Laurence Tribe @tribelaw How low can a former law professor sink? To call a bogus lawsuit based on a fake version of the First Amendment an important case, much less “the most important” of the century? Has he no shame?


Acyn @Acyn · Jul 8

Dershowitz: This is the most important First Amendment case of the 21st century

VIDEO

Dershowitz: This is the most important First Amendment case of the 21st century pic.twitter.com/7FNIoo1s1f

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 8, 2021

How low can a former law professor sink? To call a bogus lawsuit based on a fake version of the First Amendment an important case, much less “the most important” of the century? Has he no shame? https://t.co/BJlQh3Mnkt

— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) July 8, 2021

African American spelling bee champ makes history with flair

By BEN NUCKOLS
27 minutes ago
https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-sports-education-spelling-bees-national-spelling-bee-d9d5b38ed4aa1dad78540affc3886e59

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. (AP) — Zaila Avant-garde understood the significance of what she was doing as she stood on the Scripps National Spelling Bee stage, peppering pronouncer Jacques Bailly with questions about Greek and Latin roots.

Zaila knew she would be the first African American winner of the bee. She knew Black kids around the country were watching Thursday night’s ESPN2 telecast, waiting to be inspired and hoping to follow in the footsteps of someone who looked like them. She even thought of MacNolia Cox, who in 1936 became the first Black finalist at the bee and wasn’t allowed to stay in the same hotel as the rest of the spellers.

But she never let the moment become too big for her, and when she heard what turned out to be her winning word — “Murraya,” a genus of tropical Asiatic and Australian trees — she beamed with confidence. It was over.

Declared the champion, Zaila jumped and twirled with joy, only flinching in surprise when confetti was shot onto the stage.

“I was pretty relaxed on the subject of Murraya and pretty much any other word I got,” Zaila said.

The only previous Black champion was also the only international winner: Jody-Anne Maxwell of Jamaica in 1998. The bee, however, has still been a showcase for spellers of color over the past two decades, with kids of South Asian descent dominating the competition. Zaila’s win breaks a streak of at least one Indian-American champion every year since 2008.

Zaila has other priorities, which perhaps explains how she came to dominate this year’s bee. The 14-year-old from Harvey, Louisiana, is a basketball prodigy who owns three Guinness world records for dribbling multiple balls simultaneously and hopes to one day play in the WNBA or even coach in the NBA. She described spelling as a side hobby, even though she routinely practiced for seven hours a day.

“I kind of thought I would never be into spelling again, but I’m also happy that I’m going to make a clean break from it,” Zaila said. “I can go out, like my Guinness world records, just leave it right there, and walk off.”

Many of top Scripps spellers start competing as young as kindergarten. Zaila only started a few years ago, after her father, Jawara Spacetime, watched the bee on TV and realized his daughter’s affinity for doing complicated math in her head could translate well to spelling. She progressed quickly enough to make it to nationals in 2019 but bowed out in the preliminary rounds.

That’s when she started to take it more seriously and began working with a private coach, Cole Shafer-Ray, a 20-year-old Yale student and the 2015 Scripps runner-up.

“Usually to be as good as Zaila, you have to be well-connected in the spelling community. You have to have been doing it for many years,” Shafer-Ray said. “It was like a mystery, like, ‘Is this person even real?’”

Shafer-Ray quickly realized his pupil had extraordinary gifts.

“She really just had a much different approach than any speller I’ve ever seen. She basically knew the definition of every word that we did, like pretty much verbatim,” he said. “She knew, not just the word but the story behind the word, why every letter had to be that letter and couldn’t be anything else.”

Sometimes she knew more than she let on. Part of her strategy, she said, was to ask about roots that weren’t part of the word she was given, just to eliminate them from consideration.

Only one word gave her trouble: “nepeta,” a genus of mints, and she jumped even higher when she got that one right than she did when she took the trophy.

“I’ve always struggled with that word. I’ve heard it a lot of times. I don’t know, there’s just some words, for a speller, I just get them and I can’t get them right,” she said. “I even knew it was a genus of plants. I know what you are and I can’t get you.”

Zaila — her dad gave her the last name Avant-garde in tribute to jazz musician John Coltrane — is a singular champion of a most unusual bee, the first in more than 25 months. Last year’s bee was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic, and this one was thoroughly modified to minimize risk to kids and their families.

Most of the bee was held virtually, and only the 11 finalists got to compete in person, in a small portion of a cavernous arena at the ESPN Wide World of Sports complex in Florida that also hosted the NBA playoff bubble last year. The in-person crowd was limited to spellers’ immediate family, Scripps staff, selected media — and first lady Jill Biden, who spoke to the spellers and stayed to watch.

Sometimes it was so quiet in the arena that the only sound was the unamplified voice of ESPN host Kevin Negandhi as he spoke into a TV microphone.

The format of the bee, too, underwent an overhaul after the 2019 competition ended in an eight-way tie. Scripps’ word list was no match for the top spellers that year, but this year, five of the 11 finalists were eliminated in the first onstage round. Then came the new wrinkle of this year’s bee: multiple-choice vocabulary questions. All six remaining spellers got those right.

Zaila won efficiently enough — the bee was over in less than two hours — that another innovation, a lightning-round tiebreaker, wasn’t necessary.

She will take home more than $50,000 in cash and prizes. The runner-up was Chaitra Thummala, a 12-year-old from Frisco, Texas, and another student of Shafer-Ray. She has two years of eligibility remaining and instantly becomes one of next year’s favorites. Bhavana Madini, a 13-year-old from Plainview, New York, finished third and also could be back.

“Zaila deserved it. She’s always been better than me,” Chaitra said. “I could review a lot more words. I could get a stronger work ethic.”

___

Follow Ben Nuckols on Twitter at https://twitter.com/APBenNuckols

https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-sports-education-spelling-bees-national-spelling-bee-d9d5b38ed4aa1dad78540affc3886e59

Pfizer to seek OK for 3rd vaccine dose; shots still protect

By LAURAN NEERGAARD
today
https://apnews.com/article/europe-coronavirus-pandemic-science-health-34c3f2536747a7c08980d7359a8de70c

Pfizer is about to seek U.S. authorization for a third dose of its COVID-19 vaccine, saying Thursday that another shot within 12 months could dramatically boost immunity and maybe help ward off the latest worrisome coronavirus mutant.

Research from multiple countries shows the Pfizer shot and other widely used COVID-19 vaccines offer strong protection against the highly contagious delta variant, which is spreading rapidly around the world and now accounts for most new U.S. infections.

Two doses of most vaccines are critical to develop high levels of virus-fighting antibodies against all versions of the coronavirus, not just the delta variant -- and most of the world still is desperate to get those initial protective doses as the pandemic continues to rage.

But antibodies naturally wane over time, so studies also are underway to tell if and when boosters might be needed.

On Thursday, Pfizer’s Dr. Mikael Dolsten told The Associated Press that early data from the company’s booster study suggests people’s antibody levels jump five- to 10-fold after a third dose, compared to their second dose months earlier.

In August, Pfizer plans to ask the Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization of a third dose, he said.

Why might that matter for fighting the delta variant? Dolsten pointed to data from Britain and Israel showing the Pfizer vaccine “neutralizes the delta variant very well.” The assumption, he said, is that when antibodies drop low enough, the delta virus eventually could cause a mild infection before the immune system kicks back in.

But FDA authorization would be just a first step -- it wouldn’t automatically mean Americans get offered boosters, cautioned Dr. William Schaffner, a vaccine expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Public health authorities would have to decide if they’re really needed, especially since millions of people have no protection.

“The vaccines were designed to keep us out of the hospital” and continue to do so despite the more contagious delta variant, he said. Giving another dose would be “a huge effort while we are at the moment striving to get people the first dose.”

Hours after Pfizer’s announcement, U.S. health officials issued a statement saying fully vaccinated Americans don’t need a booster yet.

U.S. health agencies “are engaged in a science-based, rigorous process to consider whether or when a booster might be necessary,” the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a joint statement. That work will include data from the drug companies, “but does not rely on those data exclusively,” and any decision on booster shots would happen only when “the science demonstrates that they are needed,” the agencies said.

Currently only about 48% of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated — and some parts of the country have far lower immunization rates, places where the delta variant is surging. On Thursday, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, said that’s leading to “two truths” — highly immunized swaths of America are getting back to normal while hospitalizations are rising in other places.

“This rapid rise is troubling,” she said: A few weeks ago the delta variant accounted for just over a quarter of new U.S. cases, but it now accounts for just over 50% — and in some places, such as parts of the Midwest, as much as 80%.

MORE ON THE PANDEMIC
– As global COVID-19 deaths top 4 million, a suicide in Peru
– Do I need to take precautions at hotels if I’m vaccinated?
– Free samples are back, but with safety in mind

Also Thursday, researchers from France’s Pasteur Institute reported new evidence that full vaccination is critical.

In laboratory tests, blood from several dozen people given their first dose of the Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccines “barely inhibited” the delta variant, the team reported in the journal Nature. But weeks after getting their second dose, nearly all had what researchers deemed an immune boost strong enough to neutralize the delta variant — even if it was a little less potent than against earlier versions of the virus.

The French researchers also tested unvaccinated people who had survived a bout of the coronavirus, and found their antibodies were four-fold less potent against the new mutant. But a single vaccine dose dramatically boosted their antibody levels — sparking cross-protection against the delta variant and two other mutants, the study found. That supports public health recommendations that COVID-19 survivors get vaccinated rather than relying on natural immunity.

The lab experiments add to real-world data that the delta variant’s mutations aren’t evading the vaccines most widely used in Western countries, but underscore that it’s crucial to get more of the world immunized before the virus evolves even more.

Researchers in Britain found two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, for example, are 96% protective against hospitalization with the delta variant and 88% effective against symptomatic infection. That finding was echoed last weekend by Canadian researchers, while a report from Israel suggested protection against mild delta infection may have dipped lower, to 64%.

Whether the fully vaccinated still need to wear masks in places where the delta variant is surging is a growing question. In the U.S., the CDC maintains that fully vaccinated people don’t need to. Even before the delta variant came along, the vaccines weren’t perfect, but the best evidence suggests that if vaccinated people nonetheless get the coronavirus, they’ll have much milder cases.

“Let me emphasize, if you were vaccinated, you have a very high degree of protection,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious disease expert, said Thursday.

In the U.S., case rates have been rising for weeks and the rate of hospitalizations has started to tick up, rising 7% from the previous seven-day average, Walensky told reporters Thursday. However, deaths remain down on average, which some experts believe is at least partly due to high vaccination rates in people 65 and older — who are among the most susceptible to severe disease.

___

Associated Press writer Mike Stobbe contributed to this story.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
https://apnews.com/article/europe-coronavirus-pandemic-science-health-34c3f2536747a7c08980d7359a8de70c

2 US men, ex-Colombia soldiers held in Haiti assassination

By EVENS SANON, DÁNICA COTO and JOSHUA GOODMAN
2 hours ago
https://apnews.com/article/business-government-and-politics-colombia-caribbean-haiti-5066fd5e0169cce7df8950843c8d3544

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Seventeen suspects have been detained so far in the stunning assassination of Haiti’s president, and Haitian authorities say two are believed to hold dual U.S.-Haitian citizenship and Colombia’s government says at least six are former members of its army.

Léon Charles, chief of Haiti’s National Police, said Thursday night that 15 of the detainees were from Colombia.

The police chief said eight more suspects were being sought and three others had been killed by police. Charles had earlier said seven were killed.

“We are going to bring them to justice,” the police chief said, the 17 handcuffed suspects sitting on the floor during a news conference on developments following the brazen killing of President Jovenel Moïse at his home before dawn Wednesday.

Colombia’s government said it had been asked about six of the suspects in Haiti, including two of those killed, and had determined they were retired members of its army. It didn’t release their identities.

The head of the Colombian national police, Gen. Jorge Luis Vargas Valencia, said President Iván Duque had ordered the high command of Colombia’s army and police to cooperate in the investigation.

“A team was formed with the best investigators ... they are going to send dates, flight times, financial information that is already being collected to be sent to Port-au-Prince,” Vargas said.

The U.S. State Department said it was aware of reports that Haitian Americans were in custody but could not confirm or comment.

The Haitian Americans were identified by Haitian officials as James Solages and Joseph Vincent. Solages, at age 35, is the youngest of the suspects and the oldest is 55, according to a document shared by Haiti’s minister of elections, Mathias Pierre. He would not provide further information on those in custody.

Solages described himself as a “certified diplomatic agent,” an advocate for children and budding politician on a website for a charity he started in 2019 in south Florida to assist people in the Haitian coastal town of Jacmel. On his bio page for the charity, Solages said he previously worked as a bodyguard at the Canadian Embassy in Haiti.

Canada’s foreign relation department released a statement that did not refer to Solages by name but said one of the men detained for his alleged role in the killing had been “briefly employed as a reserve bodyguard” at its embassy by a private contractor. He gave no other details.

Calls to the charity and Solages’ associates at the charity either did not go through or weren’t answered.

Meanwhile, Taiwan’s foreign ministry said Haitian police had arrested 11 armed suspects who tried to break into the Taiwanese embassy early Thursday. It gave no details of the suspects’ identities or a reason for the break-in.

“As for whether the suspects were involved in the assassination of the President of Haiti, that will need to be investigated by the Haitian police,” Foreign Affairs spokesperson Joanne Ou told The Associated Press in Taipei.

Police were alerted by embassy security guards while Taiwanese diplomats were working from home. The ministry said some doors and windows were broken but there was no other damage to the embassy.

Haiti is one of a handful of countries worldwide that maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan instead of the rival mainland Chinese government in Beijing.

In Port-au-Prince, witnesses said a crowd discovered two suspects hiding in bushes, and some people grabbed the men by their shirts and pants, pushed them and occasionally slapped them. An Associated Press journalist saw officers put the pair in the back of a pickup and drive away as the crowd ran after them to a police station.

“They killed the president! Give them to us! We’re going to burn them,” people chanted outside Thursday.

The crowd later set fire to several abandoned cars riddled with bullet holes that they believed belonged to the suspects. The cars didn’t have license plates, and inside one was an empty box of bullets and some water.

Later, Charles urged people to stay calm and let his officers do their work. He cautioned that authorities needed evidence that was being destroyed, including the burned cars.

Officials have given out little information on the killing, other than to say the attack was carried out by “a highly trained and heavily armed group.”

Not everyone was buying the government’s description of the attack. When Haitian journalist Robenson Geffrard, who writes for a local newspaper and has a radio show, tweeted a report on comments by the police chief, he drew a flood of responses expressing skepticism. Many wondered how the sophisticated attackers described by police could penetrate Moïse’s home, security detail and panic room and escape unharmed but then be caught without planning a successful getaway.

A Haitian judge involved in the investigation said Moïse was shot a dozen times and his office and bedroom were ransacked, according to the Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste. It quoted Judge Carl Henry Destin as saying investigators found 5.56 and 7.62 mm cartridges between the gatehouse and inside the house.

Moïse’s daughter, Jomarlie Jovenel, hid in her brother’s bedroom during the attack, and a maid and another worker were tied up by the attackers, the judge said.

Interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph, who assumed leadership of Haiti with the backing of police and the military, asked people to reopen businesses and go back to work as he ordered the reopening of the international airport.

Joseph decreed a two-week state of siege after the assassination, which stunned a nation already in crisis from some of the Western Hemisphere’s worst poverty, widespread violence and political instability.

Haiti had grown increasingly unstable under Moïse, who had been ruling by decree for more than a year and faced violent protests as critics accused him of trying to amass more power while the opposition demanded he step down.

The U.N. Security Council met privately Thursday to discuss the situation in Haiti, and U.N. special envoy Helen La Lime said afterward that Haitian officials had asked for additional security assistance.

Public transportation and street vendors remained scarce Thursday, an unusual sight for the normally bustling streets of Port-au-Prince.

Marco Destin was walking to see his family since no buses, known as tap-taps, were available. He was carrying a loaf of bread for them because they had not left their house since the president’s killing out of fear for their lives.

“Every one at home is sleeping with one eye open and one eye closed,” he said. “If the head of state is not protected, I don’t have any protection whatsoever.”

Gunfire rang out intermittently across the city hours after the killing, a grim reminder of the growing power of gangs that displaced more than 14,700 people last month alone as they torched and ransacked homes in a fight over territory.

Robert Fatton, a Haitian politics expert at the University of Virginia, said gangs were a force to contend with and it isn’t certain Haiti’s security forces can enforce a state of siege.

“It’s a really explosive situation,” he said.

___

Coto reported from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Goodman reported from Miami. AP videographer Pierre-Richard Luxama in Port-au-Prince and Johnson Lai in Taipei, Taiwan, contributed to this report.

https://apnews.com/article/business-government-and-politics-colombia-caribbean-haiti-5066fd5e0169cce7df8950843c8d3544

TRUMP INTERNATIONAL GOLF CLUB SCOTLAND LIMITED

Company number SC292100
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/SC292100/persons-with-significant-control

1 active person with significant control / 0 active statements

Mr Donald John Trump ACTIVE
Correspondence address 725 Fifth Avenue, New York, United States, NY10022
Notified on 19 January 2017

Date of birth December 1977
Nationality American
Nature of control
Ownership of shares – 75% or more with control over the trustees of a trust
Ownership of voting rights - 75% or more with control over the trustees of a trust
Right to appoint and remove directors with control over the trustees of a trust
Has significant influence or control over the trustees of a trust
Country of residence
United States

Mr Allen Weisselberg CEASED
Correspondence address
725 Fifth Avenue, New York, United States, NY10022
Notified on 19 January 2017
Ceased on 8 July 2021
Date of birth August 1947
Nationality American
Nature of control
Ownership of shares – 75% or more with control over the trustees of a trust
Ownership of voting rights - 75% or more with control over the trustees of a trust
Right to appoint and remove directors with control over the trustees of a trust
Has significant influence or control over the trustees of a trust

Persons with significant control

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/SC292100/persons-with-significant-control

Mr Allen Weisselberg CEASED

Notified on 19 January 2017
Ceased on 8 July 2021
Date of birth August 1947
Nationality American
Country of residence
United States

Nature of control
Ownership of shares – 75% or more with control over the trustees of a trust
Ownership of voting rights - 75% or more with control over the trustees of a trust
Right to appoint and remove directors with control over the trustees of a trust
Has significant influence or control over the trustees of a trust

Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg has been terminated as the director of one of Trump's golf courses in Scotland

Thomas Colson and Jacob Shamsian 16 hours ago
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-organization-allen-weisselberg-terminated-scotland-golf-course-2021-7?r=US&IR=T

* Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg was terminated from one of Trump's Scotland golf courses.

* The termination followed a 15-count indictment against Weisselberg and the Trump Organization.

* Weisselberg's attorneys didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization's chief financial officer, was terminated as the director and controller of one of former President Donald Trump's golf courses in Scotland a week after the executive and the company were charged with tax crimes.

A notice filed on Thursday with Companies House, the UK registry of private companies, showed that Weisselberg had been terminated as a director of Trump International Golf Club Scotland, a holding company that owns Trump's Aberdeenshire golf resort, Trump International Golf Links.

Read more: Where is Trump's White House staff now? We created a searchable database of more than 327 top staffers to show where they all landed

He was also terminated as a "person with significant control," a designation for an individual with influence over how a company is run, another notice said.

Trump's sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr. remain directors of the company, and Trump Jr. is now the sole person with significant control. Donald Trump resigned as a director in January 2017, when he became president, Companies House records showed.



Weisselberg was appointed as one of four directors of the company in 2006, when Trump purchased the land in Aberdeenshire that he turned into the luxury golf resort.

Eric Trump remains the sole director of Trump's other Scottish golf company, Golf Recreation Scotland.

On July 1, prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney's office announced a 15-count indictment against Weisselberg and the Trump Organization alleging a wide-ranging tax-fraud scheme that involved Weisselberg dodging taxes on $1.7 million in personal income.

Weisselberg and the Trump Organization pleaded not guilty to the charges. A special-grand-jury investigation into the Trump Organization's finances is ongoing.

Prosecutors are seeking to "flip" Weisselberg into cooperating in their investigation, which is also examining whether the company misrepresented its finances in order to pay little in taxes while obtaining favorable rates for insurance and bank loans.

Attorneys for Weisselberg and a representative for the Trump Organization did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment about Weisselberg's termination from Trump International Golf Club Scotland.

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-organization-allen-weisselberg-terminated-scotland-golf-course-2021-7?r=US&IR=T

Riley Beggin @rbeggin New — Toyota announces it will stop contributing to members of Congress who opposed the election certification



7:23 PM · Jul 8, 2021·Twitter for iPhone

THREAD

New — Toyota announces it will stop contributing to members of Congress who opposed the election certification https://t.co/V55ycn6qgE pic.twitter.com/Y19BeGvQWV

— Riley Beggin (@rbeggin) July 8, 2021

Lakeland man wanted for assault on police officers during Capitol Riot

Jonathan Pollock, 21, is one of five defendants from Tampa Bay named in DOJ indictment

by: Justin Schecker
Posted: Jul 8, 2021 / 10:04 PM EDT / Updated: Jul 8, 2021 / 11:07 PM EDT
https://www.wfla.com/news/local-news/lakeland-man-wanted-for-assault-on-police-officers-during-capitol-riot/

VIDEO

TAMPA (WFLA) – The Department of Justice unsealed an indictment on Thursday that charges five individuals from Tampa Bay with attacking police officers who were defending the U.S. Capitol from the mob of former President Trump supporters on January 6.

The defendants are accused of charging at police lines, stealing riot shields and throwing objects at police officers.

Eight On Your Side was at the federal court in Tampa on June 30 when three of the defendants named in the 19 count indictment made their first appearance before a federal judge.

One of the defendants who remains at large, according to the Department of Justice, is wanted for several charges including two counts of assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers using a dangerous weapon.

According to the FBI criminal complaint, 21-year-old Jonathan Pollock of Lakeland was part of the group of five that moved from the Washington Monument to the Capitol grounds in the afternoon of Jan. 6.

Pollock’s 30-year-old sister Olivia Pollock and their cousin 22-year-old Joshua Doolin had no comment for 8 On Your Side leaving federal court in Tampa on June 30.

Hired as a Polk County Fire Rescue EMT on May 3, Doolin was terminated following his arrest.

25-year-old Joseph Hutchinson of Lakeland and 37-year-old Michael Perkins are also named in the major indictment.

A lot of the evidence included in the FBI criminal complaint are images from officers’ body-worn cameras.

Prosecutors say Jonathan Pollock charged at police with a flagpole, dragged two officers down a set of stairs, and thrust a stolen police shield into an officer’s throat.

His sister is accused of elbowing an officer and trying to strop batons of officers’ hands.

37-year-old Perkins is still in jail because prosecutors say he is too dangerous to be released. A judge will decide next week whether he will remain detained.

According to the complaint, Perkins rammed a flagpole into the chest of an officer before raising the flagpole over his head and appearing to strike an officer in the back of his head.

The court document says Hutchinson works in the Pollock family’s gun shop in Lakeland. He was arrested last week in Albany, Georgia, but is out of custody now on home detention.

Prosecutors say Hutchinson kicked officers trying to keep rioters out of the Capitol.

Doolin is the only one in the group not accused of violence against officers, but investigators say he was spotted near the Capitol with zip-tie handcuffs tucked in his belt and a canister of chemical irritants that police use in riot situations.

In Washington, D.C. on Thursday, Doolin, Hutchinson, and Olivia Pollock pleaded not guilty.

Florida continues to lead the nation with nearly 60 Capitol Riot and insurrection cases.

Six months after the attack to interrupt the certification of the 2020 electoral college results, U.S. Capitol Police announced the planned opening of a field office in Tampa to investigate threats against members of Congress.

https://www.wfla.com/news/local-news/lakeland-man-wanted-for-assault-on-police-officers-during-capitol-riot/

Michael Avenatti sentenced to 30 months in prison in Nike extortion case

By Shayna Jacobs and Devlin Barrett
July 8, 2021|Updated today at 2:59 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/avenatti-sentence-nike-trump/2021/07/08/149d95e8-df58-11eb-9f54-7eee10b5fcd2_story.html

NEW YORK — Michael Avenatti — the lawyer who made headlines representing an adult-film actress who claimed an affair with former president Donald Trump — was sentenced to 30 months in prison on Thursday for trying to extort Nike, Inc.

Avenatti was convicted in February 2020 of transmission of interstate communications with intent to extort, attempted extortion and honest services wire fraud in connection with efforts to shake down Nike for as much as $25 million during what he said was a negotiation for his client, a youth basketball coach.

Prosecutors argued at trial that Avenatti was trying to earn a payday for himself, at the expense of Nike’s reputation and trading value, by threatening to expose alleged wrongdoing within the company if it did not meet his demands to settle.

"Mr. Avenatti had become drunk on the power of his platform, or what he perceived the power of his platform to be. He had become someone who operated as if the laws and rules which apply to everyone else didn't apply to him," said U.S. District Court Judge Paul G. Gardephe.

The judge excoriated the celebrity lawyer for his conduct, but gave him a tremendous break on what could have been a nine- to 11-year prison sentence. In explaining his decision, Gardephe cited the Justice Department's decision not to charge another high-profile lawyer who the judge said was a key player in the scheme.

The youth basketball coach, Gary Franklin, didn’t know Avenatti was using his name to try to negotiate a hefty payday with the athletic apparel giant, according to prosecutors.

They alleged that Avenatti approached Nike with the demand just before the company’s quarterly earnings call and with the high-profile NCAA basketball tournament about to start. He allegedly insisted that the company pay him and another attorney millions of dollars to investigate internal wrongdoing. If not, he allegedly said, he would expose what he knew.

In a recent filing, prosecutors asked the judge to issue a “very substantial term of imprisonment,” calling Avenatti’s conduct “an egregious abuse of trust.”

A separate indictment is pending against Avenatti in federal court in Manhattan on charges he defrauded other clients, including adult-film star Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had a one-night sexual encounter with Trump.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Daniels was paid for her silence by Michael Cohen, who at the time was Trump’s attorney and later became one of his harshest critics. Trump has denied the encounter with Daniels and the payoff.

As the attorney for Daniels, Avenatti became a regular fixture and Trump antagonist on cable news, at one point exploring a 2020 Democratic primary bid.

When given the chance to speak on Thursday, Avenatti tearfully described how he had “lost” his way and put superficial desires above his family and ethics. “I’ve learned that all the fame, notoriety and money in the world is meaningless,” he said. “T.V. and Twitter, your Honor, mean nothing.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Matt Podolsky said there has yet to be “any true expression from remorse” from Avenatti. He argued that the extortion case wasn’t about “tough negotiations” or “a thin line” that was crossed.

“It was about deceit, it was about threats, it was about taking from others and it was about abuse of trust,” the prosecutor said.

Michael Avenatti was stuck in ‘rat-infested’ Manhattan jail cell and went nearly a week without a shower, letter to court says

Avenatti has already served more than three months in jail. His attorneys wrote in a presentencing memo that he had “spent months in horrific conditions of solitary confinement and isolation.”

They said the embattled legal advocate should serve no more than six months total, followed by a year of home confinement. The memo noted that Avenatti was convicted of “non-violent offenses that caused no direct loss to either Nike or Coach Franklin.”

“The principals of deterrence, punishment, and protection of the public do not warrant a lengthy sentence in this case,” wrote Avenatti lawyers Scott A. Srebnick and E. Danya Perry. They added that their client “will never practice law again,” eliminating the risk that he could reoffend in a similar fashion.

Srebnick and Perry also argued Avenatti’s “epic fall and public shaming,” which included being “openly mocked” by Trump, serves to reduce the chances he would engage in “similar conduct” again.

In court, Perry pushed for leniency calling Avenatti “a completely humbled man who has been beaten down by himself.”

The lawyers asked Gardephe to factor in Avenatti’s grueling stint in the Manhattan Correctional Center before his release to home confinement last year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Avenatti is slated to stand trial next year in the Daniels case.


Barrett reported from Washington.

By Shayna Jacobs
Shayna Jacobs is a federal courts and law enforcement reporter on the national security team at The Washington Post, where she covers the Southern and Eastern districts of New York. Twitter
Image without a caption
By Devlin Barrett
Devlin Barrett writes about the FBI and the Justice Department, and is the author of "October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election." He was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for National Reporting, for coverage of Russian interference in the U.S. election. Twitter

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/avenatti-sentence-nike-trump/2021/07/08/149d95e8-df58-11eb-9f54-7eee10b5fcd2_story.html

TRUMP INTERNATIONAL GOLF CLUB SCOTLAND LIMITED

Company number SC292100

TRUMP INTERNATIONAL GOLF CLUB SCOTLAND LIMITED (SC292100)

Persons with significant control

1 active person with significant control / 0 active statements

Mr Donald John Trump ACTIVE
Correspondence address
725 Fifth Avenue, New York, United States, NY10022
Notified on 19 January 2017
Date of birth December 1977
Nationality American
Nature of control
Ownership of shares – 75% or more with control over the trustees of a trust
Ownership of voting rights - 75% or more with control over the trustees of a trust
Right to appoint and remove directors with control over the trustees of a trust
Has significant influence or control over the trustees of a trust
Country of residence
United States


Mr Allen Weisselberg CEASED
Correspondence address
725 Fifth Avenue, New York, United States, NY10022
Notified on 19 January 2017
Ceased on 8 July 2021
Date of birth
August 1947
Nationality
American
Nature of control
Ownership of shares – 75% or more with control over the trustees of a trust
Ownership of voting rights - 75% or more with control over the trustees of a trust
Right to appoint and remove directors with control over the trustees of a trust
Has significant influence or control over the trustees of a trust
Country of residence
United States

Mr Donald John Trump
CEASED
Correspondence address
725 Fifth Avenue, New York, Usa, NY10022
Notified on
6 April 2016
Ceased on 19 January 2017
Date of birth June 1946
Nationality Usa
Nature of control
Ownership of shares – 75% or more
Country of residence
Usa

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/SC292100/persons-with-significant-control

Wendy Siegelman @WendySiegelman Trump International Golf Club Scotland Ltd - Termination of appointment of Allen Weisselberg as a director 8 July 2021

Is Weisselberg the new Sater? Trump on Sater: “If he were sitting in the room right now I really wouldn't know what he looked like”



4:51 PM · Jul 8, 2021·Twitter Web App

THREAD

Trump International Golf Club Scotland Ltd - Termination of appointment of Allen Weisselberg as a director 8 July 2021

Is Weisselberg the new Sater? Trump on Sater: “If he were sitting in the room right now I really wouldn't know what he looked like”https://t.co/YXQpjWPJQQ pic.twitter.com/4TWn9c3ZUx

— Wendy Siegelman (@WendySiegelman) July 8, 2021

Jordan Fischer @JordanOnRecord JUST UNSEALED: Four men and one woman from the Lakeland, Florida, area are charged in a 53-page indictment with assaulting police for hours during the #CapitolRiot:

- Jonathan Pollock
- Olivia Michele Pollock
- Joseph Hutchinson
- Joshua Doolin
- Michael Perkins



3:49 PM · Jul 8, 2021·Twitter Web App

THREAD

JUST UNSEALED: Four men and one woman from the Lakeland, Florida, area are charged in a 53-page indictment with assaulting police for hours during the #CapitolRiot:

- Jonathan Pollock
- Olivia Michele Pollock
- Joseph Hutchinson
- Joshua Doolin
- Michael Perkins pic.twitter.com/oGwgNc2nTz

— Jordan Fischer (@JordanOnRecord) July 8, 2021

How a group of beavers prevented a wildfire and saved California a million dollars

The woodland animals are natural engineers, diverting streams and creating wetlands in order to help them survive

Graig Graziosi
2 hours ago
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/beavers-prevent-wildfire-california-dollars-b1880529.html

A dried-out floodplain in Place County – just north of Sacramento, California – was in perfect condition to fuel wildfires. It was 2014, and California was in the midst of its worst drought in decades. The floodplain was full of dry brush and devoid of moisture. Fire prevention and ecological workers in the state were desperately working to mitigate potential wildfire fuel sources anywhere they could. Ecologists – facing a dangerously dry floodplain and a price tag of $1m to $2m for a major construction project to fix the site – did something surprising. They called in the beavers.

Thanks to the introduction of the industrious, flat-tailed mammals, the site was restored to a vibrant, marshy floodplain four years earlier than anyone anticipated, and with a significantly cheaper price tag.

The Sacramento Bee spoke with researchers involved in the furry gambit to protect the state and revitalise the land.

Lynnette Batt, the conservation director of the Placer Land Trust, which owns and maintains the land where the floodplain is located, told The Sacramento Bee that she was amazed by the "awesome" success of the project.

"It went from dry grassland ... to totally revegetated, tress popping up, willows, wetland plants of all types, different meandering stream channels across about 60 acres of floodplain," Ms Batt said.

Ultimately the Doty Ravine project only cost $58,000, which was used to prepare the land for the beavers to come in and do what they do.

Damon Ciotti, a US Fish and Wildlife Service restoration biologist who led the project, estimated that the beavers would take about a decade to return the dried out land to streams in the region, but the critters blew away his expectations. By year three, water was back in the floodplain.

The success of the project has spun off a number of other projects using beavers for land revitalisation throughout California.

Ms Batt said that federal programmes were beginning to take notice and offer training on how to use beavers for wildfire mitigation, and indicated that universities and nonprofit programmes were also interested.

Beavers have essentially evolved to be the engineers of nature, transforming their landscape to suit their needs and to protect them from predators.

Emily Fairfax, Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Resource Management at California State University Channel Island, told The Sacramento Bee that beavers are like "a chicken nugget walking through the landscape for predators."

She said that beavers, despite being fat animals that are generally slow on land, are quick in the water and use dams to divert streams to create ponds and wetlands where they can better survive.

Beavers were prevalent throughout North America, though their population was driven down until the early 1900s as they were heavily hunted for their pelts.

Once the desire for beaver hats and coats waned, the population began to rebound. There are between 15 and 25 million beavers in North America today.

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/beavers-prevent-wildfire-california-dollars-b1880529.html

I know Chris DeArmitt well and he's right in what he says.

FINALLY - the Truth about Plastics & the Environment

Everything we know about plastics is nothing more than internet gossip – and it’s untrue. The headlines and articles we read are not supported by science and evidence. I know because I’ve spent over 1000 hours reading the peer-reviewed science and it tells a very different story. If you truly care about the environment, then please read the science collected here on this site.

This site is by a career scientist who has spent over 1000 hours reading hundreds of scientific articles and reports to make sure that the facts are solid. I found that almost everything we’ve been told is utter nonsense and is soundly disproven by the science.

I don’t care if people are against plastics based on the facts, but at present people are against plastics based on clear, unsubstantiated lies. That’s a problem because we need to start with the truth if we are going to make wise decisions for a brighter future. If you care, then please look at the evidence and then decide. If you don’t, then you will be harming the environment by making poor choices.

https://plasticsparadox.com/

Chris DeArmitt - PhD, FRSC, FIMMM
1st degree connection 1st
World-Class Plastic Materials Consultant, Environmental Expert, Serial Innovator, Author & Award-Winning Speaker

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisdearmitt/


INVESTIGATIONS How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

September 11, 20205:00 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
Laura Sullivan - 2015
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled?t=1625758518527

Note: An audio version of this story aired on NPR's Planet Money. Listen to the episode here.

Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, is standing on the end of its landfill watching an avalanche of plastic trash pour out of a semitrailer: containers, bags, packaging, strawberry containers, yogurt cups.

None of this plastic will be turned into new plastic things. All of it is buried.

"To me that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust," she said. "I had been lying to people ... unwittingly."

Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. for buyers. She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. She sends the soda bottles to the state.

But when Leebrick tried to tell people the truth about burying all the other plastic, she says people didn't want to hear it.

"I remember the first meeting where I actually told a city council that it was costing more to recycle than it was to dispose of the same material as garbage," she says, "and it was like heresy had been spoken in the room: You're lying. This is gold. We take the time to clean it, take the labels off, separate it and put it here. It's gold. This is valuable."

But it's not valuable, and it never has been. And what's more, the makers of plastic — the nation's largest oil and gas companies — have known this all along, even as they spent millions of dollars telling the American public the opposite.

In Partnership
NPR and Frontline
This story is part of a joint investigation with the PBS series Frontline that includes the documentary Plastic Wars, which aired March 31 on PBS. Watch it online now.

NPR and PBS Frontline spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic.

The industry's awareness that recycling wouldn't keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program's earliest days, we found. "There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis," one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech.

Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true.

"If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR.

In response, industry representative Steve Russell, until recently the vice president of plastics for the trade group the American Chemistry Council, said the industry has never intentionally misled the public about recycling and is committed to ensuring all plastic is recycled.

"The proof is the dramatic amount of investment that is happening right now," Russell said. "I do understand the skepticism, because it hasn't happened in the past, but I think the pressure, the public commitments and, most important, the availability of technology is going to give us a different outcome."

Here's the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can't be reused more than once or twice.

On the other hand, new plastic is cheap. It's made from oil and gas, and it's almost always less expensive and of better quality to just start fresh.

All of these problems have existed for decades, no matter what new recycling technology or expensive machinery has been developed. In all that time, less than 10 percent of plastic has ever been recycled. But the public has known little about these difficulties.

It could be because that's not what they were told.

Starting in the 1990s, the public saw an increasing number of commercials and messaging about recycling plastic.

"The bottle may look empty, yet it's anything but trash," says one ad from 1990 showing a plastic bottle bouncing out of a garbage truck. "It's full of potential. ... We've pioneered the country's largest, most comprehensive plastic recycling program to help plastic fill valuable uses and roles."

These commercials carried a distinct message: Plastic is special, and the consumer should recycle it.

It may have sounded like an environmentalist's message, but the ads were paid for by the plastics industry, made up of companies like Exxon, Chevron, Dow, DuPont and their lobbying and trade organizations in Washington.

Industry companies spent tens of millions of dollars on these ads and ran them for years, promoting the benefits of a product that, for the most part, was buried, was burned or, in some cases, wound up in the ocean.

Documents show industry officials knew this reality about recycling plastic as far back as the 1970s.

Many of the industry's old documents are housed in libraries, such as the one on the grounds of the first DuPont family home in Delaware. Others are with universities, where former industry leaders sent their records.

At Syracuse University, there are boxes of files from a former industry consultant. And inside one of them is a report written in April 1973 by scientists tasked with forecasting possible issues for top industry executives.

Recycling plastic, it told the executives, was unlikely to happen on a broad scale.

"There is no recovery from obsolete products," it says.

It says pointedly: Plastic degrades with each turnover.

"A degradation of resin properties and performance occurs during the initial fabrication, through aging, and in any reclamation process," the report told executives.

Recycling plastic is "costly," it says, and sorting it, the report concludes, is "infeasible."

And there are more documents, echoing decades of this knowledge, including one analysis from a top official at the industry's most powerful trade group. "The costs of separating plastics ... are high," he tells colleagues, before noting that the cost of using oil to make plastic is so low that recycling plastic waste "can't yet be justified economically."

Larry Thomas, the former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, worked side by side with top oil and plastics executives.

He's retired now, on the coast of Florida where he likes to bike, and feels conflicted about the time he worked with the plastics industry.

"I did what the industry wanted me to do, that's for sure," he says. "But my personal views didn't always jibe with the views I had to take as part of my job."

Thomas took over back in the late 1980s, and back then, plastic was in a crisis. There was too much plastic trash. The public was getting upset.

In one document from 1989, Thomas calls executives at Exxon, Chevron, Amoco, Dow, DuPont, Procter & Gamble and others to a private meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington.

"The image of plastics is deteriorating at an alarming rate," he wrote. "We are approaching a point of no return."

He told the executives they needed to act.

The "viability of the industry and the profitability of your company" are at stake.

Thomas remembers now.

"The feeling was the plastics industry was under fire — we got to do what it takes to take the heat off, because we want to continue to make plastic products," he says.

At this time, Thomas had a co-worker named Lew Freeman. He was a vice president of the lobbying group. He remembers many of the meetings like the one in Washington.

"The basic question on the table was, You guys as our trade association in the plastics industry aren't doing enough — we need to do more," Freeman says. "I remember this is one of those exchanges that sticks with me 35 years later or however long it's been ... and it was what we need to do is ... advertise our way out of it. That was the idea thrown out."

So began the plastics industry's $50 million-a-year ad campaign promoting the benefits of plastic.

"Presenting the possibilities of plastic!" one iconic ad blared, showing kids in bike helmets and plastic bags floating in the air.

"This advertising was motivated first and foremost by legislation and other initiatives that were being introduced in state legislatures and sometimes in Congress," Freeman says, "to ban or curb the use of plastics because of its performance in the waste stream."

At the same time, the industry launched a number of feel-good projects, telling the public to recycle plastic. It funded sorting machines, recycling centers, nonprofits, even expensive benches outside grocery stores made out of plastic bags.

Few of these projects actually turned much plastic into new things.

NPR tracked down almost a dozen projects the industry publicized starting in 1989. All of them shuttered or failed by the mid-1990s. Mobil's Massachusetts recycling facility lasted three years, for example. Amoco's project to recycle plastic in New York schools lasted two. Dow and Huntsman's highly publicized plan to recycle plastic in national parks made it to seven out of 419 parks before the companies cut funding.

None of them was able to get past the economics: Making new plastic out of oil is cheaper and easier than making it out of plastic trash.

Both Freeman and Thomas, the head of the lobbying group, say the executives all knew that.

"There was a lot of discussion about how difficult it was to recycle," Thomas remembers. "They knew that the infrastructure wasn't there to really have recycling amount to a whole lot."

Even as the ads played and the projects got underway, Thomas and Freeman say industry officials wanted to get recycling plastic into people's homes and outside on their curbs with blue bins.

The industry created a special group called the Council for Solid Waste Solutions and brought a man from DuPont, Ron Liesemer, over to run it.

Liesemer's job was to at least try to make recycling work — because there was some hope, he said, however unlikely, that maybe if they could get recycling started, somehow the economics of it all would work itself out.

"I had no staff, but I had money," Liesemer says. "Millions of dollars."

Liesemer took those millions out to Minnesota and other places to start local plastic recycling programs.

But then he ran into the same problem all the industry documents found. Recycling plastic wasn't making economic sense: There were too many different kinds of plastic, hundreds of them, and they can't be melted down together. They have to be sorted out.

"Yes, it can be done," Liesemer says, "but who's going to pay for it? Because it goes into too many applications, it goes into too many structures that just would not be practical to recycle."

Liesemer says he started as many programs as he could and hoped for the best.

"They were trying to keep their products on the shelves," Liesemer says. "That's what they were focused on. They weren't thinking what lesson should we learn for the next 20 years. No. Solve today's problem."

And Thomas, who led the trade group, says all of these efforts started to have an effect: The message that plastic could be recycled was sinking in.

"I can only say that after a while, the atmosphere seemed to change," he says. "I don't know whether it was because people thought recycling had solved the problem or whether they were so in love with plastic products that they were willing to overlook the environmental concerns that were mounting up."

But as the industry pushed those public strategies to get past the crisis, officials were also quietly launching a broader plan.

In the early 1990s, at a small recycling facility near San Diego, a man named Coy Smith was one of the first to see the industry's new initiative.

Back then, Smith ran a recycling business. His customers were watching the ads and wanted to recycle plastic. So Smith allowed people to put two plastic items in their bins: soda bottles and milk jugs. He lost money on them, he says, but the aluminum, paper and steel from his regular business helped offset the costs.

But then, one day, almost overnight, his customers started putting all kinds of plastic in their bins.

"The symbols start showing up on the containers," he explains.

Smith went out to the piles of plastic and started flipping over the containers. All of them were now stamped with the triangle of arrows — known as the international recycling symbol — with a number in the middle. He knew right away what was happening.

"All of a sudden, the consumer is looking at what's on their soda bottle and they're looking at what's on their yogurt tub, and they say, 'Oh well, they both have a symbol. Oh well, I guess they both go in,' " he says.

The bins were now full of trash he couldn't sell. He called colleagues at recycling facilities all across the country. They reported having the same problem.

Industry documents from this time show that just a couple of years earlier, starting in 1989, oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic — even if there was no way to economically recycle it. Some environmentalists also supported the symbol, thinking it would help separate plastic.

Smith said what it did was make all plastic look recyclable.

"The consumers were confused," Smith says. "It totally undermined our credibility, undermined what we knew was the truth in our community, not the truth from a lobbying group out of D.C."

But the lobbying group in D.C. knew the truth in Smith's community too. A report given to top officials at the Society of the Plastics Industry in 1993 told them about the problems.

"The code is being misused," it says bluntly. "Companies are using it as a 'green' marketing tool."

The code is creating "unrealistic expectations" about how much plastic can actually be recycled, it told them.

Smith and his colleagues launched a national protest, started a working group and fought the industry for years to get the symbol removed or changed. They lost.

"We don't have manpower to compete with this," Smith says. "We just don't. Even though we were all dedicated, it still was like, can we keep fighting a battle like this on and on and on from this massive industry that clearly has no end in sight of what they're able to do and willing to do to keep their image the image they want."

"It's pure manipulation of the consumer," he says.

In response, industry officials told NPR that the code was only ever meant to help recycling facilities sort plastic and was not intended to create any confusion.

Without question, plastic has been critical to the country's success. It's cheap and durable, and it's a chemical marvel.

It's also hugely profitable. The oil industry makes more than $400 billion a year making plastic, and as demand for oil for cars and trucks declines, the industry is telling shareholders that future profits will increasingly come from plastic.

And if there was a sign of this future, it's a brand-new chemical plant that rises from the flat skyline outside Sweeny, Texas. It's so new that it's still shiny, and inside the facility, the concrete is free from stains.

Chevron Phillips Chemical's new $6 billion plastic manufacturing plant rises from the skyline in Sweeny, Texas. Company officials say they see a bright future for their products as demand for plastic continues to rise.

"We see a very bright future for our products," says Jim Becker, the vice president of sustainability for Chevron Phillips, inside a pristine new warehouse next to the plant.

"These are products the world needs and continues to need," he says. "We're very optimistic about future growth."

With that growth, though, comes ever more plastic trash. But Becker says Chevron Phillips has a plan: It will recycle 100% of the plastic it makes by 2040.

Becker seems earnest. He tells a story about vacationing with his wife and being devastated by the plastic trash they saw. When asked how Chevron Phillips will recycle 100% of the plastic it makes, he doesn't hesitate.

"Recycling has to get more efficient, more economic," he says. "We've got to do a better job, collecting the waste, sorting it. That's going to be a huge effort."

Fix recycling is the industry's message too, says Steve Russell, the industry's recent spokesman.

"Fixing recycling is an imperative, and we've got to get it right," he says. "I understand there is doubt and cynicism. That's going to exist. But check back in. We're there."

Larry Thomas, Lew Freeman and Ron Liesemer, former industry executives, helped oil companies out of the first plastic crisis by getting people to believe something the industry knew then wasn't true: That most plastic could be and would be recycled.

Russell says this time will be different.

"It didn't get recycled because the system wasn't up to par," he says. "We hadn't invested in the ability to sort it and there hadn't been market signals that companies were willing to buy it, and both of those things exist today."

But plastic today is harder to sort than ever: There are more kinds of plastic, it's cheaper to make plastic out of oil than plastic trash and there is exponentially more of it than 30 years ago.

And during those 30 years, oil and plastic companies made billions of dollars in profit as the public consumed ever more quantities of plastic.

Russell doesn't dispute that.

"And during that time, our members have invested in developing the technologies that have brought us where we are today," he says. "We are going to be able to make all of our new plastic out of existing municipal solid waste in plastic."

Recently, an industry advocacy group funded by the nation's largest oil and plastic companies launched its most expensive effort yet to promote recycling and cleanup of plastic waste. There's even a new ad.

"We have the people that can change the world," it says to soaring music as people pick up plastic trash and as bottles get sorted in a recycling center.

Freeman, the former industry official, recently watched the ad.

"Déjà vu all over again," he says as the ad finishes. "This is the same kind of thinking that ran in the '90s. I don't think this kind of advertising is, is helpful at all."

Larry Thomas said the same.

"I don't think anything has changed," Thomas says. "Sounds exactly the same."

These days as Thomas bikes down by the beach, he says he spends a lot of time thinking about the oceans and what will happen to them in 20 or 50 years, long after he is gone.

And as he thinks back to those years he spent in conference rooms with top executives from oil and plastic companies, what occurs to him now is something he says maybe should have been obvious all along.

He says what he saw was an industry that didn't want recycling to work. Because if the job is to sell as much oil as you possibly can, any amount of recycled plastic is competition.

"You know, they were not interested in putting any real money or effort into recycling because they wanted to sell virgin material," Thomas says. "Nobody that is producing a virgin product wants something to come along that is going to replace it. Produce more virgin material — that's their business."

And they are. Analysts now expect plastic production to triple by 2050.

Cat Schuknecht contributed to this report.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled?t=1625758518527

New study on delta variant reveals importance of receiving both vaccine shots, highlights challenges posed by mutations

By Joel Achenbach
July 8, 2021|Updated today at 11:01 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/delta-variant-vaccines/2021/07/08/05b1bc5e-df75-11eb-ae31-6b7c5c34f0d6_story.html

New laboratory research on the swiftly spreading delta variant of the coronavirus is highlighting the threats posed by viral mutations, adding urgency to calls to accelerate vaccination efforts across the planet.

A peer-reviewed report from scientists in France, published Thursday in the journal Nature, found that the delta variant has mutations that allow it to evade some of the neutralizing antibodies produced by vaccines or by a natural infection. A single shot of a two-dose vaccine “barely” offers any protection.

But the experiments found that fully vaccinated people — with the recommended regimen of two shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech or AstraZeneca vaccine — should retain significant protection against the delta variant. That echoes another report authored by a collaboration of scientists in the United States and published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The bottom line is that, in a time when the delta variant is rapidly gaining traction — it now accounts for a majority of new infections in the United States, according to a new estimate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — full vaccination offers a much better firewall against infection than partial vaccination.

The studies on the delta variant emerge as concerns grow globally about a resurgence of the coronavirus. On Thursday, citing the virus, the Japanese prime minister declared a state of emergency, and organizers of the Tokyo Olympic Games moved to bar spectators from all events held in and around Tokyo.

The first two authorized vaccines in the United States — shots from Pfizer and Moderna that use a technology called messenger RNA, known commonly as mRNA — are designed as a two-shot program. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, by contrast, offers roughly the same protection against severe disease after just one shot although is somewhat less effective at preventing mild to moderate symptomatic cases, according to clinical trial data.

The United Kingdom adopted a strategy of giving people a first dose of a vaccine and delaying the second, intending to broaden the reach of the limited supply. But that has led to breakthrough infections driven by the delta variant, said Monica Gandhi, an infectious-diseases doctor at the University of California at San Francisco who was not involved in either research study.

The new research from France published in Nature “really verifies the need for the full two-dose vaccine regimen to get full effectiveness of the vaccine against the delta,” she said.

The coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, continues to mutate as it circulates through the human population. The variants are more transmissible than the earliest strain that emerged in Wuhan, China, although there is limited and less compelling evidence that they are more likely to cause severe disease in any individual.

So far, the vaccines have held the line, by and large, against the onrushing swarm of variants. Experiments in the lab and real-world data show the vaccines are particularly effective at preventing severe illness.

The results of the research in France represent “good news,” said Olivier Schwartz, lead author of the Nature study and head of the Virus and Immunity Unit at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Schwartz added that future research will determine how long the neutralizing antibody response lasts against the delta.

The New England Journal study was also based on laboratory experiments. It looked at two slightly different lineages of the delta variant. One was 6.8 times less susceptible to neutralization by antibody-loaded serum taken from patients who had recovered from covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. The other lineage — the one that is spreading most rapidly — was 2.9 times less susceptible.

Despite this erosion of neutralization, the researchers concluded that fully vaccinated persons probably still had “protective immunity” from either sublineage of the delta.

This type of research has become critically important as the delta, which emerged in India, outcompetes other strains of the virus. Data posted this week by the CDC showed that, as of July 3, the delta variant represented an estimated 51.7 percent of new infections nationally, five times the prevalence of just four weeks earlier.

In some regions it is particularly dominant. As of June 19, the delta variant was seen in 72 percent of new cases in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska, collectively, the CDC data show.

The delta is part of a growing list of coronavirus “variants of concern,” a designation given to variants no longer merely “of interest.”

The World Health Organization switched to Greek letters earlier this year to help people differentiate variants that had been known as the B.1.1.7 (alpha), the B.1.351 (beta), the B.1.617.2 (delta) and so on. Virologists believe it is possible that continued mutations in the virus will lead to a shortfall of Greek letters.

“If we continue to let the virus run loose, then yes, I’m certain we’ll run out of letters and future variants will likely be worse than the current crop — and yes, we’ll likely have several circulating at the same time,” Kristian Andersen, a virologist at Scripps Research Institute, said in an email.

Each variant contains a unique suite of mutations. Some of those mutations enhance transmissibility. Some make the virus more evasive when faced with antibodies and other immune system cells.

As virologists try to understand these microscopic processes, the world is conducting an experiment on a grand scale, with most of the planet still unvaccinated and the virus circulating with limited obstacles. The evidence is clear: The long war against the coronavirus depends on the thoroughness and speed of the global vaccination effort.

“We need to vaccinate the world NOW with an all-out effort led by the United States,” Andersen said in the email.

Michael Worobey, a University of Arizona virologist, agrees the virus has not run out of moves: “We may never see the end of new variants. The virus is likely to become a fixture of human infectious disease, just like influenza viruses.”

Research on the delta variant has largely emerged from laboratory experiments that expose the virus to blood from patients who have survived covid-19 or have vaccine-induced immunity. Simultaneously, a real-world experiment is afoot: The virus is circulating in parts of the United States and in many places globally where vaccination rates are low or, in some cases, virtually non-existent.

It is increasingly clear that the virus — the precise origin of which is unclear and the subject of fraught political and scientific debate — was not exquisitely adapted to human beings when it first began to spread person to person. All viruses mutate, and SARS-CoV-2 does not mutate particularly fast. But as it spread across the planet, it had abundant opportunities to evolve.

One strain, with a mutation called D614G, emerged early in the pandemic and boosted the virus’s ability to infect people by roughly 20 percent. That mutation is now seen in almost every sample of SARS-CoV-2.

The alpha variant is roughly 50 percent more transmissible than the D614G strain. The delta is half-again more transmissible than the alpha, according to preliminary research.

For now, the evolution of the coronavirus has been driven largely by mutations that enhance its ability to bind to cells or grow in those cells. A secondary strategy of evading antibodies has been seen in several variants, and may become more significant over time as immunity builds in the human population, said Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

“We’ve seen the virus evolving to get better and better at human transmission. I would expect that process will sort of plateau,” Bloom said. “But I don’t think the evolution will stop. Because I think there is a sort of endless potential for the virus to get mutations to escape from antibodies.”


Lindsey Bever contributed to this report.

By Joel Achenbach
Joel Achenbach covers science and politics for the National desk. He has been a staff writer for The Post since 1990. Twitter

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/delta-variant-vaccines/2021/07/08/05b1bc5e-df75-11eb-ae31-6b7c5c34f0d6_story.html

EU fines German car makers $1B over emission collusion

By DAVID McHUGH and RAF CASERT
an hour ago
https://apnews.com/article/europe-technology-environment-and-nature-business-health-10d70ad75b4cfe7170a9045b18ae5f4b

BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union handed down $1 billion in fines to major German car manufacturers Thursday, saying they colluded to limit the development and rollout of car emission-control systems.

Daimler, BMW and Volkswagen along with its Audi and Porsche divisions avoided competing on technology to restrict pollution from gasoline and diesel passenger cars, the EU’s executive commission said. Daimler wasn’t fined after it revealed the cartel to the European Commission.

It was the first time the European Commission imposed collusion fines on holding back the use of technical developments, not a more traditional practice like price fixing.

EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said that even though the companies had the technology to cut harmful emissions beyond legal limits, they resisted competition and denied consumers the chance to buy less polluting cars.

“Manufacturers deliberately avoided to compete on cleaning better than what was required by EU emission standards. And they did so despite the relevant technology being available,” Vestager said. That made their practice illegal, she said.

According to Vestager, the companies agreed on the size of onboard tanks containing a urea solution known as AdBlue that is injected into the exhaust stream to limit pollution from diesel engines, and also on the driving ranges that could be expected before the tank needed refilling. A bigger tank would enable more pollution reduction.

Vestager said cooperation between companies is permissible under EU rules when it leads to efficiency gains, such as the faster introduction of new technologies. “But the dividing line is clear: Companies must not coordinate their behavior to limit the full potential of any type of technology,” she said.

Volkswagen said the investigation had ended with a finding that several other forms of cooperation under review were not improper under antitrust law.

“The (EU) Commission is breaking new legal ground with this decision, because it is the first time it has prosecuted technical cooperation as an antitrust violation,” the company said in a statement. “It is also imposing fines even though the contents of the talks were never implemented and customers were therefore never harmed.”

Volkswagen said that the tank sizes produced by all the carmakers involved were “two to three times” bigger than discussed in the talks. It said it was considering an appeal to the European Court of Justice.

BMW said that discussions on the AdBlue tanks had “no influence whatsoever on the company’s product decisions.” The company said it was significant that that the fine notice found there was no collusion involving earlier allegations of using software to restrict AdBlue dosing.

BMW said it set aside 1.4 billion euros ($1.7 billion) based on the commission’s initial accusations but reduced the set-aside in May due to more serious allegations in the case not being substantiated.

The case wasn’t directly linked to the “dieselgate” scandal of the past decade, when Volkswagen admitted that about 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide were fitted with the deceptive software, which reduced nitrogen oxide emissions when the cars were placed on a test machine but allowed higher emissions and improved engine performance during normal driving.

The scandal cost Wolfsburg, Germany-based Volkswagen 30 billion euros ($35 billion) in fines and civil settlements and led to the recall of millions of vehicles. The Volkswagen vehicles in the scandal did not use the urea tanks but relied on another pollution reduction technology.

https://apnews.com/article/europe-technology-environment-and-nature-business-health-10d70ad75b4cfe7170a9045b18ae5f4b

Spy Agencies Turn to Scientists as They Wrestle With Mysteries

American intelligence agencies are tapping outside expertise as they wrestle with mysteries like the coronavirus and U.F.O.s that are as much about science as they are about espionage.


By Julian E. Barnes
July 8, 2021 Updated 9:21 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/us/politics/intelligence-agencies-science.html

WASHINGTON — The nation’s intelligence agencies are looking for ways to increase their expertise in a range of scientific disciplines as they struggle to answer unexplained questions — about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, unidentified phenomenon observed by Navy pilots and mysterious health ailments affecting spies and diplomats around the world.

Traditional spycraft has failed to make significant progress on those high-profile inquiries, and many officials have grown convinced that they require a better marriage of intelligence gathering and scientific examination.

Intelligence officials in the Biden administration came into office pledging to work on areas traditionally dominated by science, like studying the national security implications of climate change and future pandemics. But as the other issues have cropped up, the spy agencies have had to confront questions that are as much scientific mysteries as they are challenges of traditional intelligence collection.

The White House has given the intelligence community until later this summer to report the results of a deep dive into the origins of the coronavirus, including an examination of the theory that it was accidentally leaked from a Chinese lab studying the virus as well as the prevailing view that it was transmitted from animals to humans outside a lab.

The administration has also pledged to Congress to make progress on determining the cause of mysterious health ailments on diplomats and intelligence officers, known as Havana syndrome. And finally, a preliminary inquiry into unidentified flying objects and other phenomena failed to explain almost all of the mysterious encounters by military aviators that intelligence analysts had scrutinized, prompting intelligence officials to promise a follow-up in the next three months.

To bolster the role of scientific expertise, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence brought an experienced epidemiologist from the State Department’s intelligence and research division to serve on the National Intelligence Council, according to intelligence and other government officials. The office has also created two national intelligence manager posts, one to look at climate change and the other to examine disruptive technology, intelligence officials said.

The National Security Council, working with the C.I.A. and the director of national intelligence, has established a pair of outside panels to study Havana syndrome, whose symptoms include dizziness, fatigue and sudden memory loss. Outside scientists with security clearances will be able to view classified intelligence to better understand what may have caused the brain injuries.

The work reflects “a broader priority on science and technology,” a White House official said.

One panel will focus on possible causes. The other is charged with helping develop devices that could better protect personnel, according to an administration official.

Scientific might has been vitally important to modern American intelligence agencies since their beginnings. Throughout the Cold War, scientists paired with intelligence analysts to examine adversaries’ nuclear missile development and chemical and biological weapons programs. The agencies have also cultivated deep engineering talent as they built spy satellites and reconnaissance aircraft and devised tools to intercept a wide range of communications.

But the recent intelligence challenges have required a different range of scientific expertise, including some areas that agencies have invested fewer resources in over the years.

“This is a really interesting moment where the national security interests have changed from some of the Cold War interests,” said Sue Gordon, a former top intelligence official. “Priorities are changing now.”

Faced not only with the immediate unsolved security questions, but also with the longer-term challenge of improving intelligence collection on climate change, Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, has pushed agencies to more aggressively recruit undergraduate and graduate students with an extensive range of scientific knowledge.

“The D.N.I. believes that the changing threat landscape requires the intelligence community to develop and invest in a talented work force that includes individuals with science and technology backgrounds,” said Matt Lahr, a spokesman for Ms. Haines. “Without such expertise, we will not only be unable to compete, we will not succeed in addressing the challenges we face today.”

Officials are also trying to make broader use of existing initiatives. For example, Ms. Haines’s office has been more aggressively questioning its science and technology expert group, a collection of some 500 scientists who volunteer to help intelligence agencies answer scientific problems.

Officials have asked those scientists about how coronaviruses mutate as well as about climate change and the availability of natural resources. While the scientists in the expert group do not perform intelligence analysis, their answers can help such analysts inside agencies draw more accurate conclusions, intelligence officials said.

In other cases, the efforts to bring in outside expertise is new.

During the Trump administration, the State Department commissioned the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to examine Havana syndrome. Its report concluded that a microwave weapon was a likely cause of many of the episodes but was hampered in part because of a lack of access to information; scientists were not given the full range of material collected by the intelligence agencies, officials said.

Outside scientists on the two new panels will have security clearances enabling them to look at the full range of material. The “driving purpose” of the panels is to give them access to classified information that was denied under previous studies, a White House official said.

Intelligence officials and government experts will also serve on the panels. McClatchy earlier reported on their creation.

The administration will also bring in medical experts in traumatic brain injury and technical experts on weapons systems and directed-energy devices to examine the potential causes of the health episodes, according to the administration official.

The government is examining some 130 episodes, though officials concede that some could eventually be set aside if their causes are determined and appear to be unrelated to Havana syndrome.

A number of victims had criticized the government’s handling of the issue, saying too few officials took it seriously. While some officials have remained skeptical, inside the C.I.A. the syndrome has become a top priority of William J. Burns, its director, who pushed for the new panels.

“As part of our ongoing vigorous efforts to determine the cause of these anomalous health incidents, we look forward to working with top scientists and experts inside and outside government on this panel,” Mr. Burns said in a statement.

While scientific research has been a strength of American intelligence agencies, Ms. Gordon said, the current problems may require a different approach, bringing in more people from outside and working more with so-called open source information, including raw data collected by scientists but not always examined independently by intelligence agencies.

“I do think that they will probably approach it slightly differently than they might have in the past,” Ms. Gordon said, “with a little bit more openness.”


Julian E. Barnes is a national security reporter based in Washington, covering the intelligence agencies. Before joining The Times in 2018, he wrote about security matters for The Wall Street Journal. @julianbarnes • Facebook
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/us/politics/intelligence-agencies-science.html

Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg’s Partnership Did Not Survive Trump

The company they built is wildly successful. But her Washington wisdom didn’t hold up, and neither did their close working relationship.

By Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
July 8, 2021 Updated 6:47 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/business/mark-zuckerberg-sheryl-sandberg-facebook.html

Sheryl Sandberg knew she’d be asked about the attacks on the Capitol.

For the past week, the country had been reeling from the violence in Washington, and with each passing day, reporters were uncovering more of the footprint left behind by the rioters on social media.

Speaking to the cameras rolling in her sun-filled Menlo Park, Calif., garden, Ms. Sandberg confronted this question, one she’d prepared for: Could Facebook have acted sooner to help prevent this?

Ms. Sandberg noted that the company had taken down many pages supporting the Proud Boys, a far-right militia, and “Stop the Steal” groups organized around the false claim that President Donald J. Trump had won the 2020 election. Enforcement was never perfect, she added, so some inflammatory posts remained up. But, she added, the blame primarily lay elsewhere.

“I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate, don’t have our standards, and don’t have our transparency,” she said.

That comment was picked up by news outlets across the world. Outraged members of Congress and researchers who studied right-wing groups accused Facebook of abdicating responsibility.

Those within Ms. Sandberg’s inner circle told her what she wanted to hear: Her words were being taken out of context, journalists were unfairly piling on, it wasn’t her fault.

But in other parts of the company, executives whispered to each other that Ms. Sandberg had, once again, slipped up. She was deflecting blame cast on her, or Facebook, they said.

Days later, indictments began to roll in for the rioters who had taken part in the attacks.

In one indictment, lawyers revealed how, in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 attacks, Thomas Caldwell and members of his militia group, the Oath Keepers, had openly discussed over Facebook the hotel rooms, airfare and other logistics around their trip to Washington.

On the day itself, people freely celebrated with posts on Facebook and Instagram. Minutes after Mr. Trump ended his speech with a call to his supporters to “Walk down Pennsylvania Avenue” toward the Capitol building, where hundreds of members of Congress sat, people within the crowd used their phones to livestream clashes with police and the storming of the barricades outside the building. Many, including Mr. Caldwell, were getting messages on Facebook Messenger from allies watching their advance from afar.

“All members are in the tunnel under” the Capitol read the message Mr. Caldwell received as he neared the building. Referring to members of Congress, the message added, “Seal them in. Turn on Gas.”

Moments later, Mr. Caldwell posted a quick update on Facebook that read, “Inside.”

The indictments made it clear just how large a part Facebook had played, both in spreading misinformation about election fraud to fuel anger among the Jan. 6 protesters, and in aiding the extremist militia’s communication ahead of the riots. For months, Facebook would be a footnote to a day that challenged the heart of American democracy. And Ms. Sandberg’s words attempting to place the blame elsewhere would continue to haunt her.

In the years since Mr. Trump won the 2016 election, Facebook has struggled with the role it played in his rise and in the growth of populist leaders across the world. The same tools that allowed Facebook’s business to more than double during those years — such as the News Feed that prioritized engagement and the Facebook groups that pushed like-minded people together — had been used to spread misinformation.

To achieve its record-setting growth, the company had continued building on its core technology, making business decisions based on how many hours of the day people spent on Facebook and how many times a day they returned. Facebook’s algorithms didn’t measure if the magnetic force pulling them back to Facebook was the habit of wishing a friend happy birthday, or a rabbit hole of conspiracies and misinformation.

Facebook’s problems were features, not bugs, and were the natural outgrowth of a 13-year partnership between Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive and one of its founders, and his erudite business partner, Ms. Sandberg, its chief operating officer. He was the technology visionary and she understood how to generate revenue from the attention of Facebook’s now 2.8 billion users. They worked in concert to create the world’s biggest exchange of ideas and communication.

This account, adapted from a forthcoming book on Facebook, is drawn from more than 400 interviews, including those with former and current employees of all levels of the company. The interviews paint a portrait of the Trump presidency as a trying period for the company and for its top leaders. The Trump era tested a central relationship at Facebook — between Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Zuckerberg — and she became increasingly isolated. Her role as the C.E.O.’s second-in-command was less certain with his elevation of several other executives, and with her diminishing influence in Washington.

The view from inside the upper echelons of the company was clear: It felt as though Facebook was no longer led by a No. 1 and No. 2, but a No. 1 and many.

The pair continued their twice-weekly meetings, but Mr. Zuckerberg took over more of the areas once under her purview. He made the final call on issues surrounding Mr. Trump’s spread of hate speech and dangerous misinformation, decisions Ms. Sandberg often lobbied against or told allies she felt uncomfortable with. Mr. Zuckerberg oversaw efforts in Washington to fend off regulations and had forged a friendly relationship with Mr. Trump. Ms. Sandberg surrounded herself with a “kitchen cabinet” of outside political advisers and a team of public relations officials who were often at odds with others in the company.

A spokeswoman for Facebook dismissed this characterization.

“The fault lines that the authors depict between Mark and Sheryl and the people who work with them do not exist,” said Dani Lever, the spokeswoman. “All of Mark’s direct reports work closely with Sheryl and hers with Mark. Sheryl’s role at the company has not changed.”

It is true that the core of the partnership hasn’t formally changed. Mr. Zuckerberg controls the direction of the company and Ms. Sandberg the ad business, which continues to soar unabated.

Both executives declined to comment for this story, perhaps letting the company’s performance speak for itself.

Facebook’s market valuation is now over $1 trillion.

The Beginning of an Unusual Pairing

A Christmas party is not an ideal place to avoid small talk, but Mr. Zuckerberg had arrived at the holiday gathering determined to try. It was December 2007, and Facebook was still a private company with just several hundred employees. Despite his aversion to party chat, he allowed himself to be introduced to Sheryl Sandberg.

From the moment they met, both have said, they sensed the potential to transform the company into the global power it is today.

As guests milled around them, he described his goal of turning every person in the country with an internet connection into a Facebook user. It might have sounded like a fantasy to others, but Ms. Sandberg was intrigued and threw out ideas about what it would take to build a business to keep up with that kind of growth. “It was actually smart. It was substantive,” Mr. Zuckerberg later recalled. Ms. Sandberg would go on to tell Dan Rose, a former vice president at Facebook, that she felt she had been “put on this planet to scale organizations.”

After the Christmas party, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg continued their conversations over late dinners at Ms. Sandberg’s favorite neighborhood restaurant, Flea Street, and her pristine Atherton home. (Mr. Zuckerberg still lived in a Palo Alto apartment with only a futon on the floor). Ms. Sandberg walked Mr. Zuckerberg through how she had helped expand Google’s ad business, turning search queries into data that gave advertisers rich insights about users, contributing to the company’s spectacular cash flow.

In some ways, they were opposites. Ms. Sandberg was a master manager and delegator. Her calendar at Google was scheduled to the minute. Meetings rarely ran long and typically culminated in action items. At 38, she was 15 years older than Mr. Zuckerberg, was in bed by 9:30 p.m. and up every morning by 6 for a hard cardio workout. He was a night owl, coding way past midnight and up in time to straggle into the office late in the morning. Mr. Rose recalled being pulled into meetings at 11 p.m., the middle of Mr. Zuckerberg’s workday.

Mr. Zuckerberg recognized that Ms. Sandberg excelled at, even enjoyed, all the parts of running a company that he found unfulfilling. And she would bring to Facebook an asset that her new boss knew he needed: experience in Washington, D.C. Mr. Zuckerberg wasn’t interested in politics and didn’t keep up with the news. The year before, while Mr. Zuckerberg was visiting Donald Graham, then the chairman of The Washington Post, a reporter handed the young C.E.O. a book on politics that the reporter had written. Mr. Zuckerberg said to Mr. Graham, “I’m never going to have time to read this.”

“I teased him because there were very few things where you’ll find unanimity about, and one of those things is that reading books is a good way to learn. There is no dissent on that point,” Mr. Graham said. “Mark eventually came to agree with me on that, and like everything he did, he picked it up very quickly and became a tremendous reader.”

In the lead-up to his talks with Ms. Sandberg, Mr. Zuckerberg experienced a brush with controversy that stoked concerns about potential regulations. Government officials were beginning to question if free platforms like Facebook were harming users with the data they collected. In December 2007, the Federal Trade Commission issued self-regulatory principles for behavioral advertising to protect data privacy. Mr. Zuckerberg needed help navigating Washington.

“Mark understood that some of the biggest challenges Facebook was going to face in the future were going to revolve around issues of privacy and regulatory concerns,” Mr. Rose said. Ms. Sandberg, he noted, “obviously had deep experience there, and this was very important to Mark.”

To Ms. Sandberg, the move to Facebook, a company led by an awkward 23-year-old college dropout, wasn’t as counterintuitive as it might have appeared. She was a vice president at Google, but she had hit a ceiling: There were several vice presidents at her level, and they were all competing for promotions. Eric Schmidt, then the chief executive, wasn’t looking for a No. 2. Men who weren’t performing as well as she was were getting recognized and receiving higher titles, former Google colleagues maintained.

“Despite leading a bigger, more profitable, faster-growing business than the men who were her peers, she was not given the title president, but they were,” recalled Kim Scott, a leader in the ad sales division. Ms. Sandberg was looking for something new. She said yes to Facebook.

Mr. Zuckerberg brought in Ms. Sandberg to deal with growing unease about the company in Washington. She professionalized the ragtag office there, which had been opened by a recent college graduate whose primary job was to help lawmakers set up their Facebook accounts. She represented Facebook as a member of President Barack Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, along with other executives and labor union leaders. After one meeting of the council, she accompanied Mr. Obama on Air Force One to Facebook’s headquarters, where the president held a public town hall to discuss the economy. But soon, there were cracks in the facade.

In October 2010, she met with the F.T.C. chairman, Jonathan Leibowitz, to try to quell a privacy investigation. In his office, a relaxed and confident Ms. Sandberg began the meeting with a claim that Facebook had given users more control over their data than any other internet company and that the company’s biggest regret was not communicating clearly how its privacy policy worked.

The F.T.C. officials immediately challenged her, according to people who attended the meeting. Mr. Leibowitz noted that, on a personal level, he had watched his middle-school-age daughter struggle with the privacy settings on Facebook, which had automatically made it easier for strangers to find users like her. “I’m seeing it at home,” he said.

“That’s so great,” Ms. Sandberg responded. She went on to describe the social network as “empowering” for young users. Mr. Leibowitz hadn’t meant it as good news — and emphasized to her that the F.T.C. was deeply concerned about privacy.

Ms. Lever, the Facebook spokeswoman, described the meeting as “substantive,” with a detailed explanation of the company’s privacy policies. She added that the characterization of tension in the room “misrepresents what actually happened.”

But to the people who were there, Ms. Sandberg seemed to be hearing only what she wanted to hear.

An Oval Office Offering

The executives made their way through the lobby of Trump Tower, past reporters shouting questions they ignored, into the gold elevators and up to meet with the president-elect.

“Everybody in this room has to like me ” President-elect Trump said to the group he had gathered there in December 2016. It included Ms. Sandberg and the chief executives of Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

But Ms. Sandberg had made her preferences very clear: She did not like him. In fact, she was still in shock and mourning for Hillary Clinton’s defeat. She was a reliable and prominent Democratic bundler. She had served as chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers during the Clinton administration and her name had been floated for Treasury secretary in a potential Hillary Clinton administration. Now she was waylaid from her path back into politics, after eight years of stratospheric success as a feminist icon and business leader.

Moreover, her Democratic connections were of limited use in the newly elected administration. She called on Joel Kaplan, the company’s top Republican and vice president of global policy, whom she hired in May 2011. (Mr. Kaplan, who accompanied Ms. Sandberg to Trump Tower, stayed one day longer to interview with the Trump transition team for the position of director of the Office of Management and Budget. Facebook said he withdrew his candidacy before the meeting, but took the interview anyway.)

Mr. Kaplan, a former deputy chief of staff for President George W. Bush, had warned Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Zuckerberg that they had to repair relations with Republicans who resented their support for Democrats. Ms. Sandberg attended the Trump Tower meeting, seated two chairs to the right of the president-elect and between Vice President Mike Pence and Larry Page, one of Google’s founders, but barely spoke. The president-elect, who had sparred with many of the companies whose leaders he now addressed, and who would go on to complicate Facebook’s policies on speech in ways company leaders did not yet comprehend, appeared to be in good spirits that day.

“You’ll call my people, you’ll call me. It doesn’t make any difference,” Mr. Trump said. “We have no formal chain of command over here.”

Facebook did call him. But it was Mr. Zuckerberg who became the emissary to Washington.

In the months and years after the 2016 election, Facebook confronted a number of challenges connected to the Trump presidency. The company investigated and dealt with fallout from the scope of Russian interference with the election on its platform.

Ms. Lever, the Facebook spokeswoman, noted that it was natural for Mr. Zuckerberg to take on a larger role in dealing with speech and misinformation. Other tech leaders were also increasingly engaged on those issues. “These areas demanded more time, attention and focus, which both Mark and Sheryl have given them,” she said.

At the same time, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg continued to drift further apart. He was critical of her handling of public relations related to election interference and another scandal in March 2018, when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm working for Mr. Trump, had used data harvested from Facebook users to target voters. Both were breaches that technically stemmed from his side of the business — products — but she was in charge of dealing with the public’s anger over the episodes. One of her primary roles had been to charm Washington on Facebook’s behalf, and protect and burnish its image. Neither project was going particularly well.

On the afternoon of Sept. 19, 2019, Mr. Zuckerberg slipped into the Oval Office for a meeting unrecorded in public schedules for the president.

Mr. Trump leaned forward, resting his elbows on the ornately carved 19th-century Resolute desk. As he boasted about the performance of the economy under his administration, a jumbo glass of Diet Coke collected condensation on a coaster in front of him. Mr. Zuckerberg sat on the other side of the desk, in a straight-back wooden chair wedged between Mr. Kaplan and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser. Dan Scavino, the president’s director of social media, sat at the end of the row.

Mr. Zuckerberg had come with a gift.

He told Mr. Trump that a team had run the numbers using proprietary internal data, and the president had the highest engagement of any politician on Facebook, according to people familiar with the discussion. Mr. Trump’s personal account, with 28 million followers at that time, was a blowout success. The former reality show star was visibly pleased.

Later in the day, Mr. Trump disclosed the meeting on Facebook and Twitter, posting a photo of the two men shaking hands, a wide smile on the C.E.O.’s face. “Nice meeting with Mark Zuckerberg of @Facebook in the Oval Office today,” read the caption.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s introduction to Mr. Trump’s White House had come through Mr. Kaplan and Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook and the tech industry’s most vocal supporter of the president. Mr. Zuckerberg had first gotten to know Mr. Kushner, who graduated from Harvard the year Mr. Zuckerberg began.

Before his Oval Office meeting, Mr. Zuckerberg scheduled an appointment with Mr. Kushner, who had led digital media strategy for the Trump campaign. He wanted to deliver a compliment about the campaign, and told Mr. Kushner: “You were very good on Facebook.”

Not Sandberg’s Washington Anymore

Ms. Sandberg greeted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a smile. The speaker responded coolly, but she did invite Ms. Sandberg to join her on the couches in the guest seating area.

It was May 8, 2019, and the appointment with the speaker capped two days of difficult meetings with lawmakers about efforts to prevent disinformation during the 2020 elections.

It was a trying period for Ms. Sandberg. Her work responsibilities were crushing: Friends said she was feeling tremendous pressure, and some guilt, for the cascade of scandals confronting the company.

The tense mood in the speaker’s office was in stark contrast to the one during a visit Ms. Sandberg made to Ms. Pelosi in July 2015. They took a photo together, with both women smiling, and later Ms. Pelosi posted it to Facebook, heaping praise on Ms. Sandberg’s advocacy for women in the work force.

Now, four years later, Ms. Sandberg sought to regain some of that favor as she described efforts to take down fake foreign accounts, the hiring of thousands of content moderators and the use of artificial intelligence and other technologies to quickly track and take down disinformation. She assured Ms. Pelosi that Facebook would not fight regulations. She pointed to Mr. Zuckerberg’s opinion essay in The Washington Post in April, which called for privacy rules, laws requiring financial disclosures in online election ads, and rules that enabled Facebook users to take their data off the social network and use it on rival sites.

The two talked for nearly an hour. Ms. Sandberg admitted that Facebook had problems, and the company appeared to be at least trying to fix them. Ms. Pelosi was still on guard, but the efforts appeared to be a step forward.

Finally. They seem to be getting it, Ms. Pelosi said.

Two weeks later, a video featuring the speaker was widely shared on Facebook. Someone had manipulated the video, making it seem as if Ms. Pelosi was slurring her words.

On a Facebook page called Politics Watchdog, the video attracted two million views and was shared tens of thousands of times. From there, it was shared to hundreds of private Facebook groups, many of them highly partisan pages. Within 24 hours, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and a former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, had tweeted the link, along with the message, “What’s wrong with Nancy Pelosi? Her speech pattern is bizarre.”

The private Facebook groups Mr. Zuckerberg had championed two months earlier as part of a pivot to privacy were the ones now spreading the video. Within the confines of the small groups, Facebook users not only joked with one another about how to edit the video but also shared tips on how to ensure that it would reach the maximum number of people. YouTube quickly took down the video, but Facebook was where it was getting significant traction.

The speaker’s staff was livid. Her office had particularly strong ties to Facebook. Catlin O’Neill, Ms. Pelosi’s former chief of staff, was one of Facebook’s most senior Democratic lobbyists.

Inside Facebook, executives were ignoring the Pelosi staff’s calls because they were trying to formulate a response. The fact checkers and the A.I. hadn’t flagged the video for false content or prevented its spread. It was easy to fool Facebook’s filters and detection tools with simple workarounds, it turned out.

But the doctored video of Ms. Pelosi revealed more than the failings of Facebook’s technology to stop the spread of misleading viral videos. It exposed the internal confusion and disagreement over the issue of highly partisan political content.

Executives, lobbyists, and communications staff spent the next day in a slow-motion debate. Ms. Sandberg said she thought there was a good argument to take the video down under rules against disinformation, but she left it at that. Mr. Kaplan and members of the policy team said it was important to appear neutral to politics and to be consistent with the company’s promise of free speech.

Ms. Sandberg would have been the senior woman in those discussions, as she was in any discussion at the company, and probably one of few women involved in the decision making at all. After their 2015 visit, Ms. Pelosi had expressed admiration for Ms. Sandberg’s work on behalf of women, and both knew well the additional scrutiny and attacks that female leaders can face. That the video existed at all and had spread so widely, often with gendered commentary, was also a testament to that.

The conversations became tortured exercises in “what-if” arguments. Mr. Zuckerberg and other members of the policy team pondered if the video could be defined as parody. If so, it could be an important contribution to political debate. Some communications employees noted that the same kind of spoof of Ms. Pelosi could have appeared on the television show “Saturday Night Live.” Others on the security team pushed back and said viewers clearly knew that “S.N.L.” was a comedy show and that the video of Ms. Pelosi was not watermarked as a parody.

Employees involved in the discussions were frustrated, but they emphasized that a policy for just one video would also affect billions of others, so the decision could not be rushed.

“It’s easy to criticize the process, but there isn’t a playbook for making policy decisions that make everyone happy, particularly when attempting to apply standards consistently,” Ms. Lever, the spokeswoman, said this week.

On Friday, 48 hours after the video surfaced, Mr. Zuckerberg made the final call. He said to keep it up.

Ms. Sandberg did not try to explain, or justify, the decision to Ms. Pelosi’s staff.

Later that year, Mr. Zuckerberg had a chance to publicly elaborate on the thinking behind that decision and others like it. On Oct. 17, he appeared at Georgetown University’s campus in Washington to deliver his first major public address on Facebook’s responsibility as a platform for speech.

He described Facebook as part of a new force that he called “the fifth estate,” which provided an unfiltered and unedited voice to its 2.7 billion users. He warned against shutting down dissenting views. The cacophony of voices would, of course, be discomfiting, but debate was essential to a healthy democracy. The public would act as the fact checkers of a politician’s lies. It wasn’t the role of a business to make such consequential governance decisions, he said.

Ms. Lever added recently that the company did not want to act unilaterally to make these choices and would welcome regulations from legislators.

Immediately after the Georgetown address, civil rights leaders, academics, journalists and consumer groups panned the speech, saying political lies had the potential to foment violence.

An aide to Ms. Sandberg fired off a series of angry emails about the Georgetown speech to her. She wrote back that he should forward the emails to Nick Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister who had become Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communications, and others who might influence Mr. Zuckerberg’s thinking. Her inaction infuriated colleagues and some of her lieutenants — his decisions, after all, were in direct contradiction to the core values she promoted in public. There was little she could do to change Mr. Zuckerberg’s mind, Ms. Sandberg confided to those close to her.

Just a few days after Mr. Zuckerberg told the subdued Georgetown crowd that Facebook would not curtail political speech, Ms. Sandberg appeared at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit in Los Angeles, and sat for an interview with Katie Couric. The two women had once bonded over their shared experience of being widowed young; Ms. Couric had lost her husband to colon cancer at age 42. Ms. Sandberg’s husband, Dave Goldberg, died in May 2015, and Ms. Couric had supported Ms. Sandberg’s 2017 book about coping with that loss, “Option B,” with interviews at public events.

But during their nearly hourlong conversation, Ms. Couric grilled Ms. Sandberg about bullying on Instagram and Facebook. She pushed her to defend Facebook against calls to break up the company and asked skeptically if the promised privacy reforms would be effective.

Several times, Ms. Sandberg conceded that the issues were difficult and that Facebook felt responsible, but she stopped short of saying that the company would take the type of decisive action demanded by civil liberty groups and academics.

Toward the end of the conversation, Ms. Couric posed the question that few were bold enough to ask Ms. Sandberg directly: “Since you are so associated with Facebook, how worried are you about your personal legacy as a result of your association with this company?” Ms. Sandberg didn’t skip a beat as she reverted to the message she had delivered from her first days at Facebook.

“I really believe in what I said about people having voice. There are a lot of problems to fix. They are real, and I have a real responsibility to do it. I feel honored to do it,” she said, with a steady voice and calm smile. She later told aides that inside, she was burning with humiliation.

Good for the World or Facebook?

Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Zuckerberg still meet at the start and end of each week, signaling to the company, and to the outside world, that they remain in lock step. Friends and Facebook executives speak to their personal closeness.

When they first met, Mr. Zuckerberg realized that Ms. Sandberg could excel at the parts of the C.E.O. job that he found boring. In the 13 years they’ve been working together, Mr. Zuckerberg now understands that he cannot outsource some of those duties.

At least not to another person. He is concerned about the company’s position in the world, but he generally is less swayed by Ms. Sandberg’s view, or anyone else’s.

Instead, he relies on two internal metrics, known internally as GFW, Good-for-the-World, and CAU, Cares-about-the-world. Facebook constantly polls its own users on whether they saw Facebook as one or both of those things.

Both the numbers plummeted, and remained low, after the revelations about Russian election interference and data harvesting by Cambridge Analytica. For years, they failed to rise, no matter how many promises Facebook made to do better and how many new security programs the company started. Mr. Zuckerberg, who received the numbers weekly, told aides that eventually the tide would turn and people would start to see Facebook differently.

Privately, executives told each other there were other numbers that mattered more.

On Jan. 27, 2021, just weeks after the riots in Washington, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg joined an earnings call with investment analysts.

In yet another about-face decision on speech, Mr. Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was planning to de-emphasize political content in the News Feed because, he said, “people don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our service.”

He was still making calls on the biggest policy decisions. The announcement was also a tacit acknowledgment of Facebook’s yearslong failure to control hazardous rhetoric running roughshod on the social network, particularly during the election. “We’re going to continue to focus on helping millions of more people participate in healthy communities,” he added.

Then Ms. Sandberg shifted the focus to earnings. “This was a strong quarter for our business,” she said. Revenue for the fourth quarter was up 33 percent, to $28 billion, “the fastest growth rate in over two years.”



Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang cover technology for The New York Times. They are the authors of the forthcoming book “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination,” from which this article is adapted.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/business/mark-zuckerberg-sheryl-sandberg-facebook.html

Judge: Air Force mostly at fault in 2017 Texas church attack

A federal judge wrote that the Air Force was “60% responsible" for the deaths and injuries at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
07/07/2021 12:17 PM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/07/judge-air-force-fault-2017-texas-church-attack-498557

AUSTIN, Texas — A federal judge has ruled that the U.S. Air Force is mostly responsible for a former serviceman killing more than two dozen people at a Texas church in 2017 because it failed to submit his criminal history into a database, which should have prevented him from purchasing firearms.

U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez in San Antonio wrote in a ruling signed Wednesday that the Air Force was “60% responsible" for the deaths and injuries at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs. The attack remains the worst mass shooting in Texas history.

Devin Kelley had served nearly five years in the Air Force before being discharged in 2014 for bad conduct, after he was convicted of assaulting a former wife and stepson, cracking the child’s skull. The Air Force has publicly acknowledged that the felony conviction for domestic violence, had it been put into the FBI database, could have prevented Kelley from buying guns from licensed firearms dealers, and also from possessing body armor.

“Its failure proximately caused the deaths and injuries of Plaintiffs at the Sutherland Springs First Baptist Church,” Rodriguez wrote.

Kelley opened fire during a Sunday service at the church of Sutherland Springs in November 2017. Authorities put the official death toll at 26 because one of the 25 people killed was pregnant. Kelley died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound after he was shot and chased by two men who heard the gunfire at the church.

The lawsuit against the federal government was brought by family members of the victims. Rodriguez ordered a later trial to assess damages owed to the families.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/07/judge-air-force-fault-2017-texas-church-attack-498557

The Smoke Comes Every Year.

Sugar Companies Say the Air Is Safe.

by Lulu Ramadan, The Palm Beach Post, and Ash Ngu and Maya Miller, ProPublica. July 8, 2021
https://projects.propublica.org/black-snow/

To harvest more than half of America’s cane sugar, billion-dollar companies set fire to fields, a money-saving practice that’s being banned by other countries. Some residents say they struggle to breathe, so we started tracking air quality.

In the fall of 2019, brothers Donovan and Jayceon Sonson spent eight weeks lying in hospital beds, struggling to breathe.

The young boys, then 5 and 6 years old, had developed upper respiratory infections on top of the severe asthma they’d had since they were toddlers.

Anytime they left their apartment, they took their “medicine box,” a plastic bin filled with red inhalers, prescribed steroids and a pink nebulizer shaped like a kitten. When the hospital released the boys just before Thanksgiving, doctors sent the family home with guidance on how to protect the boys from future episodes.

Among the instructions: “Keep your child away from secondhand smoke.”

Thelma Freeman, the boys’ grandmother, stared at the note. She didn’t smoke. Neither did anyone in her home. The problem was all around her, she thought, coming not from smokers but from an industry that provides thousands of jobs in her town: sugar.

Freeman and her grandkids are among the 31,000 people who live in the towns that dot the Glades, an agricultural region in Florida defined by its vast cane fields that produce more than half the nation’s cane sugar.

Nearly every day during the winter and spring, sugar companies set fire to dozens of cane fields across western Palm Beach County. These burns are a harvesting method that rids the plant of its outer leaves but releases harmful smoke. Locals call the resulting ash that blankets their community “black snow.”

Each burn lasted less than an hour, but an average of 25 fields were burned every day in the four months analyzed by The Palm Beach Post and ProPublica. The practice disproportionately affects residents in Pahokee, Belle Glade and South Bay, where about a third of the population lives in poverty. The smoke rarely reaches wealthier, whiter cities like West Palm Beach.

For years, residents in Florida’s heartland have complained about the smoke and ash that blanket this patchwork of mostly Black and Hispanic communities.

And for years, state health and environmental officials have said the air is healthy to breathe. So has the sugar industry, the largest employer in the region, with more than 12,000 workers during the six-month harvest season.

That battle has now escalated in federal court. In perhaps the largest challenge to the multibillion-dollar industry in years, Glades residents are suing sugar companies, alleging that pollution from cane burning damages residents’ health. The industry denies those claims, arguing as recently as November that a government-run air monitor in Belle Glade showed the area is in compliance with the Clean Air Act, the landmark 1970 law aimed at protecting the public from harmful pollution.

The problem? State officials found that the monitor was malfunctioning as far back as eight years ago, and, as of last week, it was still not fit to gauge Clean Air Act compliance. Documents obtained through public records requests show that the Florida Department of Environmental Protection flagged the faulty monitor in 2013, telling their federal counterparts that it didn’t meet strict accuracy standards and wasn’t suited to determine whether the air quality meets the requirements outlined in the federal law.

The monitor could cost the state as much as $35,000 to replace. But even if it were working properly, the state and federal framework for measuring air quality fails to capture the impact of sugar cane burning, an investigation by The Palm Beach Post and ProPublica found.

That’s because federal regulators rely on 24-hour and annual averages to track a type of particulate matter — an inhalable mixture of pollutants and debris tied to heart and lung disease — that is emitted by cane burning. These averages sometimes obscure short-term pollution, a defining feature of Florida’s harvesting process.

The Post and ProPublica set out to see what the air is like in the Glades during the burns. The reporters analyzed cane burn permits and plume data from the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which projected where smoke would travel. They also worked closely with six experts in air-quality and public health from universities across the country, including three in Florida, as well as with residents, to place outdoor air sensors that measured particulate matter. The measurements were not intended to assess compliance with the Clean Air Act. Rather, the goal was to see if residents were being exposed to pollutants in ways that current monitoring systems would miss.

They were.

The sensors captured repeated spikes in pollution on days when the state authorized cane burning and projected that the smoke would blow toward them, our analysis found. While particulate matter can come from a variety of sources, air monitoring experts said the findings suggest the pollution is likely coming from cane burns. These short-term spikes, lasting less than an hour, often reached four times the average pollution levels in the area. Health and air-quality experts added that this exposure poses health risks both in the short term and over the course of the monthslong burn season.

Other major sugar-producing countries are moving to end or sharply limit cane burning, acknowledging that the practice is harmful because it subjects those nearby to many of the same pollutants that come from smoking tobacco, albeit with less intensity than inhaling from a filtered cigarette. Brazil, which produces more than 20% of the world’s cane sugar, has been phasing out the practice for more than a decade after researchers there raised concerns about particulate matter emissions.

Each year in the United States, tens of thousands of people die prematurely from exposure to particulate matter. People of color are disproportionately exposed, according to research published in April.

Palm Beach County emits more particulate matter from agricultural fires than any other county nationwide, according to Environmental Protection Agency emissions estimates from 2017, the latest year for which data is available. Those emissions are almost entirely byproducts of cane burning: 98.5% of the agricultural acreage burned in the county since 2010 has been for sugar cane, according to data from the state agriculture department.

The experts who reviewed The Post and ProPublica’s sensor analysis said the findings suggest policymakers should bolster air monitoring in the Glades, begin considering shorter-term spikes in pollution that are not currently built into federal air standards, and study community exposure to these pollutants.

As residents and the industry battle in court, federal officials also have been eyeing changes. Under former President Donald Trump’s administration, the EPA considered — and rejected — strengthening regulation of particulate matter, which could have included a lower threshold for 24-hour averages or requirements for measuring in shorter durations. In June, President Joe Biden’s EPA announced that it would review that decision, acknowledging that evidence shows long- and short-term exposure to particulate matter can harm people’s health, “leading to heart attacks, asthma attacks, and premature death.”

But while the federal agency weighs more protections for public health, Florida lawmakers moved in a different direction this spring, passing legislation to protect farmers from legal challenges over air pollution, with some elected officials arguing that there’s no evidence of poor air quality in the state’s sugar-growing region. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law in April.
...
MUCH MORE
https://projects.propublica.org/black-snow/

Japan to declare virus emergency lasting through Olympics

By MARI YAMAGUCHI
today
https://apnews.com/article/japan-coronavirus-pandemic-olympic-games-2020-tokyo-olympics-sports-f757eef4c7b7a606232145444a52e57f

TOKYO (AP) — Japan is set to place Tokyo under a state of emergency that would last through the Olympics, fearing an ongoing COVID-19 surge will multiply during the Games.

At a meeting with experts Thursday morning, government officials proposed a plan to issue a state of emergency in Tokyo from next Monday to Aug. 22. The Summer Olympics, already delayed a year by the pandemic, begin July 23 and close Aug. 8.

The Games already will take place without foreign spectators, but the planned six-week state of emergency likely ends chances of a local audience. A decision about fans is expected later Thursday when local organizers meet with the International Olympic Committee and other representatives.

Tokyo is currently under less-stringent measures that focus on shortened hours for bars and restaurants but have proven less effective at slowing the spread of the coronavirus.

Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga is to formally announce the emergency plans later Thursday, hours after IOC President Thomas Bach was to land in Tokyo. Bach must self-isolate for three days in the IOC’s five-star hotel in the Japanese capital before heading to Hiroshima, where heavy rain is threatening flooding.

The upcoming emergency will be the fourth for Tokyo since the pandemic began and is a last-minute change of plan made late Wednesday after a meeting with experts who warned strongly against the government’s soft approach.

A main focus of the emergency is a request for bars, restaurants and karaoke parlors serving alcohol to close. A ban on serving alcohol is a key step to tone down Olympic-related festivities and keep people from drinking and partying. Tokyo residents are expected to face stay-home requests and watch the Games on TV from home.

“How to stop people enjoying the Olympics from going out for drinks is a main issue,” Health Minister Norihisa Tamura said.

Tokyo reported 920 new cases on Wednesday, up from 714 last week and its highest since 1,010 on May 13. The figure is in line with experts’ earlier estimate that daily cases in Tokyo could hit 1,000 before the Games and could spike into thousands in August.

Kazuhiro Tateta, a Toho University infectious diseases expert, noted an earlier state of emergency in the spring came too late to prevent hospitals in Osaka from overflowing with patients and said another delay should not be allowed.

Ryuji Wakita, director-general of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, noted that two-thirds of Japan’s cases are from the Tokyo region and “our concern is the spread of the infections to neighboring areas.”

Experts also noted cases among younger, unvaccinated people are rising as Japan’s inoculation drive loses steam due to supply uncertainty.

Just 15% of Japanese are fully vaccinated, low compared to 47.4% in the United States and almost 50% in Britain. Nationwide, Japan has had about 810,000 infections and nearly 14,900 deaths.

“The infections are in their expansion phase and everyone in this country must firmly understand the seriousness of it,” Dr. Shigeru Omi, a top government medical adviser, told reporters.

He urged authorities to quickly take tough measures ahead of the Olympics with summer vacations approaching. “The period from July to September is the most critical time for Japan’s COVID-19 measures,” Omi said.

https://apnews.com/article/japan-coronavirus-pandemic-olympic-games-2020-tokyo-olympics-sports-f757eef4c7b7a606232145444a52e57f

Trump charged Secret Service nearly $10,200 in May for agents’ rooms

By David A. Fahrenthold
July 8, 2021|Updated today at 5:34 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-secret-service-charges/2021/07/07/7f88043a-df2e-11eb-b507-697762d090dd_story.html

Former president Donald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., charged the Secret Service nearly $10,200 for guest rooms used by his protective detail during Trump’s first month at the club this summer, newly released spending records show.

The records — released by the Secret Service in response to a public-records request — show that the ex-president has continued a habit he began in first days of his presidency: charging rent to the agency that protects his life.

Since Trump left office in January, U.S. taxpayers have paid Trump’s businesses more than $50,000 for rooms used by Secret Service agents, records show.

The Washington Post reported previously that Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club — where he lived from January, when he left the White House, to early May — charged the Secret Service more than $40,000 so that agents could use a room near Trump.

These newly released records provide the first proof that, when Trump moved north to Bedminster, the invoices kept coming.

The Secret Service released a bill it paid to Trump Bedminster in May, totaling $10,199.52. The agency redacted the nightly rate, but the dollar amount itself offered a clue: The bill was an exact multiple of what Trump Bedminster charged the Secret Service while Trump was still in office: $566.64 per night for a four-bedroom “cottage” on the property.

At that rate, the bill from May 2021 would have paid for 18 nights in the cottage. Trump arrived in Bedminster on May 9.

The bill from May is the only one that the Secret Service has released from Trump’s time at Bedminster this year. But the agency released another document showing that charges probably continued after that: It released an internal document called a “hotel request” form, covering the period from May 28 to July 1. The form showed that agents planned to rent rooms at Bedminster through at least the start of July.

Separately, the Secret Service also released other bills showing $3,400 in charges from Trump Bedminster before Trump himself arrived. Those receipts — from January, February and early May — did not say why the Secret Service was at the club.

Neither Trump’s family business — the Trump Organization — nor Trump’s political operation responded to a request for comment.

A Secret Service spokeswoman declined to comment, saying the agency does not talk about protective operations.

Legal experts have said there are no laws to prohibit Trump’s company from charging the Secret Service rent at his properties, either during or after his presidency. The rate is effectively up to him: By law, the Secret Service can pay whatever it must to rent rooms near its protectees for use as command posts and meeting rooms.

“The service is more focused on the protective necessity, as opposed to, ‘How much is it going to cost after the fact?’ There’s nothing they can do” if rates are high, said Jonathan Wackrow, a longtime Secret Service agent who now works for the consulting firm Teneo. “It’s a question of not, ‘Can they do it?’ but ‘Should they be charging that much?’?”

The scale of Trump’s charges appears to be unusual among recent presidents and vice presidents.

In recent history, The Post could find only one other protected person who had charged the Secret Service rent: Joe Biden. As vice president, Biden charged the Secret Service $2,200 per month to use a cottage on his property in Delaware. In total, Biden received $171,600 between 2011 and 2017.

Biden has not charged the Secret Service rent since becoming president in January, a White House spokesman said.

The charges from Trump’s company exceeded Biden’s lifetime total by March 2017, Trump’s third month in office, according to records obtained by The Post. Trump’s company charged the State Department to host summits with foreign leaders, the Secret Service for rooms while protecting Trump and his children, and the Defense Department for aides accompanying the president to Mar-a-Lago and to his Irish golf club.

In all, Trump’s company charged the government more than $2.5 million during his presidency, according to a Post analysis of federal spending records.

It is unclear how the Trump Organization set the rates that it charges the Secret Service at Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster. Before The Post revealed the extent of the charges, Trump’s son Eric said in 2019 that the rate was “like 50 bucks” per night.

The Post has now examined charges for more than 3,600 nights at Trump properties and found no rates that low. Instead, at Mar-a-Lago, rates ranged from $396.15 to $650 per room. At Bedminster, the rate for the four-room “Sarazen Cottage” was $566.64.

As former president, Trump is entitled to a government pension of $219,000 per year; the General Services Administration said he had received $99,323 of it as of this week.

Jordan Libowitz, of the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said that — in light of Trump’s other assets and income — he should consider allowing the Secret Service to stay at his properties free.

“He obviously should have Secret Service protection,” Libowitz said. However, Libowitz said, “there’s no reason that his company should not do the patriotic thing, and just comp the government for the security it is providing him.”


By David Fahrenthold
David A. Fahrenthold is a reporter covering the Trump family and its business interests. He has been at The Washington Post since 2000, and previously covered Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the environment and the D.C. police. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-secret-service-charges/2021/07/07/7f88043a-df2e-11eb-b507-697762d090dd_story.html

Michael Avenatti faces sentencing in Nike extortion scheme

By LARRY NEUMEISTER
today
https://apnews.com/article/michael-avenatti-nba-sentencing-sports-health-30982af5b85ce95fc8baf9704191f5ed

NEW YORK (AP) — Michael Avenatti, the brash California lawyer who publicly sparred with then-President Donald Trump before criminal fraud charges on two coasts disrupted his rapid ascent to fame, faces sentencing in one of those cases Thursday.

Over a year after a jury concluded Avenatti tried to extort millions of dollars from Nike by threatening the company with bad publicity, U.S. District Judge Paul G. Gardephe will sentence him in Manhattan. Avenatti was convicted on charges that he tried to extort up to $25 million from the Beaverton, Oregon-based sportswear giant as he represented a Los Angeles youth basketball league organizer upset Nike had ended its league sponsorship.

Regardless of the outcome, Avenatti faces trials in Los Angeles later this year on fraud charges and a separate trial next year in Manhattan, where he is charged with cheating his former client — the porn star Stormy Daniels — of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Avenatti, 50, represented Daniels in 2018 in lawsuits against Trump, appearing often on cable news programs to disparage the Republican as he explored running for president against Trump in 2020, boasting he’d “have no problem raising money.” Daniels said a decade-earlier tryst with Trump led her to be paid $130,000 by Trump’s personal lawyer in 2016 to stay silent. Trump denied the affair.

Talk of those aspirations evaporated when prosecutors in Los Angeles and New York charged him with fraud in March 2019. Prosecutors in Los Angeles said he was enjoying a $200,000-a-month lifestyle while cheating clients of millions of dollars and the Internal Revenue Service of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Charges alleging he cheated Daniels of proceeds from a book deal followed weeks later. Avenatti pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Prosecutors have requested a “very substantial” sentence, citing the U.S. Probation Department’s recommendation of an eight-year prison term. Avenatti’s lawyers said six months in prison and a year of home detention was enough punishment.

On Tuesday, Gardephe rejected a request by Avenatti’s lawyers to toss out his conviction in the Nike case on attempted extortion and honest services fraud charges. The judge wrote that evidence showed that Avenatti “devised an approach to Nike that was designed to enrich himself” rather than address his client’s objectives.

In written sentencing arguments, prosecutors said Avenatti tried to enrich himself by “weaponizing his public profile” to try to force Nike to submit to his demands.

In a victim impact statement, Nike’s lawyers said Avenatti did considerable harm to the company by falsely trying to link it to a scandal in which bribes were paid to the families of NBA-bound college basketball players to steer them to powerhouse programs. An employee of Adidas, a Nike competitor, was convicted in that prosecution.

The lawyers said Avenatti threatened to do billions of dollars of damage to Nike and then falsely tweeted that criminal conduct at Nike reached the “highest levels.”

Avenatti’s former client, Gary Franklin Jr., said in a statement submitted by prosecutors that Avenatti’s action had “devastated me financially, professionally, and emotionally.” Franklin was expected in court Thursday.

In their presentence submission, Avenatti’s lawyers said their client had suffered enough, citing enormous public shame and a difficult stint in jail last year that ended after lawyers said he was particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus.

Although prosecutors asked Gardephe to impose a $1 million restitution order to help cover Nike’s legal expenses, Avenatti’s attorneys cited the lack of financial losses as a reason for leniency.

“There was no financial loss to any victims so there is no restitution in this case,” they wrote. “The fact that a white collar federal criminal case was brought despite this fact is itself an important mitigating factor.”

https://apnews.com/article/michael-avenatti-nba-sentencing-sports-health-30982af5b85ce95fc8baf9704191f5ed

Fiery explosion erupts on ship at major global port in Dubai

By ISABEL DEBRE and AYA BATRAWY
today
https://apnews.com/article/dubai-explosion-0a75a2a73e728de8a9f2b975e2f3b279

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A fiery explosion erupted on a container ship anchored in Dubai at one of the world’s largest ports late Wednesday, authorities said, sending tremors across the commercial hub of the United Arab Emirates.

There were no immediate reports of casualties, and it was unclear what triggered the blast.

The blaze sent up giant orange flames from a vessel at the Jebel Ali Port, the busiest in the Middle East. Jebel Ali sits on the eastern side of the Arabian Peninsula and is also the busiest port of call for American warships outside the U.S.

The combustion unleashed a shock wave through the city of Dubai, causing walls and windows to shake in neighborhoods as far as 25 kilometers (15 miles) away from the port. Residents filmed from their high-rises as a fiery ball illuminated the night sky. The blast was powerful enough to be seen from space by satellite.

Some 2 1/2 hours after the blast, Dubai’s civil defense teams said they had brought the fire under control and started the “cooling process.” Authorities posted footage on social media of firefighters dousing giant shipping containers. The glow of the blaze remained visible in the background as civil defense crews worked to contain the fire.

The extent of damage to the sprawling port and surrounding cargo was not immediately clear. Footage shared on social media of the aftermath showed charred containers, ashes and littered debris.

The sheer force and visibility of the explosion suggested the presence of a combustible substance. Dubai authorities told the Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya TV that the crew had evacuated in time and that the fire appeared to have started in one of the containers holding flammable material, without elaborating.

Seeking to downplay the explosion, Mona al-Marri, director general of the Dubai Media Office, told Al-Arabiya the incident “could happen anywhere in the world” and that authorities were investigating the cause.

The Jebel Ali Port at the northern end of Dubai is the largest man-made deep-water harbor in the world and serves cargo from the Indian subcontinent, Africa and Asia. The port is not only a critical global cargo hub, but a lifeline for Dubai and surrounding emirates, serving as the point of entry for essential imports.

Dubai authorities did not identify the stricken ship beyond saying it was a small vessel with a capacity of 130 containers.

Ship tracker MarineTraffic showed a fleet of small support vessels surrounding a docked container ship called the Ocean Trader flagged in Comoros. Footage from the scene rebroadcast by the UAE’s state-run WAM news agency showed firefighters hosing down a vessel bearing paint and logo that corresponds to the Ocean Trader, operated by the Dubai-based Inzu Ship Charter.

The Ocean Trader docked at Jebel Ali Port at midday Wednesday. Ship tracking data showed the vessel had been sailing up and down the coast of the UAE since April. The United Nations ship database identified the vessel’s owners as Sash Shipping corporation. Sash and Inzu Ship Charter did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Operated by the Dubai-based DP World, Jebel Ali Port boasts a handling capacity of over 22 million containers and sprawling terminals that can berth some of the world’s largest ships. Port officials said they were “taking all necessary measures to ensure that the normal movement of vessels continues without any disruption.”

State-owned DP World describes Jebel Ali Port as a “gateway hub” and a “vital link in the global trade network” that connects eastern and western markets. The company did not immediately respond to request for comment on the blast.

___

Associated Press writer Jon Gambrell in Hamilton, Ohio, contributed to this report.

https://apnews.com/article/dubai-explosion-0a75a2a73e728de8a9f2b975e2f3b279

More states agree to settlement plan for opioid-maker Purdue

By GEOFF MULVIHILL
today
https://apnews.com/article/business-opioids-health-government-and-politics-2bb248ad904a0ef737c3645a73f001b6

More than a dozen states have dropped their longstanding objections to OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma’s reorganization plan, edging the company closer to resolving its bankruptcy case and transforming itself into a new entity that helps combat the U.S. opioid epidemic through its own profits.

The agreement from multiple state attorneys general, including those who had most aggressively opposed Purdue’s original settlement proposal, was disclosed late Wednesday night in a filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in White Plains, N.Y. It followed weeks of intense mediations that resulted in changes to Purdue’s original exit plan.

The new settlement terms call for Purdue to make tens of millions of internal documents public, a step several attorneys general, including those for Massachusetts and New York, had demanded as a way to hold the company accountable.

Attorneys general for both states were among the 15 who agreed to the new plan, joining about half the states that had previously approved it. Nine states and the District of Columbia did not sign on.

Purdue sought bankruptcy protection in 2019 as a way to settle about 3,000 lawsuits it faced from state and local governments and other entities. They claimed the company’s continued marketing of its powerful prescription painkiller contributed to a crisis that has been linked to nearly 500,000 deaths in the U.S. over the last two decades.

The court filing came from a mediator appointed by the bankruptcy court and shows that members of the wealthy Sackler family who own Purdue agreed to increase their cash contribution to the settlement by $50 million. They also will allow $175 million held in Sackler family charities to go toward abating the crisis.

In all, Sackler family members are contributing $4.5 billion in cash and assets in the charitable funds toward the settlement.

The agreement also prohibits the Sackler family from obtaining naming rights related to their charitable donations until they have paid all the money owed under the settlement and have given up all business interests related to the manufacturing or sale of opioids.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, who had been the first attorney general to sue members of the Sackler family, praised the modified deal in a statement early Thursday. She pointed to the $90 million her state would receive and the way the company could waive attorney-client privilege to release hundreds of thousands of confidential communications with lawyers about its tactics for selling opioids and other matters.

“While I know this resolution does not bring back loved ones or undo the evil of what the Sacklers did, forcing them to turn over their secrets by providing all the documents, forcing them to repay billions, forcing the Sacklers out of the opioid business, and shutting down Purdue will help stop anything like this from ever happening again,” Healey said.

Attempts late Wednesday and early Thursday to reach representatives of the Sacklers, Purdue and other attorneys general were unsuccessful.

Purdue’s plan also calls for members of the Sackler family to give up ownership of the Connecticut-based company as part of a sweeping deal it says could be worth $10 billion over time. That includes the value of overdose-reversal drugs the company is planning to produce.

Money from the deal is to go to government entities, which have agreed to use it to address the opioid crisis, along with individual victims and their families.

The broad outlines of the plan are similar to what they were nearly two years ago when Purdue first sought bankruptcy protection.

Most groups representing various creditors, including victims and local governments, had grudgingly supported the plan. But state attorneys general until now were deeply divided, with about half of them supporting the plan and half fighting against it.

The attorneys general who had opposed the plan said they didn’t like the idea of having to rely on profits from the continued sale of prescription painkillers to combat the opioid epidemic. They also said the deal didn’t do enough to hold Sackler family members accountable or to make public documents that could help explain the company’s role in the crisis.

Last month, Massachusetts’ Healey told The Associated Press, “The Sacklers are not offering to pay anything near what they should for the harm and devastation caused to families and communities around this country.”

The support from additional states comes less than two weeks before the deadline to object formally to Purdue’s reorganization plan and about a month before a hearing on whether it should be accepted.

With just nine states and the District of Columbia remaining opposed to the plan, it makes it more likely the federal bankruptcy judge will confirm the deal.

Activists also dislike it, and two Democratic members of Congress have asked the U.S. Department of Justice to oppose it. Reps. Carolyn Maloney of New York and Mark DeSaulnier of California said the deal would wrongly grant protection from civil lawsuits to members of the Sackler family. The Justice Department has not weighed in.

Last year, the company pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges that included conspiracy to defraud the United States and violating anti-kickback laws. Under the deal, the company agreed to pay $225 million to the federal government. Penalties of more than $8 billion were to be waived if the company enters into a bankruptcy settlement that works to fight the opioid crisis.

In a separate civil settlement announced at the same time, Sackler family members agreed to pay the federal government $225 million, while admitting no wrongdoing.

The opioid crisis includes overdoses involving prescription drugs as well as illegal ones such as heroin and fentanyl. Purdue’s bankruptcy case is the highest-profile piece of complicated nationwide litigation against drugmakers, distribution companies and pharmacies.

Trials against other companies in the industry are playing out in California, New York and West Virginia, and negotiations are continuing to settle many of the claims.

https://apnews.com/article/business-opioids-health-government-and-politics-2bb248ad904a0ef737c3645a73f001b6

Police capture, kill alleged assailants in assassination of Haitian president

By Rachel Pannett
July 8, 2021|Updated today at 3:57 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/08/haiti-president-assassinated/

Police killed four alleged assailants and arrested two others suspected of assassinating Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, in an attack that has escalated a spiraling political and security crisis in the impoverished Caribbean nation.

The gunmen have not been identified but Communications Minister Pradel Henriquez described them “foreigners.”

The motivation for Wednesday’s overnight attack is currently unknown. Moïse, 53, dissolved parliament in January 2020 and ruled by decree as opponents and protesters demanded that he step down. Armed gangs with unclear allegiances have seized control of growing portions of the country, terrorizing the population with kidnappings, rapes and killings.

“He had obviously many enemies,” said Robert Fatton, a politics professor and expert on Haiti from the University of Virginia. “There might have been some degree of complicity on the part of those protecting the president.”

His death raises questions around who is in charge of the country. Moïse had been due to install Ariel Henry, a neurologist, as prime minister on Wednesday after dismissing his predecessor Claude Joseph — the latest in a revolving door of prime ministers. It was Joseph who announced Moïse’s killing on Wednesday morning, and said he was now the head of Haiti’s government.

However, in a separate Associated Press interview, Henry appeared to contradict Joseph. “It’s an exceptional situation. There is a bit of confusion,” he said. “I am the prime minister in office.”

The leadership vacuum is a potential powder keg in a nation grappling with deepening economic, political and social woes, with gang violence spiking in the capital Port-au-Prince, inflation spiraling, and food and fuel becoming scarcer in a country where 60% of the population makes less than $2 a day.

“The past 30 years have been one calamity after another and now it is getting more serious,” Fatton said. “We have two individuals vying for the position of prime minister. The economy is in terrible shape, the covid situation is deteriorating. No one is vaccinated. And then you have the security situation. The police are completely fragmented and some members of gangs are former police officers.”

The Supreme Court’s chief justice, who might be expected to help provide stability in a crisis, died recently of covid-19.

Fatton said Haiti — which was subject to a controversial U.N. stabilization mission between 2004 and 2017 — could face another such intervention if the security situation worsened after the president’s murder.

The U.N. Security Council condemned the assassination on Wednesday and called on all parties to “remain calm, exercise restraint and to avoid any act that could contribute to further instability.”

In a statement, the 15-member council “made an emphatic call on all political stakeholders in Haiti to refrain from any acts of violence and any incitement to violence.” It also called for the perpetrators to be brought to justice.

The council is due to be briefed on Moise’s assassination in a closed-door meeting on Thursday.

World leaders were quick to condemn the assassination on Wednesday, including President Biden who said he was “shocked and saddened to hear of the horrific assassination,” and condemned “this heinous act.”

Despite the turmoil, State Department spokesman Ned Price said it was still the view of the United States that elections this year should proceed. Moïse had been ruling by decree for more than a year after failing to hold elections, and the opposition demanded he step down in recent months, saying he was leading it toward yet another grim period of authoritarianism.

Jake Johnston, a Haiti specialist from the Center for Economic and Policy Research think tank, called for patience from the international community, saying a push for new elections in the current state of turmoil was an “extremely dangerous game.”

Rather than going through with rushed elections, Haitian civil society organizations had before Moïse’s assassination proposed a negotiated departure for the president and his replacement through a nonpartisan transitional government that could undertake needed reforms and eventually oversee a secure and credible transition back to democracy. The Biden administration, the U.N. Security Council, and Organization of American States had all rejected this path forward.

“There’s multiple crises happening here. There’s a massive food crisis. Hurricane season is approaching. The economic crisis is deepening,” said Johnston. “Rather than trying to rush in and solve the situation, international actors should exercise some patience.”

The assassination could pose another big test for the Biden administration, observers said, if it fans a wave of Haitian immigration.

Gang violence and the coronavirus outbreak are both worsening. A shooting rampage in the streets of Port-au-Prince last week left at least 15 people dead. At least 278 Haitians have been killed this year in attacks that have led some citizens to flee the capital, traveling by boat and plane to avoid dangerous, gang-controlled roads.


By Rachel Pannett
Rachel Pannett writes about Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific for The Washington Post. She joined the Post's foreign desk in 2021 after more than a decade with The Wall Street Journal, where she was deputy bureau chief for Australia and New Zealand. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/08/haiti-president-assassinated/

Trump’s latest ridiculous lawsuit shows how small he has become

Opinion by Paul Waldman
Columnist The Washington Post
July 7, 2021|Updated yesterday at 4:31 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/07/trumps-latest-ridiculous-lawsuit-shows-how-small-he-has-become/

For someone who filed thousands of lawsuits during his career in business, former president Donald Trump has been rather quiet on the legal front since he left office — particularly if you don’t count the criminal charges his business and associates are facing — with only a few minor suits filed here and there.

But that ended on Wednesday. Trump announced that he has filed suit against Facebook, Google, Twitter, and their CEOs, a class action that will at last seek justice for the people those companies have so grievously wronged, starting with Trump himself.

It sounds like something big: a former president, facing off against some of the biggest, most influential and most profitable tech companies in America. But, in fact, it’s puny and pathetic.

Perhaps because of his company’s struggles, Trump is returning to his roots as a small-time grifter, desperate to draw attention to himself and willing to do just about anything to grab a few extra bucks.

The lawsuit itself is so laughable that it gives away the game; not even Trump could think this is something he’d actually win.

His complaint against Facebook — presumably prepared by actual lawyers, hard as that may be to believe — claims that it “rises beyond that of a private company to that of a state actor. As such, Defendant is constrained by the First Amendment right to free speech in the censorship decisions it makes regarding its Users.”

It goes on to use the word “unconstitutional” again and again to describe Facebook’s decisions, despite the fact that only government action is or isn’t constitutional.

Facebook may be one of the most pernicious forces on Earth, but it’s a private company that set up rules for those who chose to use its service. Trump repeatedly violated those rules, and was kicked off. It really isn’t all that complicated, and it’s the furthest thing from “unconstitutional.

Of course, this is only the latest in a long-running series of complaints from conservatives about social media companies, which gained urgency when Facebook and Twitter removed Trump’s accounts after the 2020 election. Despite his repeated violations of their rules, they no doubt waited that long because they worried that banning him beforehand would look like they were trying to help him lose, despite all their services had done to enable his rise.

And it isn’t just Trump; other Republicans looking to establish their Trumpian bona fides have tried to use their own power to target these companies. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law banning social media companies from kicking politicians (i.e., Republicans who violate their terms of service) off their platforms; a federal judge quickly blocked the law, citing its blatant infringement of the companies’ right to create and enforce standards.

The Texas Senate passed a similar bill; after it failed in the House, Gov. Greg Abbott — like DeSantis, a Republican who might hope to ride the Trumpian base to the 2024 GOP presidential nomination — called a special session of his state’s legislature. Among the things it will consider:

Legislation safeguarding the freedom of speech by protecting social-media users from being censored by social-media companies based on the user’s expressed viewpoints, including by providing a legal remedy for those wrongfully excluded from a platform.

To repeat, even if the companies were just removing Republicans for being Republicans (which they aren’t), they would have every right to do so.

Ambitious politicians often stage stunts to appeal to their party’s base; the dumber they think that base is, the dumber the stunts will be. But Trump is a former president. No one expected him to discover dignity for the first time in his 75 years, yet so much of what he is doing these days is just petty and small.

And what is this suit about? It’s about money, of course. As soon as Trump announced the suit, fundraising texts were blasted out to his supporters.

“President Trump is filing a LAWSUIT against Facebook and Twitter for UNFAIR CENSORSHIP!” they read. “Please contribute IMMEDIATELY to INCREASE your impact by 500% and to get your name on the Donor List President Trump sees!”

Five dollars? Ten dollars? Whatever you can contribute to help Trump, get out that credit card and do it now.

This is a reminder of Trump’s truest nature: a sad small-timer telling everyone how big he is.

For much of his career, there has been no scam too small for him to pull and no product too cheesy for him to hawk, whether it was steaks or ties or vodka or vitamins. That last one involved people sending in a urine test, after which they’d receive a package of vitamins supposedly tuned to their unique metabolism. You can guess how it ended.

If it could bring in a few bucks, he did it. And that’s what he’s still doing.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/07/trumps-latest-ridiculous-lawsuit-shows-how-small-he-has-become/

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Trump files class action lawsuits targeting Facebook, Google and Twitter over ‘censorship’ of conservatives

One suit claims Facebook should be considered a 'state actor’ whose decisions are subject to First Amendment limits on government action

By Cat Zakrzewski and Rachel Lerman
July 7, 2021 at 4:45 p.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/07/trump-lawsuit-social-media/

Former president Donald Trump on Wednesday filed class-action lawsuits targeting Facebook, Google and Twitter and their CEOs, escalating his long-running battle with the companies following their suspensions of his accounts.

The suits were filed in the Southern District of Florida, and Trump said at a news conference in Bedminster, N.J., that they would call for the court to issue an order blocking the companies’ alleged censorship of the American people.

“We’re demanding an end to the shadowbanning, a stop to the silencing, and a stop to the blacklisting, banishing and canceling that you know so well,” Trump said.

The suits allege that the companies violated Trump’s First Amendment rights in suspending his accounts and argues that Facebook, in particular, no longer should be considered a private company but “a state actor” whose actions are constrained by First Amendment restrictions on government limitations on free speech. Traditionally, the First Amendment is thought to constrain only government actions, not those of private companies.

It also called for the court to strike down Section 230, a decades-old Internet law that protects tech companies from lawsuits over content moderation decisions.

The suits seek unspecified punitive damages.

Legal and tech experts immediately criticized the claims, warning they had little chance of succeeding. Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University Law School in California, said dozens of similar lawsuits have failed in court. He said Trump is “playing a standard media game. It fits into a broader pattern of the former president bringing lawsuits and then not vigorously pursuing them."

“There’s no way a plaintiff has been able to get traction in the past, and there’s no way that Trump is going to be able to get traction either,” he said.

Paul Barret, the deputy director of the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, said the lawsuits were dead on arrival.

“Trump has the First Amendment argument exactly wrong,” he said in a statement. "In fact, Facebook and Twitter themselves have a First Amendment free speech right to determine what speech their platforms project and amplify —and that right includes excluding speakers who incite violence, as Trump did in connection with the January 6 Capitol insurrection.”

The lawsuit is the latest chapter in Trump’s tumultuous relationship with the social media companies, which helped fuel his political rise and served as critical megaphones during his presidency until both platforms suspended his account, citing incitement of violence, in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Since then, Republicans have been escalating their political attacks on the Silicon Valley giants calling the move censorship.

Trump will face an uphill battle in court, under Section 230. The lawsuit also is likely to face claims that any action against the platforms violates their First Amendment rights; just last week, a federal judge cited the Constitution in blocking a Florida social media law from taking effect. The law would have levied fines against the tech companies if they suspended politicians in the run-up to an election.

Trump is suspended from Facebook for 2 years and can’t return until ‘risk to public safety is receded’

Twitter in January permanently suspended Trump’s account, citing the risk of further violence in the wake of the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol. Facebook has suspended the former president for two years, and has said it will only reinstate him if “the risk to public safety has receded.” Trump has had a dramatically lower reach online since. He recently shut down his blog after just 29 days following reports by The Washington Post and other outlets highlighting its underwhelming traffic.

Trump made clear that the lawsuits were retaliation for those moves.

“Of course there’s no better evidence that Big Tech is out of control than they banned the sitting president of the United States earlier this year,” he said at the news conference. “If they can do it to me they can do it to anyone.”

Facebook and Twitter declined to comment. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

But even before those dramatic rebukes, Trump railed against social media companies for allegedly censoring him and other conservatives. In May 2020, he signed an executive order that took aim at Section 230. President Biden revoked that order in May.

Trump accuses social media companies of ‘terrible bias’ at White House summit decried by critics

He also rallied his online allies at a “Social Media Summit” at the White House two years ago, where he railed against the tech companies for exhibiting “terrible bias” and silencing his supporters. That same year, the Trump administration launched a campaign to collect stories of alleged instances of political bias on social media.

Meanwhile, House Republicans on Wednesday also stepped up their attacks on Big Tech amid a bipartisan push to overhaul U.S. competition laws. Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee released a plan calling for an overhaul of Section 230 and faster court consideration of antitrust cases.


Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

1.6k Comments


By Cat Zakrzewski
Cat Zakrzewski is a technology policy reporter and authors the Washington Post's Technology 202 newsletter. Twitter
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By Rachel Lerman
Rachel Lerman covers breaking news in technology for The Washington Post. Twitter


https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/07/trump-lawsuit-social-media/

That is an excellent idea!

Coronavirus news - live: PM fails to deny millions will have to self-isolate as rising cases delay cancer surgery

Akshita Jain,Rory Sullivan @RorySullivan92
15 minutes ago
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/coronavirus-news-live-uk-vaccine-cases-b1879439.html

Boris Johnson has failed to deny that as many as 3.5 million people a week will be forced into self-isolation by his decision to scrap all coronavirus restrictions on 19 July.

The PM was pressed repeatedly in the Commons to spell out forecasts of deaths, hospitalisations and self-isolation orders, and was twice rebuked by Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle as he dodged the question.

Meanwhile, cancer patients at one of England’s largest hospital trusts face having their surgeries cancelled after rising numbers of coronavirus cases.

A medical Nobel laureate has warned the decision to lift rules such as mandatory face coverings could unleash a “vaccine-resistant variant”.

Sir Paul Nurse, the chief executive of the Francis Crick Institute, which has been heavily involved in Covid-19 research, questioned the wisdom of opening up “so much so fast” when infections were increasing rapidly.

He said the policy could “create a variant resistant to the vaccine”.

Experts are warning the policy change will condemn thousands of young Britons to long Covid, with the British Medical Association telling The Independent that up to 10,000 people could be struck down by the debilitating condition in the coming weeks.

Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran, chairperson of the all-party parliamentary group on coronavirus, said that long-Covid sufferers would be the “collateral damage” of Boris Johnson’s approach, and campaigners have written to health secretary Sajid Javid urging him to reconsider.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/coronavirus-news-live-uk-vaccine-cases-b1879439.html

FBI infiltrates group whose members wanted to test homemade bombs, surveil Capitol, secede from US, court records show

By Hannah Rabinowitz and Katelyn Polantz, CNN
Updated 1248 GMT (2048 HKT) July 7, 2021
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/07/politics/capitol-riot-bible-study-group-fbi-virginia/index.html

(CNN)The FBI has infiltrated a "Bible study" group in Virginia that after the January 6 riot had members discussing surveilling the US Capitol and their wish for secession from the US, and investigators closely followed one member's plans to build and test Molotov cocktails, according to recently unsealed court records.

The startling new case, landing six months after the pro-Trump insurrection, adds to the more than 500 Capitol riot federal criminal cases already in court and fleshes out what's known about the Justice Department's understanding of the continued interests of right-wing extremists to allegedly interfere with the US government and discuss with each other how to do so. The new case highlights one group member's apparent interest in a second American civil war.

The newly disclosed criminal case against Virginia man Fi Duong -- who also goes by "Monkey King" and "Jim," according to the court record -- arose after Duong interacted with undercover law enforcement officers several times on January 6 and into recent months, when the FBI ultimately gained access to his group in Virginia then accompanied him to an old jail as Duong allegedly pursued bomb-building.

Law enforcement's undercover interactions with Duong and his contacts since January are laid out in a 14-page statement from the FBI filed in court in recent days to support his arrest and initial charges.

January 6 charges

Duong was arrested last week, after the Justice Department charged him with four federal crimes, including entering the restricted grounds of the Capitol and obstruction of an official proceeding related to his alleged participation in the siege on January 6, according to his court record.

On January 6 in downtown Washington, Duong spoke with an undercover Metropolitan Police officer, according to his charging papers. Duong was dressed in black, in an alleged effort to disguise himself as the leftist group antifa, investigators say. During the conversation, Duong asked the undercover officer if they were a "patriot," and identified himself as an "operator," according to FBI records supporting his arrest.

As the riot progressed, the undercover officer saw him again, kneeling by a marble fence on a terrace of the Capitol -- an area that was normally restricted, according to court records. Investigators say Duong also videotaped himself inside the Capitol and was captured on the building's cameras wearing a white mask shaped like a wide grin.
The charges Duong faces are minor compared with what other right-wing extremists have faced for their alleged roles in the insurrection. He has not yet been formally indicted, and his charges could be expanded or rewritten in the coming weeks.

He has not been charged with crimes related to any post-January 6 conduct, including the alleged bomb planning.

Duong's attorney declined to comment on Tuesday.

He has not yet entered a plea.

FBI connects with group

In mid-January, an undercover agent from the FBI made contact with Duong, who was a member of a secretive "loosely affiliated, unnamed group of like-minded individuals" in Virginia, according to court records made public on Tuesday describing the additional allegations against him.

Though Duong put a member of the militia-like extremist group the Three Percenters in contact with his group, the FBI noted in court, his group appeared to exist separately from any known major groups previously identified as taking part in the Capitol riot.

Duong added the FBI agent to one of the group's encrypted chats, then the agent attended one of the group's meetings with Duong and other group members, according to the FBI.

"For me, right now, my goal is in building the infrastructure first, to then building up the individuals that will compose of this, perhaps long after I'm gone," investigators say Duong told the undercover FBI agent in March. He also said he had written a "manifesto," the court record says.
"If I get into a gun fight with the feds and I don't make it, I want to be able to transfer as much wisdom to my son as possible," investigators noted him saying, according to a court filing.

'Bible study' group

Duong told the FBI agent that his group tried to be "cloak and dagger" and wanted to "build resistances," according to court records. The agent then attended what the group members called a "Bible study" meeting at an Alexandria, Virginia, house in February, where the group members discussed the Bible and secession, weaponry and combat training, and using methods to make their communications private, according to court records.

One person in the group commented at the meeting about creating "a semi-autonomous region" for Virginia. "I like the Constitution; I don't like the Democratic sh*t this region keeps voting for," the person said, according to the FBI.

In early February, Duong and associates began to use encrypted messages to discuss gathering intelligence on the restricted zone that the National Guard had established around the Capitol, according to the FBI.
One group member, identified in court records as "Associate 1," said he took video of Capitol entrances and would share it over an encrypted messaging app. He later claimed to have deleted the video but said that Duong had a copy, according to the charging documents.
"How do we feel about an Intel run around the Capitol tonight?" the FBI said the person wrote. "Fewer of them out. Posture may be lowered. Good opportunity to expose weaknesses."

Collecting weapons

Duong had compiled a cache of weapons at his home in Alexandria, investigators say, including an AK-47 and five boxes full of materials to make and test Molotov cocktails.

At one group meeting at Duong's house in May, the undercover agent saw five cardboard boxes filled with about 50 glass bottles, and heard him and another person discuss what they could fill them with to make explosives, according to the court papers.

The agent later asked Duong more about the Molotov
cocktails and his plans for them, keeping tabs on interest he had in testing them. Places they discussed included a rock quarry in West Virginia, Duong's backyard or at a former prison in Virginia, according to the court record.

Ultimately, Duong and the undercover FBI agent met another undercover agent in mid-June at the former prison to discuss testing homemade bombs, the FBI wrote in its statement supporting Duong's arrest. Duong asked them about holding training at the site, too, according to the FBI.

"Give it about another three weeks," Duong told one of the undercover agents, as they were leaving the jail site, about his plans for testing. "Money's really tight right now. I gotta have a few boring weekends, stay at home and no do sh*t."

Later that day, Duong riffed to the undercover FBI agent about the cost of peace versus standing one's ground.

"We're not a point where people are out in the street rioting. It's coming soon. I'd give it about another six weeks...whatever supplies you can get now, get 'em now," Duong told the undercover FBI agent as they left the old jail, according to the court record.

Duong appeared for the first time last Friday in federal court in DC. A judge released him from detention, after the Justice Department agreed he could be released, according to his court record.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/07/politics/capitol-riot-bible-study-group-fbi-virginia/index.html

“Congresswoman Bush said two really dumb things,” Watters said. Emboldened, he continued: “She says this land was stolen. This land wasn’t stolen. We won this land on the battlefield and we bought it, right? We purchased Spain – I mean we purchased Florida from Spain. We have the receipts. What, do you want to give Florida back to Spain?”

The U.S. acquires Spanish Florida

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-u-s-acquires-spanish-florida

Spain’s hold on Florida was tenuous in the years after American independence, and numerous boundary disputes developed with the United States. In 1819, after years of negotiations, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams achieved a diplomatic coup with the signing of the Florida Purchase Treaty, which officially put Florida into U.S. hands at no cost beyond the U.S. assumption of some $5 million of claims by U.S. citizens against Spain. Formal U.S. occupation began in 1821, and General Andrew Jackson, the hero of the War of 1812, was appointed military governor. Florida was organized as a U.S. territory in 1822 and was admitted into the Union as a slave state in 1845.

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Article Title
The U.S. acquires Spanish Florida

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History.com Editors

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HISTORY

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https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-u-s-acquires-spanish-florida

For Native peoples, an apology never spoken is no apology at all

Opinion by Negiel Bigpond and Sam Brownback
July 7, 2021 at 12:06 a.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/06/native-peoples-an-apology-never-spoken-is-no-apology-all/

Negiel Bigpond is a full-blooded member of the Yuchi Indian Tribe whose family was subjected to the Trail of Tears. He is currently serving as Apostle of Morning Star Church of All Nations in Oklahoma. Sam Brownback, a Republican, served as U.S. ambassador at large for International Religious Freedom (2018-2021), governor of Kansas (2011-2018) and U.S. senator (1996-2011), where he worked with Bigpond on a resolution that was passed into law apologizing to the Native American people.

Harry White Wolf was a Cheyenne tribal member buried in the cemetery at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan. A baby being held at Haskell when it was a boarding school for Native American children, Harry died in 1884, just six months old. Today, headstones marking graves similar to Harry’s dot the Haskell Cemetery, marking a solemn, silent rebuke to the U.S. government, which removed these children from their homes and trained them to be like the dominant culture.

Perhaps the only silence more deafening is the continued failure of our nation and its leaders to apologize publicly to the community it so damaged. To paraphrase the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., it is not the silence of the enemy that is remembered, but rather that of the friend and advocate who never speaks up.

It’s time — long past time — to officially acknowledge what our country did and to speak an apology. Not only for taking children from Native families, but for the broken treaties and the carnage visited upon First Nations people by U.S. government policy. Without this necessary step, the healing process our community desperately needs cannot truly commence, and we cannot repair the resentment that stems from our troubled past.

In 2009, a dozen long years ago, we led the congressional effort to issue an official apology by the U.S. government to Native peoples. A version, apologizing “on behalf of the people of the United States to all Native peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native peoples by citizens of the United States” was signed into law by President Barack Obama, buried in the massive defense appropriations bill.

The legislation “urges the President to acknowledge the wrongs of the United States against Indian tribes in the history of the United States in order to bring healing to this land.” But no words of apology have ever been uttered by a president of the United States to tribal leaders.

To many Native people, an apology not expressed is worse than no apology at all, just another set of meaningless words buried in official treaties and broken promises.

Sadly, there is much for which to apologize. To take just one example, in 1838, the Potawatomi Indians were peacefully living in Indiana, south of Lake Michigan. Many had converted to Christianity and had built a church. Without warning, a call went out for all the Potawatomi to come to the church. There, they were told they were being forced to move by foot to Kansas. Indiana state militia soldiers would “escort” them to their new home over 600 miles west.

The journey, known as the Trail of Death, took more than two months and 42 lives, 28 of them children. Of the 859 Potawatomi forced to move to Kansas, eking out an existence in a strange land, 600 would die and be buried in the first nine years.

While the Potawatomi received some payment for their land, they and most First Nations people, experienced death, cultural extinction and dislocation unimaginable today. In 1879, Ponca Chief Standing Bear, whose tribe was forced to relocate from Nebraska to Indian Territory in Oklahoma, was arrested when he returned to his tribal land to bury his son. When Standing Bear sued for his right to return home, the government’s lawyer argued that an Indian was neither a person nor a citizen and therefore didn’t have the right to bring suit to secure his release. Federal Judge Elmer Dundy ruled that “the Indian is a ‘person’ ” under the Constitution — but not without also referring to Native Americans as a “weak, insignificant, unlettered, and generally despised race.” Still, this was a major legal victory, given the times.

Canada, New Zealand and other nations with similar histories to ours have conducted public apology ceremonies by their leaders to start reconciliation with their pasts. While that doesn’t solve all the problems, it can allow a healing process to begin.

When will America do this? The blood of the innocent cries out from our land.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/06/native-peoples-an-apology-never-spoken-is-no-apology-all/

Trump told chief of staff Hitler ‘did a lot of good things’, book says

* Remark shocked John Kelly, author Michael Bender reports

* Book details former president’s ‘stunning disregard for history’

Martin Pengelly in Washington
@MartinPengelly
Wed 7 Jul 2021 01.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/06/donald-trump-hitler-michael-bender-book

On a visit to Europe to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the first world war, Donald Trump insisted to his then chief of staff, John Kelly: “Well, Hitler did a lot of good things.”

The remark from the former US president on the 2018 trip, which reportedly “stunned” Kelly, a retired US Marine Corps general, is reported in a new book by Michael Bender of the Wall Street Journal.

Frankly, We Did Win This Election has been widely trailed ahead of publication next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Bender reports that Trump made the remark during an impromptu history lesson in which Kelly “reminded the president which countries were on which side during the conflict” and “connected the dots from the first world war to the second world war and all of Hitler’s atrocities”.

Bender is one of a number of authors to have interviewed Trump since he was ejected from power.

He reports that Trump denied making the remark about Hitler.

But Bender says unnamed sources reported that Kelly “told the president that he was wrong, but Trump was undeterred”, emphasizing German economic recovery under Hitler during the 1930s.

“Kelly pushed back again,” Bender writes, “and argued that the German people would have been better off poor than subjected to the Nazi genocide.”

Bender adds that Kelly told Trump that even if his claim about the German economy under the Nazis after 1933 were true, “you cannot ever say anything supportive of Adolf Hitler. You just can’t.”

Trump ran into considerable trouble on the centennial trip to Europe, even beyond his usual conflicts with other world leaders.

A decision to cancel a visit to an American cemetery proved controversial. Trump was later reported to have called American soldiers who died in the war “losers” and “suckers”.

Kelly, whose son was killed in Afghanistan in 2010, left the White House in early 2019. He has spoken critically of Trump since, reportedly telling friends the president he served was “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life”.

Bender writes that Kelly did his best to overcome Trump’s “stunning disregard for history”.

“Senior officials described his understanding of slavery, Jim Crow, or the Black experience in general post-civil war as vague to nonexistent,” he writes. “But Trump’s indifference to Black history was similar to his disregard for the history of any race, religion or creed.”

Concern over the rise of the far right in the US grew during Trump’s time in power and continues, as he maintains a grip on a Republican party determined to obstruct investigations of the deadly 6 January assault on the US Capitol by supporters seeking to overturn his election defeat.

Trump has made positive remarks about far-right and white supremacist groups.

During a presidential debate in 2020, Trump was asked if he would denounce white supremacists and militia groups. He struggled with the answer and eventually told the far-right Proud Boys group to “stand back and stand by”.

In 2017, in the aftermath of a neo-Nazi march in Virginia which earned supportive remarks from Trump, the German magazine Stern used on its cover an illustration of Trump giving a Nazi salute while wrapped in the US flag. Its headline: “Sein kampf” – his struggle.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/06/donald-trump-hitler-michael-bender-book

How Trump’s claims to being ‘the king of the tax code’ could come back to haunt him

By Aaron Blake
Senior reporter
July 6, 2021 at 3:46 p.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/06/how-trumps-claims-being-king-tax-code-could-come-back-haunt-him/

When former president Donald Trump weighed in on the criminal tax case against his business this weekend, some saw a tacit admission to the schemes the Trump Organization is accused of.

“They go after good, hard-working people for not paying taxes on a company car,” Trump said Saturday night at a rally in Sarasota, Fla. “You didn’t pay tax on the car or a company apartment. You used an apartment because you need an apartment because you have to travel too far where your house is. You didn’t pay tax. Or education for your grandchildren. I don’t even know. Do you have to? Does anybody know the answer to that stuff?”

It’s certainly valid to suggest Trump is granting that these violations might have indeed happened. Perhaps the better interpretation, though, is that Trump is mounting a defense: one of ignorance. (Okay, maybe this stuff happened, but we — or at least I — didn’t know it was illegal.) And knowledge of the tax law is vital to proving tax fraud.

There is one massive problem with all of this, though. And that’s that Trump has spent years telling us he is, in fact, the world’s — and even history’s — foremost expert on the tax code.

“By the way, just so you know, I know more formulas, I know more about tax abatements, I know more about taxes than any human being that God ever created,” Trump said in March 2016.

“I know every form of tax — believe me — from the [value-added taxes] to the fair tax to — every single form of tax,” he said in August 2015.

That same month, Trump claimed, “Look, nobody knows the tax code better than I do. Okay? I know it better. I’m the king of the tax code.”

Trump added in May 2016: “I think nobody knows more about taxes than I do, maybe in the history of the world. Nobody knows more about taxes.”

That same month: “Nobody knows more about taxes than I do — and income than I do.”

And after the New York Times in October 2016 obtained a 1995 tax return that suggested Trump went to great lengths to avoid paying taxes, Trump tweeted: “I understand the tax laws better than almost anyone, which is why I’m the one who can truly fix them.”



Trump's October 2016 tweet about taxes. (Aaron Blake/Twitter)
He added two days later: “I know how the tax code works better than anyone, and I am going to fix it so it is fair, and just, and works for you and your family.”

At other points, Trump avoided placing himself in the No. 1 slot, but rather merely put himself in the rarefied air of the extreme few who truly understand the tax code.

“I’ve been saying from the beginning of this campaign how ridiculous, complex and, yes, unfair the tax system is,” he said in Colorado the day after the Times’s report. “It is an unfair system, and so complex that very few people understand it. Fortunately, I understand it.”

He added in the same speech: “My understanding of the tax code gave me a tremendous advantage over those who didn’t have a clue about it, including many of my competitors, who lost everything they had, never to be heard from again — never — they were never heard from again.”

And this continued into his presidency, particularly when it came to the tax cuts the GOP passed.

“I know more about the big bills … than any president that’s ever been in office,” he told the Times in December 2017. “Whether it’s health care and taxes. Especially taxes.”

Trump also said in January 2016, “I use every single thing in the book. And I have great people.”

That last one, in particular, now looms pretty large. Trump wasn’t just attesting to his own intricate knowledge of the finer points of the tax code, but also to the acumen of those surrounding him. The totality of his comments practically screams: We knew exactly what we were doing at all times, and I concerned myself with these matters greatly.

That’s an extremely far cry from someone saying he didn’t even know they had to pay taxes on perks like apartments and company cars. That’s among the most basic bits of corporate tax knowledge one could have.

And as we and many others have noted, prosecutors in the indictment suggest this was indeed rather deliberate and carefully laid out in the documents they have obtained. Essentially, prosecutors say, those documents show direct compensation for chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, who has been indicted along with the Trump Organization, was reduced in accordance with these indirect benefits.

“For certain years, the Trump Organization maintained internal spreadsheets that tracked the amounts it paid for Weisselberg’s rent, utility, and garage expenses,” the indictment says. “Simultaneously, the Trump Organization reduced the amount of direct compensation that Weisselberg received in the form of checks or direct deposits to account for the indirect compensation that he received in the form of payments of rent, utility bills, and garage expenses.”

Trump’s past comments about his knowledge of the tax code, of course, are characteristically full of bluster. This is hardly the only thing he’s claimed to be the best or most knowledgeable about. Back in October 2016, after one of these same comments, I detailed 19 things Trump claimed he knew better than anyone else. (Among them: renewable energy, the military, debt, money and “the horrors of nuclear.”)

But, to the extent the tax violations are indeed proved and the only defense left is to claim they were innocent mistakes, you can bet these past comments will factor into the case. And should the case ever ensnare Trump personally, he seems to be laying out a preemptive defense.

It’s just a defense that bears no resemblance to pretty much everything he said before he found himself in legal hot water.

Daniel Goldman
@danielsgoldman
·
Jul 4
This was an intentional legal strategy to combat the prior statements about how well he knows the tax code. There is a heightened intent standard for tax crimes and the DA has to prove the defendant knew the law and willfully broke it. This was his attempt to claim ignorance.

Andrew Feinberg
@AndrewFeinberg
· Jul 4
"You didn’t pay tax on the car or a company apartment...you didn’t pay tax, or education for your grandchildren — I, don’t even know what do you have to put? Does anybody know the answer to that stuff?"

Prosecutors call this an admission...

VIDEO

"You didn’t pay tax on the car or a company apartment...you didn’t pay tax, or education for your grandchildren — I, don’t even know what do you have to put? Does anybody know the answer to that stuff?"

Prosecutors call this an admission... pic.twitter.com/3Myuzy0cB9

— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) July 4, 2021

This was an intentional legal strategy to combat the prior statements about how well he knows the tax code. There is a heightened intent standard for tax crimes and the DA has to prove the defendant knew the law and willfully broke it. This was his attempt to claim ignorance. https://t.co/37Dke0RzhG

— Daniel Goldman (@danielsgoldman) July 4, 2021

Travis Akers @travisakers Rudy Giuliani has been subpoenaed to hand over all documents stemming from his appearances on Fox News starting in 2016 as well as all communications with the network related to the 2020 presidential election and Dominion.

Giuliani’s Messages With Fox Sought by Dominion in Election Suit
By Erik Larson
1 July 2021, 15:45 BST
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-01/giuliani-s-messages-with-fox-sought-by-dominion-in-election-suit

THREAD
https://twitter.com/travisakers/status/1412233227109085185

JakkiiSaid....Shhhh @jakkiisaid Replying to @travisakers



3:51 AM · Jul 6, 2021·Twitter Web App

THREAD

pic.twitter.com/ROFH6pREPh

— JakkiiSaid....Shhhh (@jakkiisaid) July 6, 2021

Republicans’ effort to deny the Capitol attack is working – and it’s dangerous

David Smith Washington bureau chief
@smithinamerica
Tue 6 Jul 2021 08.26 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/06/republicans-effort-to-deny-the-capitol-attack-is-working-and-its-dangerous

Six months on, as politicians and the rightwing media downplay the attack or shift the blame, fears of a replay grow

It has been described as America’s darkest day since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But whereas 9/11 is solemnly memorialised in stone, a concerted effort is under way to airbrush the US Capitol insurrection from history.

Six months on from the mayhem on 6 January, when a mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed the heart of American democracy to disrupt the confirmation of Joe Biden’s election victory, Republicans and rightwing media have variously attempted to downplay the attack or blame it on leftwing infiltrators and the FBI.

Interviews with diehard Trump fans suggest that the riot denialism is working. Many refuse to condemn the insurrectionists who beat police officers, smashed windows and called for then Vice-President Mike Pence to be hanged. The swirl of conspiracy theories, combined with Trump’s deluded claims of a stole election, raise fears of a replay that could be even more violent.

“Rightwing media and some Republicans, including Republicans in the Senate and the House, are trying to make it seem as though what was a siege on the Capitol was not actually a siege on the Capitol,” said Monika McDermott, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York.

“We all saw it. We saw them breaking down doors. We saw our members of Congress running for cover and trying to get away. We saw Mike Pence being shuttled out of the chamber. All of these frightening things that we saw happen are now being denied or being or being laid at the feet of Antifa or the FBI or some other source, which just seems at this point ludicrous.”

Hours after the insurrection in Washington, members of Congress returned to the chambers to complete the certification of Biden’s electoral college win. Some Republicans did seem shaken and aware that a new, dangerous line had been crossed. Yet 147 still voted to overturn the election outcome, an ultimately futile gesture.

A month later a minority also voted to impeach and convict Trump for his role in sparking the insurrection, but not enough to stop him being acquitted. Since then, many party members have been eager to “move on” and minimize the events of that day.

Senator Ron Johnson told Fox News: “We’ve seen plenty of video of people in the Capitol, and they weren’t rioting. It doesn’t look like an armed insurrection when you have people that breach the Capitol – and I don’t condone it – but they’re staying within the rope lines in the rotunda. That’s not what armed insurrection would look like.”

Congressman Andrew Clyde – who was photographed barricading the House of Representatives chamber – told a hearing that, based on TV footage, “you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit”. His colleague Louie Gohmert added: “I just want the president to understand. There have been things worse than people without any firearms coming into a building.”

Even Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader who had said the former president “bears responsibility” for the attack, ultimately bent to Trump’s will and backed the removal of congresswoman Liz Cheney – who was clear-eyed and outspoken about the gravity of the assault – from House leadership.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader who also condemned Trump’s role in the insurrection, nevertheless ensured that Republicans deployed a procedural rule known as the filibuster to block the creation of a 9/11-style bipartisan commission to investigate it. This was despite the justice department warning that domestic terrorism now poses a bigger threat than attacks from overseas.

Kurt Bardella, a former Republican congressional aide who is now a Democrat, said: “I’m old enough to remember when the Republican party was willing to launch this country into a global war, fought on multiple fronts over the course of many years, because of what happened on September 11. And yet here we are just six months removed from something that happened on our own soil and on our own Capitol and Republicans are actively trying to rewrite history to make it out to be something that it wasn’t.”

Bardella, a contributor to the Los Angeles Times and USA Today newspapers, added: “If those who would deny the gravity of what happened on January 6 achieved a position of power, it is almost a guarantee that this will happen again, only it will be even more violent and more deadly.

“The Republican party is creating a construct in which they are giving permission to their supporters to view any election that doesn’t result in them winning as illegitimate and that is a very dangerous and destabilizing position that will have violent consequences.”

Not for the first time, Republicans are being aided and abetted by rightwing media personalities amplifying their message, not necessarily to change minds but to muddy the waters, leave the events of 6 January open to speculation and give Trump supporters a way to rationalize and justify them.

Conservative television, fringe website and rightwing podcasts are pumping out the propaganda and disinformation. Laura Ingraham, a Fox News host, has told viewers flatly: “It was not an insurrection.”

Her colleague Tucker Carlson, who has a huge following, floated the groundless “false flag” theory that the FBI secretly orchestrated the riot. As he was speaking, a banner appeared on screen that said: “The left wants new information on Jan 6 to go away.”

Chris Hayes, a host on the rival MSNBC network, commented: “The purpose here is not for communicating information. It’s to break the consensus of reality so that people can be manipulated and radicalised. And it is incredibly dangerous. And it is working.”

It is indeed working. Riot denialism was rife at Trump’s first post-presidential rally in Wellington, Ohio, on 26 June, where supporters began from the premise that the election had been stolen.

Gary Sherrill, 65, a concrete mixer driver wearing a “Make America great again” cap, said the insurrection was justified. “They said those people were invading but they own the building. The people inside work for them.”

Rose Kidd, 63, a retired nurse, made the evidence-free claim: “That was all staged. [House speaker Nancy] Pelosi knew. Antifa and BLM [Black Lives Matter] were all bussed in. Video shows it was they who broke the windows. Patriots don’t do that.”

And Gary Bartlett, 65, a retired manual worker at a car manufacturer, added: “99% of the people there were peaceful. The ones who went inside, I don’t know if they were Trump supporters or Antifa who infiltrated. Most of them walked in and walked back out.”

Democrats are working to understand 6 January and ensure it takes it rightful place in the history books. On Wednesday the House passed a resolution to form a select committee to investigate the carnage, with Pelosi appointing eight members and McCarthy appointing five. Many believe that such a reckoning is necessary for a national catharsis and healing – the struggle of memory against forgetting.

McDermott, the political scientist at Fordham, commented: “This was an unprecedented historic event and it is not one that should be wiped off of the history books or hidden away as though it didn’t happen or be minimised in any way. What happened was very real.

“It’s something that the country has to come to terms with, which I don’t see happening right now. We’re in very real danger of forgetting that there is a part of our society that is willing to use violence to get what they want out of the government. And I’ve done polling on this myself and those people are out there. They do think violence is a legitimate way to go and, by giving them cover, this is a very dangerous precedent we’re setting.”


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/06/republicans-effort-to-deny-the-capitol-attack-is-working-and-its-dangerous