteer based on business considerations. Employees will be required to sign a separation agreement and release of claims in a form provided by the Company in exchange for the accompanying severance benefits.
I regret of course the need for such a move and I appreciate deeply the dedication all of you continue to show through challenging times. Thanks to your hard work, the news department continues to produce world-class journalism every day and I'm confident this process is the right one to set us on the right footing for renewed growth in the years ahead.
Sydney Ember, The New York Times’s media reporter, pointed out on Twitter that the FAQ section of the memo says “there are no current plans for future buyouts.”
Earlier this week, the newspaper reported that Dow Jones & Co., the Journal’s parent company, “launched a broader review of operations to cut costs in response to a significant decline in print advertising.” More:
The memo didn’t lay out specifics, but people familiar with the situation said one element of the plan involves combining the “Business & Tech” and “Money & Investing” sections. That would be aimed at reducing production costs, and wouldn’t signal a cutback in coverage in those core areas, one of the people said.
The newspaper’s report quoted unnamed sources as saying the revamp “could include a reduction of head count.”
Looks like whoever launched this morning’s attack on the internet is at it again, shutting down access to Twitter, Reddit, Netflix, and other sites. Around noon ET, domain name server company Dyn said hackers had once again targeted them with a distributed denial of service attack, flooding their servers with nonsense and hampering their ability to properly direct internet traffic.
This time, the U.S. reports of outages appear more closely centered on the northeast states, with sizable gridlock also seen in Japan, the U.K., and France, according to downdetector.com.
Police officers demonstrate on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, France (Michel Euler / AP)
Hundreds of police officers marched in Paris and other French cities Thursday for the fourth night of protests against their working conditions, Agence France-Presse reports.
The officers, who say they are ill-equipped to defend themselves on the job, protested against an increasing workload, bureaucracy, and outdated equipment. They also called on the government to implement fixed minimum sentences for attacks against officers. The demonstrations follow several attacks on police in recent months, including a Molotov cocktail thrown on a patrol car and the killing of a French officer and his partner in June by a man who pledged allegiance to ISIS .
The demonstrations come amid a nationwide state of emergency—which has been in place since last November’s attacks—and will likely play a role in the country’s presidential election in six months. Many of the presidential candidates have used the opportunity to criticize President François Hollande, including Alain Juppé, the center-right candidate, and Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate.
In a statement to police Friday, Bernard Cazeneuve, the French interior minister, said: “You are asking for respect, we owe you that. You are asking for resources, we’ll give you them. You are asking for support, you’ve earned it.”
AT&T Reportedly Is in Talks to Acquire Time Warner
(Brendan McDermid / Reuters)
AT&T is in advanced talks to buy Time Warner and a deal could be announced as early as this weekend, Bloombergand theWall Street Journal report.
The merger would unite AT&T’s portfolio of wireless, broadband, and satellite-TV services with Time Warner’s vast entertainment empire, which includes CNN, HBO, TNT, and TBS.
AT&T and Time Warner representatives declined to comment.
There Is Nothing Funny About Exploding Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Sticky Bombs
Submitted to Reddit by Haku111
It seems Samsung has little sense of humor when it comes to its combustible Galaxy Note 7 cellphone. The company recalled the Note 7 last month because its lithium-ion batteries can burst into flames. It’s banned by some airlines, and become the butt of a presidential wisecrack. But the joke Samsung didn’t find funny was made this week by video-game enthusiasts.
A gamer who uses the screen name HitmanNiko wrote a code that players can download—called a “mod”—for Grand Theft Auto V that replaces sticky bombs with Samsung’s pyrotechnics-friendly cellphone. Gamers then posted videos to YouTube of their digital character using the phone to blow up people, cars, and helicopters.
Some owners of those YouTube accounts then received copyright-infringement notices, and their videos were removed. One U.S. gamer, who goes by the screen name DoctorGTA, said in a YouTube video his livestream account was suspended after he got an infringement notice from Samsung Electronics America Inc.
So far, Samsung has done a bad job of damage control. This latest move to silence jibes from gamers seems only to have raised more notice that Samsung produced millions of phones that can potentially catch fire.
Here's an example of the sticky-bomb Samsung videos (fast forward to 45 seconds):
America’s Latest Whiskey Rebellion May Be Coming to an End
(Bruce Schreiner / AP)
Jim Beam workers in Kentucky, on strike for the past six days to protest long work hours, were offered a new contract Thursday that includes a company pledge to hire more workers, according to the Associated Press.
About 250 union workers are scheduled to vote on the new contract Friday, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union said.
Workers walked out last Saturday from distilleries at Clermont and Boston, Kentucky, over working hours. Jim Beam workers said they were often forced to work 60-80 hours per week in order to meet the demands of the global bourbon boom.
Clarkson Hine, a company spokesman, said Thursday the company was encouraged by the tentative deal reached with union leaders.
Bourbon, Kentucky’s golden commodity, is a $3 billion a year industry. Ninety-five percent of the world’s bourbon is produced in the state.
Jim Beam is owned by Suntory Holdings Ltd., the Japanese beverage giant. Suntory bought the classic American whisky brand for $16 billion in 2014. In the first six months of 2016, Suntory’s alcohol profits rose 24 percent due to the popularity of its American spirit sales.
Smoke rises from a building in Kirkuk, Iraq, where two ISIS militants are believed to be holed up Friday. (Rudaw TV / AP)
ISIS fighters attacked the Iraqi city of Kirkuk Friday, killing at least 19 people, even as Iraqi forces were closing in on Mosul, the group’s last major stronghold in Iraq.
The battle in Kirkuk appears to be ongoing, and there are various versions of what’s exactly happening there. The BBC reported that ISIS fighters attacked government buildings, killing at least six police officers. They also targeted a power station that’s under construction and killed 13 workers. Twelve ISIS fighters were also reportedly killed. Images on social media posted by a Kurdish news site showed Kirkuk residents had hanged at least one suspected ISIS fighter.
The attack is a reminder that while ISIS is losing territory in Iraq and neighboring Syria, it still remains a force to be reckoned with in the region. The attack in Kirkuk comes as Iraqi forces, Kurdish Peshmerga, and their allies—backed by U.S. airstrikes—are trying to retake Mosul, which is about 100 miles northwest of Kirkuk.
About 5,000 ISIS fighters are reportedly still in Mosul, the group’s last major stronghold in Iraq, along with 1.5 million people.
Double-Oh No: Pierce Brosnan Wants Out of Indian Ad Campaign
John Salangsang / AP
Pierce Brosnan, the former James Bond star, endorsed what he thought was breath-freshening, tooth-whitening mint. He appeared in Indian newspapers, with his lush beard and arched eyebrow, holding a tin of Pan Bahar. A minute-long TV commercial shows the former 007 cooly waltzing into a fancy hotel, disarming men, women, and a pack of ninjas with his good looks—and a can of Pan Bahar.
But Brosnan is upset now because Pan Bahar is associated in India with addictive forms of chewing tobacco. Those products, which are made from a mixture of nuts, seeds, herbs, spices, and tobacco, are used by millions of Indians and have been linked to cancer. Pan Bahar’s manufacturer, Ashok & Co., told the BBC the public has misconceived their product and there’s neither nicotine or tobacco in it.
In a statement to People magazine, Brosnan said: “As a man who has spent decades championing women’s healthcare and environmental protection, I was distressed to learn of Pan Bahar’s unauthorized and deceptive use of my image to endorse their range of pan masala products. I would never have entered into an agreement to promote a product in India that is dangerous to one’s health.”
Brosnan demanded the company remove his image from all of the company’s products. Here’s a video of the commercial:
Update 9:45 a.m. ET: Dyn, a large domain name service company, reports that it was attacked by a distributed denial-of-service attack around 7 a.m. ET, shutting down access to a number of popular internet sites. As of 9:20 a.m. ET, it had restored service to normal.
Dyn is one of several companies that essentially maintains a master list of websites, translating “CNN.com” into the string of numbers that actually directs readers to the news network’s servers. It appears they were flooded with targeted traffic by an unknown party with the intention of shutting down access to these sites.
Our original post below:
If your internet connection seems slow this morning—especially if you live in the U.S. Northeast—you’re not imagining it. Internet-monitoring service downrightnow.com says Twitter is experiencing a serious outage, and crowd-sourced downdetector.com reports trouble at a slew of popular sites, including CNN, Amazon, Netflix, and Reddit.
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, and Donald Trump, her GOP rival, paused their contentious campaign for the presidency for an evening of what was supposed to be light-hearted ribbing and self-effacing humor.
But as my colleague Megan Garber noted, the evening at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner was going according to plan “until Trump decided it was time to tease his opponent a little more sharply.” Trump’s remarks, she said, “went full stream-of-consciousness [and] on the attack.” The crowd, at various points in the night, gasped, booed, booed some more, and then some.
South Africa Says It's Leaving the International Criminal Court
South Africa’s failure to arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir prompted criticism. (Mike Hutchings / Reuters)
South Africa said Friday it notified the UN on October 19 that it is leaving The Hague-based International Criminal Court.
Michael Masutha, the justice minister, said at a news conference South Africa didn’t want to carry out the ICC’s arrest warrants, which would lead to “regime change.” Masutha said the government would introduce legislation in parliament to withdraw the country from the ICC.
Last year, the government didn’t arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who was in the country despite an ICC warrant against him for his alleged actions in the Darfur region. A South African court criticized the government for that failure.
Human-rights groups condemned Friday’s announcement, and experts predict it will trigger similar decisions by other African nations, many of which believe the ICC is biased against African leaders. The UN declined to comment.
Office workers work in offices, for better or for worse.
I noticed the shoes first. That I was wearing them. Real shoes, the leather kind, with laces. After a year and a half, I was finally returning to the office, and that meant giving up the puffer slippers and slides that had sustained me for so long. Real shoes, I quickly remembered, are terrible. Likewise pants. Likewise getting to work, and being at work. Whew.
That was summer 2021. I’ve since acclimated to the office once again: I don the uniform; I make the commute; I pour the coffee; I do my job; and then I go back home. There are costs to this arrangement, clearly. I lose some time—time I could spend working!—transporting myself, in shoes and pants, from one building to another. I miss the chance to finish household tasks between my meetings, or fix myself a healthy and affordable lunch. As a university professor and administrator, I have more flexibility than most professionals, and I’m not required to go in each and every day. But even so, I have less control over each hour of my life than I used to—a fact that could very well be making me less productive overall. Indeed, it’s possible, or even likely, that my employer—and yours—could help their workers and the bottom line, simply by allowing us to work from home or come in on a hybrid plan. Remote, flexible employment might be a win for everyone.
Carl von Clausewitz observed in his classic On War that “the maximum use of force is by no means incompatible with the simultaneous use of the intellect.” That means, in part, acting thoughtfully but with the utmost effort, understanding that war is more bar fight than chess game. Or, to put it in the simpler words of Jim Malone, Eliot Ness’s counselor in The Untouchables, “You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way! And that’s how you get Capone.”
Al Capone is an apt analogy for what the West confronts in Russia: a particularly noxious mix of Mafia mentality, hypernationalist ideology, and totalitarian technique. Elegance is not the Russian way, and it cannot be our way. This is the light in which one should measure the accomplishments of NATO’s recent gathering in Madrid.
There are not enough humans to take care of all the animals.
When Michelle Stokes noticed a necrotic wound on her cat, Jellyfish, last July, she and her husband had to call about 50 vets before finding one that could squeeze them in.
The local emergency animal hospital was so backed up that it said the wound—serious but not yet life-threatening—wasn’t really an emergency. Jellyfish didn’t have a regular vet, because Stokes and her husband had just moved to the Cleveland area. They pulled up Google Maps and started going down the list of offices they found. It was the same response every time: no vacancies, not taking new patients, not until August or even September. Meanwhile, Jellyfish was getting sicker and more lethargic. “We just kept trying and trying and trying,” Stokes told me. “We pretty much called every single vet’s office in the greater-Cleveland area.” A week in, they finally got a lucky break. They managed to speak directly to a vet at one practice, and when Stokes sent over a photo of the wound, the vet said to bring Jellyfish in for surgery. The cat’s now doing just fine.
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I wonder if the remaining sensible Republicans have accepted the irretrievable loss of the GOP they once knew.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
In 1991, the last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was briefly deposed in a coup by hard-line members of the Soviet Communist Party. Gorbachev, upon his return to Moscow, tried to differentiate between the plotters and the Party itself. One of his closest advisers, Aleksandr Yakovlev, told him that this effort was pointless, akin to “serving tea to a corpse.”
When it comes to lasting romance, passion has nothing on friendship.
“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.
“I think I may have met my future wife,” I told my father on the phone, “but there are a few issues.” To be precise: I met the woman in question on a weeklong trip to Europe, she lived in Spain, we’d only been on a couple of dates, and we didn’t speak a word of the same language. Obviously, I told my amused father, “she has no idea I plan to marry her.” But I was 24 and lovestruck, and none of that stopped me from embarking on a quixotic romantic adventure. After a year punctuated by two frustratingly short visits, I quit my job in New York and moved to Barcelona with a plan to learn the language and a prayer that when she could actually understand me, she might love me.
Too many Americans are blithely dismissing threats that could prove cataclysmic.
Even as we watch the reservoirs and lakes of the West go dry, we keep watering our lawns, soaking our golf courses, and growing water-thirsty crops.
As inflation mounts and the national debt balloons, progressive politicians vote for ever more spending.
As the ice caps melt and record temperatures make the evening news, we figure that buying a Prius and recycling the boxes from our daily Amazon deliveries will suffice.
When TV news outlets broadcast video after video of people illegally crossing the nation’s southern border, many of us change the channel.
And when a renowned conservative former federal appellate judge testifies that we are already in a war for our democracy and that January 6, 2021, was a genuine constitutional crisis, MAGA loyalists snicker that he speaks slowly and celebrate that most people weren’t watching.
Pop culture tends to romanticize bookstores as workplaces. Imogen Binnie’s Nevada does the opposite.
Many writers have to wait until old age to see their work reissued. Imogen Binnie, whose debut novel, Nevada, came out in 2013, only had to wait nine years. Nevada was first released by Topside Press, an indie publisher that was run by trans editors and that put out primarily trans literature. It became a word-of-mouth hit, generating what the writer Casey Plett calls a “communal response,” especially among trans and queer readers. After Topside folded in 2017, taking the book out of print, fans kept Nevada alive—discussing it, recommending it, and distributing it via a site called Have You Read Nevada? Eventually, one such fan, the editor Jackson Howard, reached out to Binnie, which led to Farrar, Straus & Giroux reissuing the book this summer.
Shared rides are back for the first time since March 2020. Did anyone notice?
In the end, Uber Pool had to go. By mid-March 2020, chunks of America were already in lockdown, AMC had boarded up its movie theaters, and the country’s toilet-paper reserves were getting wiped out. The novel coronavirus was here, and sharing rides with strangers in a different stranger’s car had become yet another part of life upended by the pandemic. “If you must travel” using any of Uber’s other options, the company made sure to note on March 17, the day it officially disabled the pooling feature on its app, “please keep your driver’s well-being in mind by washing your hands before and after entering the vehicle.”
Before the pandemic, shared rides (both from Uber Pool and its biggest competitor, Lyft Line) were an inescapable part of urban life for the professional class. They were the dive bar of ride hailing: always cheap, mostly chaotic. But while just about every other mode of transportation has long since returned—goodbye masks on planes, hello cruise ships—Uber Pool has been nowhere to be found. Yes, people can still order Ubers for themselves, but the drama (and the very occasional joy) of schlepping across town while avoiding eye contact with two other Poolers has vanished.
The escapist sweep of the Netflix show’s story keeps clashing with its winking plunder of archival pop culture.
This article contains light spoilers through the fourth season of Stranger Things.
Somehow, even thousands of viewing minutes in, my synapses numbed by a cinematic universe so squelchy that it induces visceral anxiety, I still don’t really know how to feel about Stranger Things. It’s hard to even say exactly what it is. TV watchers today are accustomed to streaming works that coalesce, murkily, somewhere between film and television. (Try—if you can—to define The Beatles: Get Back, an almost-eight-hour, three-part work of living theater directed by Peter Jackson.) But the transmediality of Stranger Things is stranger still. Each season follows an immutable formula—kids encounter a monster, superpowered girl saves the world, sweet but expendable supporting character is sacrificed in the process—swiping from a grab bag of ’80s VHS tapes, nostalgic earworms, and coming-of-age angst. And each season is designed to then be liberally rehashed: memed on Twitter, spotted on the Spotify charts, replicated on TikTok, explicated on Reddit.
In pursuit of money, universities and conferences are uprooting traditional rivalries and regional loyalties.
College-sports traditionalists were appalled last week when the Big Ten athletic conference announced that it will add UCLA and the University of Southern California to its membership in 2024—creating a seismic shift in the college-sports landscape that will generate millions of dollars in revenue for the two California powerhouse programs.
This reorganization is the strongest indicator yet that college sports is cannibalizing itself. In pursuit of greater revenue from broadcast rights, schools and conferences are more and more willing to ignore traditional rivalries, customs, and regional loyalties.
For now, USC and UCLA are members of the Pac-12, long the premier conference in the West. Athletes at the two schools are about to spend a lot more time traveling to play faraway new rivals in the Midwest, where the Big Ten is based. But many college football programs are going to be facing new realities. CBS Sports reported that another major conference, the Big 12, may soon peel as many as six more members away from the now-beleaguered Pac-12.