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Revealed: leak uncovers global abuse of cyber-surveillance weapon
Spyware sold to authoritarian regimes used to target activists, politicians and journalists, data suggests
Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Paul Lewis, David Pegg,Sam Cutler,Nina Lakhani and Michael Safi
Sun 18 Jul 2021 12.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/revealed-leak-uncovers-global-abuse-of-cyber-surveillance-weapon-nso-group-pegasus
Human rights activists, journalists and lawyers across the world have been targeted by authoritarian governments using hacking software sold by the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, according to an investigation into a massive data leak.
The investigation by the Guardian and 16 other media organisations suggests widespread and continuing abuse of NSO’s hacking spyware, Pegasus, which the company insists is only intended for use against criminals and terrorists.
Pegasus is a malware that infects iPhones and Android devices to enable operators of the tool to extract messages, photos and emails, record calls and secretly activate microphones.
The leak contains a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that, it is believed, have been identified as those of people of interest by clients of NSO since 2016.
Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based nonprofit media organisation, and Amnesty International initially had access to the leaked list and shared access with media partners as part of the Pegasus project, a reporting consortium.
The presence of a phone number in the data does not reveal whether a device was infected with Pegasus or subject to an attempted hack. However, the consortium believes the data is indicative of the potential targets NSO’s government clients identified in advance of possible surveillance attempts.
Forensics analysis of a small number of phones whose numbers appeared on the leaked list also showed more than half had traces of the Pegasus spyware.
The Guardian and its media partners will be revealing the identities of people whose number appeared on the list in the coming days. They include hundreds of business executives, religious figures, academics, NGO employees, union officials and government officials, including cabinet ministers, presidents and prime ministers.
The list also contains the numbers of close family members of one country’s ruler, suggesting the ruler may have instructed their intelligence agencies to explore the possibility of monitoring their own relatives.
The disclosures begin on Sunday, with the revelation that the numbers of more than 180 journalists are listed in the data, including reporters, editors and executives at the Financial Times, CNN, the New York Times, France 24, the Economist, Associated Press and Reuters.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/revealed-leak-uncovers-global-abuse-of-cyber-surveillance-weapon-nso-group-pegasus
The Disinformation Dozen: Executive Summary
1. The Disinformation Dozen are twelve anti-vaxxers who play leading roles in spreading digital misinformation about Covid vaccines. They were selected because they have large numbers of followers, produce high volumes of anti-vaccine content or have seen rapid growth of their social media accounts in the last two months.
2. Analysis of a sample of anti-vaccine content that was shared or posted on Facebook and Twitter a total of 812,000 times between 1 February and 16 March 2021 shows that 65 percent of anti-vaccine content is attributable to the Disinformation Dozen.
3. Despite repeatedly violating Facebook, Instagram and Twitter’s terms of service agreements, nine of the Disinformation Dozen remain on all three platforms, while just three have been comprehensively removed from just one platform.
4. This is the product of a series of failures from social media platforms:
a. Research conducted by CCDH last year has shown that platforms fail to act on 95 percent of the Covid and vaccine misinformation reported to them.
b. CCDH’s recent report, Malgorithm, uncovered evidence that Instagram’s algorithm actively recommends similar misinformation.
c. Tracking of 425 anti-vaccine accounts by CCDH shows that their total following across platforms now stood at 59.2 million in December, an increase of 877,000 more than they had in June.
d. CCDH’s ongoing tracking shows that the 20 anti-vaxxers with the largest followings account for over two-thirds of this total cross-platform following of 59.2 million.
5. Analysis of anti-vaccine content posted to Facebook over 689,000 times in the last two months shows that up to 73 percent of that content originates with members of the Disinformation Dozen of leading online anti-vaxxers.
6. Facebook’s own internal analysis of vaccine hesitant content on its platform is likely to underestimate the influence of leading anti-vaxxers by failing to address the ultimate source of this content, and by the recorded failure of its algorithms to identify content concerning vaccines.
7. Analysis of over 120,000 anti-vaccine tweets collected in the last two months shows that up to 17 percent feature the Disinformation Dozen of leading online anti-vaxxers.
8. The most effective and efficient way to stop the dissemination of harmful information is to deplatform the most highly visible repeat offenders, who we term the Disinformation Dozen. This should also include the organisations these individuals control or fund, as well as any backup accounts they have established to evade removal.
9. Platforms should establish a clear threshold for enforcement action, such as two strikes, after which restrictions are applied to accounts short of deplaforming them.
10. Users should be presented with warning screens when attempting to follow links to sites known to host vaccine misinformation, and users exposed to posts containing misinformation should be shown effective corrections.
11. Facebook should not allow private and secret anti-vaccine Groups where dangerous anti-vaccine disinformation can be spread with impunity.
The Disinformation Dozen are responsible for up to 65% of antivaccine content At the outset of this research, we identified a dozen individuals who appeared to be extremely influential creators of digital anti-vaccine content. These individuals were selected either because they run anti-vaccine social media accounts with large numbers of followers, because they produce high volumes of anti-vaccine content or because their growth was accelerating rapidly at the outset of our research in February.
Full profiles of each are available at the end of this report.
1. Joseph Mercola
2. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
3. Ty and Charlene Bollinger
4. Sherri Tenpenny
5. Rizza Islam
6. Rashid Buttar
7. Erin Elizabeth
8. Sayer Ji
9. Kelly Brogan
10. Christiane Northrup
11. Ben Tapper
12. Kevin Jenkins
The Disinformation Dozen are responsible for up to 65% of anti-vaccine content
The Disinformation 12.
https://252f2edd-1c8b-49f5-9bb2-cb57bb47e4ba.filesusr.com/ugd/f4d9b9_b7cedc0553604720b7137f8663366ee5.pdf
Improve the Fit and Filtration of Your Mask to Reduce the Spread of COVID-19
Updated Apr. 6, 2021
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/mask-fit-and-filtration.html
Correct and consistent mask use is a critical step everyone can take to reduce their risk of getting and spreading COVID-19. Masks work best when everyone wears them, but not all masks provide the same protection. How well a mask fits, how well it filters the air, and how many layers it has are all important to consider when choosing which mask to wear. Wearing a mask around people who do not live with you or when someone in your house is sick is now even more critical with the increased spread of new COVID-19 variants, some of which appear to spread more easily and quickly than the original virus that causes COVID-19.
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https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/mask-fit-and-filtration.html
Covid: UK faces a difficult summer, says leading scientist
By Hazel Shearing
BBC News
Published3 hours ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57877033
It is going to be a "difficult summer" with Covid cases in the UK possibly reaching 200,000 a day, the scientist whose modelling led to the first nationwide restrictions has suggested.
Prof Neil Ferguson said there could be as many as 2,000 daily hospital admissions per day, which would cause "major disruption" to the NHS.
England and Scotland are set to ease restrictions from Monday.
The UK recorded more than 50,000 cases on both Friday and Saturday.
The last time case numbers were that high was in mid-January.
Prof Ferguson, who sits on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show it was "almost certain" that the UK would reach 100,000 cases and 1,000 hospital admissions per day as almost all legal restrictions on social contact end in England and school holidays begin.
He said maintaining that level could be described as "success".
"The real question is do we get to double that, or even higher?" he said, though adding that it was "much less certain" to predict.
He said a further 500,000 people could get long Covid.
Prof Ferguson said the "best projections" were that the peak of this wave could occur between August and mid-September, and it would take around three weeks to know the impact of relaxing restrictions.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has described England's approach to easing lockdown as "cautious but irreversible".
Asked whether restrictions could be reintroduced, Prof Ferguson said there may be "a need to slow the spread to some extent" if hospital admissions were to reach 2,000 or 3,000 per day.
"It's going to be a difficult summer for many reasons... I think case numbers are likely to be declining at least by late September, even in the the worst-case scenario," he said.
"Going into the the winter, I think we will have quite quite a high degree of immunity against Covid, the real concerns are a resurgence of influenza, because we haven't had any influenza for 18 months."
He added that flu "could be, frankly, almost as damaging both for health and the health system, by December or January, as Covid has been this year".
Earlier, Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick said there would be "some quite challenging weeks ahead".
Social distancing rules will end in England on Monday, although government guidelines advise face coverings should still be worn in enclosed spaces such as in shops and on public transport.
"We will all need to exercise good judgement," Mr Jenrick told Sky News.
Scotland will move to level zero of Covid restrictions on Monday, meaning pubs and restaurants can open until midnight. However, limits on outdoor meetings will remain, the return of workers to offices will be delayed and face coverings will still be mandatory.
Most Covid rules in Wales are set to be scrapped from 7 August., but face coverings will still be required in most public places and on public transport.
In Northern Ireland, restrictions will be eased further on 26 July, if approved at a review on 22 July
In other key developments:
* prime minister and chancellor will self-isolate as normal following contact with Health Secretary Sajid Javid, who tested positive for coronavirus, after initially saying they would take part in a pilot scheme involving daily testing.
* Mr Jenrick said a decision on routinely offering Covid jabs to under-18s will be made within days.
* Thousands of people with long Covid could benefit from the funding of 15 new studies of the condition, its causes and potential treatments.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57877033
‘Selfish-isolation’: how politicians and public reacted to Boris Johnson’s U-turn
The PM and chancellor provoked a furious backlash before they U-turned and said they would isolate
Josh Halliday
Sun 18 Jul 2021 10.01 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/18/selfish-isolation-how-politicians-and-public-reacted-to-boris-johnson-u-turn
Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak were forced into a hasty U-turn after a furious backlash over their attempt to avoid self-isolation by saying they were part of a pilot testing scheme. Anger at events on Sunday united Conservative and Labour MPs, business leaders and those who have lost loved ones to Covid-19.
Lobby Akinnola of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group, whose father died from coronavirus last year: “It’s like this government has learned nothing since the Barnard Castle debacle. People all over the country are making huge sacrifices. They’re isolating when pinged because they know how important it is to protect people. But apparently Mr Johnson and Mr Sunak think the rules don’t apply to them.
“They’re putting people at risk and making a mockery of the sacrifice of others. The prime minister and his chancellor are supposed to be leading by example, but instead they think they get to pick and choose selfish-isolation over self-isolation. When will they realise the rules apply to them as much as the rest of us?”
Keir Starmer, Labour leader: “This Conservative government is in chaos. Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak tried to fix the rules yet again to benefit themselves. They only backtracked when they got found out. They’re like failed bankrobbers who only offered to give the money back because they’ve been caught.”
Gavin Barwell, former chief of staff to Theresa May and ex-Conservative minister: “They don’t seem to learn, do they? Most people don’t pay much attention to much of what goes on in SW1, but any sense of politicians not following the rules they expect everyone else to follow is guaranteed to cut through.”
Tim Montgomerie, former adviser to Boris Johnson and conservative commentator: “In reacting so negatively to Downing Street’s initial decision not to self-isolate I can’t remember many times when Twitter was so united. Something seriously wrong at the heart of this government.”
Andy Burnham, Labour mayor of Greater Manchester: “I’m sorry but this U-turn is nowhere near enough. As we go into tomorrow, much more grip, clarity and leadership is needed if we are to manage the risks. Ministers should start now and make a clear statement that masks will continue to be mandatory on all public transport.”
Anna Soubry, former Conservative minister: “This is what government looks like when it loses its moral compass and abandons values and principles. The world looks on in complete disbelief at what our country has become. These are the consequence of the Conservatives’ shift to the right and election of Boris Johnson. #WakeUpBritain”
David Gauke, former Conservative minister: “In my day, we did our U-turns over a few days, sometimes even over a few weeks … Wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that it was Rishi Sunak who forced the U-turn. All a shambles but the quick retreat probably means not that much political damage done. But extraordinary that anyone thought it was viable.”
Sacha Lord, night-time economy adviser for Greater Manchester: “Now that we have seen the PM and chancellor’s complete disregard for track and trace, they now urgently need to review it before 16 August. It’s crippling businesses and jobs across the UK. Tomorrow, people will being pinged left, right and centre. Utter madness.”
Charlotte Wilson, Twitter user: “I’m somewhat ashamed to say that my husband has just deleted the NHS track and trace app following the news that Johnson and Sunak have no intention of isolating having been pinged. The thing is though, who can blame him? Thousands are going to do the same.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/18/selfish-isolation-how-politicians-and-public-reacted-to-boris-johnson-u-turn
U-turn as Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak to self-isolate after criticism
U-turn came hours after No 10 said PM and chancellor would avoid isolation by joining pilot testing scheme
Ben Quinn @BenQuinn75
Sun 18 Jul 2021 06.02 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/18/boris-johnson-and-rishi-sunak-will-not-isolate-after-being-pinged-says-no-10
Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have been forced into a U-turn and will self-isolate after coming into contact with the health secretary, who has contracted Covid-19.
The UK prime minister and chancellor had initially tried to avoid isolation by saying they were part of a pilot testing scheme, prompting an outcry from members of the public and backbench Conservative MPs.
Their U-turn came after only three hours amid chaos at No 10 over plans to drop many Covid restrictions for “freedom day” on Monday, and minutes after the communities secretary, Robert Jenrick, had defended their plans to continue working from Downing Street.
It means the prime minister, chancellor and health secretary will all be isolating, along with hundreds of thousands of others due to exposure to coronavirus, when restrictions are dropped across England from Monday.
A Downing Street spokesperson said: “The prime minister has been contacted by NHS test and trace to say he is a contact of someone with Covid. He was at Chequers when contacted by test and trace and will remain there to isolate. He will not be taking part in the testing pilot.
“He will continue to conduct meetings with ministers remotely. The chancellor has also been contacted and will also isolate as required and will not be taking part in the pilot.”
Sunak tweeted: “Whilst the test and trace pilot is fairly restrictive, allowing only essential government business, I recognise that even the sense that the rules aren’t the same for everyone is wrong. To that end I’ll be self-isolating as normal and not taking part in the pilot.”
Javid tested positive for coronavirus on Saturday. The prime minister is reported to have had a lengthy meeting with him at No 10 on Friday.
Downing Street earlier confirmed Johnson and Sunak were part of a pilot scheme that allows certain people to have daily rapid flow tests instead of having to self-isolate. “They will be conducting only essential government business during this period,” said a spokesperson.
Reaction to the news was rapid and furious, with instances on social media of people reporting they were going to delete the NHS Covid-19 app from their phones.
The shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, said many people across the UK would be dismayed by the “special, exclusive rule” for Johnson and Sunak.
“There will be parents across the country who have struggled this year when their children have been sent home because they were in a bubble and had to self-isolate,” he told Sky News.
“There will be workers across the country that have to isolate because they’ve been pinged, including in public services, including the NHS. For many of them, waking up this morning to hear that there is a special rule, an exclusive rule, for Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, they will be saying that this looks like one rule for them and something else for the rest of us.”
Kate Nicholls, the CEO of UK Hospitality, which represents bars, hotels and others in the sector, said: “It cannot be right that only those on pilot projects are exempt from the need to self-isolate. We need a workable and pragmatic self-isolation policy which keeps people safe but also keeps the economy moving.”
Jonathan Bartley, the co-leader of the Green party, said: “Hundreds of thousands of young people, including my children, had their education and lives repeatedly turned upside down again and again after dutifully and responsibly isolating. And now this. Anger doesn’t begin to cover it.”
Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former director of communications at Downing Street, described it as the “Johnson-Sunak test pilot scandal” and predicted it would “cut through” to the public even more directly than the controversy surrounding the lockdown journeys undertaken to Durham by Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former chief adviser.
Downing Street is one of 20 organisations, including other government departments, Transport for London and Network Rail, which are part of a workplace testing study in which participants can test daily at work rather than stay at home.
Organisations taking part have to have an asymptomatic testing site set up. Individuals who have been “pinged” after being in contact with someone who has tested positive for Covid can go to work on the basis that they are using lateral flow tests, but must self-isolate when not at work.
The organisations known to be part of the trial have given their consent to be identified, according to No 10, which added that a full list would be published after the results have been recorded.
A spokesperson said the study was separate from a better known pilot scheme, outlined online by the Department of Health and Social Care, which splits participants at random into two groups. In that study, those in a control group will be given a PCR test and must self-isolate as normal for 10 days, while participants in another group benefit from having a 24-hour release from self-isolation if daily lateral flow tests return negative results.
Javid was self-isolating on Saturday after testing positive for Covid, as senior public health leaders from across the UK accused Boris Johnson on Sunday of “letting Covid rip” by relaxing legal restrictions.
The health secretary, who is double-vaccinated, said he had mild symptoms and confirmed the result of a lateral flow test with a positive PCR test.
“I will continue to isolate and work from home,” Javid tweeted.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/18/boris-johnson-and-rishi-sunak-will-not-isolate-after-being-pinged-says-no-10
Cloth face masks are 'comfort blankets' that do little to curb Covid spread, Sage adviser warns
Dr Colin Axon warned some cloth masks have gaps that are invisible to the naked eye, but are 500,000 times the size of viral Covid particles
By Justin Stoneman
17 July 2021 • 1:45pm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/17/cloth-face-masks-comfort-blankets-do-little-curb-covid-spread/?li_source=LI&li_medium=li-recommendation-widget
Standard face coverings are just "comfort blankets" that do little to reduce the spread of Covid particles, a scientist advising Sage on ventilation has said.
Dr Colin Axon, who has advised the government on minimising the risk of cross-infection in supermarkets, accused medics of presenting a "cartoonish" view of how how tiny particles travel through the air.
He warned some cloth masks have gaps which are invisible to the naked eye, but are 500,000 times the size of viral Covid particles.
"The small sizes are not easily understood but an imperfect analogy would be to imagine marbles fired at builders' scaffolding, some might hit a pole and rebound, but obviously most will fly through," he told The Telegraph.
The mask debate has been reignited this week after the Government published 'Freedom Day' guidance recommending their continued use. It led to Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, enforcing their continued use on the London Underground.
Dr Axon said the public need to be offered a wider view of the science behind face masks, rather than the "partial view" of information being pushed by medics over their effectiveness.
'Medics have a cartoonish view of how the world is'
"Medics have this cartoonised view of how particles move through the air - it's not their fault, it's not their domain - they've got a cartoonish view of how the world is," he said.
"Once a particle is not on a biological surface it is no longer a biomedical issue, it is simply about physics. The public has only a partial view of the story if information only comes from one type of source. Medics have some of the answers but not a whole view."
Dr Axon, Brunel University's senior lecturer in engineering, said that the true mechanisms involved are best evaluated through science.
"When the particle enters another body it returns to a biomedical issue but the mask debate is about the particle journey," he said.
"Masks can catch droplets and sputum from a cough but what is important is that SARS CoV-2 is predominantly distributed by tiny aerosols."
Dr Axon said that medics were "unable to comprehend" the miniscule elements at play, adding: "A Covid viral particle is around 100 nanometres, material gaps in blue surgical masks are up to 1,000 times that size, cloth mask gaps can be 500,000 times the size."
Dr Axon, whose report on ventilation in supermarkets was used by both Nervtag and Sage to aid decisions, says that medics "cannot have it both ways" over asymptomatic spread.
He added: "Not everyone carrying Covid is coughing, but they are still breathing, those aerosols escape masks and will render the mask ineffective."
Droplets from coughs are much larger, and more likely to be stopped by a properly used mask, Dr Axon says. An Oxford study last summer concluded that masks were "effective" in reducing the spread of the virus.
'We are entrenching bad behaviour'
However, other studies have cast doubt on their effectiveness. A subsequent Danish study involving 6,000 people concluded that there was no statistical difference in infection spread in non-wearers, while data on US states with non-mandated usage failed to show a correlated uptick in cases.
"The public were demanding something must be done, they got masks, it is just a comfort blanket," Dr Axon noted. "But now it is entrenched, and we are entrenching bad behaviour.
"All around the world you can look at mask mandates and superimpose on infection rates, you cannot see that mask mandates made any effect whatsoever.
"The best thing you can say about any mask is that any positive effect they do have is too small to be measured."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/17/cloth-face-masks-comfort-blankets-do-little-curb-covid-spread/?li_source=LI&li_medium=li-recommendation-widget
Northrup herself expounded on a vaccine conspiracy in a widely circulated video interview apparently recorded in October 2020, in which she claimed COVID-19 vaccines would change people’s DNA and infiltrate their bodies with tiny “nanoparticle” robots with two-way 5G antennas. “They have the ability to take your biometric data – not only your vaccine record, but your breathing, your heart rate, your activity, sexual activity, these drugs that you’re taking, where you travel – all of that and then take that data and store it in the cloud,” she said. This information, she said, would then be paired with a barcode that would “connect us to cryptocurrency, so that would become literally slaves to the system.”
“Once those nanoparticles go in, there’s no detoxing from them, there’s no getting them out of there,” Northrup continued. “They combine with your DNA and you are suddenly programmable, and with the proposed 5G networks the body would be an antenna where you could be controlled from outside of yourself.”
https://www.pressherald.com/2021/05/02/meet-christiane-northrup-doctor-of-disinformation/
Meet Christiane Northrup, doctor of disinformation
The Yarmouth obstetrician-gynecologist was once a best-selling self-help author and regular Oprah guest. Now she promotes extreme conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic, masks and vaccines.
BY COLIN WOODARDSTAFF WRITER
Posted May 2 Updated May 5
https://www.pressherald.com/2021/05/02/meet-christiane-northrup-doctor-of-disinformation/
The auditorium at Rhema Bible Training College in suburban Tulsa, Oklahoma, was filled with more than 4,000 unmasked people and onstage sat dozens more when Maine’s celebrity physician, Dr. Christiane Northrup, stepped up to the podium the evening of April 16.
Disgraced Trump campaign adviser Michael Flynn had stood in the same spot four hours earlier, railing to attendees of the Health and Freedom Conference against schoolchildren wearing masks and the validity of the 2020 election. Trump attorney Lin Wood would follow her an hour later, loudly extolling the “truth” of the QAnon conspiracy and urging the execution by firing squad of those who were allegedly kidnapping, raping and eating children, a sprawling cabal of evildoers he claimed included “the Clintons, the Obamas, the Bidens and the Bushes.”
Over the next 20 minutes Northrup – who once regularly graced Oprah Winfrey’s television couch, delivered a commencement address to the University of Maine at Farmington, and practiced obstetrics and gynecology for 26 years in Yarmouth – rattled out a stream of falsehoods: that COVID-19 vaccines don’t prevent the disease but will make humankind sterile and might kill babies breastfed by their vaccinated mothers; that people shouldn’t wear masks but should fear being around vaccinated people, who could infect others with malignant vaccine particles and who are being secretly spied upon with components of the vaccine that covertly relay physiological information to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation via cellphone cameras and a patented mechanism involving cryptocurrency.
RELATED
Instagram blocks account of celebrity Maine doctor who spreads vaccine disinformation
https://www.pressherald.com/2021/04/30/instagram-blocks-account-of-celebrity-maine-doctor-who-spreads-vaccine-disinformation/?rel=related
“I don’t actually want to have the body fluids of anybody who’s had (COVID-19 vaccines) come into my body,” she said, likening them to “murder weapons” and implying the audience should indefinitely separate themselves from the inoculated, including members of their own households. “I have heard today that many, many couples in Texas are getting divorced over this one.”
The crowd gave her a standing ovation. Dr. Northrup had found her new audience.
For those who remember her as The New York Times best-selling author of “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom,” a prominent obstetrician-gynecologist and champion of a feminine and intuitive approach to health and well-being, Northrup’s evolution over the past year may startle. She has emerged as one of the nation’s most influential figures in disseminating anti-vaccine conspiracy theories that are complicating the effort to put a lid on the global pandemic, which requires widespread vaccination to deny the virus hosts to propagate, mutate and spread.
With half a million Facebook followers, and hundreds of thousands more on Twitter and, until Thursday, Instagram, Northrup’s increasingly outrageous theories have an enormous reach. The Center for Confronting Digital Hate in late March named her as one of the “disinformation dozen” who collectively generate 65 percent of all anti-COVID-19 vaccine social media shares and up to 73 percent of those on Facebook.
“The typical way anti-vaxxers are portrayed is that they are a disorganized thing, but it’s actually an organized industry of highly capable propagandists,” says the center’s executive director, Imran Ahmed. “The content Northrup produces is dangerous and would lead people to take actions or not take actions which would protect their lives, and it’s unbelievable to see that she continues to have a platform on major social media platforms despite the fact she is a threat to biosecurity.”
One of the nation’s most prominent epidemiologists, Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said Northrup and the other members of the “disinformation dozen” are causing serious damage.
“I have no doubt that the disinformation has cost us tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lives – people who have failed to protect themselves because they don’t believe in the virus,” says Nuzzo, who co-wrote a foreword to the center’s report. “Now we have a vaccine that can prevent deaths and hospitalizations. For people not to get vaccinated because they are convinced that the vaccines are bad for them, that’s a human tragedy the magnitude of which is hard to even describe.”
On April 16, U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico called on Twitter and Facebook, which owns Instagram, to act in “a swift and decisive manner” against Northrup and the other members of the “disinformation dozen.”
“For too long, social media platforms have failed to adequately protect Americans by not taking sufficient action to prevent the spread of vaccine disinformation online,” the Democratic senators wrote. “Many of these accounts continue to post content that reach millions of users, repeatedly violating your policies with impunity.”
Northrup’s Instagram account, which had 175,500 followers, was blocked Thursday for purveying disinformation, a Facebook spokesman confirmed Friday. Her Facebook and Twitter accounts remained active.
CONSPIRACIES ABOUT THE VIRUS
Northrup, who allowed her medical license to expire in 2015, did not respond to numerous interview requests. In a recent Facebook video she defended her social media messaging, saying she wouldn’t “believe in unfounded conspiracies and become involved in something that would result in such defamation.”
But in her social media feeds, Northrup has put forward or endorsed a wide range of unfounded and conspiratorial messaging, telling her Facebook followers that vaccinated people might be “owned and controlled” by companies owning patented materials in the vaccine and advising Instagram followers from a Tulsa airport departure lounge April 18 that they should avoid vaccinated people, including spouses, because they could expose them to harmful vaccine materials extruded from their bodies.
“What I would do is choose your friends very carefully and stay away from people who are not on the same page if you possibly can,” she said in the video feed before boarding a flight to return to Maine. “Be with like-minded groups of people.”
On Twitter in November and December she spread false reports on conservative websites claiming scientists had discovered that people not exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19 don’t spread the disease (they do); that wearing masks causes wearers permanent damage through oxygen depletion; that a “Philly mob boss” had stolen the 2020 election from Donald Trump and might “flip on Biden”; and that the “end game” of those in charge of the pandemic is “genocide.”
The latter post Northrup shared claims the pandemic is planned, a “sinister plot” that aims “to cull a large percentage of the human race and to turn the survivors into a completely controlled army of slaves who own nothing and are dictated to and tracked, traced and monitored 24/7 everywhere, even inside their own homes, which of course they will no longer own.”
One of her more infamous endorsements came on May 5, 2020, when she shared a 26-minute conspiracy video, “Plandemic,” with her Facebook followers. An analysis by The New York Times found Northrup’s share played the key catalyzing role in the phenomenal spread of the slickly produced video, which argued that a secret cabal of elites was using COVID-19 and the vaccines that would be developed to fight it to enrich and empower themselves.
“Her status as a celebrity doctor made her endorsement of ‘Plandemic’ powerful,” The New York Times reported May 20. “After Dr. Northrup shared the video, more than 1,000 people also shared it, many of them to groups that oppose mandatory vaccinations.”
Northrup herself expounded on a vaccine conspiracy in a widely circulated video interview apparently recorded in October 2020, in which she claimed COVID-19 vaccines would change people’s DNA and infiltrate their bodies with tiny “nanoparticle” robots with two-way 5G antennas. “They have the ability to take your biometric data – not only your vaccine record, but your breathing, your heart rate, your activity, sexual activity, these drugs that you’re taking, where you travel – all of that and then take that data and store it in the cloud,” she said. This information, she said, would then be paired with a barcode that would “connect us to cryptocurrency, so that would become literally slaves to the system.”
“Once those nanoparticles go in, there’s no detoxing from them, there’s no getting them out of there,” Northrup continued. “They combine with your DNA and you are suddenly programmable, and with the proposed 5G networks the body would be an antenna where you could be controlled from outside of yourself.”
On Nov. 13 she retweeted a post from another member of the “disinformation dozen,” Sherri Tenpenny, that stated the “asymptomatic carrier con” was “the most evil genius ever devised to create a mass of subservient unthinking obedient slaves that are willing to give up being human just to stay ‘safe.’” Northrup prefaced the retweet with her own comment: “This is just plain TRUE! A crime against humanity.”
Her ungrounded theories have real-world impacts. In April a private Miami school her grandchildren attend, Centner Academy, announced it would no longer employ anyone who had received COVID-19 vaccinations. The school cited debunked information that echoed Northrup’s recent talking points in Tulsa and on social media: that “tens of thousands of women” were experiencing “adverse reproductive issues simply from being in close proximity with those who have received any one of the COVID-19 injections.”
“No one knows exactly what may be causing these irregularities, but it appears that those who have received the injections may be transmitting something from their bodies to those with whom they come in contact,” the school’s statement continued.
None of the COVID-19 vaccines have been linked to reproductive or neonatal problems, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advise pregnant women to get vaccinated.
“She’s spread a bunch of lies abut the safety of these vaccines, so obviously this can lead to more and more people catching the virus and more and more people getting sick and dying from it,” says Jonathan Jarry of the McGill University Office for Science and Society, who tracks scientific disinformation and has followed Northrup’s social media evolution.
“The larger picture is that she tells her followers to trust their gut and their intuition and to not stop and think carefully about things first but to trust the first answer that pops into your head,” Jarry adds. “That’s dangerous, because there’s a lot of things in our world that are not intuitive.”
FROM O’s COUCH TO Q’S STAGE
Over the past quarter-century, Northrup’s path has led her from Oprah’s couch to the QAnon stage. A native of Buffalo, New York, and graduate of the Dartmouth Medical School, she has said she always had skepticism about conventional (and often male-dominated) approaches to medicine. In 1986 she opened a private practice in Yarmouth, Women to Women, that combined conventional and alternative medicine and helped pioneer the women’s health movement in Maine.
She catapulted into national celebrity after the publication of “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom” in 1994, which was a New York Times best-seller, sold 1.6 million copies, was translated into 17 languages and landed her as a regular guest as a wellness expert on Oprah Winfrey’s and Dr. Oz’s shows. Oprah credited another of Northrup’s best-selling books, “The Wisdom of Menopause,” with inspiring her to lose weight and get in shape.
“She was able to go from a fairly straight-laced gynecologist with a legitimate practice and the social status that came with it to branching out to a national and international network of new age publishing and conferences,” says cult researcher Matthew Remski, co-host of the Conspirituality podcast, who has followed Northrup’s career. “When she comes out with ‘Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom,’ she is playing this edge between offering fairly conventional medical advice and also opening her audience up to the idea that Chinese herbs and acupuncture might also be effective.”
Northrup stressed alternative therapies and was skeptical of vaccines long before the pandemic struck. In 2006 she began speaking out against what she saw as dangers with Gardasil, the HPV vaccine, and encouraged parents not to have their daughters receive it and to focus on good health and nutrition instead.
But by her own account to a QAnon podcaster, it was Maine’s 2019 law removing religious and philosophical vaccination exemptions for students and school and nursery school staff that made her become “very galvanized” around vaccination and certain public health mandates. When she went to testify against the bill on March 13 of that year, she was flabbergasted by the presence of so many experts supporting it.
“My colleagues get up there (like) someone inserted a tape deck into their head and said – this is the official narrative – ‘vaccines are safe and effective, and we need them for public health,’” she told the host of the QAnon FAQ podcast on May 20 of last year. “And I’m looking around at the people and the narrative and the science, and I’m thinking, ‘Am I in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”?'” – a reference to the movie set in a mental health institution.
When the coronavirus hit the United States in March 2020, Northrup quickly became convinced something nefarious was at work. Confined to her house at the end of March, she spent a lot of her energy in the first month of the crisis taking care of her terminally ill boyfriend until his death April 21. Then the themes of her social media feed began to take a darker turn.
“There was this slow but steady merger between her previously held New Age fascinations and anti-vaccinations beliefs with a lot of influences from either QAnon or Q-adjacent influencers on the internet,” says Remski, with her sharing of the “Plandemic” video on May 5 marking a sharp inflection point. ‘We have no idea where she was spending her time online, but it was pretty clear that she started functioning as a gateway between the QAnon world and more mainstream circles.”
By the time of her May 20 QAnon FAQ interview, Northrup was already suspicious of the pandemic, claiming that social distancing was “ridiculous,” that COVID-19 could be cured with vitamins, and that Maine Medical Center in Portland had shut down its COVID-19 wing. “I think there’s a dark agenda behind all of this,” she told the host. “I really can’t think anything else.”
She also volunteered that she was working with two other people who would later earn places in the “disinformation dozen” – Tenpenny and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – and that they formed “a big umbrella.”
“You need to know you’re not alone,” she told the Q audience. “You declare your sovereignty. ‘We do not consent!’”
Northrup’s political giving also shifted dramatically around this time. Over the previous decade she had made 17 federal campaign contributions that went overwhelmingly to Democrats or the action committees of Democratic-leaning groups like EMILY’s List and NARAL, Federal Election Commission filings show. But starting May 27 she began a rapid barrage of donations entirely to Republicans, Donald Trump and the Trump MAGA committee – 570 donations in all through November totaling $16,311. House recipients included gun rights firebrand Lauren Boebert, who is under scrutiny for her ties to groups that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6; Trump-aligned mask opponent Michele Steele of California; and abortion opponent Dan Crenshaw, who received a 0 percent rating from NARAL, the pro-choice group, and a 100 percent rating from Right to Life America.
By the time she spoke in Oklahoma last month, Northrup’s contrarian pandemic message had further crystallized. “Do not allow yourself to get trampled by the lemmings running toward the cliff,” she told the audience, referring to people seeking vaccinations. “You are going to have the DNA that reseeds the planet, OK? You are going to have to do it. The rest of them there, there’s no going back. Do not chase people into burning buildings.”
Nuzzo, the Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, hopes other social media platforms take action against Northrup and the other members of the dozen. “It’s clear to me that this is an asymmetric fight, because doctors and nurses and public health agencies don’t have the resources to combat this false information on their own,” she says. “We can’t communicate our way out of this spiral if there are these highly organized groups, and we in the public health community just can’t match their reach.”
https://www.pressherald.com/2021/05/02/meet-christiane-northrup-doctor-of-disinformation/
Jake Tapper @jaketapper · Jul 16 Some confusion out there about this so allow me: this is the study identifying the “disinformation dozen” who are allegedly the source of most of the false information about the vaccine on Facebook. Robert Kennedy Jr of course continues his ignominy
The Disinformation Dozen
Why platforms must act on twelve leading online anti-vaxxers
https://www.counterhate.com/disinformationdozen
Read the report
https://252f2edd-1c8b-49f5-9bb2-cb57bb47e4ba.filesusr.com/ugd/f4d9b9_b7cedc0553604720b7137f8663366ee5.pdf
8:59 PM · Jul 16, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
Some confusion out there about this so allow me: this is the study identifying the “disinformation dozen” who are allegedly the source of most of the false information about the vaccine on Facebook. Robert Kennedy Jr of course continues his ignominy https://t.co/8cadt7YZNW
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) July 16, 2021
Just 12 people are responsible for the majority of COVID-19 conspiracy theories online, study finds. JFK's anti-vaxxer nephew is one of the 'disinformation dozen.'
JOSHUA ZITSER JUL 18, 2021, 17:24 IST
https://www.businessinsider.in/science/news/just-12-people-are-responsible-for-the-majority-of-covid-19-conspiracy-theories-online-study-finds-jfks-anti-vaxxer-nephew-is-one-of-the-disinformation-dozen-/articleshow/84522511.cms
* 12 people are responsible for the majority of COVID-19 disinformation shared online, according to a new study.
* The CCDH found that 65% of anti-vaccine posts on Facebook and Twitter could be attributed to the "disinformation dozen."
* The disinformation dozen includes a bodybuilder, a wellness blogger, and JFK's nephew.
The majority of COVID-19 disinformation shared online comes from just 12 people, according to a new report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).
The CCDH analyzed 812,000 anti-vaccine posts shared on Facebook and Twitter between February 1 and March 16, 2021. It found that 65 percent of this content could be attributed to what is being dubbed the "disinformation dozen."
On Facebook alone, the CCDH found that those 12 people were responsible for 73 percent of the anti-vaccine content on the platform.
Read more: Anti-maskers are using fake medical cards to avoid scrutiny for not wearing coverings in public
The disinformation dozen is made up of a bodybuilder, a wellness blogger, and a religious zealot, The Guardian reported.
Also, most notably, it includes the nephew of former President John F Kennedy. Robert F Kennedy Jr is a prominent anti-vaxxer who has proliferated disinformation connecting vaccines to autism and the COVID-19 shots to 5G phone technology.
His account was part removed by Instagram, the CCDH said, but he remains active on Facebook and Twitter.
Fewer than half of the members of the disinformation dozen - Kennedy, Sherri Tenpenny, Rizza Islam, Sayer Ji, and Kelly Brogan - have had one of their social media accounts removed or partially removed, the study said. The CCDH is now calling on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to de-platform every member of the disinformation dozen with haste.
"The most effective and efficient way to stop the dissemination of harmful information is to de-platform the most highly visible repeat offenders, who we term the disinformation dozen," the study said. "This should also include the organizations these individuals control or fund, as well as any backup accounts they have established to evade removal."
https://www.businessinsider.in/science/news/just-12-people-are-responsible-for-the-majority-of-covid-19-conspiracy-theories-online-study-finds-jfks-anti-vaxxer-nephew-is-one-of-the-disinformation-dozen-/articleshow/84522511.cms
In Trump’s Jan. 6 recast, attackers become martyrs, heroes
By CALVIN WOODWARD, COLLEEN LONG and DAVID KLEPPER
55 minutes ago
https://apnews.com/article/capitol-siege-trump-misinformation-aa051fa751d718407638dbe308647a7a
WASHINGTON (AP) — A cocktail of propaganda, conspiracy theory and disinformation — of the kind intoxicating to the masses in the darkest turns of history — is fueling delusion over the agonies of Jan. 6.
Hate is “love.” Violence is “peace.” The pro-Donald Trump attackers are patriots.
Months after the then-president’s supporters stormed the Capitol that winter day, Trump and his acolytes are taking this revisionism to a new and dangerous place — one of martyrs and warlike heroes, and of revenge. It’s a place where cries of “blue lives matter” have transformed into shouts of “f--- the blue.”
The fact inversion about the siege is the latest in Trump’s contorted oeuvre of the “big lie” compendium, the most specious of which is that the election was stolen from him, when it was not.
It is rooted in the formula of potent propaganda through the ages: Say it loud, say it often, say it with the heft of political power behind you, and people will believe. Once spread by pamphlets, posters and word of mouth, now spread by swipe of finger, the result is the same: a passionate, unquestioning following.
Techniques of glorifying your side and demonizing the other with skewed information, if not outright lies, have been in play at least since World War I, when the U.S. government roused sentiment for the cause with posters depicting the German soldier as an ape-human with a willowy American maiden in his clutches. That paled next to what followed years later with Nazi Germany’s terrifying use of propaganda for the slaughter and subjugation of millions.
Whether the deception feeds warmongering or merely a defeated president’s ego, some of the methods are the same, like telling the same fabrication over and over until it sticks.
Trump perfected the art of repetition — about the “election hoax,” the “rigged election” and ”massive voter fraud,” with none of those accusations substantiated in the dozens of court cases and official post-election audits but engrained nonetheless among his supporters.
Four years ago, Trump appeared to equate white supremacists and racial justice protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his comment that there were “very fine people, on both sides.”
This time, in this telling, the very fine people on Jan. 6 were on one side: his.
For the other side — the police, overwhelmed for hours and bloodied in the insurrection — Trump only has an in-your-face question that doubles as a four-word conspiracy theory: “Who killed Ashli Babbitt?”
Those words have become a viral mantra meant to elevate Babbitt as a righteous martyr in the cause of liberty. They ricochet around the mainline social media platforms where Trump is banned for spreading misinformation but his followers still commiserate. The woman died from a police officer’s bullet fired as she tried to climb through the jagged glass of a smashed window toward the House chamber during the riot.
Babbitt has become the face of the insurrection — emblazoned on T-shirts and cheered in basement ballrooms at hotels around the country where conspiracy theorists gather to vent. In Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood, flyers are plastered on street lamps and building facades telling of an unveiling of a statue of Babbitt in nearby Alexandria, Virginia, on July 27, at “high noon.”
Trump and many Republicans have cycled through various characterizations of the insurrection, each iteration wholly unlike the previous one. The attackers were said to be leftist antifa followers in disguise. Then they were said to be overexcited tourists. Now they are heralded as foot soldiers for freedom.
Each iteration has required Americans to ignore the rage they saw on their screens, and some lawmakers to ignore that they were among the shocked targets of the attackers that day. The hunted now praise the hunters.
Taken together, the revisionists and their believers are “swimming in a vast sea of nonsense,” said Brendan Buck, a former top aide to onetime House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.
That sea’s currents are familiar to historians who study what makes some conspiracy theories and propaganda persuasive.
Once people buy into the lies, there can be no convincing them they aren’t true, said Dolores Albarracin, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of a coming book, “Creating Conspiracy Beliefs: How Our Thoughts are Shaped.”
Despite the well-documented facts about what happened on Jan. 6, believers often dismiss anyone who tries to set them straight by claiming they are either duped or part of the conspiracy, Albarracin said.
“The belief contains a device that protects it,” she said. “Nothing can invalidate the conspiracy theory. Trying to refute the theory proves the theory and signals you as a conspirator.”
DJ Peterson, an expert on authoritarianism and propaganda, is president of Longview Global Advisors, a Los Angeles-based consulting firm, and former director of the Eurasia Group and the RAND Corporation. He said that in an online world awash in information and a real world riven by polarization, “you pick and choose what you want to believe, including sticking your head in the sand.”
Trump, Peterson said, excels at amplifying claims that galvanize his core supporters and turn them against other Americans.
“That’s where the power of Trump is,” he said. “He’s good at picking up on these threads ... that lower the level of trust and create division.”
Recent polls are consistent in illustrating the country’s divide over Trump and his post-election histrionics. In essence, two-thirds of the population is against him; two-thirds of Republicans for him. In one of the latest, Quinnipiac found that 66% of Republicans consider President Joe Biden to have been illegitimately elected.
That number and others like it in multiple polls represent tens of millions of people who were hoodwinked into believing allegations of election fraud that have been thoroughly investigated and refuted, including by Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr. Trump’s fabrications have stuck and now undergird the attempts by him and those closest to him to glorify the Jan. 6 mob.
“The consequence of lying is you kind of never get back to where you were before,” said Harvard historian Jill Lepore, whose podcast, “The Last Archive,” explores hoaxes, deceptions and what has happened to truth. “That’s what’s pernicious about our particular moment.”
Of Trump, she said: “His method is generally to just create chaos so that people really don’t know which way to look.”
In the case of the insurrection, his followers looked away. An aggressive amnesia seems to have taken hold over how ugly it all was, even though the scenes that were broadcast and streamed in real time are forever.
Swarming to the Capitol after a staging rally where Trump told them to “fight like hell,” and vowed, falsely, that he would be right there with them, the attackers beat the vastly outnumbered law enforcement officers, injuring scores of them. In one particularly awful case, an officer was crushed against a door by people pushing to get in, his mouth bleeding as the side of his face pressed against the glass of the door.
Lawmakers inside ran for their lives, hiding for hours as the mob wandered the halls of Congress holding up Trump flags. The assailants called out for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and wanted Trump’s vice president, who was there, too. “Hang Mike Pence,” they chanted.
Babbitt was part of the group that was trying to beat down the doors of the House chamber as Capitol Police officers were evacuating the House floor and as some members were still trapped in the upper gallery. The officers used furniture to barricade the glass doors separating the hallway from the Speaker’s Lobby to try to stave off the attackers, who were breaking glass with their fists, flagpoles and other objects.
Only three police officers were guarding the doors on the other side of the stacked furniture as at least 20 attackers tried to get in, screaming, “F--- the blue!” and “Break it down!” One smashed the door glass next to an officer’s head; another warned the officers they would be hurt if they didn’t get out of the way.
A Capitol Police lieutenant pointed his gun. “Gun!” “Gun!” the attackers shouted as the hysteria reached a fever pitch. They started to lift Babbitt up, to climb through the window. The officer fired one round.
Babbitt was struck in the shoulder. She later died. The officer was cleared of wrongdoing, and his name was not released.
Trump now states falsely — and with a stream of repetitions — that she was shot “right in the head.”
“They were there for one reason, the rigged election,” he told Fox News a week ago. “They felt the election was rigged. That’s why they were there. And they were peaceful people. These were great people. The crowd was unbelievable. And I mentioned the word love. The love — the love in the air, I have never seen anything like it.”
___
Klepper reported from Providence, R.I.
https://apnews.com/article/capitol-siege-trump-misinformation-aa051fa751d718407638dbe308647a7a
StoryWrangler
What’s the Story?
Language is humanity’s greatest social technology. While we’ve been communicating for thousands of years, it is only recently that we’ve begun sharing content online—posting selfies, searching for validation, and expressing our uninformed opinions in hot takes and quote tweets. Making sense of all that is being said is a tall order, best suited to a suite of algorithms. Computers can digest bits of language and help us describe, explain, and understand cultural phenomenon at the scale of human populations. The StoryWrangler instrument reflects our first step towards wrestling the day’s events into coherence. It is an approximate daily leaderboard for language popularity around the globe.
https://storywrangling.org/
Scientists create tool to explore billions of social media messages, potentially predict political and financial turmoil
Date:July 16, 2021
Source: University of Vermont
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210716150806.htm
Summary:
Scientists have invented an instrument to peer deeply into billions of Twitter posts -- providing an unprecedented, minute-by-minute view of popularity, from rising political movements, to K-pop, to emerging diseases. The tool -- called the Storywrangler -- gathers phrases across 150 different languages, analyzing the rise and fall of ideas and stories, each day, among people around the world. The Storywrangler quantifies collective attention.
FULL STORY
For thousands of years, people looked into the night sky with their naked eyes -- and told stories about the few visible stars. Then we invented telescopes. In 1840, the philosopher Thomas Carlyle claimed that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." Then we started posting on Twitter.
Now scientists have invented an instrument to peer deeply into the billions and billions of posts made on Twitter since 2008 -- and have begun to uncover the vast galaxy of stories that they contain.
"We call it the Storywrangler," says Thayer Alshaabi, a doctoral student at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research. "It's like a telescope to look -- in real time -- at all this data that people share on social media. We hope people will use it themselves, in the same way you might look up at the stars and ask your own questions."
The new tool can give an unprecedented, minute-by-minute view of popularity, from rising political movements to box office flops; from the staggering success of K-pop to signals of emerging new diseases.
The story of the Storywrangler -- a curation and analysis of over 150 billion tweets -- and some of its key findings were published on July 16 in the journal Science Advances.
EXPRESSIONS OF THE MANY
The team of eight scientists who invented Storywrangler -- from the University of Vermont, Charles River Analytics, and MassMutual Data Science -- gather about ten percent of all the tweets made every day, around the globe. For each day, they break these tweets into single bits, as well as pairs and triplets, generating frequencies from more than a trillion words, hashtags, handles, symbols and emoji, like "Super Bowl," "Black Lives Matter," "gravitational waves," "#metoo," "coronavirus," and "keto diet."
"This is the first visualization tool that allows you to look at one-, two-, and three-word phrases, across 150 different languages, from the inception of Twitter to the present," says Jane Adams, a co-author on the new study who recently finished a three-year position as a data-visualization artist-in-residence at UVM's Complex Systems Center.
The online tool, powered by UVM's supercomputer at the Vermont Advanced Computing Core, provides a powerful lens for viewing and analyzing the rise and fall of words, ideas, and stories each day among people around the world. "It's important because it shows major discourses as they're happening," Adams says. "It's quantifying collective attention." Though Twitter does not represent the whole of humanity, it is used by a very large and diverse group of people, which means that it "encodes popularity and spreading," the scientists write, giving a novel view of discourse not just of famous people, like political figures and celebrities, but also the daily "expressions of the many," the team notes.
In one striking test of the vast dataset on the Storywrangler, the team showed that it could be used to potentially predict political and financial turmoil. They examined the percent change in the use of the words "rebellion" and "crackdown" in various regions of the world. They found that the rise and fall of these terms was significantly associated with change in a well-established index of geopolitical risk for those same places.
WHAT'S HAPPENING?
The global story now being written on social media brings billions of voices -- commenting and sharing, complaining and attacking -- and, in all cases, recording -- about world wars, weird cats, political movements, new music, what's for dinner, deadly diseases, favorite soccer stars, religious hopes and dirty jokes.
"The Storywrangler gives us a data-driven way to index what regular people are talking about in everyday conversations, not just what reporters or authors have chosen; it's not just the educated or the wealthy or cultural elites," says applied mathematician Chris Danforth, a professor at the University of Vermont who co-led the creation of the StoryWrangler with his colleague Peter Dodds. Together, they run UVM's Computational Story Lab.
"This is part of the evolution of science," says Dodds, an expert on complex systems and professor in UVM's Department of Computer Science. "This tool can enable new approaches in journalism, powerful ways to look at natural language processing, and the development of computational history."
How much a few powerful people shape the course of events has been debated for centuries. But, certainly, if we knew what every peasant, soldier, shopkeeper, nurse, and teenager was saying during the French Revolution, we'd have a richly different set of stories about the rise and reign of Napoleon. "Here's the deep question," says Dodds, "what happened? Like, what actually happened?"
GLOBAL SENSOR
The UVM team, with support from the National Science Foundation, is using Twitter to demonstrate how chatter on distributed social media can act as a kind of global sensor system -- of what happened, how people reacted, and what might come next. But other social media streams, from Reddit to 4chan to Weibo, could, in theory, also be used to feed Storywrangler or similar devices: tracing the reaction to major news events and natural disasters; following the fame and fate of political leaders and sports stars; and opening a view of casual conversation that can provide insights into dynamics ranging from racism to employment, emerging health threats to new memes.
In the new Science Advances study, the team presents a sample from the Storywrangler's online viewer, with three global events highlighted: the death of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani; the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic; and the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. The Storywrangler dataset records a sudden spike of tweets and retweets using the term "Soleimani" on January 3, 2020, when the United States assassinated the general; the strong rise of "coronavirus" and the virus emoji over the spring of 2020 as the disease spread; and a burst of use of the hashtag "#BlackLivesMatter" on and after May 25, 2020, the day George Floyd was murdered.
"There's a hashtag that's being invented while I'm talking right now," says UVM's Chris Danforth. "We didn't know to look for that yesterday, but it will show up in the data and become part of the story."
Story Source:
Materials provided by University of Vermont. Original written by Joshua Brown. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
Thayer Alshaabi, Jane L. Adams, Michael V. Arnold, Joshua R. Minot, David R. Dewhurst, Andrew J. Reagan, Christopher M. Danforth, Peter Sheridan Dodds. Storywrangler: A massive exploratorium for sociolinguistic, cultural, socioeconomic, and political timelines using Twitter. Science Advances, 2021; 7 (29): eabe6534 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abe6534
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University of Vermont. "Scientists create tool to explore billions of social media messages, potentially predict political and financial turmoil." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 16 July 2021. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210716150806.htm>.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210716150806.htm
Overlooked No More, ‘Skipped History’ Explores Forgotten Events
A comedy web series hosted by a historical satirist explores overlooked ideas, people and events that continue to shape the United States.
By Pierre-Antoine Louis
July 17, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/us/overlooked-no-more-skipped-history-explores-forgotten-events.html
“Skipped History,” a comedy web series, explores overlooked ideas, people and events that continue to shape the United States. Hosted by Ben Tumin, a historical satirist, the series makes history both accessible and funny. https://skippedhistory.substack.com/
“To me, the reality is that history is endlessly compelling,” Mr. Tumin said. “If you’re just looking for answers for how the society we live in became the society that it is today, and it’s such a flawed society in so many ways, that finding where things went wrong helps to reimagine how things could go right in the future.”
The first season of “Skipped History” was met with praise from prominent historians. Greg Grandin, a history professor and Pulitzer Prize winner, called the show “a treasure,” after an episode that explored the racially motivated reasons for America’s first major war abroad in the Philippines.
“There are statistics that students in high school and middle school typically find history to be one of the most boring subjects,” Mr. Tumin said. “And meanwhile, there are all these academics and educators doing incredible work and unearthing incredible history that we had no idea about. So the question is not, ‘Is history interesting?’ It’s about how you present it.”
I recently spoke with Mr. Tumin about the creation of “Skipped History,” the importance of U.S. history and why so many of the stories Mr. Tumin has told have been forgotten or overlooked. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
How did “Skipped History” get started?
Before the pandemic, I was a live performer of longer-form humorous historical pieces. I was set to go on tour with a piece exploring a U.S.-led coup in Guatemala in 1944. This was in 2018. And so inspired by [President Trump’s] travel ban, I dug into the history of refugees and made a 45-minute presentation featuring comedic interviews with Syrian refugees. I’d show polls from 1938 of citizens in the U.S. and their views of refugees then and compare them to polls now and show very clear parallels.
Afterward, in the conversations with audiences, people were always interested in more history. That’s when I was like, OK, time to dig into more history. I studied history in college and I love reading history books. I’m just naturally very curious and a bit nerdy.
The pandemic was a very unwelcome opportunity to catch up on a lot of history books that I hadn’t had time to read because I’ve been traveling around so much, and once I started reading those books, the idea just kind of came together.
An extensive amount of research, including videos, goes into each episode. How do you find all the elements that you include?
I’ll read a book that maybe a historian has recommended to me or that has gotten a lot of notice or just sounds interesting. And I look for moments or people or ideas that I didn’t know about, that just make me catch my breath and are astounding.
For example, how is it possible that a racist German statistician in the 1890s wrote a deeply flawed book on race and crime statistics, and then these statistics and his analysis spread around the U.S. to the point that police departments still unwittingly cite his analysis to justify tactics like stop-and-frisk?
I’ll look for moments like that and ask myself: How is this possible? Because it seems fitting. It seems in line with the currents of U.S. history. But it also seems so outrageous and it’s something that maybe other people would be interested in learning.
Why is it important to tell these stories?
In 1970, James Baldwin wrote a letter to Angela Davis in which he said, “What has happened, it seems to me, and to put it far too simply, is that a whole new generation of people have assessed and absorbed their history, and, in that tremendous action, have freed themselves of it and will never be victims again.”
And I think that’s revealing of the empowering nature of history and how it can be really joyous and fulfilling to learn.
Why do you think a lot of this history has been skipped?
I would borrow a phrase from historian Tiya Miles, who describes “the conundrum of the archives,” that is how the historical record tends to relate what people in power want it to relate. I love and admire historians for conducting an unheralded form of resistance and combing through archives to reveal what many people would rather we never knew. In turn, it’s a joy to bring those stories to life in a different way on “Skipped History” and shine more light on historians’ work.
I also think the reason so many moments in history are skipped is because there’s erasure of U.S. history. Making history uninteresting is part of U.S. history. Writing a racist version of history into schools is part of U.S. history. And on the flip side, we now have more interest in learning what that real history is and people are producing it.
Think about all of these different history commissions around the U.S. trying to come up with their counters to the 1619 Project, which is a revelatory and remarkable piece of history that represents this really interesting moment where people are looking at U.S. history in new ways. And maybe most importantly, we are now seeing people like Nikole Hannah-Jones or Elizabeth Hinton having the platforms to publish these pieces and get the attention and respect that their really incredible work deserves.
Season 2 of “Skipped History” is wrapping up. Are there any stories you hope to cover in the third season?
Season 3 is going to focus on economic history, some environmental history and some more Indigenous people’s history. Plus the through-currents that seem to be behind every episode, which is white supremacy growth unchecked. There are also a few other things that I want to cover.
How would you describe “Skipped History” for new viewers?
I think for new viewers there’s a mixture of seriousness and silliness to “Skipped History.” And I say that it’s possible to insert levity without taking things lightly. People often associate history with being drab and also with being really depressing, and that’s one of the barriers for a lot of people.
And honestly, I think everyone who studies history is affected by that. I think it’s important to know that you can discuss these subjects in ways that are really interesting and still make jokes and make it entertaining.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/us/overlooked-no-more-skipped-history-explores-forgotten-events.html
Israeli Companies Aided Saudi Spying Despite Khashoggi Killing
Ignoring concerns that Saudi Arabia was abusing Israeli spyware to crush dissent at home and abroad, Israel encouraged its companies to work with the kingdom.
By Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti
July 17, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/world/middleeast/israel-saudi-khashoggi-hacking-nso.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
TEL AVIV — Israel secretly authorized a group of cyber-surveillance firms to work for the government of Saudi Arabia despite international condemnation of the kingdom’s abuse of surveillance software to crush dissent, even after the Saudi killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, government officials and others familiar with the contracts said.
After the murder of Mr. Khashoggi in 2018, one of the firms, NSO Group, canceled its contracts with Saudi Arabia amid accusations that its hacking tools were being misused to abet heinous crimes.
But the Israeli government encouraged NSO and two other companies to continue working with Saudi Arabia, and issued a new license for a fourth to do similar work, overriding any concerns about human rights abuses, according to one senior Israeli official and three people affiliated with the companies.
Since then, Saudi Arabia has continued to use the spyware to monitor dissidents and political opponents.
The fact that Israel’s government has encouraged its private companies to do security work for the kingdom — one of its historic adversaries and a nation that still does not formally recognize Israel — is yet more evidence of the reordering of traditional alliances in the region and the strategy by Israel and several Persian Gulf countries to join forces to isolate Iran.
NSO is by far the best known of the Israeli firms, largely because of revelations in the last few years that its Pegasus program was used by numerous governments to spy on, and eventually imprison, human rights activists.
NSO sold Pegasus to Saudi Arabia in 2017. The kingdom used the spyware as part of a ruthless campaign to crush dissent inside the kingdom and to hunt down Saudi dissidents abroad.
It is not publicly known whether Saudi Arabia used Pegasus or other Israeli-made spyware in the plot to kill Mr. Khashoggi. NSO has denied that its software was used.
Israel’s Ministry of Defense also licensed for Saudi work a company called Candiru, which Microsoft accused last week of helping its government clients spy on more than 100 journalists, politicians, dissidents and human rights advocates around the world.
Microsoft, which conducted its investigation in tandem with Citizen Lab, a research institute at the University of Toronto, said Candiru had used malware to exploit a vulnerability in Microsoft products, enabling its government clients to spy on perceived enemies.
Candiru has had at least one contract with Saudi Arabia since 2018.
Israel has also granted licenses to at least two other firms, Verint, which was licensed before the Khashoggi killing, and Quadream, which signed a contract with Saudi Arabia after the killing.
A fifth company, Cellebrite, which manufactures physical hacking systems for mobile phones, has also sold its services to the Saudi government, but without ministry approval, according to the newspaper Haaretz.
Israel insists that if any Israeli spyware were used to violate civil rights that it would revoke the company’s license.
If the Defense Ministry “discovers that the purchased item is being used in contravention of the terms of the license, especially after any violation of human rights, a procedure of cancellation of the defense export license or of enforcing its terms is initiated,” the ministry said in a statement in response to questions from The New York Times.
The ministry declined to respond to specific questions about the licenses it gave to the Israeli firms, but said that “a wide range of security, diplomatic and strategic considerations are taken into account” when considering whether to grant a license to export offensive cyber technology.
Revelations about the abuses of NSO products led the company to hire a group of outside consultants in 2018 to provide advice about which new clients NSO should take on and which to avoid. The group included Daniel Shapiro, the former Obama administration ambassador to Israel, and Beacon Global Strategies, a Washington strategic consulting firm.
Beacon is led by Jeremy Bash, a former C.I.A. and Pentagon chief of staff; Michael Allen, a former staff director for the House Intelligence Committee; and Andrew Shapiro, a former top State Department official.
While the group’s mandate was to vet potential new clients, the international outrage over Mr. Khashoggi’s killing in October 2018 led the group to advise NSO to cancel its Saudi contracts and shut down NSO systems in the kingdom.
Separately, NSO conducted an internal investigation into whether any of its tools were used by Saudi officials for the Khashoggi operation and concluded that they were not. However a lawsuit against NSO by a friend of Mr. Khashoggi’s claims that his phone had been hacked by Saudi Arabia using Pegasus, and that hack gave Saudi officials access to his conversations with Mr. Khashoggi, including communications about opposition projects.
Over several days in late 2018, executives both of NSO and the private equity firm that owned it at the time, Francisco Partners, met in Washington with the advisory group.
According to several people familiar with the meetings, the NSO executives argued that the Israeli government was strongly encouraging the company to weather the storm and continue its work in Saudi Arabia. They also said that Israeli officials had indicated to them that the Trump administration also wanted NSO’s work with Saudi Arabia to continue.
In the end, NSO management heeded the advice of the outside group and canceled its contracts with Saudi Arabia in late 2018. Mr. Shapiro, the former ambassador to Israel, ended his work for the company shortly afterward.
Months later, however, after another private equity firm bought NSO, the company was once again doing business with Saudi Arabia.
NSO’s new owner, Novalpina, rejected the advice of the outside advisory group and NSO resumed its work in Saudi Arabia in mid-2019. Around that time, Beacon ended its work with NSO.
The new contract with the Saudis came with some restrictions. For example, NSO set up its system to block any attempts by Saudi officials to hack European telephone numbers, according to a person familiar with the programming.
But it is clear that Saudi Arabia has continued to use NSO software to spy on perceived opponents abroad.
In one case that has come to light, three dozen phones belonging to journalists at Al Jazeera, which Saudi Arabia considers a threat, were hacked using NSO’s Pegasus software last year, according to Citizen Lab. Citizen Lab traced 18 of the attacks back to Saudi intelligence.
After the revelation of the attack on Al Jazeera journalists, NSO recently shut down the system, and at a meeting in early July, the company’s board decided to declare new deals with Saudi Arabia off limits, according to a person familiar with the decision.
Israel’s defense ministry is currently fighting lawsuits by Israeli rights activists demanding that it release details about its process for granting the licenses.
The Israeli government also imposes strict secrecy on the companies that receive the licenses, threatening to revoke them if the companies speak publicly about the identity of their clients.
An NSO statement said the company could not discuss the identity of its government customers, but added: “As NSO has previously stated, our technology was not associated in any way with the heinous murder of Jamal Khashoggi. This includes listening, monitoring, tracking or collecting information.”
Officials with Candiru, Verint and the government of Saudi Arabia declined to comment. Officials with Quadream could not be reached.
These business ties came as Israel was quietly building relationships directly with the Saudi government.
Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s prime minister, met several times with Saudi Arabia’s day-to-day ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and military and intelligence leaders of the two countries meet frequently.
While Saudi Arabia was not officially party to the Abraham Accords — the diplomatic initiatives during the end of the Trump administration normalizing relations between Israel and several Arab countries — Saudi leaders worked behind the scenes to help broker the deals.
Ronen Bergman reported from Tel Aviv, and Mark Mazzetti from Washington. Ben Hubbard contributed reporting from Beirut.
Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House.
Mark Mazzetti is a Washington investigative correspondent, and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. He is the author of "The Way of the Knife: the C.I.A, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth." @MarkMazzettiNYT
A version of this article appears in print on July 18, 2021, Section A, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Israel Let Spyware Firms Work With Saudi Arabia After Khashoggi Killing. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/world/middleeast/israel-saudi-khashoggi-hacking-nso.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
AP FACT CHECK: Trump makes false claims about Arizona audit
By JONATHAN J. COOPER
yesterday
https://apnews.com/article/technology-joe-biden-arizona-government-and-politics-ap-fact-check-0e7fad7e5bdf02d953c6b90a474267cc
PHOENIX (AP) — Former President Donald Trump issued three statements in two days falsely claiming that voting fraud and irregularities cost him Arizona’s electoral votes.
Trump relied on comments made Thursday by contractors hired by state Senate Republicans to oversee a partisan review of the 2020 vote count in Maricopa County, which includes metro Phoenix.
The “forensic audit,” as Senate GOP leaders are calling their review, is overseen by Cyber Ninjas, a small computer security firm with no election experience before Trump began questioning the 2020 results. Its CEO, Doug Logan, spread false conspiracy theories about the election before he was hired to lead the Arizona review.
Logan and Ben Cotton, a digital forensics analyst working on the audit, described issues they say need further review. Trump has parroted them as evidence the election results are tainted.
County officials and elections experts say the claims are false and based on a misunderstanding of election materials, which they say creates an appearance of irregularities where none exists.
Trump laid out his claims most specifically in a statement Friday night. A look at the irregularities he alleges in that statement:
TRUMP: “168,000 fraudulent ballots printed on illegal paper (unofficial ballots)”
THE FACTS: All of that is false. The ballots were not unofficial or printed on illegal paper, and even Logan never alleged they were fraudulent.
Logan pointed to ballots with the printing slightly offset between the front and back. He claimed this could cause votes to be counted for the wrong candidate if ink from one side bleeds through to another. He said the alignment issues were mostly from polling-place ballots, which are printed onsite, and said about 168,000 ballots were cast that way. The overwhelming majority of Arizona voters cast ballots by mail.
“We are seeing a lot of very thin paper stock being used especially on Election Day,” Logan added.
The allegation harkens back to the debunked “Sharpiegate” conspiracy theory that arose in the days after the election. Election experts say bleed-through doesn’t affect the vote count because bubbles on one side of a ballot don’t align with those on the other. Ballots that can’t be read are flagged and duplicated by a bipartisan team.
Arizona’s election procedures manual says only that ballots “must be printed with black ink on white paper of sufficient thickness to prevent the printing from being discernible on the reverse side the ballot.” Maricopa County uses 80 pound Votesecur paper from Rolland, which is among the papers approved by Dominion Voting Systems, which makes the county’s tabulation equipment, said Fields Moseley, a county spokesman.
Logan did not provide any evidence that alignment problems affected the vote count and said the issue needs more analysis.
___
TRUMP, citing “74,000 mail in ballots received that were never mailed (magically appearing ballots).”
THE FACTS: No, there were no magically appearing ballots. He is alleging that the number of filled-out ballots received in the mail by election officials exceeded the number of people who had asked earlier for mail-in ballots, by 74,000. But that’s not at all what happened.
The claim mischaracterizes reports created for political parties to track who has voted early so they can target their get-out-the-vote efforts.
One report tracks all requests that voters make for early ballots, either by mail or in person, up to 11 days before the election. The other report tracks all ballots received through the day before the election. That leaves a 10-day window during which people who vote in-person but don’t request a mail ballot would appear on one report but not the other.
___
TRUMP, claiming “11,000 voters were added to the voter rolls AFTER the election and still voted.”
THE FACTS: There’s nothing untoward about voters rolls growing after Election Day. The rolls are simply updated to reflect people whose provisional ballots are added to the tally after election officials verify that they were eligible to vote.
The allegation that the updated tally was the result of electoral wrongdoing first came from Logan this past week, when he told state lawmakers of “11,326 people that did not show up on the Nov. 7 version of the voter rolls, after votes were cast, but then appeared on the Dec. 4 voter rolls.”
Maricopa County officials said Logan is probably referring to provisional ballots, which are cast by people who do not appear on the voter rolls or don’t have the proper identification on Election Day. They’re only counted if the voter later shows he or she was eligible to vote. To be eligible, such voters must have registered before the deadline.
“These go through a rigorous verification process to make sure that the provisional ballots cast are only counted if the voter is eligible to vote in the election,” Maricopa County officials wrote on Twitter. “This happens after Election Day. Only eligible voters are added to the voter rolls.”
___
TRUMP, alleging “all the access logs to the machines were wiped, and the election server was hacked during the election.”
THE FACTS: That flies in the face of the evidence. Maricopa County’s election server is not connected to the internet and independent auditors found no evidence the election server was hacked.
Trump’s hacking allegation refers to the unauthorized download of public data from the county’s voter registration system. That system, which is connected to the internet and broadly accessible to political parties and election workers, is not linked to the election management system, the web of ballot counters, computers and servers that tallies votes.
The election management system is “air gapped,” or kept disconnected from the rest of the county’s computer network and the wider internet. Two firms certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to test voting systems found Maricopa County’s machines were not connected to the internet and did not have malicious hardware or software installed.
___
TRUMP: “Arizona shows Fraud and Voting Irregularities many times more than would be needed to change the outcome of the Election.”
THE FACTS: Not so. The number of potential fraud cases is far smaller than President Joe Biden’s margin of victory in Arizona.
County election officials identified 182 cases where voting problems were clear enough that they referred them to investigators for further review, according to an Associated Press investigation. So far, only four cases have led to charges, including those identified in a separate state investigation. No one has been convicted. No person’s vote was counted twice.
Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes out of 3.4 million cast. Of the four cases that have resulted in criminal charges, two involved Democratic voters and two involved Republicans.
___
EDITOR’S NOTE — A look at the veracity of claims by political figures.
___
Associated Press writer Ali Swenson in Seattle contributed to this report.
___
Find AP Fact Checks at http://apnews.com/APFactCheck
Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck
https://apnews.com/article/technology-joe-biden-arizona-government-and-politics-ap-fact-check-0e7fad7e5bdf02d953c6b90a474267cc
FACT FOCUS: A false narrative of 74K extra votes in Arizona
By ALI SWENSON
https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-arizona-ap-fact-check-election-2020-campaign-2016-f0c36df59ee1069d65aa6a70a22d88cc
Cyber Ninjas, the cybersecurity consulting firm hired by Arizona Senate Republicans to oversee a partisan review of the 2020 election, on Thursday pushed a false narrative that Maricopa County received thousands of mail-in ballots that had no record of being sent out to voters.
The firm’s CEO Doug Logan used the baseless claim to urge legislators to subpoena more records and canvass voters at home, grasping for evidence of fraud even as a hand count of a statistical sample of ballots and two post-election audits showed no proof of wrongdoing in Maricopa County’s election.
The false claim has reverberated online in the day since Logan’s comments, parroted by lawmakers and Republican commentators including Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward, Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert and former President Donald Trump.
Yet Maricopa County officials and election experts confirm that the claim isn’t true and represents a misunderstanding of how early voting works in Arizona.
Here’s a closer look at the facts.
CLAIM: Arizona’s largest county in the 2020 election received and counted 74,000 mail-in ballots that had no record of ever being sent out to voters.
THE FACTS: False. The claim mischaracterizes reports that are intended to help political parties track early voters for their get-out-the-vote efforts, not tally mail-in ballots through Election Day. The reports don’t represent all mail-in ballots sent out and received, so the numbers aren’t expected to match up, according to Maricopa County officials and outside experts.
“We have 74,243 mail-in ballots where there is no clear record of them being sent,” Logan said at a meeting livestreamed at Arizona’s Capitol on Thursday. “That could be something where documentation wasn’t done right. There’s a clerical issue. There’s not proper things there, but I think when we’ve got 74,000, it merits knocking on a door and validating some of this information.”
Logan based his false claim on two types of early voting reports issued by Maricopa County: EV32 files and EV33 files. He claimed that EV32 files are “supposed to give a record of when a mail-in ballot is sent” and EV33 files are “supposed to give a record of when the mail-in ballot is received.”
That’s not accurate, according to Maricopa County officials, who tweeted on Friday that “the EV32 Returns & EV33 files are not the proper files to refer to for a complete accumulating of all early ballots sent and received.”
Instead, the EV32 and EV33 files are reports created for political parties to aid them in their get-out-the-vote efforts during early voting, according to Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund and a former Maricopa County elections official. Arizona law requires county recorders to provide this data to political parties and candidates, Patrick said.
Arizona reports both mail-in ballots and early in-person votes at voting centers as early votes, so both are included in the data in files EV32 and EV33, Patrick said.
The EV32 file includes all requests that voters make for early ballots, either by mail or in person, up to 11 days before Election Day, Patrick said. The EV33 file includes returned early ballots up to the Monday before Election Day.
That means there is a 10-day period between the final day of each report, during which thousands of mail-in votes are submitted and thousands of additional voters go to voting centers, request early ballots in person and submit them. Furthermore, the files don’t include any early ballots that came in on Election Day.
“To use these files as an attempt to understand the number of voters who were mailed a ballot or who returned a ballot is misguided,” Patrick said. “That information is obtained from the Voted File, not a GOTV tool for the political parties and candidates.” “GOTV” is short for “get out the vote.”
Maricopa County officials tweeted later Friday that they calculated the true number of mail-in ballots requested and returned in November’s election. According to that count, nearly 450,000 more mail-in ballots were requested than returned.
Rod Thomson, a public relations consultant working for Cyber Ninjas, said Maricopa County refused to answer questions posed by the audit team in private, forcing Logan to ask for explanations in public.
“Mr. Logan never said this was fraud or criminal, he merely stated the facts as they were provided to him and did not have an explanation,” Thomson said. “None of this would be necessary if the county would simply communicate with the audit team when there are questions.”
Logan is a Trump supporter who has spread conspiracy theories backing Trump’s false claims of fraud. His firm is overseeing the GOP audit despite having no prior experience in elections. Experts in election administration say it’s not following reliable procedures.
Jack Sellers, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, said in a statement on Thursday that the auditors are “portraying as suspicious what is actually normal and well known to people who work in elections.”
“What we heard today represents an alternate reality that has veered out of control since the November General Election,” Sellers wrote.
https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-arizona-ap-fact-check-election-2020-campaign-2016-f0c36df59ee1069d65aa6a70a22d88cc
The media scramble at the heart of Trump Book Summer
By Paul Farhi
July 17, 2021|Updated today at 10:47 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/trump-books-journalist-scoops/2021/07/16/99241cc0-e574-11eb-b722-89ea0dde7771_story.html
The peak of Trump Book Summer, the moment of maximum media intensity, may have come last Wednesday, when reporters scrambled to match a story about a story contained in one of those books.
Around 3 p.m. that day, New York magazine published an article based on a revelation its writer had discovered in the pages of “I Alone Can Fix It,” one of the entries in the current spate of Trump Studies, a copy of which the magazine said it had “obtained” before its official release.
The gist of the magazine’s report — that the book would reveal that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, feared Trump would precipitate a coup to maintain power — was so hot that it in turn triggered a nearly immediate follow-up report on CNN.com, written by no less than five reporters. Which in turn prompted The Washington Post to chase down the same nugget — which was kind of ironic considering the book that produced the scoop was written by two Post reporters and had already generated a prominent excerpt in the paper, with a second to come days later.
The media-on-media scramble, a kind of Russian nesting doll of reportage, attested to both the profound import of the Milley anecdote and the cultural heat of the new syllabus of Trump books. On the same day, “I Alone,” written by The Post’s Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, was the best-selling book on Amazon, which includes preorders for not-yet-released books. The third and fourth bestsellers were also dishy Trump titles, “Landslide,” by the independent journalist Michael Wolff, and “Frankly, We Did Win This Election,” by the Wall Street Journal’s Michael C. Bender, respectively. A fourth book, “Nightmare Scenario,” about Trump’s handling of the pandemic by two other Post reporters, Damian Paletta and Yasmeen Abutaleb, had climbed up the lists the week before.
Books about Trump may be the most popular, and populous, nonfiction genre since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks inspired a publishing boom. Volumes documenting the scandal and chaos of the 45th president’s administration have been burning up the charts since he took office. Some authors have had two bites in a single presidential term: Leonnig and Rucker’s “Very Stable Genius” appeared last year. Wolff has written three in the past three years.
This spurt doesn’t include another dozen or so Trump books that will be released over the next few months, including one co-authored by Washington Post veteran Bob Woodward, who has already written two Trump tomes, including last September’s predictably best-selling “Rage.”
Why the enduring fascination? It might be because there’s still so much to tell.
“News, tweets, outrages and scandals move at such a dizzying pace in the Trump era that was impossible for the American public to make sense of what was happening in real time,” said Keith Urbahn, founder and president of Javelin, a literary and public relations agency. Books in general, and Trump books in particular, provide context “in ways breaking news cannot.”
Urbahn’s company, based in Alexandria, Va., has represented a string of Trump authors — not just journalists Bender, Paletta and Abutaleb but also former administration officials. It roster includes James Comey, John Bolton, and “Anonymous,” a.k.a. Miles Taylor, the author of “A Warning,” a 2019 bestseller about his insight into the Trump White House.
The current Trump book traffic jam isn’t entirely coincidental; it was engineered in part. Bender’s book was supposed to be published in August, but his publisher, Twelve Books, moved it up to last week after learning that the other books would be published around the start of beach-reading season.
The hurried-up release seemingly defies conventional book-marketing wisdom. Publishers, like movie studios, usually avoid head-to-head competition, shifting the most promising titles out of the way of similar projects so they don’t have to compete for publicity and consumers’ dollars.
And yet this particular pileup seems to have worked synergistically, creating a kind of restaurant-row effect in which consumers are drawn by the concentration of offerings. News stories inspired by these books, such as the reports about Milley, often mention the various books together, boosting each one.
“Competition is sometimes beneficial,” says Albert Regnery, co-founder and president of Republic Book Publishers. “Two books [about the same topic] can be reviewed or written about together, meaning both benefit. .?.?. It’s all about sales, and sales is all about how much publicity can be generated.”
It also helps that each of the books, which document the frantic final months of Trump’s presidency, contains a seemingly unending list of you’re-not-going-to-believe-this anecdotes and revelations.
Bender, for example, reports that Trump told White House chief of staff John Kelly that Hitler “did a lot of good things” and broached with Miley an idea to mobilize the military to quell demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Wolff says Trump toyed with the idea of postponing the election, using the Floyd protests as a pretext. Paletta and Abutaleb report that Trump was far sicker from covid when he entered the hospital last fall than the White House ever acknowledged. In addition to Milley’s misgivings, Rucker and Leonnig write that presidential lawyer Rudy Giuliani advised Trump to simply declare victory in key swing states, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. (For the record, Trump has denied the Hitler comment or that he ever discussed a coup).
Yet such revelations raise a question: Why are these reporters only telling us these things now?
The same question came up last year, when Woodward’s “Rage” made news for the author’s disclosure that Trump knew as early as February 2020 that the incipient coronavirus pandemic was “deadly” even as he publicly downplayed it. But critics questioned why Woodward — who learned this firsthand from his interviews with Trump in early 2020 — didn’t let the world know about this sooner. Woodward argued that his book’s mission was to present a more complete picture of Trump’s response to the pandemic. And that in addition, when Trump first shared his intel about the virus, he had no idea if Trump was telling the truth. (“Which is always a problem with Trump,” he said.)
Rucker and Leonnig’s reporting for their book was walled off from their daily beat responsibilities, so real-time reports in the newspaper were out of the question, said Washington Post editor Sally Buzbee.
“Basically, when staffers go on unpaid book leaves, which is the case here, there is an understanding that the reporting they are doing is for the book,” she said. “The Post typically publishes the book’s first excerpt, which gives our readers the first cut at the news. This is our long-standing practice and has served readers of The Post and the reporters well.”
New York Times editor Dean Baquet said he encourages his reporters to “keep in touch” with editors at the paper when they’re working on books, and to alert them when they come up with something worthy of daily publication.
“Sometimes we make the judgment that it is okay to hold [a big scoop], or at least to hold until we publish an excerpt,” he said. Book-writing and daily news reporting aren’t “church and state,” said Baquet, whose star White House reporter Maggie Haberman is at work on a Trump book, “and I do hope reporters break their big news in the Times.”
Rucker noted another constraint on real-time reporting of the news he and Leonnig uncovered: “Many of the officials we interviewed for ‘I Alone Can Fix It’ agreed to speak with us about these events only after Trump had left office and only for the purposes of this deeper history,” he said.
“Some of our sources told us they did not share this information with journalists in real time because they feared retribution from the sitting president, but as time passed they became more comfortable recounting their experiences to us for the historical record,” he added.
Bender didn’t respond to a request for comment. But Wall Street Journal spokesman Steve Severinghaus said, “While we generally expect our journalists to break current, relevant stories on our platforms first, we take each instance on a case-by-case basis, balancing the needs of our audiences’ timely right to know and respecting our journalists’ outside efforts.” He declined to respond to a question about whether the newspaper had discussed publishing Bender’s findings before publication of his book.
Book contracts typically are silent on the question of whether it’s permissible for a journalist to report his or her own scoops before a book’s publication, said Regnery, the publisher.
“My position as publisher is that’s a matter between the publisher and his employer, and you better check with your employer because [withholding news] could get you fired,” he said.
“Of course, [publishers] always want the best information.”
By Paul Farhi
Paul Farhi is The Washington Post's media reporter. He started at The Post in 1988 and has been a financial reporter, a political reporter and a Style reporter. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/trump-books-journalist-scoops/2021/07/16/99241cc0-e574-11eb-b722-89ea0dde7771_story.html
Time to ditch the bra?
Around 400 underwear related accidents are recorded in Britain every year
CAMILLA TOMINEY ASSOCIATE EDITOR
17 July 2021 • 7:00am
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/17/time-ditch-bra/
I was horrified to read that Gillian Anderson has ditched her bras. “I don’t care if my breasts reach my belly button,” the Crown actress declared. “I’m not wearing a bra anymore. It’s just too f---ing uncomfortable.”
One wonders what sort of undergarments the 52-year-old has been wearing. If she’s been going fully Madonna in Vogue or dressing like Princess Leia in Return of the Jedi then I don’t blame her, but has she not considered some sort of non-underwired, half-way house?
That said, I was interested to read that women might actually be safer going bra-free. Around 400 underwear related accidents are recorded in Britain every year, with women particularly susceptible to being struck by lightning if they are wearing metal underwiring in their bras.
And it’s not just women who are at risk. According to medical records, a 27-year-old man sustained a fracture and ligament damage when he twisted his left middle finger while trying to unclasp the bra of a female companion.
It certainly brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “booby trap”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/17/time-ditch-bra/
Just wait until all the antivaxxers find out that every chicken sandwich and hamburger they've ever eaten came from chickens and cows that were pumped full of vaccines.
2:34 PM · Jul 16, 2021·Twitter for Android
THREAD
https://twitter.com/BlackKnight10k/status/1416028379929845764D
Vaccines
https://exploreanimalhealth.org/dig-deeper/vaccines/
Animal vaccines play a key role in protecting animal health and contribute to public health through a safer food supply. They also help to reduce the need for antibiotics by preventing diseases that might otherwise require antibiotic treatment.
The use of vaccinations over the last century has prevented death and disease in millions of animals. Vaccinations are commonly used to protect pets from highly contagious and deadly diseases such as rabies, parvovirus, distemper and hepatitis. Livestock and poultry such as chickens, turkeys, pigs and cattle are vaccinated to protect against diseases like rotavirus, E. coli, pinkeye and tetanus.
The rabies vaccine is an example of the impact of a highly successful animal vaccine that also impacts people. Rabies might be the oldest infectious disease known to man. Vaccines have nearly eliminated human rabies in developed countries. But, more than 50,000 people die of rabies every year in Asia and Africa and studies indicate a majority of those cases are due to people being bitten by dogs that have not been vaccinated.
An example of a vaccine victory on the animal health side occurred in 2011. The World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) declared an ancient and deadly disease among cattle (rinderpest, also known as “cattle plague”) officially eradicated throughout the world thanks primarily to vaccinations.
Vaccines support an animal’s immune system. At best, a vaccine prevents an animal from getting a particular disease. At a minimum, it lessens the impact of the disease. In any case, vaccinations help to keep animals healthy and food safe. How do they impact the safety of food? Vaccines, for example, may decrease the incidence of salmonella in chickens, which can make the eggs we eat safer, and contribute to a safer food supply.
Vaccines can also help reduce the need for antibiotics by preventing diseases that might otherwise require antibiotic treatment. A shared goal throughout the agricultural community is to reduce the need for antibiotics, while ensuring they are available when needed to responsibly address animal suffering. Vaccines help to achieve this goal.
Preventing sickness or lessening its impact on animals by administering vaccines is the ethical thing to do. In essence, vaccines are an important tool to improve animal health, and they contribute to food safety.
https://exploreanimalhealth.org/dig-deeper/vaccines/
‘A propaganda tool’ for Trump: A second federal judge castigates attorneys who filed a lawsuit challenging the 2020 results
By Rosalind S. Helderman
July 16, 2021|Updated today at 8:33 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sanctions-hearing-2020-lawsuit/2021/07/16/90392266-e661-11eb-b722-89ea0dde7771_story.html
Just before Christmas, two Colorado lawyers filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of 160 million American voters, alleging a vast conspiracy to steal the 2020 presidential election by the voting equipment manufacturer Dominion Voting Systems, Facebook, its founder Mark Zuckerberg, his wife Priscilla Chan and elected officials in four states — and asking for $160 billion in damages.
The case was dismissed in April, but now a federal judge is considering disciplining the lawyers for filing a frivolous claim — sharply questioning the duo in a Friday hearing about whether they had allowed themselves to be used as “a propaganda tool” of former president Donald Trump.
“Did that ever occur to you? That, possibly, [you’re] just repeating stuff the president is lying about?” Federal Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter asked the two lawyers, Gary D. Fielder and Ernest John Walker, during a hearing to consider sanctioning them.
The two lawyers argued they had a good-faith belief that the election was stolen and did not trust government officials and others who affirmed that it was secure and that there was not widespread fraud.
It was the second time this week that a judge dressed down lawyers who filed cases alleging fraud in the 2020 election, as the legal system grapples with how to hold accountable those who used the court system to spread falsehoods about the vote.
‘This is really fantastical’: Federal judge in Michigan presses Trump-allied lawyers on 2020 election fraud claims in sanctions hearing
On Monday, a federal judge in Michigan spent nearly six hours skeptically questioning a group of nine lawyers, including pro-Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood, in a similar hearing to determine whether to discipline the group for filing a lawsuit that sought to overturn President Biden’s win in that state.
Sanctions hearings are pending in other states as well, including Wisconsin, where Gov. Tony Evers (D) has asked a judge to order Trump and his lawyers to pay the state’s legal fees stemming from post-election litigation.
Meanwhile, a committee of judges in New York suspended the law license of former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, arguing that Trump’s personal lawyer had “communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements” that amounted to an ongoing threat to the public. Giuliani’s lawyers have said they are confident his license will be restored after a hearing.
Legal rules require that attorneys be truthful in court and not clog up the court system with frivolous motions. Lawyers who violate the rules can be required to pay their opponents’ legal fees or can be assessed additional monetary penalties. Judges can also refer them for grievance procedures that can result in disbarment.
In the Colorado hearing on Friday, the judge repeatedly questioned Fielder and Walker about how much independent investigation they conducted before filing a lawsuit filled with unproven allegations about a wide range of individuals.
He noted that at the time, top officials such as Attorney General William P. Barr and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had publicly stated that there was no evidence of widespread fraud or election-machine hacking that affected the outcome of the election. Those findings, Neureiter suggested, should have been a “red light for you, at least a flashing yellow light” that more investigation was needed before filing the claim.
Both attorneys said they continued to question the legitimacy of the election and would file the case again.
Walker told the judge that it was “ludicrous” to suggest he and Fielder had done no original research before filing. “It’s offensive to me and my co-counsel,” he said. “We took this case seriously.”
Fielder said the two had a “good faith” belief that the election was stolen, citing theories put forward by various other lawyers and Trump allies — including, he said, MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell. “These are serious allegations, made by serious people,” he explained.
Referring to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Fielder argued that he and Walker “saw the potential for insurrection” before it took place and filed the lawsuit to offer people who believed they had been wronged in the election a place to have their complaints addressed.
“We’re peaceful people. We wanted to come to court and resolve it in a peaceful way,” he said. “What happened on January 6 was exactly what we predicted in the complaint.”
But the judge questioned whether, as officers of the court, the lawyers could file a lawsuit based on mere belief of problems. He noted the they had presented “not one iota” of evidence to support claims, for instance, that Dominion’s machines were hacked or that Facebook had manipulated the election via grants donated by Zuckerberg and routed to local officials through a nonprofit group.
Instead, he noted, they provided only sworn statements from people who believed the election was rigged — a belief fueled by Trump’s repeated false claims.
“Many people have been influenced by the outgoing officeholder saying the election was stolen. They sincerely believe everything that is stated by the outgoing officeholder,” Neureiter said. “Of course they’re going to think and feel and have genuine emotions about this. .?.?. How does that a federal lawsuit make, the fact that the people felt aggrieved somehow?”
Neureiter also questioned a website the lawyers set up to raise money to finance the suit, appearing to probe whether the lawsuit was filed to spur donations. The website is similar to fundraising efforts by other individuals and nonprofits that have said they are pursuing challenges to the election.
Fielder told the judge that 2,100 people had donated $95,000 in response to their requests for money and that all but $7,000 had been spent to prepare and file legal motions. “I haven’t tried to make money,” he said.
According to his biography, Neureiter, who was appointed a magistrate by other judges in 2018, previously served for a time on a committee that investigated alleged ethical violations by lawyers who practice in Colorado’s federal courts.
Lawyers for the various entities and individuals named in the suit urged Neureiter to impose penalties as a way of deterring other attorneys from continuing to press false claims about the election or using the courts in similar fashion in the future.
Joshua Matz, a lawyer representing the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life, which made grants to local election offices attacked by Trump allies, said the Colorado lawyers had used the courts “as soap box to spread despicable and dangerous lies — lies that have imperiled election officials .?.?. That nearly destroyed the Capitol and that still undermine our democracy.”
“A law license does not confer unbounded prerogative to file objectively legally frivolous lawsuits, built on .?.?. a conspiracy theory derived largely from a pillow salesman, aimed at undermining a legitimate presidential election,” he argued during Friday’s hearing.
Neureiter said he would take the matter under advisement and issue a ruling soon.
By Rosalind Helderman
Rosalind Helderman is a political enterprise and investigations reporter for The Washington Post. She joined The Post in 2001. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sanctions-hearing-2020-lawsuit/2021/07/16/90392266-e661-11eb-b722-89ea0dde7771_story.html
How Republican Vaccine Opposition Got to This Point
In recent months, Republican skepticism of Covid vaccines and their rollout has grown louder: One recent poll found that 47 percent said they weren’t likely to get vaccinated.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/us/politics/republicans-vaccines.html
By Lisa Lerer July 17, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/us/politics/republicans-vaccines.html
After Sherri Tenpenny, a Cleveland-area doctor, falsely suggested during a hearing last month in the Ohio House of Representatives that Covid vaccines left people “magnetized” and could “interface” with 5G cellular towers, Republican lawmakers thanked her for her “enlightening” testimony.
In Congress, Republicans who once praised the Trump administration for its work facilitating the swift development of the vaccines now wage campaigns of vaccine misinformation, sowing doubts about safety and effectiveness from the Capitol.
And this week, Republican state lawmakers in Tennessee successfully pressured health officials to stop outreach to children for all vaccines. The guidance prohibits sending reminders about the second dose of a Covid vaccine to adolescents who had received one shot and communicating about routine inoculations, like the flu shot.
A wave of opposition to Covid vaccines has risen within the Republican Party, as conservative news outlets produce a steady diet of misinformation about vaccines and some G.O.P. lawmakers invite anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists to testify in statehouses and Congress. With very little resistance from party leaders, these Republican efforts have elevated falsehoods and doubts about vaccinations from the fringes of American life to the center of our political conversation.
It’s a pattern that was seen throughout the Trump administration: Rather than rebuke conspiratorial thinking and inaccuracies when they begin spreading among their party’s base, many Republicans tolerate extremist misinformation.
Some conservatives promulgate the falsehoods as a way to rally their political base, embracing ideas like a stolen election, rampant voter fraud and revisionist history about the deadly siege at the Capitol. Many others say very little at all, preferring to dodge questions from the news media.
Those who do speak up remain reluctant to specifically name colleagues who have given voice to misinformation, or to call out media personalities who have done so, like Tucker Carlson of Fox News.
“We don’t control conservative media figures so far as I know — at least I don’t,” Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, told The New York Times recently. “That being said, I think it’s an enormous error for anyone to suggest that we shouldn’t be taking vaccines.”
Anti-vaccination sentiment isn’t new to Republican voters. During the 2016 Republican presidential primary race, a number of candidates, including Donald J. Trump, repeated debunked theories that vaccines caused autism in children. Around that time, Republican state legislators began opposing laws that would tighten vaccine requirements for children.
But over the past few months, the shift within the party has accelerated, as some supporters of Mr. Trump embrace the belief that the national effort to promote Covid vaccinations is harmful, unconstitutional or perhaps even a sign of a nefarious government plot.
“Think about what those mechanisms could be used for,” Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina said of the Biden administration’s plan to go door-to-door to reach millions of unvaccinated Americans, going on to claim without evidence: “They could then go door-to-door to take your guns. They could go door-to-door to take your Bibles.”
In a report this month, the Kaiser Family Foundation found a growing vaccination divide between Republican and Democratic areas, with nearly 47 percent of people in counties won by President Biden fully vaccinated, compared with 35 percent of people in Trump counties. In a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, 47 percent of Republicans said they weren’t likely to get vaccinated, compared with just 6 percent of Democrats.
As Covid cases across the country rise, nearly all recent hospitalizations and deaths have occurred among unvaccinated people, White House officials have said. While the national outlook remains much better than during previous upticks, Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general, this week issued his first advisory of the Biden administration, warning of the “urgent threat” of health misinformation.
There’s a tendency among Republican leaders to quietly — and sometimes not-so-quietly — attribute the support for fringe beliefs and figures to Mr. Trump. But when it comes to vaccinations, it’s difficult to pin the blame on the former president.
Mr. Trump has eagerly taken credit for the accelerated development process of the vaccines, and has urged Americans to get vaccinated. (He did, however, quietly receive a vaccine in private before he left office, rather than hold a public event for the shot that might have encouraged his supporters to follow his lead.) In an interview with Fox News last month, the former president expressed some concern about vaccinating “very young people” but said he remained a “big believer in what we did with the vaccine.”
“it’s incredible what we did,” he said. “You see the results.”
Other Republicans have not remained quite as steadfast in their echoing of Mr. Trump’s message on vaccines. Last year, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin praised Trump’s “brilliant” Operation Warp Speed. This year, he has made a number of dubious claims about adverse reactions and deaths linked to the vaccines.
In March, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia praised Mr. Trump for saving lives with the vaccines. This month, she urged Americans to “just say no” to the vaccine, using Nazi-era imagery to criticize the Biden administration’s effort to reach unvaccinated people.
“People have a choice, they don’t need your medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations,” she tweeted. “You can’t force people to be part of the human experiment.”
Less than a week later, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader, encouraged Americans to get vaccinated, citing his experience as a childhood survivor of polio.
“We have not one, not two, but three highly effective vaccines, so I’m perplexed by the difficulty we have finishing the job,” he said.
Yet when asked by a reporter whether some of the challenge could stem from the words of members of his own party, Mr. McConnell demurred.
“I’ve already answered the question about how I feel about this,” he said. “I can only speak for myself, and I just did a few minutes ago.”
Lisa Lerer is a national political correspondent, covering campaigns, elections and political power. @llerer
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/us/politics/republicans-vaccines.html
Trump showerhead rule on more water flow goes down the drain
By MATTHEW DALY
yesterday
https://apnews.com/article/trump-showerhead-rule-reversed-biden-6b6dc448e974a948cdcad3d43bfccbe3
WASHINGTON (AP) — So much for Donald Trump’s quest for “perfect” hair.
The Biden administration is reversing a Trump-era rule approved after the former president complained he wasn’t getting wet enough because of limits on water flow from showerheads.
Now, with a new president in office, the Energy Department is going back to a standard adopted in 2013, saying it provides plenty of water for a good soak and a thorough clean.
The rule change will have little practical effect, since nearly all commercially made showerheads comply with the 2013 rule — the pet peeve of the former president notwithstanding.
The Energy Department said the action clarifies what’s been happening in the marketplace. Showers that provide the extra supply of water desired by Trump are not easily found, officials said.
Since 1992, federal law has dictated that new showerheads should not pour more than 2.5 gallons (9.5 liters) of water per minute. As newer shower fixtures came out with multiple nozzles, the Obama administration defined the showerhead restrictions to apply to what comes out in total. So if there are four nozzles, no more than 2.5 gallons total should come out among all four.
The Trump-era rule, finalized in December, allows each nozzle to spray as much as 2.5 gallons, not just the overall showerhead.
A proposed rule change, set to be published in the Federal Register next week, reverts to the Obama-era standard. The public will have 60 days to comment before a final rule is developed.
The change will ensure that consumers continue to save money while reducing water use and paying lower energy bills, the Energy Department said. Officials estimated that the Obama-era rule saved households about $38 a year, and the Energy Department expects similar savings by reverting to the 2013 standard.
“As many parts of America experience historic droughts, this commonsense proposal means consumers can purchase showerheads that conserve water and save them money on their utility bills,? Kelly Speakes-Backman, acting assistant secretary for the department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, said Friday.
While publicly talking about the need to keep his hair “perfect,” Trump made increasing water flow and dialing back longstanding appliance conservation standards — including for light bulbs, toilets and dishwashers — a personal issue.
“So showerheads — you take a shower, the water doesn’t come out. You want to wash your hands, the water doesn’t come out,? Trump said at the White House last year. “So what do you do? You just stand there longer or you take a shower longer? Because my hair — I don’t know about you, but it has to be perfect. Perfect.”
But consumer and conservation groups said the 2020 rule change was silly, unnecessary and wasteful, especially as the West bakes through a historic two-decade-long megadrought.
With four or five or more nozzles, “you could have 10, 15 gallons per minute powering out of the showerhead, literally probably washing you out of the bathroom,” said Andrew deLaski, executive director of the energy conservation group Appliance Standards Awareness Project. “At a time when a good portion of the country is experiencing serious drought exacerbated by climate change, there’s no place for showerheads that use needless amounts of water.”
DeLaski and officials at Consumer Reports said there’s been no public outcry or need for change. The Energy Department’s database of 12,499 showerheads showed 74% of them use 2 gallons (7.5 liters) or less water per minute, which is 20% less than the federal standard.
A 2016 test of showerheads by Consumer Reports found that the best-rated showerheads, including a $20 model, provided a pleasing amount of water flow and met federal standards.
The Energy Department also is proposing to remove the definition of “body spray” adopted in the 2020 final rule. The rule allows “body sprays” to circumvent congressional intent to promote water conservation simply based on orientation of the water flow — a side spray rather than overhead.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-showerhead-rule-reversed-biden-6b6dc448e974a948cdcad3d43bfccbe3
Exclusive: Neighbours ‘pinged’ through walls by NHS Covid app
Test and Trace is sending alerts to people who have never come into contact with positive virus case
By Bill Gardner
15 July 2021 • 10:00pm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/15/neighbours-pinged-walls-nhs-covid-app/
Neighbours are being told to self-isolate because the NHS Test and Trace app is "pinging" people through walls, it has emerged.
Figures show more than half a million alerts were sent through the app last week – the most since records began – raising fears of a "pingdemic", with businesses, transport and schools brought to a standstill.
But The Telegraph has learned that some people are being forced to self-isolate for 10 days despite never having come into face-to-face contact with a positive Covid case.
According to sources close to the Test and Trace app team, the Bluetooth signal used is known to be strong enough to penetrate walls.
That is understood to have been raised as a concern in the initial stages of building the technology – now being reviewed amid concerns it is too sensitive – although Whitehall sources said on Thursday that any changes would not be made for some weeks.
It means people are being forced into isolation because a neighbour whose home they share a wall with has fallen ill.
"We are hearing of anecdotal cases and we do know that it is possible for the signal to travel through walls, although it is weakened," one source said. "The app has been calibrated to try to avoid that happening, but we are reviewing the issue of notifications carefully."
..
Number of contact tracing alerts sent
In England
SOURCE: NHS TEST AND TRACE
The Telegraph discovered hundreds of people complaining on social media about being "pinged" despite not having left their homes. Cases included a carer who had to cancel her father's cancer appointment after her two neighbours tested positive for Covid.
Dr Fiona Sampson, a senior research fellow in emergency and urgent care at the University of Sheffield, told The Telegraph: "My partner got pinged and rang 111 to find out when the contact was. However, he hadn't left the house on the day of the alleged contact.
"We later realised he had been working with his phone on the table, less than two metres away from our neighbour."
Jason Delaney, 39, who owns a bar in Alton, Hampshire, said he was pinged despite not having come into close contact with anyone on the day in question. He added: "I then found out that my neighbour had tested positive for Covid, and we have a standard connecting wall.
"I stayed home for 10 days, like I was told, and that probably cost me around four grand in takings. To be honest, I have lost a lot of confidence in the app. You try to do your bit to stop the infection spreading, of course – but to be told to self-isolate for no reason makes you think 'is this really worth it?'"
A government spokesman would not say how many people were believed to have been pinged through walls, but insisted the number was not large enough to be considered "an issue". The spokesman added: "But we wouldn't say that this never happens." NHS guidance says the Bluetooth signal is reduced through walls rather than blocked entirely, with people on the other side "less likely" to receive an alert.
It comes as the NHS app wreaks chaos, with the latest figures showing that 530,126 alerts were sent in the most recent week – up 46 per cent on the previous week and the highest seven-day total since data was first published in January.
The number is more than 10 times as many as in the week to June 2. In the final week of April, only 39,875 close contacts were identified.
On Thursday night, the chief executive of Rolls-Royce said the firm was "on the edge of a critical situation" and would not rule out shutting down production after a large proportion of its staff were pinged. Torsten Muller-Otvos told The Telegraph: "Cases have gone through the roof, and it is causing havoc."
Meanwhile, one in five workers in hospitality and retail are self-isolating, NHS hospitals are reporting staff absences of up to 25 per cent and bus and train services are frequently cancelled or delayed due to driver shortages.
...
NHS Covid app venue alerts sent
In England and Wales
SOURCE: NHS TEST AND TRACE
Robert Jenrick, the Communities Secretary, said on Thursday that the Government was increasingly worried about the number of people being forced off work by the app.
"We are concerned about absences as a result of being pinged, for example. That is one of the reasons why we do need to move to a more proportionate approach," he told LBC Radio. "The Government is going to be setting out its plans in the coming weeks, so I'm not going to pre-empt those."
The Covid app is based on an algorithm using a weakened Bluetooth signal to track those who have been within two metres of someone with Covid for 15 minutes or more. NHS guidance says the signal is "reduced" through walls and therefore "less likely to satisfy the necessary criteria" if someone is close to a neighbour.
Ministers are concerned that many users are deleting the app after a recent poll showed that 19 per cent of adults had removed it from their phones, with a further 20 per cent saying they would do so after most Covid restrictions are lifted on July 19.
Officials and scientists have been tasked with tweaking the app to make it less sensitive, while double-jabbed contacts of positive cases will no longer need to self-isolate for 10 days from August 16.
Dr Jenny Harries, the head of the UK Health Security Agency, told MPs last week: "We have a piece of work ongoing at the moment because it is entirely possible to tune the app to ensure that it is appropriate to the risk."
A government spokesman said: “There is no issue with the app tracing close contacts through walls.
“The NHS COVID-19 app has been downloaded more than 26 million times, saved thousands of lives and stopped hundreds of thousands of cases by doing exactly what it is designed to do - informing close contacts of someone who has tested positive for COVID-19 they are at risk and advising them to isolate.
"In the context of rising cases it is vital people are aware of their personal risk so they can make informed decisions on their behaviour to protect those around them.”
Case study: ‘The whole thing appears to be a complete nonsense’
A carer who believes she was "pinged" through her neighbour's wall had to cancel her father's cancer appointment after being told to self-isolate for 10 days.
Sue Kent, 54, who runs a pet business in Manchester, received an alert last week saying she had been in close contact with a positive case on Monday.
"That day I paid the window cleaner on the doorstep but I doubt we were in contact for 15 seconds, let alone 15 minutes," she said. "Then I was pinged by the app, and it said I'd been in contact with someone. I thought 'how the hell has that happened?'
"Then my neighbours told me they had tested positive. I live in a semi, and when I'm watching TV they are watching TV right next to me, practically. That's the only way I could have been close to someone.
"I did my duty and stayed at home for 10 days, but I had to cancel my father's appointment because I'm his sole carer. It does make you lose heart in trying to help because the whole thing appears to be a complete nonsense."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/15/neighbours-pinged-walls-nhs-covid-app/
AP: Few AZ voter fraud cases, discrediting Trump’s claims
By BOB CHRISTIE and CHRISTINA A. CASSIDY
today
https://apnews.com/article/business-government-and-politics-only-on-ap-election-2020-8260008a320b6c96a15e6884af3fa474
PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona county election officials have identified fewer than 200 cases of potential voter fraud out of more than 3 million ballots cast in last year’s presidential election, further discrediting former President Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen election as his allies continue a disputed ballot review in the state’s most populous county.
An Associated Press investigation found 182 cases where problems were clear enough that officials referred them to investigators for further review. So far, only four cases have led to charges, including those identified in a separate state investigation. No one has been convicted. No person’s vote was counted twice.
While it’s possible more cases could emerge, the numbers illustrate the implausibility of Trump’s claims that fraud and irregularities in Arizona cost him the state’s electorate votes. In final, certified and audited results, Biden won 10,400 more votes than Trump out of 3.4 million cast.
AP’s findings align with previous studies showing voter fraud is rare. Numerous safeguards are built into the system to not only prevent fraud from happening but to detect it when it does.
“The fact of the matter is that election officials across the state are highly invested in helping to ensure the integrity of our elections and the public’s confidence in them,” said Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat. “And part of that entails taking potential voter fraud seriously.”
Arizona’s potential cases also illustrate another reality: Voter fraud is often bipartisan. Of the four Arizona cases that have resulted in criminal charges, two involved Democratic voters and two involved Republicans.
AP’s review supports statements made by many state and local elections officials — and even some Republican county officials and GOP Gov. Doug Ducey — that Arizona’s presidential election was secure and its results valid.
And still, Arizona’s GOP-led state Senate has for months been conducting what it describes as a “forensic audit” of results in Phoenix’s Maricopa County. The effort has been discredited by election experts and faced bipartisan criticism, but some Republicans, including Trump, have suggested it will uncover evidence of widespread fraud.
“This is not a massive issue,” said Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who oversaw the Maricopa County election office during the 2020 election and lost his re-election bid. “It is a lie that has developed over time. It’s been fed by conspiracy theorists.”
The AP tallied the potential cases after submitting public record requests to all Arizona counties. Most counties — 11 out of 15 — reported they had forwarded no potential cases to local prosecutors. The majority of cases identified so far involve people casting a ballot for a relative who had died or people who tried to cast two ballots.
In addition to the AP’s review of county election offices, an Election Integrity Unit of the state attorney general’s office that was created in 2019 to ferret out fraud has been reviewing potential cases of fraud.
A spokesman for Attorney General Mark Brnovich told the AP in April that the unit had 21 active investigations, although he did not specify if all were from last fall.
A month later, the office indicted a woman for casting a ballot on behalf of her dead mother in November. A spokeswoman declined to provide updated information this week.
Maricopa County, which is subject to the disputed ballot review ordered by state Senate Republicans, has identified just one case of potential fraud out of 2.1 million ballots cast. That was a voter who might have cast a ballot in another state. The case was sent to the county attorney’s office, which forwarded it to the state attorney general.
Virtually all the cases identified by county election officials are in Pima County, home to Tucson, and involved voters who attempted to cast two ballots.
The Pima County Recorder’s Office has a practice of referring all cases with even a hint of potential fraud to prosecutors for review, something the state’s 14 other county recorders do not do. Pima County officials forwarded 151 cases to prosecutors. They did not refer 25 others from voters over age 70 because there was a greater chance those errors — typically attempts to vote twice — were the result of memory lapses or confusion, not criminal intent, an election official said.
None of the 176 duplicate ballots was counted twice. A spokesman for the Pima County Attorney’s Office, Joe Watson, said that the 151 cases it received were still being reviewed and that no charges had been filed.
Pima County’s tally of referrals to prosecutors after last year’s election was in line with those in 2016 and 2018. Prosecutors filed no voter fraud cases after the 2016 election and just one after the 2018 election, and that case was later dismissed, Watson said Friday.
But there were some new patterns this year, said deputy recorder Pamela Franklin. An unusually high number of people appeared to have intentionally voted twice, often by voting early in person and then again by mail. In Arizona, where nearly 80% of voters cast ballots by mail, it’s not unusual for someone to forget they returned their mail-in ballot and then later ask for a replacement or try to vote in person, she said. But this pattern was new.
Franklin noted several factors at play, including worries about U.S. Postal Service delays. In addition, Trump at one point encouraged voters who cast their ballots early by mail to show up at their polling places on Election Day and vote again if poll workers couldn’t confirm their mail ballots had been received.
The results in Arizona are similar to early findings in other battleground states. Local election officials in Wisconsin identified just 27 potential cases of voter fraud out of 3.3 million ballots cast last November, according to records obtained by the AP under the state’s open records law. Potential voter fraud cases in other states where Trump and his allies mounted challenges have so far amounted to just a tiny fraction of Trump’s losing margin in those states.
The Associated Press conducted the review following months of Trump and his allies claiming without proof that he had won the 2020 election. His claims of widespread fraud have been rejected by election officials, judges, a group of election security officials and even Trump’s own attorney general at the time. Even so, supporters continue to repeat them and they have been cited by state lawmakers as justification for tighter voting rules across the country.
In Arizona, Republican state lawmakers have used the unsubstantiated claims to justify the unprecedented outside Senate review of the election in Maricopa County and to pass legislation that could make it harder for infrequent voters to receive mail ballots automatically.
Trump, in a statement, called AP’s tally an attempt to “discredit the massive number of voter irregularities and fraud” in key battleground states and said the “real numbers” will be released “shortly.” He did not provide any evidence to back up his assertions.
Senate President Karen Fann has repeatedly said her goal is not to overturn the election results. Instead, she has said she wants to find out if there were any problems and show voters who believe Trump’s claims whether they should trust the results.
“Everybody keeps saying, ‘Oh, there’s no evidence’ and it’s like, ‘Yeah well, let’s do the audit.’ And if there’s nothing there, then we say, ‘Look, there was nothing there,’” Fann told the AP in early May. “If we find something, and it’s a big if, but if we find something, then we can say, ‘OK, we do have evidence and now how do we fix this?’” Fann did not return calls this week to discuss the AP findings.
Aside from double voting, the cases flagged by officials mostly involved a ballot cast after someone had died, including three voters in Yavapai County who face felony charges for casting ballots for spouses who died before the election.
In Yuma County, one case of a voter attempting to cast two ballots was sent to the county attorney for review. Chief Civil Deputy William Kerekus told the AP that there was no intent at voter fraud and the case was closed without charges.
Cochise County Recorder David Stevens found mail-in ballots were received from two voters who died before mail ballots were sent in early October. Sheriff’s deputies investigating the cases found their homes were vacant and closed the cases. The votes were not counted.
___
Cassidy reported from Atlanta.
https://apnews.com/article/business-government-and-politics-only-on-ap-election-2020-8260008a320b6c96a15e6884af3fa474
Want to Improve Recycling? Focus on People, Not Policy
Chaz Miller | Jul 15, 2021
https://www.waste360.com/recycling/want-improve-recycling-focus-people-not-policy
2021 is a great year to be a recycling lobbyist or policy wonk. This year saw the most recycling bills introduced at the state and Federal level since the tsunami of laws following the 1987 voyage of the garbage barge.
Some of the state bills passed, although most didn’t. 2022 will see more bills pass because state legislators won’t be preoccupied with pandemic-related issues. As for Congress, it held a few hearings and will be in session for the rest of the year. Hope abounds for federal legislation, especially infrastructure support for better MRFs.
As they pursue new laws, advocates and legislators are likely to continue confusing policy and people. They are motivated by the belief that policy is the cure to all that ails recycling. They believe new, stronger laws will lead to more people recycling and not just recycling but recycling right. After all, we advocates tend to believe that everyone else is like us and just wants to recycle as much as possible. We just need better policy to allow this to happen. Elected officials tend to believe that people will automatically change their recycling habits in response to a new law.
The problem is, too many don’t. SWANA’s new report, “Reducing Contamination in Curbside Recycling Programs”, shows the results of an intensive recycling education and enforcement program in two Ohio suburbs. The study showed that a stubbornly high percentage of residents are, at best, indifferent to recycling. Constituting about a quarter of the households, they provide over half of the contamination when they “recycle”. Why should anyone be surprised that in a country with 330 million people, many just don’t care about recycling?
One problem is that advocates and elected officials don’t seem to know what they want to accomplish with their proposals. Is recycling intended to save natural or economic resources or is it intended to cause less waste going to disposal or is it intended to lower greenhouse gas emissions or all three or more? These are not mutually consistent goals.
Recycling clearly saves natural resources. Recycling programs are more likely to add to the cost of solid waste programs rather than to save money because recyclables are more expensive to collect than trash and because they must be processed. As for lowering greenhouse gas emissions, recycling has a mixed record depending on the material being recycled.
Another problem is that recycling goals tend to be aspirational. The reality is the higher the goal the less likely it will be met. It is fair to say, however, that aspirational goals often lead to aspirational accounting. Europe is a good example of this. The European Union’s auditors recently warned the EU will fall short of meeting its 2025 and 2030 plastic recycling goals. One reason? “New stricter reporting rules” that will “likely lead the EU’s reported average plastic packaging recycling rate to drop…from 41% to 32-29%.”
Most important of all, we need to learn from our mistakes. This is something successful scrap dealers do every day. If they don’t, they go out of business. They don’t rely on policy. They rely on performance.
Policy is important. But policy doesn’t put recyclables on the curbside, people do. Infrastructure needs to be improved. But infrastructure doesn’t put recyclables on the curbside, people do. Recycled content mandates can create additional end markets for recyclables. But those mandates don’t put recyclables on the curbside, people do. Extended producer responsibility laws can cover some recycling costs. But producers don’t put recyclables on the curbside, people do.
Until we start understanding the human behavior involved in putting the recycling bin at the curbside but also in putting the right things in the bin, we will continue to wonder why recycling underperforms. The same goes for understanding why people who are quite good at recycling at home, seem to be indifferent to putting the right materials in the recycling bin at the local coffee shop or an airport. And don’t get me started on the behavior problems with recycling in apartment buildings.
Until we start focusing on human behavior, even the best policies will fail. Put people first and policies can follow.
https://www.waste360.com/recycling/want-improve-recycling-focus-people-not-policy
VIDEO: Is Recycling Worth It Anymore? People On The Front Lines Say Maybe Not
April 21, 20216:00 AM ET
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/21/987111675/video-is-recycling-worth-it-anymore-people-on-the-front-lines-say-maybe-not
Recycling works, but it's not magic. As America continues to lead the world in per capita waste production, it's becoming more and more clear that everybody — from manufacturers to consumers — "over-believes" in recycling.
This is a story about responsibility and what happens when everyone keeps trying to pass it off to the next person — and what happens, when finally, there is no next person.
This video is based in part on Throughline's podcast episode "The Litter Myth."
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/21/987111675/video-is-recycling-worth-it-anymore-people-on-the-front-lines-say-maybe-not
U.S. charges two men for plotting to blow up Democratic headquarters in California
Sarah N. Lynch
July 16, 2021
4:54 PM BST Last Updated 3 hours ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-charges-two-men-plotting-blow-up-democratic-headquarters-california-2021-07-16/
WASHINGTON, July 16 (Reuters) - Two California men have been indicted on charges they conspired to attack the Democratic Party headquarters in Sacramento, the U.S. Justice Department said on Friday.
According to the unsealed indictment, Ian Benjamin Rogers, 45, of Napa and Jarrod Copeland, 37, of Vallejo started plotting to attack Democratic targets after the 2020 presidential election. They also tried to get support from an anti-government group to further the cause.
The indictment does not name the militia group they contacted.
However, in a different court filing, prosecutors said that Copeland emailed the far-right group Proud Boys in an effort to "recruit others to join the plot," and also was a member of a militia group affiliated with the Three Percenters.
Both the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters have come under government scrutiny recently, after some of their members were indicted in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by former President Donald Trump's supporters.
An attorney for Rogers declined to comment, and an attorney for Copeland could not be immediately reached.
In numerous messages they exchanged, the two discussed blowing up buildings, the Justice Department said.
In one exchange in January 2021, for instance, Rogers told Copeland: "I want to blow up a democrat building bad."
"I agree," Copeland responded. "Plan attack."
Federal law enforcement agents executed a search warrant on Jan. 15 at Rogers' home and seized a stockpile of weapons including 45 to 50 firearms, thousands of rounds of ammunition and five pipe bombs.
Prosecutors say Copeland tried to destroy evidence during the investigation and communicated with the leader of a militia group who told him to switch communication platforms and delete the evidence.
Rogers was arrested on the day the search warrant was executed and remains in the custody of the state. Copeland was arrested on Thursday and will appear for a detention hearing on July 20, the Justice Department said.
In the detention memo, prosecutors said Copeland joined the U.S. military in December 2013, but was arrested for desertion in May 2014. He received an "other than honorable discharge" in lieu of being court-martialed.
The memo says Copeland and Rogers were infuriated after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, and they "understood they would be viewed as domestic terrorists" if they carried out their vision to overturn the U.S. government.
Their plot allegedly began on Nov. 25, 2020, as Rogers told Copeland in an encrypted messaging application: "Ok bro we need to hit the enemy in the mouth."
Initially, it says, they discussed attacking the California governor's mansion, though the plan later evolved and the Democratic headquarters in California became the target. Other possible targets they discussed included the corporate offices for Twitter (TWTR.N) and Facebook (FB.O).
A criminal complaint that charged Rogers in the case also said they discussed attacking Democratic contributor George Soros.
The indictment does not allege that Rogers or Copeland had any involvement in the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol.
The FBI is still searching for an unknown suspect who planted explosive devices near the Democratic and Republican committee headquarters on Jan. 5.
Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; additional reporting by Mark Hosenball; Editing by Dan Grebler
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-charges-two-men-plotting-blow-up-democratic-headquarters-california-2021-07-16/
Leaked Matt Hancock CCTV footage was in ‘public interest’, says Boris Johnson’s office
The investigation into an alleged data breach continues, after two people suspected of recording the film had their homes raided
By Martin Evans, CRIME CORRESPONDENT
16 July 2021 • 7:04pm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/07/16/leaked-matt-hancock-cctv-footage-public-interest-says-boris/
The leaked CCTV footage which exposed Matt Hancock's affair was in the public interest, the Prime Minister's spokesman has said, as an investigation into an alleged data breach continues.
Two people suspected of recording the film without consent had their homes raided on Thursday by officials from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).
Police and Crime Commissioners have also called for the police to launch an urgent investigation amid concern over the security of government buildings.
But the Prime Minister's official spokesman said Boris Johnson believed in the importance of a free press being able to investigate matters that were in the public interest.
The ICO has the power to impose an unlimited fine if someone is convicted of an offence under the Data Protection Act. The raids on people's homes have led to concern that whistleblowers might be put off coming forward to raise matters that are in the public interest.
Asked whether Mr Johnson had any concerns about the fact the whistleblowers were now under investigation, his spokesman said: “It’s obviously the case that the ICO are investigating, and as such it would be inappropriate for me to comment any further while that investigation is ongoing.
“But more broadly, the Prime Minister previously has spoken about his belief of the importance of a free press, which can investigate matters that are in the public interest.”
Asked if the Prime Minister had been informed ahead of the raids, he replied: “It’s an independent investigation, so it is led by them, it’d be inappropriate for me to comment.”
Mr Hancock resigned last month after footage of him kissing his lover, Gina Coladangelo – who was also a paid Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) official – was leaked to The Sun newspaper.
The footage is understood to have been captured by a CCTV camera inside Mr Hancock's office.
The ICO – which investigates data breaches – was called in by Emcor Group, the company that provides the CCTV network at the DHSC, in a bid to identify those responsible.
A spokesperson for Emcor said: “We can confirm that we submitted a breach report, as the Department of Health and Social Care’s data processor, alleging images were recorded from the Department of Health and Social Care CCTV system without consent.”
It is believed the DHSC identified the suspects last month and officials from the ICO have seized a number of electronic devices, including mobile phones and computers, in a bid to establish whether any data breaches had occurred.
Lucy Frazer, the Solicitor General, said it was right “as a general principle” for the ICO to carry out an investigation into an alleged data breach surrounding the revelations.
Asked whether she supported the action, Ms Frazer told LBC Radio: “I do think that where people have breached security rules, it is appropriate to investigate, but that investigation is ongoing.”
Pressed on whether there was public interest in the information being in the public domain, the minister said: “I think those matters, having been brought to the public attention, it was right for Matt Hancock to resign, and that’s why he did resign, absolutely.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/07/16/leaked-matt-hancock-cctv-footage-public-interest-says-boris/
Covid news – live: Boris Johnson’s policy poses ‘danger to the world’, as cases soar past 50,000 a day
Akshita Jain,Chiara Giordano,Matt Mathers and Tim Wyatt 2 hrs ago
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/coronavirus/covid-news-%e2%80%93-live-boris-johnsons-policy-poses-danger-to-the-world-as-cases-soar-past-50000-a-day/ar-AAMdpE8?li=BBoPWjQ
Treating the Unvaccinated
In Utah, and across the U.S., doctors are facing a wave of preventable COVID deaths—and trying to convince the hesitant that “it doesn’t have to be this way.”
By Dhruv Khullar
July 16, 2021
https://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/treating-the-unvaccinated
Near the close of the First World War, Ferdinand Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander, rejected a ceasefire request from the Germans. The two sides were actively negotiating the Armistice; it was clear that the end of the war was imminent. Still, the negotiations continued for several more days, and between Foch’s refusal, on November 8, 1918, and the signing of the Armistice, just after 5 a.m. on November 11th, nearly seven thousand men were killed and thousands more were injured. News that the war would end at 11 a.m. that day was transmitted immediately to both Allied and Central commanders. Still, as Adam Hochschild detailed in a 2018 essay for The New Yorker, the fighting continued: there were more casualties on the final day of the First World War than on D Day, in 1944. The last American killed in combat died at 10:59 a.m.
A century later, we are again losing Americans to a war that could already have ended. Nearly all covid-19 deaths in the United States are now avoidable. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, data suggest that more than ninety-nine per cent of covid deaths in recent months were among Americans who weren’t fully vaccinated—a finding so extraordinary that one might question its accuracy if similar statistics weren’t being reported in study after study after study. Six months after the covid vaccines became available, more than forty per cent of American adults have not been fully vaccinated. The broad numbers don’t tell the full story: vaccine uptake is hugely variable across the U.S., and so more contagious variants are struggling to spread in some communities while inflicting real damage in others. Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to have been immunized; Vermont’s immunization rate is roughly twice that of Mississippi, where fifty-seven per cent of adults have not been fully immunized. Last month, half of American adults said that they lived in a household in which everyone had been at least partially vaccinated, even as a quarter reported that no one in their household had received a single dose. We are, increasingly, living in two Americas.
Early in the pandemic, when I was caring for covid-19 patients during New York City’s apocalyptic surge, I met Scott Aberegg and Tony Edwards, two critical-care physicians from the University of Utah who’d flown in to help. At the time, most of America remained unaffected by the virus, but New York State was recording a tenth of all the new cases in the world; hundreds of doctors, nurses, and respiratory therapists from across the country had volunteered to help a city reeling from thousands of covid deaths each week. In early April, 2020, Aberegg, Edwards, and I stood around a nursing station in a makeshift I.C.U., covered from head to toe in P.P.E., as alarms pinged and monitors flashed all around us. I felt a mix of gratitude and awe. The virus had shut the city down; we didn’t know how to treat it; nurses and doctors had died of it. And these guys had run toward the fire.
Since then, Aberegg and Edwards have cared for I.C.U. patients in each subsequent covid wave: the surge that hit the South last summer, then the viral inferno that engulfed the nation in the winter. Earlier this month, Aberegg sent me an e-mail. “The unvaccinated are dying en masse out west,” he wrote. Aberegg described one man who had “looked pretty good on arrival” but was dead within thirty-six hours; he said he’d seen husbands and wives, both unvaccinated, who were dying of covid-19. In the U.S., a fourth wave is under way. It’s smaller, more circumscribed, and more manageable—and yet it is especially tragic, because it comes at the eleventh hour.
When I caught up with Aberegg by phone, he told me that, last month, the number of covid admissions in his I.C.U. had slowed to a trickle. But, by the end of June, cases had started to rise. He began fielding calls from hospitals in neighboring states asking if they could transfer their critically ill patients to his facility, at the University of Utah. By the Fourth of July, half of his hospital’s medical I.C.U. beds were occupied by covid patients. Most were in their fifties; some were in their thirties, he said. The oldest patient he could remember was in his sixties.
Aberegg told me about a recent case. In late June, he received a call from a small-town hospital in a neighboring state. A man in his late fifties was struggling to breathe, and doctors were debating whether to intubate him. The man’s hospital, like some others in that area, didn’t have full-time critical-care doctors, and so throughout the day Aberegg offered guidance by phone. Eventually, the team of doctors decided to fly the man to the hospital where Aberegg works, in Salt Lake City. He learned that the man’s wife was also ill with covid-19.
In Utah, the man was intubated. “We thought he would just kind of ride it out,” Aberegg said. “That it would be a two-week ordeal, then he’d start to get better. But that night the bottom fell out.” Despite various ventilator maneuvers, the man’s oxygen levels plummeted; his blood pressure cratered and, eventually, his heart stopped. When it was clear that he wouldn’t live, his wife—who was now receiving care at Aberegg’s hospital, as well—was wheeled into the room so that she could hold his hand as he took his final breath.
During our conversation, I asked Aberegg how it felt to care for so many critically ill covid patients, many of them middle-aged or younger, at a time when life-saving vaccines are widely available. “There’s a big internal conflict,” he said. “On the one hand, there’s this sense of ‘Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.’ There’s a natural inclination to think not that they got what they deserved, because no one deserves this, but that they have some culpability because of the choices they made.” He went on, “When you have that intuition, you have to try to push it aside. You have to say, That’s a moral judgment which is outside my role as a doctor. And because it’s a pejorative moral judgment, I need to do everything I can to fight against it. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t remain somewhere in the recesses of my mind. This sense of, Boy, it doesn’t have to be this way.”
Aberegg shies away from raising the topic of vaccination with critically ill patients and their families. “It’s a very uncomfortable conversation,” he said. “You don’t want to point fingers or assign blame. Because people are so sick, so many of our conversations in the I.C.U. are already fraught and emotional and challenging. The last thing I want is to invite more of that. It’s become almost a third rail.” Aberegg’s hospital requires visitors to show proof of prior coronavirus infection or vaccination before they enter the I.C.U. Because of this policy, he said, “We end up doing a lot of telephone updates.”
Aberegg, who’s originally from northeastern Ohio, sees vaccine hesitancy not just in his work but in his personal life. His parents, who are politically conservative, got immunized only because he has been an I.C.U. physician fighting the coronavirus for the better part of a year and a half. Many of their friends and acquaintances remain unvaccinated. He told me about the father of a good friend who was recently injured in an occupational accident that left him with multiple broken bones. Even as a bedbound septuagenarian with a neck brace, he refuses to get vaccinated. He described another older acquaintance who told him, “We’re not drinking that Kool-Aid.”
“I said, ‘The unvaccinated are dropping like flies around here!’ ” Aberegg recalled. “But they just blow me off. People want to make their own decisions, even if they’re poor ones. They don’t want to be forced to do anything. It’s part of their identity. But it does make you wonder how informed their choices are. It’s like riding a motorcycle without a helmet. The wakeup call always comes too late.”
Tony Edwards, who trained under Aberegg, now works at a community hospital about twenty miles southwest of the University of Utah, on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. When I spoke with him in early July, he, too, told me that coronavirus cases had increased markedly at his hospital. (Utah currently has the nation’s sixth-worst coronavirus outbreak.) In early June, there were days when not a single medical I.C.U. room at Edwards’s hospital housed a covid patient; now they account for about a third of the critically ill patients in his I.C.U. The most striking feature of this wave is that “they’re all young,” Edwards said. “I can’t remember treating a single older covid patient in the past couple months. It feels like they either got it, and they’re gone, or they got vaccinated, and they’re safe.”
Like Aberegg, Edwards told me that it’s not unusual for families to be admitted to an I.C.U. together; when we spoke, he was caring for two couples in their forties. Unlike Aberegg, however, he is very direct when speaking with patients’ families about getting vaccinated. “The first few times unvaccinated patients came in, I wouldn’t bring it up—it felt too raw,” Edwards said. “But I’ve gotten so frustrated that I now have no problem being straight with them. It’s the most aggressive I’ve been with any medical recommendation in my career.” In Edwards’s experience, families almost always say that they’ll get immunized as soon as possible. “Everyone is, like, Yeah, O.K., you’re right, head nod, head nod,” he said. “Then I follow up in a few days and they just kind of look at me sheepishly.” Recently, the wife of a critically ill patient told him that she would get vaccinated that day. She didn’t, and, not long after, she became a patient along with her husband. “I walk in one morning and I’m, like, Oh, there’s two patients with the same last name—what’s up with that?” he said.
With the advent and availability of vaccines, Edwards assumed that he wouldn’t be gearing up for another coronavirus wave. But four in ten adults in Utah are not fully vaccinated. “I try not to feel angry, but it’s hard,” he said. “I try to be fair. I know I’m a well-off white doctor who understands science and medicine. The vaccine came to my place of work and I just rolled up my sleeve. I get that it’s harder for other people. But at this point it’s, like, C’mon, man, this is the most important thing you can do for your health. I’m frustrated, and I don’t know what to do to make myself un-frustrated.”
I’ve followed a similar path in my own thinking. Before the coronavirus pandemic, I assumed that the seeds of vaccine hesitancy—directed, usually, toward shots for diseases like measles—lay in the success of vaccination; if someone had never confronted the devastating paralysis of polio, or the rib-fracturing cough of pertussis, it might be easy for them to question the efficacy or safety of vaccines. The risks of illness might seem distant and amorphous, while the risks of vaccination—however spurious—could feel vivid and tangible. As the coronavirus began to spread, I figured that it would change that equation. Surely, faced with a lethal, contagious, economy-destroying pathogen that had upended every aspect of society, even ardent vaccine skeptics would get on board.
That prediction, it turns out, was incorrect. The coronavirus has unleashed unprecedented havoc, killing more than six hundred thousand Americans and potentially leaving millions more with lingering symptoms; covid vaccines are safe, effective, free, and accessible. Still, millions of Americans remain susceptible to death and disease by choice. Having developed vaccines of astonishing efficacy, we have failed to convince huge segments of the population that those vaccines are worth taking. Scientific success has foundered on the rocks of tribalist mistrust.
What would it take to reach something closer to full vaccination? There are four main levers available to policymakers. Education is the most obvious one: after a year of vaccine talk, it may feel like there’s nothing left to say, but many people still have questions about whether, where, and when they can get vaccinated; recent polling suggests that a majority of Americans—including four in ten who’ve been immunized—either believe or are unsure about at least one vaccine myth. At the same time, more than eighty per cent of unvaccinated individuals say that they would turn to a doctor when deciding whether to get a shot. So it is not too late for conversation to change minds.
Incentives are another lever: states are experimenting with everything from free beer and lottery tickets to college scholarships and cash payments. (Evidence on the effect of these initiatives is mixed, but some research suggests that they may temporarily boost uptake.) Full F.D.A. approval is another: nearly a third of those who remain on the fence say that such an approval would make them more likely to get vaccinated. (Currently, even though hundreds of millions of doses have been administered, covid shots are given under an Emergency Use Authorization; Pfizer and Moderna recently applied for approval, but it’s unclear how soon they might receive it.) Finally, there are mandates. Increasingly, vaccination is a requirement for living on a college campus, working in an office, flying internationally, attending a concert. (While the public is evenly divided on vaccine passports, many Republican governors have issued orders or signed laws prohibiting or constraining their use; the Biden Administration has said that it will not introduce a national vaccine mandate or registry, but, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, businesses can require on-site employees to get immunized.) It’s possible that all of these factors—combined, perhaps, with fear of the Delta variant—could push some holdouts over the line.
Iasked Edwards what, if anything, he thought might tip the scales for people unsure about the covid vaccines. He was at a loss, but connected me with two women he works with at one of his hospital’s clinics, who, despite helping people suffering from the aftereffects of covid-19, have elected not to get vaccinated. (The medical center where they work strongly encourages staff and patients to get immunized.)
Ashlianne Carroll worked in a car dealership before starting as the clinic’s receptionist, in December of 2019. She’s pregnant with twins, due in January, and nearly everyone in her family—her father, her three brothers, their wives and children—has been immunized. Carroll herself gets the flu vaccine every year, but “that’s been around forever,” she told me. “We know the long-term effects. I don’t trust the covid vaccine yet. There hasn’t been enough testing. All the stuff you hear about side effects makes it not worth it to me.” Carroll said that she’d read reports online of the vaccines’ being linked to stillbirths. “Even if there’s a small chance, why risk it?” she said. To her, contracting the coronavirus seems like the less ominous possibility. Her husband, his parents, and his siblings all got covid last year; none were hospitalized. “I feel like I’m in good enough health that it won’t be an issue for me even if I do get it,” she said.
Nicole Howard, who works closely with Edwards as a medical assistant, has similar views. Howard had a mild case of covid in January—low-grade fever, chest congestion, body aches. But she told me that this prior infection, and the immunity it confers, has no bearing on her decision not to get immunized. (The C.D.C. recommends that even people who’ve had covid be vaccinated, to better prepare their immune systems to fight reinfection.) “I hear about these variants, and I do wonder if it’s possible I could get it again,” she said. “But I’m thirty-one. I’m healthy. I don’t have any underlying medical conditions.” In her clinic, Howard regularly encounters people suffering from the short- and long-term consequences of covid-19. I asked her how it felt knowing that some of the coronavirus patients she cares for are younger than she is. “Most are older,” she said. “I’m not afraid of covid. I won’t live my life in fear.”
Howard emphasized that she takes other precautions against the coronavirus: she wears a mask in public, maintains physical distance, and washes her hands frequently. But, when it comes to covid vaccines, at least for the time being, she’s made her decision. “You can put me in a lottery, you can give me free Starbucks for a year, but it’s not going to change my mind,” she said. “Because it’s not about that for me. It’s about what the vaccine could do to me in the future. My personal feeling is that the covid vaccines got pushed out too fast. They weren’t studied for long enough. We don’t know what’s going to happen five years down the road. You see these horror stories. Blood clots, stroke, myocarditis. I’m in my childbearing years. Will it cause fertility issues? Will it negatively impact my unborn child?” (The covid vaccines do not alter your DNA, cause infertility, or affect fetal development; the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been linked to extremely rare instances of dangerous blood clots, and the mRNA vaccines to a marginally higher risk of myocarditis, especially in young men—but, in both cases, the benefits of vaccination far outweigh the risks, and over all the covid vaccines are among the most intensely monitored and effective in history.) Howard said it’s possible that she’ll reconsider “in a year or two,” if “there’s been more testing and more long-term follow-up,” and if she doesn’t see any issues. What of the possibility of infection—from Delta or another, even more infectious variant—between now and then? “Well,” she said. “I guess that’s just a risk I’m willing to take.”
In the days since speaking with Carroll and Howard, I’ve considered the reasons for the gap between my views and theirs. It’s not that they think covid-19 is a hoax; they have witnessed firsthand the consequences of infection, just as I have. It’s not that they belong to social networks that are deeply skeptical of vaccines; on the contrary, they work in a medical setting, and most of their friends and family members have been immunized. Still, having weighed the strength of the vaccine science, the likelihood of low-probability events, and the unknowns that remain, they have arrived at conclusions very different from mine.
I used to think that fear could push many hesitant people to get vaccinated—that watching covid put a friend on a ventilator would make one rush to get a shot. But fear seems to work in unpredictable ways. It’s possible to shift one’s gaze away from the gravely ill and onto those who contracted the virus but escaped unscathed. It’s possible to be more afraid of the vaccine than of the virus. Perhaps the psychology of risk plays a role: for the willfully unvaccinated, it may be easier to accept the preëxisting risk of contracting covid than to embrace the incredibly small but unfamiliar risks posed by the vaccines. Many people seem to believe either that they won’t contract the virus or that their illness won’t be that bad—a natural and attractive view for younger Americans, but a risky one. Nearly ninety per cent of Americans over the age of sixty-five—people of all races, ethnicities, income brackets, and political persuasions—have received at least one dose of a covid vaccine. Those facing the greatest risk seem to have an easier time taking an accurate measure of it.
But smaller risks can still be considerable—and, with more infectious variants on the rise, the virus is growing more dangerous to those who remain susceptible. In states where vaccine hesitancy is high, its consequences are already stark. In recent weeks, some of the country’s low-vaccination areas have begun driving a national doubling of daily coronavirus cases, and experiencing a spike in hospitalizations and deaths.
Death is a loss in all its forms. Still, some ends are more comprehensible than others. We might take as inevitable the loss of life in the pitch of war, but casualties suffered in the battle’s final moments, when peace is so clearly at hand, carry with them an added senselessness. Today’s coronavirus deaths are senseless. We’ve been offered a ceasefire. It’s past time we take it.
https://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/treating-the-unvaccinated
Seth Abramson @SethAbramson If you're refusing to get vaccinated against a deadly virus that's now killed almost a million people in the United States, you should
(1) write up your will immediately,
(2) write a preemptive apology to those you will endanger/kill with your recklessness,
(3) sign DNR paperwork
3:10 PM · Jul 16, 2021·Twitter for Android
THREAD
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1416037500649418756
Seth Abramson @SethAbramson If you're refusing to get vaccinated against a deadly virus that's now killed almost a million people in the United States, you should (1) write up your will immediately, (2) write a preemptive apology to those you will endanger/kill with your recklessness, (3) sign DNR paperwork
3:10 PM · Jul 16, 2021·Twitter for Android
THREAD
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1416037500649418756
Republicans are rewriting the past so they can seize power in the future
Opinion by Max Boot Columnist
July 15, 2021|Updated yesterday at 2:03 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/15/republicans-are-rewriting-past-so-they-can-seize-power-future/
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” — George Orwell
All authoritarian movements know the power of historical myths. That’s why they go to such great lengths to rewrite the past to justify their rule — and the atrocities they carry out against the minorities that they scapegoat for their country’s ills. The Republican Party, as it becomes increasingly anti-democratic, is no different. It is busy reshaping both the distant past and the more recent past to its liking.
Because the GOP is the White people’s party (former president Donald Trump won 58 percent of White voters in 2020, according to exit polls), it seeks to deny that the United States has a history of racism to atone for. It wants White people to feel good about themselves — and to resist suggestions that they should share political or economic power with minorities. This goes beyond attacks on “critical race theory” or defenses of Confederate monuments — it’s a rejection of any nuanced understanding of U.S. history that concedes that the good was mixed with the bad.
Hence former secretary of state Mike Pompeo tweets: “If we teach that the founding of the United States of America was somehow flawed. It was corrupt. It was racist. That’s really dangerous. It strikes at the very foundations of our country.” In a similar vein, former Trump White House spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany told Fox News: “We know most of our forefathers, all of our main Founding Fathers, were against slavery, recognized the evils of it.”
This is some serious historical revisionism, given that a reported 41 of 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence owned enslaved people. True, many were ambivalent enslavers, but they were enslavers nevertheless. This is America’s original sin, and it can’t be erased. That doesn’t mean America is irredeemably evil; the Constitution was eventually amended to abolish slavery. But it does mean that America has some serious demons to grapple with — and they were not vanquished in either 1865 or 1965. By airing White grievances, the GOP simply highlights the continuing impact of racism in the United States.
As the country becomes more multicultural and diverse, Republicans are increasingly willing to resort to undemocratic, even violent, means to defend conservative, White hegemony. This explains their efforts to rewrite before our eyes the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.
Initially Republicans were not sure what to make of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol: Was it a Good Thing carried out by stouthearted Trumpkins or a Bad Thing carried out by evil antifa provocateurs? A “normal tourist visit” or a dastardly plot by “FBI operatives”? The only thing Republicans could agree on is that Trump wasn’t to blame. In a recent Morning Consult poll, 52 percent of Republicans said Democrats in Congress were primarily responsible compared with only 30 percent who said Trump was responsible.
Now Trump has settled the debate by embracing the rioters. In an interview last Sunday with uber-fan Maria Bartiromo of Fox “News,” Trump said there was a “lovefest between the police, the Capitol Police, and the people that walked down to the Capitol.” (The Capitol Police union says 140 officers were injured during this love-in.) He praised the “tremendous people” who walked through doors that “were open.” (The doors were opened by rioters who had smashed windows to get inside.) He demanded that the authorities “release the people that are incarcerated,” because they supposedly had “no guns.” (One rioter was charged with a firearms offense and many others were armed with weapons ranging from baseball bats to bear spray.)
Most alarming of all, Trump deified Ashli Babbitt — the Air Force veteran and QAnon follower who was shot to death by a police officer while attempting to break through a barricaded door into the House Speaker’s Lobby — as a Trumpist martyr. He called her “an innocent, wonderful, incredible woman” and suggested there was some deep, dark conspiracy surrounding her death. “Who shot Ashli Babbitt?” he demanded to know. “Why are they keeping that secret? ... People want to know, and why.” If Trump wants to know who’s responsible for her death, he should look in the mirror.
There is nothing inherently wrong with a political movement claiming a martyr. Medgar Evers was a martyr of the civil rights movement, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) eulogized a Capitol Police officer killed on April 2 as a “martyr for democracy.” What’s concerning and telling is that Trump has claimed as a martyr a woman who believed in the “big lie” and died trying to overturn a democratic election by force.
There is a chilling reason why Trump and his followers are whitewashing a domestic terrorist — and the enslavers and segregationists of the distant past. It is the same reason all authoritarian movements rewrite history: They are creating myths to justify their seizure of power. Don’t be surprised if the next attack on our democracy — and there will be a next time — is accompanied by a stirring rendition of the (as yet unwritten) “Ballad of Ashli Babbitt.”
Opinion by Max Boot
Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.” Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/15/republicans-are-rewriting-past-so-they-can-seize-power-future/
Scott MacFarlane @MacFarlaneNews The video in this newly released Justice Dept court exhibit in US Capitol Insurrection case shows a perspective of the frontlines ... and the brutal assault on police
But I can't get past the woman heard screaming "Pull them out!"
VIDEO
The video in this newly released Justice Dept court exhibit in US Capitol Insurrection case shows a perspective of the frontlines ... and the brutal assault on police
— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) July 15, 2021
But I can't get past the woman heard screaming "Pull them out!" pic.twitter.com/aCq8iaz7XP
The video in this newly released Justice Dept court exhibit in US Capitol Insurrection case shows a perspective of the frontlines ... and the brutal assault on police
— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) July 15, 2021
But I can't get past the woman heard screaming "Pull them out!" pic.twitter.com/aCq8iaz7XP
Scott MacFarlane @MacFarlaneNews The video in this newly released Justice Dept court exhibit in US Capitol Insurrection case shows a perspective of the frontlines ... and the brutal assault on police
But I can't get past the woman heard screaming "Pull them out!"
VIDEO
The video in this newly released Justice Dept court exhibit in US Capitol Insurrection case shows a perspective of the frontlines ... and the brutal assault on police
— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) July 15, 2021
But I can't get past the woman heard screaming "Pull them out!" pic.twitter.com/aCq8iaz7XP
The video in this newly released Justice Dept court exhibit in US Capitol Insurrection case shows a perspective of the frontlines ... and the brutal assault on police
— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) July 15, 2021
But I can't get past the woman heard screaming "Pull them out!" pic.twitter.com/aCq8iaz7XP
EFRA LAUNCHES INQUIRY INTO GOVERNMENT’S HANDLING OF PLASTIC WASTE
By Kai Malloy | 13 July 2021
https://resource.co/article/efra-launches-inquiry-government-s-handling-plastic-waste
The House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (EFRA) Committee has announced a new inquiry into the Government’s tackling of the plastic waste problem.
It will examine the management of plastic waste, scrutinising how the UK Government intends to tackle its plastics problem, and whether its targets go far enough.
The Committee is appointed by the House of Commons in order to examine the expenditure, administration and policy of the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
In terms of plastic targets, the Government aims to work towards all plastic packaging placed on the market being recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025.
By 2042, the Government has set a target of eliminating all 'avoidable' plastic waste, with an ‘ambition’ of zero avoidable waste by 2050 – in pursuit of this goal, plastic packaging taxes and deposit return schemes will be implemented.
It is estimated that five million tonnes of plastic are used in the UK every year, of which almost half is packaging.
Despite high-profile campaigns to encourage recycling and reduce plastic use, just 32 per cent of all plastic is currently recycled.
Concerns have also been raised regarding the volume of plastic packaging waste that is exported to other countries, where some has been found to end up being dumped or burnt rather than recycled.
The cross-party Committee will now be exploring the measures announced by the Government to achieve both its 2042 goal, and its shorter-term 2025 ambition.
MPs will also question how alternatives to plastic can be found and supported, and what more can be done to ensure that plastic waste is not sent abroad simply to be dumped.
The inquiry’s questions:
The Committee is seeking answers to the following questions, with an initial deadline of 10th September:
* What measures should the UK Government take to reduce the production and disposal of single-use plastics in England?
* Are the measures announced so far, including a ban on certain single-use plastics and a plastic packaging tax, sufficient?
* How should alternatives to plastic consumption be identified and supported, without resorting to more environmentally damaging options?
* Is the UK Government’s target of eliminating avoidable plastic waste by 2042 ambitious enough?
* Will the UK Government be able to achieve its shorter-term ambition of working towards all plastic packaging placed on the market being recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025?
* Does the UK Government need to do more to ensure that plastic waste is not exported and then managed unsustainably? If so, what steps should it take?
Neil Parish MP, Chair of the EFRA Committee, commented: "We have a plastics problem.”
“Over the past 18 months, even the most environmentally conscious of us have had to resort to single-use plastics in our efforts to control the spread of covid-19.”
“But the tide must turn on plastic use, and fast.”
"The Government has announced many new measures to combat our reliance on disposable packaging and products.”
“It is essential that these measures go far- and fast- enough, and that we do not just end up exporting our problem overseas."
https://resource.co/article/efra-launches-inquiry-government-s-handling-plastic-waste
Plastic waste
Inquiry
Despite growing awareness of the effects of plastic pollution, a large proportion of plastic waste is still not recycled, and the UK currently exports large quantities of plastic packaging overseas, where it may end up being managed unsustainably.
The UK Government has set a target of eliminating all 'avoidable' plastic waste by 2042, with a shorter-term ambition to “work towards” only recyclable, reusable or compostable plastic packaging being placed on the market by 2025. Measures they have announced include a plastic packaging tax, a deposit return scheme, and banning some single-use plastics, like straws.
This inquiry scrutinises the level of the Government’s ambition, whether current measures on plastic waste go far enough, and how alternatives to plastic consumption can be identified and supported.
This inquiry is currently accepting evidence
The committee wants to hear your views. We welcome submissions from anyone with answers to the questions in the call for evidence. You can submit evidence until Thursday 9 September 2021.
https://committees.parliament.uk/work/1391/plastic-waste/
Explosive Interview Directly Implicates Trump in Tax Scheme
SMOKING GUN
As investigators look into a scheme at the Trump Organization to avoid paying taxes on employee benefits, one witness has set the scene to show Trump was involved.
Jose Pagliery Political Investigations Reporter Daily Beast
Updated Jul. 16, 2021 5:26AM ET Published Jul. 16, 2021 4:55AM ET
https://www.thedailybeast.com/explosive-interview-directly-implicates-donald-trump-in-tax-scheme?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
A witness in the New York investigation against the Trump Organization has told prosecutors that Donald Trump personally guaranteed he would cover school costs for the family members of two employees in lieu of a raise—directly implicating the former president in an ongoing criminal tax fraud case.
The explosive claims come from Jennifer Weisselberg, the ex-wife of a longtime company employee, during a teleconference call with investigators on Friday, June 25, according to two sources who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity.
On that afternoon's Zoom call, those sources said, investigators with the Manhattan district attorney and New York state attorney general asked Jennifer Weisselberg whether Trump himself was involved in the company’s alleged tax-dodging scheme of making corporate gifts instead of increasing salary that would be taxed.
He was, she answered.
Weisselberg then provided key details for investigators. In January 2012, inside Trump’s office at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, Jennifer Weisselberg watched as Trump discussed compensation with her husband and her father-in-law, both company employees. Her husband wouldn’t be getting a raise, but their children would get their tuition paid for at a top-rated private academy instead.
Weisselberg allegedly relayed to prosecutors that Trump turned to her and said: "Don’t worry, I’ve got it covered.”
Prosecutors were astonished, according to one source.
The Daily Beast received descriptions of the call from two people familiar with the details of the call.
According to two sources, among the prosecutors on the call were Carey Dunne, the Manhattan DA’s general counsel; Mark F. Pomerantz, a white collar crime specialist brought on for this investigation; and Gary Fishman, an assistant attorney general deputized to work on this joint investigation.
If true, Jennifer Weisselberg’s claims would directly tie Trump to what a New York criminal indictment described as a corporate scheme to pay executives “in a matter that was ‘off the books.’”
“The scheme allowed the Trump Organization to evade the payment of payroll taxes that [it] was required to pay,” an indictment for the Trump Organization claims. On the flip side, it also alleges that executives avoided having to pay income taxes on a huge chunk of their pay.
Neither the Manhattan DA nor the state AG would comment on this story. Jennifer Weisselberg declined as well.
The indictment, filed the very next week on June 30, does not criminally charge Trump as an individual, but it does describe how he signed checks that paid for the Weisselberg children to attend an expensive private school in Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
While longtime chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg could be crucial to a criminal case against Trump, it’s Jennifer Weisselberg—his former daughter-in-law—who’s thus far been more helpful.
Prosecutors have already used documents in Jennifer Weisselberg’s divorce case to explore how Trump paid more than $50,000 a year, starting in 2012, for the kids to attend the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School.
Her ex-husband, Barry Weisselberg, the longtime manager of the Wollman ice rink, also provided potentially damning testimony during his divorce case in 2018. He described how his salary remained flat for years—and how his father, the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, made sure the cost of their luxurious lifestyle was covered. Among the perks: a swanky apartment in the heart of the city facing the south end of Central Park, and later, a unit in the upscale Upper East Side. In both instances, the true value of the rent was substantially higher than what he could afford on his official salary.
That testimony formed some of the basis for last month’s indictment of his father, Allen Weisselberg. He and the company were charged with criminal tax fraud, falsifying business records, and scheming to defraud the government.
The CFO surrendered to law enforcement on July 1 and was arraigned in Manhattan criminal court, where he pleaded not guilty. Allen Weisselberg, who has been with the Trump Organization for decades, is accused of hiding $1.76 million of “indirect employee compensation” he got over a 12-year period that ended in 2017.
The Trump Organization’s lawyer, Alan Futerfas, has lambasted the investigation as an illegitimate move by a local prosecutor against a former president. Futerfas declined to comment on this story.
The offices of Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. and New York Attorney General Letitia James have indicated that the investigation is ongoing. Prosecutors have yet to file charges against others allegedly involved in the scheme, but judging by the indictment, more charges could be on the way.
For instance, the indictment identifies an “unindicted co-conspirator #1,” who remains unnamed but is described as the company’s “agent” and is accused of underreporting the CFO’s taxable income in 2009.
—with additional reporting by Asawin Suebsaeng
https://www.thedailybeast.com/explosive-interview-directly-implicates-donald-trump-in-tax-scheme?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
Trump opines on coup while rejecting fears about his actions
By JILL COLVIN
yesterday
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-government-and-politics-arts-and-entertainment-election-2020-6313a41893e409c00eb621d6f7ab9d06
WASHINGTON (AP) — Former President Donald Trump insisted Thursday that he wouldn’t have used the military to illegally seize control of the government after his election loss. But he suggested that if he had tried to carry out a coup, it wouldn’t have been with his top military adviser.
In a lengthy statement, Trump responded to revelations in a new book detailing fears from Gen. Mark Milley that the outgoing president would stage a coup during his final weeks in office. Trump said he’s “not into coups” and “never threatened, or spoke about, to anyone, a coup of our Government.” At the same time, Trump said that “if I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is” Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The mere mention of a coup was a stunning remark from a former president, especially one who left office under the cloud of a violent insurrection he helped incite at the U.S. Capitol in January in an effort to impede the peaceful transfer of power to Democrat Joe Biden. Since then, the FBI has warned of a rapidly growing threat of homegrown violent extremism.
Despite such concerns, Trump is maintaining his grip on the Republican Party. He was meeting on Thursday with House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy and has stepped up his public schedule, holding a series of rallies for his supporters across the country in which he continues to spread the lie that last year’s election was stolen from him.
His comment about a coup was in response to new reporting from “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year” by Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. The book reports that Milley was shaken by Trump’s refusal to concede in the weeks after the election.
According to early excerpts published by CNN and the Post on Wednesday ahead of its release, Milley was so concerned that Trump or his allies might try to use the military to remain in power that he and other top officials strategized about how they might block him — even hatching a plan to resign, one by one.
Milley also reportedly compared Trump’s rhetoric to Adolf Hitler’s during his rise to power.
“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley reportedly told aides. “The gospel of the Führer.”
Milley’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But Milley has previously spoken out against drawing the military into election politics, especially after coming under fire for joining Trump on a walk through Lafayette Square for a photo op at a church shortly after the square had been violently cleared of protesters.
Trump, in the statement, mocked Milley’s response to that moment, saying it helped him realize that his top military adviser was “certainly not the type of person I would be talking ‘coup’ with.”
The book is one of a long list being released in the coming weeks examining the chaotic final days of the Trump administration, the Jan. 6 insurrection and the outgoing president’s refusal to accept the election’s outcome. Trump sat for hours of interviews with many of the authors, but has issued a flurry of statements in recent days disputing their reporting and criticizing former staff for participating.
There is no evidence that supports Trump’s claims that the election was somehow “stolen” from him. State election officials, Trump’s own attorney general and numerous judges, including many appointed by Trump, have rejected allegations of massive fraud. Trump’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”
Trump remains a dominant force in Republican politics, as demonstrated by McCarthy’s visit on Thursday to the former president’s summer home in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Trump and McCarthy were expected to spend their meeting discussing upcoming special elections, Republicans’ record fundraising hauls and Democrats they see as vulnerable in the 2022 midterm elections, according to a person familiar with the agenda who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe a private meeting. McCarthy previously met with Trump in January at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
Meanwhile, Republicans who are eyeing White House bids of their own aren’t crossing Trump, who remains popular with many GOP voters.
GOP Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a potential 2024 presidential contender, said “no comment,” when asked if he thought Trump’s statement was appropriate for a former president. A member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and an Army veteran of two combat tours in Iraq, Cotton declined to comment again when asked if he wanted to criticize Trump’s remark.
“I think he has the right to say what he wants to say,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, when asked if he was comfortable with a former president even hypothetically entertaining the idea of a coup.
“You know, Donald Trump speaks for himself and he always has,” said Cruz, another potential White House candidate in 2024.
___
Associated Press writers Robert Burns and Alan Fram contributed to this report.
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-government-and-politics-arts-and-entertainment-election-2020-6313a41893e409c00eb621d6f7ab9d06