Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
A man who went on a racist rant gave out his address and said come 'see me.’ More than 100 protesters did.
By Julian Mark
July 6, 2021 at 11:15 a.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07/06/cagney-mathews-racist-rant/
A man who police say yelled racist slurs in front of a residence in Mount Laurel, N.J., on Friday gave out his address to a person filming him, and then challenged them to visit his home.
“Bring whoever,” the man police identified as Edward Cagney Mathews, 45, added.
The video, which appears to show Mathews repeatedly calling his Black neighbor the n-word and a “monkey,” went viral.
Three days later, protesters started showing up at the address listed in the video. By Monday morning, dozens of protesters had gathered outside Mathews’s door, chanting “We want Edward!” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. And, by the evening, the crowd appeared to have grown to more than 100.
With a line of police officers guarding his house, Mathews briefly emerged during the protest and tried to apologize, the Inquirer reported, but protesters remained livid. As he faced charges for his behavior in the video, including harassment and biased intimidation, police later escorted Mathews out of his home with his hands behind his back.
Protesters cheered, while some hurled food and water bottles at him. The incident followed more than a year of nationwide protests over the treatment of Black people and race relations in the United States.
“He said to pull up. We pulled up,” Aliya Robinson, 43, who lives near Mathews, told the Inquirer. “We’re not going to tolerate this anymore.”
Mathews could not be reached for comment late Monday, but he told the Inquirer his racist tirade was a result of him being drunk and the confrontation involved a long-running dispute over the homeowners’ association. He apologized.
“I certainly wasn’t expecting an encounter like that and certainly wasn’t expecting to disrespect anybody,” Mathews said. “Let me be clear: That is no excuse for what I said, but I lost my temper.”
Robinson and her daughter, Jazmyn, are among several residents who claim Mathews had harassed them and used racist language toward them before Friday’s incident, according to KYW-TV. Ashleigh Gibbons, 35, another neighbor, told the Inquirer Mathews has been harassing her for years.
“I totally understand why the protesters were here today,” Burlington County Prosecutor Scott A. Coffina said at a Monday night news conference.
In a statement early Monday, the Mount Laurel Police Department said the incident began at 7:50 p.m. on Friday, when a resident reported she was “continually harassed by her neighbor,” whom police identified as Mathews. After the video of him spread on social media, which racked up tens of thousands of views by Monday, police launched the investigation and then announced the charges.
Coffina said at the news conference that his office is also charging Mathews with assault.
The police department said in its statement that it does not tolerate hate or bias intimidation “in any form.”
“This type of behavior is totally unacceptable,” the statement adds. “We can assure our residents that incidents like this are thoroughly investigated and that those who commit such offenses will be held accountable for their actions.”
Likewise, the Mount Laurel Township mayor and council said it rejected Mathews’s “horrible and dangerous behavior and acts of hate like it.”
“This is not who we are and what our township stands for,” the statement adds.
The video appears to show Mathews approaching one of his neighbors, and repeatedly getting into the man’s face. The unidentified neighbor, who is Black, tells Mathews to leave. But Mathews argues that he had a right to stand in front of the house and does not leave.
“Learn your laws,” Mathews allegedly says to the man. “It’s not Africa.”
“I was born in America,” the man replies.
A police officer shows up minutes later and asks Mathews to go back to his house. As Mathews continues to scream racial epithets, the police officer says, “Cut it out, dude.”
Tia Brown, a protester at Mathews’s house, saw the video and said it was the police officer’s lax attitude that angered her, NJ.com reported. “They had a conversation with him like it was nothing,” she said.
Likewise, the Mount Laurel Police Department was criticized for not acting on complaints it received in the past about Mathews. A police spokesman, who did not return calls from The Washington Post late Monday, told the Inquirer that there had not been enough evidence to bring charges in the past.
“We understand the frustration,” Kyle Gardner, the department spokesman, said. “The perception was that we did nothing about it. We’re doing the best we can.”
By Julian Mark
Julian Mark is a reporter on The Washington Post's Morning Mix team. Before joining The Post, he covered housing and policing for Mission Local in San Francisco. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07/06/cagney-mathews-racist-rant/
DEGRADATION OF PLASTICS
One of the major arguments against plastics is that they last for a thousand years, so therefore we must avoid creating any waste plastic because it will accumulate and be with us forever. That sounds ominous, but is it true?
The first thing to say is that all organic materials degrade. For the layperson, organic means everything based on carbon. Organic materials include apples, meat, wood, paper, cotton, our DNA (a polymer), collagen (a polymer), leaves (made of cellulose, which is a polymer), crude oil and so on. Every person will realize this is true as soon as they consider their own experience. An apple will rot and eventually vanish.
Similarly, plastic items we use degrade and fail because they are also organic materials.
Many people will remember the original plastic garden chairs. They were made of polypropylene (PP), and after some months in the sun, they would turn white and brittle and break due to microcracks on their surface. Sunlight was enough to destroy these chairs in a matter of months.
I read an article about museum curators who were frustrated that Neil Armstrong’s iconic spacesuit was degrading and they were powerless to stop the plastic and rubber parts from crumbling. Think about that for a moment. A spacesuit carefully kept out of sunlight and at room temperature, yet still it degrades. In the end, the Smithsonian raised over $700,000 to restore the suit and put it back on display.
The spacesuit was not an isolated case. A good friend of mine was a Plastics Conservator at a London museum and his task was to try to stop the plastic exhibits from falling to pieces. These were all plastic items kept in the cool behind glass, and yet they were degrading in a matter of years or decades.
1000-YEAR PLASTIC MYTH
The environmental groups tell us that plastics are bad because they don’t degrade. They normally give a number of either >450 years or a thousand years for the degradation of plastics. If that were true, it would be wonderful because the plastic on my car would last 1,000 years and I would only have to repaint my house every 1,000 years. The plastic siding on our houses would also last a millennium. If plastic did last that long, then we would see 1000-year warranties on the products we buy. Have you ever seen a 1000-year warranty on a plastic item? Try calling your local Home Depot or Lowe’s and ask what plastic products offer a 1000-year warrantee. Your call may well be met with hysterical laughter. No sensible person believes that plastics last that long. We know that from our own experience, so why do people believe the 1000-year myth? Would you rather believe your own eyes or some anonymous blogger?
The Plastics Paradox - Book by Chris DeArmitt.pdf
https://plasticsparadox.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Plastics-Paradox-Book-Double-Page-Web-Download.pdf
Museums are in a race against time to keep plastic art from falling apart
By Sam Kean Jul. 2, 2021 , 8:00 AM
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/07/museums-are-race-against-time-keep-plastic-art-falling-apart
Leanne Tonkin still remembers the ruined coats. She was doing a fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in the mid-2010s when she saw a red mackintosh from the 1960s. The raincoat was so rigid it could stand up on its own, as though inhabited by a ghost. Another mackintosh was hardly recognizable as clothing. “You could make out a button on it, but it was completely melted,” she says.
Nothing out of the ordinary had happened to the coats. They didn’t get caught in fires or exposed to caustic chemicals. Instead, they were doomed for a simpler reason: They contained inherently unstable plastics.
People often grumble that plastics are too durable. Water bottles, shopping bags, and other trash litter the planet, from Mount Everest to the Mariana Trench, because plastics are ubiquitous and don’t break down easily.
To skirt that limitation, in 2019 the Getty purchased its own plastic making equipment: an extruder and injection-molding system. Staff members then flipped through old issues of magazines such as Modern Plastics to find representative recipes. The Getty can now re-create historic plastics with the exact ingredients used originally. Scientists there are already running stress tests on small discs and bars, with an eye toward performing artificial aging tests on them later.
Certain artifacts are especially vulnerable because some pioneers in plastic art didn’t always know how to mix ingredients properly, says Thea van Oosten, a polymer chemist who, until retiring a few years ago, worked for decades at the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE). “It’s like baking a cake: If you don’t have exact amounts, it goes wrong,” she says. “The object you make is already a time bomb.”
And sometimes, it’s not the artist’s fault. In the 1960s, the Italian artist Piero Gilardi began to create hundreds of bright, colorful foam pieces. Those pieces included small beds of roses and other items as well as a few dozen “nature carpets”—large rectangles decorated with foam pumpkins, cabbages, and watermelons. He wanted viewers to walk around on the carpets—which meant they had to be durable.
Unfortunately, the polyurethane foam he used is inherently unstable. It’s especially vulnerable to light damage, and by the mid-1990s, Gilardi’s pumpkins, roses, and other figures were splitting and crumbling. Museums locked some of them away in the dark.
So van Oosten and colleagues at RCE began to study ways to protect polyurethane. First, they took foam samples similar to the nature carpets and infused some with stabilizing and consolidating chemicals that modern manufacturers often use. Van Oosten calls those chemicals “sunscreens” because their goal was to prevent further light damage and rebuild worn polymer fibers. Then the team used xenon lamps to artificially age both treated and untreated samples, and examined them under high-powered microscopes.
The results were encouraging. Samples that lacked sunscreen had withered under the barrage of photons: The molecular “struts” shoring up the foam were 42% thinner and notably more brittle than before the lamp treatment. The struts in samples with sunscreen decreased by as little as 12.5%.
Armed with that knowledge, conservators working with RCE infused several Gilardi sculptures, including two nature carpets, with the sunscreen to stabilize them. Van Oosten is proud that several have even gone on display again, albeit sometimes beneath protective cases. Long called the “queen of plastics,” in 2012, van Oosten was knighted in the Netherlands for her efforts to preserve plastic objects and spread knowledge to other institutes.
DESPITE SUCH SUCCESS stories, preservation of plastics will likely get harder. Old objects continue to deteriorate. Worse, biodegradable plastics, designed to disintegrate, are increasingly common.
And more is at stake here than individual objects. Ferreira notes that archaeologists first defined the great material ages of human history—Stone Age, Iron Age, and so on—after examining artifacts in museums. We now live in an age of plastic, she says, “and what we decide to collect today, what we decide to preserve … will have a strong impact on how in the future we’ll be seen.”
Future archaeologists examining the leavings of the 21st century will likely find scads of toxic crud, along with plenty of plastic trash. But if museum preservation efforts succeed, maybe those scholars will also see that plastic items today can be culturally meaningful—and even cherished.
Posted in: ChemistryEnvironmentScientific Community
doi:10.1126/science.abk1721
Sam Kean
Sam Kean is a science journalist in Washington, D.C.
But some plastic materials change over time. They crack and frizzle. They “weep” out additives. They melt into sludge. All of which creates huge headaches for institutions, such as museums, trying to preserve culturally important objects.
Until recently, museums only had to worry about traditional materials. “We know how to approach the restoration of paintings, books, and materials like wood, metals, and glass,” says Anna Laganà, a research specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute. “But for plastics, our knowledge is still limited.” Tonkin, now a doctoral researcher in fashion conservation at Nottingham Trent University, agrees: “We’re now scuttling around trying to figure out how to conserve” plastics, she says.
The variety of plastic objects at risk is dizzying: early radios, avant-garde sculptures, celluloid animation stills from Disney films, David Bowie costumes, the first artificial heart. Nearly every museum in the world has plastic items, and even well-cared-for objects can fall apart alarmingly quickly.
After years of light exposure, foam figures on these “nature carpets” were cracking and deteriorating. ALETH LORNE
Joana Lia Ferreira, an assistant professor of conservation and restoration at the NOVA School of Science and Technology, recalls an exhibit with a lamp that had a black polyurethane foam shade. One day, conservators noticed the shade had started to collapse, so they removed the lamp from the exhibit to save it. But it was too late: The shade began to crumble and soon collapsed completely. “From one week to another,” Ferreira says, “it was on the floor.”
Museums are doing everything they can to save culturally important items from similar fates. Over the past decade, conservators have developed better tools to identify vulnerable objects. Some conservators have also started to run experiments to shore up preservation practices and arrest decay. Plastics have existed for roughly 150 years at this point, and curators want their plastic treasures to still be recognizable 150 years into the future.
SOME PLASTICS, such as polycarbonate and acrylic, are quite stable. But the long-chain polymer molecules in other plastics can break down when exposed to oxygen or light, among other potential threats. Unfortunately, some of the most “malignant” plastics—cellulose nitrate, cellulose acetate, polyurethane, polyvinyl chloride (PVC)—were common historically, finding use in items as diverse as photography film, billiard balls, and high-end clothing and furniture. The additional ingredients in those plastics, including plasticizers, dyes, and fire retardants, can introduce their own problems. PVC, for instance, forms both sturdy plumbing pipes and supple shower curtains, depending on the additives. And those mixtures can naturally unmix over time, especially when temperatures fluctuate.
One common challenge for conservators is figuring out what materials they’re even working with. Techniques such as Raman spectroscopy and pyrolysis–gas chromatography–mass spectrometry can create a molecular “fingerprint” from a sample of material. By looking for a match in a database of spectra posted online by a European-led project called POPART (Preservation of Plastic Artefacts in museum collections), museums can determine what materials they have.
Some polymers go to pieces
Different plastics break down at different rates depending on their compositions and environments. Some plastics are fairly unstable (orange), including early plastics from the 19th century and first decades of the 20th century, often found in culturally important plastic objects. Modern plastics (blue) are far more stable and can take centuries or longer to decompose.
A polyurethane foam “nature carpet” by Italian artist Piero Gilardi ALETH LORNE
Museums are in a race against time to keep plastic art from falling apart
By Sam KeanJul. 2, 2021 , 8:00 AM
Leanne Tonkin still remembers the ruined coats. She was doing a fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in the mid-2010s when she saw a red mackintosh from the 1960s. The raincoat was so rigid it could stand up on its own, as though inhabited by a ghost. Another mackintosh was hardly recognizable as clothing. “You could make out a button on it, but it was completely melted,” she says.
Nothing out of the ordinary had happened to the coats. They didn’t get caught in fires or exposed to caustic chemicals. Instead, they were doomed for a simpler reason: They contained inherently unstable plastics.
People often grumble that plastics are too durable. Water bottles, shopping bags, and other trash litter the planet, from Mount Everest to the Mariana Trench, because plastics are ubiquitous and don’t break down easily.
SIGN UP FOR OUR DAILY NEWSLETTER
Get more great content like this delivered right to you!
Email Address *
But some plastic materials change over time. They crack and frizzle. They “weep” out additives. They melt into sludge. All of which creates huge headaches for institutions, such as museums, trying to preserve culturally important objects.
Until recently, museums only had to worry about traditional materials. “We know how to approach the restoration of paintings, books, and materials like wood, metals, and glass,” says Anna Laganà, a research specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute. “But for plastics, our knowledge is still limited.” Tonkin, now a doctoral researcher in fashion conservation at Nottingham Trent University, agrees: “We’re now scuttling around trying to figure out how to conserve” plastics, she says.
The variety of plastic objects at risk is dizzying: early radios, avant-garde sculptures, celluloid animation stills from Disney films, David Bowie costumes, the first artificial heart. Nearly every museum in the world has plastic items, and even well-cared-for objects can fall apart alarmingly quickly.
After years of light exposure, foam figures on these “nature carpets” were cracking and deteriorating. ALETH LORNE
Joana Lia Ferreira, an assistant professor of conservation and restoration at the NOVA School of Science and Technology, recalls an exhibit with a lamp that had a black polyurethane foam shade. One day, conservators noticed the shade had started to collapse, so they removed the lamp from the exhibit to save it. But it was too late: The shade began to crumble and soon collapsed completely. “From one week to another,” Ferreira says, “it was on the floor.”
Museums are doing everything they can to save culturally important items from similar fates. Over the past decade, conservators have developed better tools to identify vulnerable objects. Some conservators have also started to run experiments to shore up preservation practices and arrest decay. Plastics have existed for roughly 150 years at this point, and curators want their plastic treasures to still be recognizable 150 years into the future.
SOME PLASTICS, such as polycarbonate and acrylic, are quite stable. But the long-chain polymer molecules in other plastics can break down when exposed to oxygen or light, among other potential threats. Unfortunately, some of the most “malignant” plastics—cellulose nitrate, cellulose acetate, polyurethane, polyvinyl chloride (PVC)—were common historically, finding use in items as diverse as photography film, billiard balls, and high-end clothing and furniture. The additional ingredients in those plastics, including plasticizers, dyes, and fire retardants, can introduce their own problems. PVC, for instance, forms both sturdy plumbing pipes and supple shower curtains, depending on the additives. And those mixtures can naturally unmix over time, especially when temperatures fluctuate.
One common challenge for conservators is figuring out what materials they’re even working with. Techniques such as Raman spectroscopy and pyrolysis–gas chromatography–mass spectrometry can create a molecular “fingerprint” from a sample of material. By looking for a match in a database of spectra posted online by a European-led project called POPART (Preservation of Plastic Artefacts in museum collections), museums can determine what materials they have.
Some polymers go to pieces
Different plastics break down at different rates depending on their compositions and environments. Some plastics are fairly unstable (orange), including early plastics from the 19th century and first decades of the 20th century, often found in culturally important plastic objects. Modern plastics (blue) are far more stable and can take centuries or longer to decompose.
SEE IMAGES https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/07/museums-are-race-against-time-keep-plastic-art-falling-apart
Cellulose nitrate This plastic, used in early film and consumer goods, can be flammable and dangerous.
Polyethylene terephthalate (PET)One of the most common plastics in the world, PET is used in water bottles and clamshell food packaging.
Poly(methyl methacrylate)Also known as acrylic, this often-transparent polymer is common in LCD and smartphone screens.
Cellulose acetate This polymer found use in early Legos, sculptures, and fashion items like belts. It can smell of vinegar as it decays.
PolyurethaneOften used in foams, polyurethane has molecular struts that,after 10 to 20 years, can degrade because of light exposure.
V. ALTOUNIAN/SCIENCE
Still, many small museums lack access to fancy lab equipment, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars. So some institutes have developed low-tech approaches based on touching, tapping, and sniffing. Depending on the type, plastics can feel glasslike or waxy. After decay begins, they can also feel sticky as internal plasticizers migrate to the surface. Auditory tests are available, too: Some plastics sound tinny when tapped; others, stolid and dull. And deteriorating plastics can release an astounding array of odors—chlorine, vinegar, pine, burnt hair, used sneakers, mothballs, car tires, sulfur.
Once conservators identify the plastic, they can take steps to preserve it. The general rule is “keep it cold, keep it dark, keep it dry, [and] keep it without oxygen in some cases,” says Odile Madden, a senior scientist at the Getty. But the optimal conditions can differ even within the same family of material; it all depends on the specific ingredients and their proportions. Testing new preservation techniques on unique objects is risky, so some conservators have turned to controlled experiments.
Tonkin, for instance, simulated clothing by adding stitches and metal studs to 20-centimeter squares of PVC fabric (common in modern raincoats). Then, she stored them for months at temperatures ranging from –17.8°C to 21.1°C and humidities between 40% and 50%.
Intuitively, deep-freeze storage might seem the most promising way to preserve a material. But in the coldest conditions, Tonkin found, PVC molecules crystallized, squeezing out the plasticizers that make the fabric supple. The fabric ended up brittle and pitted with minute holes. Storing plastics at 4.4°C avoided that problem. In addition, Tonkin found that when transferring the material into or out of chilled storage, keeping it at an intermediate temperature of about 15.5°C for 24 hours could help avoid damage from quick temperature changes.
Other conservators have run experiments to artificially age plastics, trying to understand exactly how they break down—and glean clues about how to arrest decay. Xenon arc lamps bombard materials with photons, collapsing years of light exposure into hours. Researchers can use weather chambers to study heat and humidity. Madden has also considered exposing plastics to pollutants to study the effects of dirty air.
Such experiments face a limiting factor: a lack of historically accurate plastics. For safety and stability, today’s manufacturers add different ingredients to plastics than in decades past. So the results of experiments on modern polymers might not hold for historic ones.
Treatment with protective “sunscreens” allowed some nature carpets to go back on display. ALETH LORNE
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/07/museums-are-race-against-time-keep-plastic-art-falling-apart
How Trump Supporters Took the U.S. Capitol | Visual Investigations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWJVMoe7OY0
894,391 views Jul 1, 2021
The New York Times
3.57M subscribers
Sign up for our Visual Investigations newsletter: https://nyti.ms/3xhj7dE
As part of a six-month investigation, The Times synchronized and mapped thousands of videos and police audio of the U.S. Capitol riot to provide the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.
Haley Willis
4 days ago
I’m Haley, one of the producers on this new 40-minute documentary. Our Visual Investigations team synchronized and mapped thousands of videos of the U.S. Capitol riot to provide the most complete picture to date of what happened on Jan. 6 — and why. This was a massive team effort over six months, involving resources from across the Times newsroom. We went to court to unseal police body camera footage, scoured law enforcement radio communications and interviewed witnesses. Let us know if you have any questions below and we’ll try to answer. Thanks for watching.
Subscribe: http://bit.ly/U8Ys7n
More from The New York Times Video: http://nytimes.com/video
----------
Whether it's reporting on conflicts abroad and political divisions at home, or covering the latest style trends and scientific developments, New York Times video journalists provide a revealing and unforgettable view of the world. It's all the news that's fit to watch.
Capitol rioters’ footage powers NYT’s ‘Day of Rage’ project
Some of the best sources for a painstaking video investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot were the rioters themselves — an irony given the hostility many journalists faced that day
Via AP news wire
3 days ago
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/capitol-rioters-footage-powers-nyts-day-of-rage-project-donald-trump-day-of-rage-new-york-nyt-california-b1877129.html
Donald Trump feared Ghislaine Maxwell could embroil him in Jeffrey Epstein scandal, new book claims
The former president, who had tried to distance himself from Epstein, asked if Maxwell “would roll on anybody”
By David Millward,
US CORRESPONDENT
5 July 2021 • 7:54pm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/05/donald-trump-feared-ghislaine-maxwell-could-embroil-jeffrey/
Donald Trump feared that Ghislaine Maxwell could embroil him in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, the author Michael Wolff has claimed in a new book.
Mr Trump had sought to play down his long association with financier Epstein, who was found dead in his prison cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell, who faces sex trafficking and other charges stemming from her relationship with Epstein, worried Mr Trump, Wolff has written in his latest book detailing the final days of his administration and the post-election aftermath.
“Has she said anything about me?” he wondered. “Is she going to talk? Will she roll on anybody?” the former president is alleged to have said.
Ms Maxwell has pleaded not guilty.
Mr Trump’s friendship with Epstein goes back decades, to the days when the former president was better known as a property developer rather than politician.
In a 2002 profile of Epstein in New York magazine, Mr Trump is quoted as saying: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy.
‘He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
He later severed links saying he “was not a fan”’
Mr Trump is one of several prominent people who have found themselves linked to Epstein and Ms Maxwell.
Former president Bill Clinton travelled on Epstein’s private plane, known as the “Lolita Express” but denies having gone to the paedophile’s private island.
Prince Andrew has been pictured with Epstein. He has vehemently denied allegations that he had underage sex with Virginia Guiffre who had been recruited by Epstein.
Wolff’s book, Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency, which is serialised in The Times, said Mr Trump was rumoured to be considering running for the House of Representatives, so he could spearhead an attempt to impeach his successor Joe Biden.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/05/donald-trump-feared-ghislaine-maxwell-could-embroil-jeffrey/
US left Afghan airfield at night, didn’t tell new commander
By KATHY GANNON
49 minutes ago
https://apnews.com/article/bagram-afghanistan-airfield-us-troops-f3614828364f567593251aaaa167e623
BAGRAM, Afghanistan (AP) — The U.S. left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left, Afghan military officials said.
Afghanistan’s army showed off the sprawling air base Monday, providing a rare first glimpse of what had been the epicenter of America’s war to unseat the Taliban and hunt down the al-Qaida perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks on America.
The U.S. announced Friday it had completely vacated its biggest airfield in the country in advance of a final withdrawal the Pentagon says will be completed by the end of August.
“We (heard) some rumor that the Americans had left Bagram ... and finally by seven o’clock in the morning, we understood that it was confirmed that they had already left Bagram,” Gen. Mir Asadullah Kohistani, Bagram’s new commander said.
U.S. military spokesman Col. Sonny Leggett did not address the specific complaints of many Afghan soldiers who inherited the abandoned airfield, instead referring to a statement last week.
The statement said the handover of the many bases had been in the process soon after President Joe Biden’s mid-April announcement that America was withdrawing the last of its forces. Leggett said in the statement that they had coordinated their departures with Afghanistan’s leaders.
Before the Afghan army could take control of the airfield about an hour’s drive from the Afghan capital Kabul, it was invaded by a small army of looters, who ransacked barrack after barrack and rummaged through giant storage tents before being evicted, according to Afghan military officials.
“At first we thought maybe they were Taliban,” said Abdul Raouf, a soldier of 10 years. He said the the U.S. called from the Kabul airport and said “we are here at the airport in Kabul.”
Kohistani insisted the Afghan National Security and Defense Force could hold on to the heavily fortified base despite a string of Taliban wins on the battlefield. The airfield also includes a prison with about 5,000 prisoners, many of them allegedly Taliban.
The Taliban’s latest surge comes as the last U.S. and NATO forces pull out of the country. As of last week, most NATO soldiers had already quietly left. The last U.S. soldiers are likely to remain until an agreement to protect the Kabul Hamid Karzai International Airport, which is expected to be done by Turkey, is completed.
Meanwhile, in northern Afghanistan, district after district has fallen to the Taliban. In just the last two days hundreds of Afghan soldiers fled across the border into Tajikistan rather than fight the insurgents.
“In battle it is sometimes one step forward and some steps back,” said Kohistani.
Kohistani said the Afghan military is changing its strategy to focus on the strategic districts. He insisted they would retake them in the coming days without saying how that would be accomplished.
On display on Monday was a massive facility, the size of a small city, that had been exclusively used by the U.S. and NATO. The sheer size is extraordinary, with roadways weaving through barracks and past hangar-like buildings. There are two runways and over 100 parking spots for fighter jets known as revetments because of the blast walls that protect each aircraft. One of the two runways is 12,000 feet (3,660 meters) long and was built in 2006. There’s a passenger lounge, a 50-bed hospital and giant hangar-size tents filled with supplies such as furniture.
Kohistani said the U.S. left behind 3.5 million items, all itemized by the departing U.S. military. They include tens of thousands of bottles of water, energy drinks and military ready-made meals, known as MRE’s.
“When you say 3.5 million items, it is every small items, like every phone, every door knob, every window in every barracks, every door in every barracks,” he said.
The big ticket items left behind include thousands of civilian vehicles, many of them without keys to start them, and hundreds of armored vehicles. Kohistani said the U.S. also left behind small weapons and the ammunition for them, but the departing troops took heavy weapons with them. Ammunition for weapons not being left behind for the Afghan military was blown up before they left.
Afghan soldiers who wandered Monday throughout the base that had once seen as many as 100,000 U.S. troops were deeply critical of how the U.S. left Bagram, leaving in the night without telling the Afghan soldiers tasked with patrolling the perimeter.
“In one night, they lost all the goodwill of 20 years by leaving the way they did, in the night, without telling the Afghan soldiers who were outside patrolling the area,” said Afghan soldier Naematullah, who asked that only his one name be used.
Within 20 minutes of the U.S.’s silent departure on Friday, the electricity was shut down and the base was plunged into darkness, said Raouf, the soldier of 10 years who has also served in Taliban strongholds of Helmand and Kandahar provinces.
The sudden darkness was like a signal to the looters, he said. They entered from the north, smashing through the first barrier, ransacking buildings, loading anything that was not nailed down into trucks.
On Monday, three days after the U.S. departure, Afghan soldiers were still collecting piles of garbage that included empty water bottles, cans and empty energy drinks left behind by the looters.
Kohistani, meanwhile, said the nearly 20 years of U.S. and NATO involvement in Afghanistan was appreciated but now it was time for Afghans to step up.
“We have to solve our problem. We have to secure our country and once again build our country with our own hands,” he said.
____
Associated Press writer Tameem Akhgar contributed to this report.
https://apnews.com/article/bagram-afghanistan-airfield-us-troops-f3614828364f567593251aaaa167e623
Trump has cut off Rudy Giuliani, and is annoyed that he asked to be paid for his work on challenging the election, book says
Bill Bostock 17 hours ago
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-cut-off-rudy-giuliani-annoyed-asked-payment-michael-wolff-2021-7?r=US&IR=T
* Rudy Giuliani spearheaded Donald Trump's attempt to overturn his election loss until February.
* Giuliani is said to have long been asking Trump to pay his legal fees but has been ignored.
* Trump and his family have also cast off Giuliani, a new book from Michael Wolff says.
Donald Trump's family has cut off Rudy Giuliani, and the former president has been irked that the lawyer asked to be paid for his work challenging Trump's loss in the 2020 election, a new book says.
On Sunday, The Times of London published an excerpt from "Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency," the coming book on the Trump presidency from the author Michael Wolff.
In the extract, Wolff delves into Trump's postpresidential life at his Mar-a-Lago resort and describes Trump as frustrated by the lack of progress in his quest to overturn the 2020 election result.
Giuliani, a longtime ally and personal lawyer of the president, started leading the Trump campaign's efforts to overturn the election on November 4 but departed sometime in February after a series of setbacks.
Since then, reports have detailed how Giuliani and his allies have sought to get paid for the legal work, but to no avail, falling foul of the president in the process.
"Trump is annoyed that he tried to get paid for his election challenge work," Wolff wrote, per The Times.
The excerpt said Giuliani had "gotten only the cold shoulder" while seeking payment from Trump amid the prospect of expensive legal battles of his own.
Trump's family has "cast out, cut off" Giuliani, the excerpt said, without specifying which members of the clan.
Giuliani is the subject of a Justice Department investigation into whether he broke foreign lobbying laws while working as Trump's lawyer. Giuliani has not been charged with a crime.
According to Wolff, Trump has also taken to asking visitors to his Mar-a-Lago resort "if they know any good" lawyers to help him continue his plan to overturn the election via the US courts.
Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.
The amount owed to Giuliani by Trump is not known, but at one point Maria Ryan, an aide and rumored girlfriend of Giuliani, told the Trump campaign that his rate for working on the election challenge was $20,000 a day, The New York Times reported.
In mid-January, both The Washington Post and The New York Times cited sources saying that Trump had instructed his aides not to pay Giuliani his legal fees following Trump's second impeachment.
The New York Times said at the time that White House officials also started blocking Giuliani's calls to Trump.
An excerpt from another book about Trump - "Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost" by the Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender - published by the Daily Mail indicates that Trump regularly insulted Giuliani while they worked together.
In one instance, Bender wrote, Trump mocked Giuliani for falling asleep in a meeting.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-cut-off-rudy-giuliani-annoyed-asked-payment-michael-wolff-2021-7?r=US&IR=T
Countering Truth Decay
A RAND Initiative to Restore the Role of Facts and Analysis in Public Life
https://www.rand.org/research/projects/truth-decay.html
What Is Truth Decay?
RAND defines “Truth Decay” as the diminishing role of facts and analysis in American public life. This phenomenon has taken hold over the last two decades, eroding civil discourse, causing political paralysis, and leading to public uncertainty and disengagement.
Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life 2018
Truth Decay is characterized by four trends:
1. increasing disagreement about facts
2. a blurring of the line between opinion and fact
3. the increasing relative volume and resulting influence of opinion over fact
4. declining trust in formerly respected sources of facts
Most of these trends are not unprecedented in U.S. history. But today's level of disagreement over objective facts appears to be a new phenomenon. So how did we get here?
Read more https://www.rand.org/research/projects/truth-decay/about-truth-decay.html
At RAND, we have never shied away from a problem because it is too difficult or too complex. We've made countering Truth Decay one of our highest priorities because it is both, and because it threatens the very foundations of our democracy.
Michael D. Rich
President and Chief Executive Officer, RAND Corporation
Source: RAND Review
https://www.rand.org/research/projects/truth-decay.html
Former Murdoch Exec: Fox News Is Poison For America
Preston Padden
Mon, 5 July 2021, 6:21 am
https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/former-murdoch-exec-fox-news-052129970.html
Rupert Murdoch, whom I served for seven years, has many business and journalistic achievements. He owes himself a better legacy than a news channel that no reasonable person would believe.
It was my great honor to join Rupert, Barry Diller (who now is the chairman of IAC, The Daily Beast’s parent company), Jamie Kellner and many others in the early days of Fox Broadcasting Company, the network that’s the home to The Simpsons and the NFL. I worked closely with Rupert and I found him to be brilliant, courageous, optimistic, and a gentleman. (Everything that follows regarding Fox News and Rupert Murdoch represents my opinion.)
I had first-hand exposure to all of those qualities as he defied all of the odds to build a fourth network—a network that an expensive government study in the 1980s had concluded was “not likely to be viable.” He ignored the ridicule from ABC, CBS, and NBC, whose president called us the “coat hanger network”—a reference to the loop antennas required to receive our weak UHF local affiliate stations. Rupert never lost his confidence or his optimism. He snatched the Sunday afternoon NFL games away from CBS. He recruited strong VHF local affiliate stations from all three of the old networks. And by 2005 he had built the most watched broadcast television network in America. Amazing!
Initially Fox News followed the standard Murdoch playbook: find a market in need of new competition, jump in with both feet and shake up the status quo. Clearly there was an opening for a responsible and truthful center-right news network. And that is how Fox News started. I played a cameo role in the birth of Fox News by accompanying Roger Ailes to meet with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani to seek his help in persuading Time-Warner CEO Gerry Levin to carry Fox News on the all-important Time-Warner Cable systems in New York City. Levin did not want to provide “oxygen” for a new channel to compete with Time-Warner’s CNN. Ultimately Murdoch had to pay a massive “tribute” to cable operators to get Fox News added to their systems. But as always, he was confident—confident that his new channel would be a success and that he would get all the money back. And he did.
But, in recent years things have gone badly off the tracks at Fox News. Fox News is no longer a truthful center-right news network. The channel (especially the leading prime-time opinion programming) has contributed substantially and directly to:
* the unnecessary deaths of many Americans by disparaging the wearing of life-saving COVID masks;
* divisions in our society by stoking racial animus and fueling the totally false impression that Black Lives Matter and Antifa are engaged in nightly, life-threatening riots across the country;
* the unnecessary deaths of many Americans by fueling hesitation and doubt about the efficacy and safety of life-saving COVID-19 vaccines [Fox News provided me examples of pro-mask/vaccine on-air comments, but in my opinion, they were heavily outweighed by the negative comments of the highly rated primetime opinion hosts];
* former President Trump’s “Big Lie” that the election was stolen from him by providing a continuous platform for wild and false claims about the election—claims refuted by more than 60 judges, Republican State election officials, recounts in numerous States and Trump’s own Attorney General; and
* the Jan. 6, 2021, violent assault on the U.S. Capitol by continually promoting former President Trump’s “Stop The Steal” rally.
Fox News has caused many millions of Americans—most of them Republicans (as my wife and I were for 50 years)—to believe things that simply are not true. For example, Yahoo News reports that 73 percent of Republicans blame “left-wing protesters” for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Of course, that is ludicrous. All one has to do is look at the pictures or videos of the attack to see that the violent mob was comprised of Trump supporters. Similarly, a poll by SSRS in late April found that two-thirds of Republicans either believe or suspect that the election was stolen from Trump—60 percent saying there is “hard evidence” that the election was stolen. As noted above, this ridiculous notion has been thoroughly refuted. But millions of Americans believe these falsehoods because they have been drilled into their minds, night after night, by Fox News.
The greatest irony is that I don’t believe that most of the falsehoods on Fox News reflect Rupert Murdoch’s own views. I believe that he thought that it was important to protect his own health by wearing a mask during the pandemic and he encouraged me to do the same. I believe that he thought that it was important to protect his own health by getting vaccinated at the earliest opportunity and he encouraged me to do the same. And I believe that he thinks that former President Trump is an egomaniac who lost the election by turning off voters, especially suburban women, with his behavior.
Over the past nine months I have tried, with increasing bluntness, to get Rupert to understand the real damage that Fox News is doing to America. I failed, and it was arrogant and naïve to ever have thought that I could succeed. I am at a loss to understand why he will not change course. I can only guess that the destructive editorial policy of Fox News is driven by a deep-seated vein of anti-establishment/contrarian thinking in Rupert that, at age 90, is not going to change.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/former-murdoch-exec-fox-news-052129970.html
In crosshairs of ransomware crooks, cyber insurers struggle
By FRANK BAJAK
today
https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-government-and-politics-4c2272cdd428ddfa1f3644d513566c06
BOSTON (AP) — In the past few weeks, ransomware criminals claimed as trophies at least three North American insurance brokerages that offer policies to help others survive the very network-paralyzing, data-pilfering extortion attacks they themselves apparently suffered.
Cybercriminals who hack into corporate and government networks to steal sensitive data for extortion routinely try to learn how much cyber insurance coverage the victims have. Knowing what victims can afford to pay can give them an edge in ransom negotiations. The cyber insurance industry, too, is a prime target for crooks seeking its customers’ identities and scope of coverage.
Before ransomware evolved into a full-scale global epidemic plaguing businesses, hospitals, schools and local governments, cyber insurance was a profitable niche industry. It was accused of fueling the criminal feeding frenzy by routinely recommending that victims pay up, but kept many from going bankrupt.
Now, the sector isn’t just in the criminals’ crosshairs. It’s teetering on the edge of profitability, upended by a more than 400% rise last year in ransomware cases and skyrocketing extortion demands. As a percentage of premiums collected, cyber insurance payouts now top 70%, the break-even point.
Fabian Wosar, chief technical officer of Emsisoft, a cybersecurity firm specializing in ransomware, said the prevailing attitude among insurers is no longer: Pay the criminals. It’s likely to be cheaper for all involved.
“The ransomware groups got way too greedy too quickly. So the cost-benefit equation the insurers initially used to figure out whether or not they should pay a ransom — it’s just not there anymore,” he said.
It’s not clear how the single biggest ransomware attack on record, which began Friday, will impact insurers. But it can’t be good.
Pressure is building on the industry to stop reimbursing for ransoms.
In May, the major cyber insurer AXA decided to do so with all new policies in France. But it is so far apparently alone in the industry, and governments are not moving to outlaw reimbursement.
AXA is among major insurers that have suffered ransomware attacks, with operations in Thailand hard-hit. Chicago-based CNA Financial Corp., the seventh--ranked U.S. cybersecurity underwriter last year, saw its network crippled in March. Less than a week earlier, the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future published an interview with a member of the Russian-speaking ransomware gang, REvil, that is skilled in pre-attack intelligence-gathering and happens to be behind the current attack. He suggested it actively targets insurers for data on their clients.
CNA would not confirm a Bloomberg report that it paid a $40 million ransom, which would be the highest reported ransom on record. Nor would it say what or how much data was stolen. It said only that systems where most policyholder data was stored “were not impacted.”
In a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, CNA also said that its losses might not be fully covered by its insurance and “future cybersecurity insurance coverage may be difficult to obtain or may only be available at significantly higher costs to us.”
Another major insurance player hit by ransomware was broker Gallagher. Although it was hit in September, only this past week (June 30) did it disclose that the attackers may have stolen highly detailed data from an unspecified number of customers — from passwords and Social Security numbers to credit card data and medical diagnoses. Company spokeswoman Kelli Murray would not say if any cyber insurance policy contracts were on compromised servers. Nor would she say whether Gallagher paid a ransom. The criminals, from the RagnarLocker gang, apparently never posted information about the attack on their dark web leak site, suggesting that Gallagher paid.
Of the three insurance brokers that ransomware gangs claimed to have attacked in recent weeks, posting stolen data on their dark web sites as evidence, two, in Montreal and Detroit, did not respond to phone calls and emails. The third, in southern California, acknowledged being hobbled for a week.
By the time the Colonial Pipeline and major meat processer JBS were hit by ransomware in May, insurers were already passing higher coverage costs to customers.
Cyber premiums jumped by 29% in January in the U.S. and Canada from the previous month, said Gregory Eskins, an analyst at top commercial insurance broker Marsh McLennan. In February, the month-to-month jump was 32%, in March it was 39%.
In a bid to turn back ransomware-related losses — Eskins said they amounted to about 40% of cyber insurance claims in North America last year — policy renewals are carrying new, stricter rules or lowered coverage limits.
“The price has to match the risk,” said Michael Phillips, chief claims officer at the San Francisco cyber insurance firm Resilience and a co-chair of the public-private Ransomware Task Force.
A policy might now specify that reimbursement for extortion payments can’t exceed one-third of overall coverage, which typically also encompasses recovery and lost income and can include payments to PR firms to mitigate reputational damage. Or an insurer may cut coverage in half, or introduce a deductible, said Brent Reith of the broker Aon.
While some smaller carriers have dropped coverage altogether, the big players are instead retooling.
Then there are hybrid insurers like Resilience and Boston-based Corvus. They don’t simply ask potential customers to fill out a questionnaire. They physically probe their cyber defenses and actively engage clients as cyber threats occur.
“We’re monitoring and making active recommendations not just once a year but throughout the year and dynamically,” said Corvus CEO Phil Edmundson.
But is the overall industry nimble enough to absorb the growing onslaught?
The Government Accountability Office warned in a May report that “the extent to which cyber insurance will continue to be generally available and affordable remains uncertain.” And the New York State Department of Finance said in a February circular that massive industry losses were possible.
Both insured and insurers, stingy about sharing experiences and data, shoulder the blame for that, the U.K. Royal United Services Institute said in a new report. Most ransomware attacks go unreported, and no central clearinghouse on them exists, though governments are beginning to pressure for mandatory industry reporting. As a business sector, insurers are not especially transparent. In the U.S. they are regulated not by the federal government but by the states.
And for now, cyber insurers are mostly resisting calls to halt reimbursements for ransoms paid.
In a May earnings call, the CEO of U.K.-based Beazley, Adrian Cox, said “generally speaking network security is not good enough at the moment.” He said it is up to government to decide whether payments are bad public policy. CEO Evan Greenberg of the leading U.S. cyber insurer, Chubb Limited, agreed in the company’s annual report in February that deciding on a ban is government’s purview. But he did endorse outlawing payments.
Jan Lemnitzer, a Copenhagen Business School lecturer, thinks cyber insurance should be compulsory for businesses large and small, just as everyone who drives must have car insurance and seat belts. The Royal United Services Institute study recommends it for all government suppliers and vendors.
While he considers banning ransom payments problematic, Lemnitzer says it would be a “no-brainer” to compel insurers to stop reimbursing for them.
Some have suggested imposing fines on ransom payments as a disincentive. Or the government could retain a percentage of any cryptocurrency recovered from ransomware criminals, the proceeds going to a federal ransomware defense fund.
Such measures could bite into criminal revenues, said attorney Stewart Baker of Steptoe and Johnson, a former NSA general counsel.
“In the long run, it probably means that resources that are currently going to Russia to pay for Ferraris in Moscow will instead go to improve cybersecurity in the United States.”
https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-government-and-politics-4c2272cdd428ddfa1f3644d513566c06
Scale, details of massive Kaseya ransomware attack emerge
By FRANK BAJAK
today
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-europe-government-and-politics-technology-business-fc0df4c42f8cd6148bf936ca24bb5cbe
BOSTON (AP) — Cybersecurity teams worked feverishly Sunday to stem the impact of the single biggest global ransomware attack on record, with some details emerging about how the Russia-linked gang responsible breached the company whose software was the conduit.
An affiliate of the notorious REvil gang, best known for extorting $11 million from the meat-processor JBS after a Memorial Day attack, infected thousands of victims in at least 17 countries on Friday, largely through firms that remotely manage IT infrastructure for multiple customers, cybersecurity researchers said.
REvil was demanding ransoms of up to $5 million, the researchers said. But late Sunday it offered in a posting on its dark web site a universal decryptor software key that would unscramble all affected machines in exchange for $70 million in cryptocurrency.
Earlier, the FBI said in a statement that while it was investigating the attack its scale “may make it so that we are unable to respond to each victim individually.” Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger later issued a statement saying President Joe Biden had “directed the full resources of the government to investigate this incident” and urged all who believed they were compromised to alert the FBI.
Biden suggested Saturday the U.S. would respond if it was determined that the Kremlin is at all involved.
Less than a month ago, Biden pressed Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop giving safe haven to REvil and other ransomware gangs whose unrelenting extortionary attacks the U.S. deems a national security threat.
A broad array of businesses and public agencies were hit by the latest attack, apparently on all continents, including in financial services, travel and leisure and the public sector — though few large companies, the cybersecurity firm Sophos reported. Ransomware criminals infiltrate networks and sow malware that cripples them by scrambling all their data. Victims get a decoder key when they pay up.
The Swedish grocery chain Coop said most of its 800 stores would be closed for a second day Sunday because their cash register software supplier was crippled. A Swedish pharmacy chain, gas station chain, the state railway and public broadcaster SVT were also hit.
In Germany, an unnamed IT services company told authorities several thousand of its customers were compromised, the news agency dpa reported. Also among reported victims were two big Dutch IT services companies — VelzArt and Hoppenbrouwer Techniek. Most ransomware victims don’t publicly report attacks or disclose if they’ve paid ransoms.
CEO Fred Voccola of the breached software company, Kaseya, estimated the victim number in the low thousands, mostly small businesses like “dental practices, architecture firms, plastic surgery centers, libraries, things like that.”
Voccola said in an interview that only between 50-60 of the company’s 37,000 customers were compromised. But 70% were managed service providers who use the company’s hacked VSA software to manage multiple customers. It automates the installation of software and security updates and manages backups and other vital tasks.
Experts say it was no coincidence that REvil launched the attack at the start of the Fourth of July holiday weekend, knowing U.S. offices would be lightly staffed. Many victims may not learn of it until they are back at work on Monday. Most end users of managed service providers “have no idea” whose software keep their networks humming, said Voccola,
Kaseya said it sent a detection tool to nearly 900 customers on Saturday night.
The REvil offer to offer blanket decryption for all victims of the Kaseya attack in exchange for $70 million suggested its inability to cope with the sheer quantity of infected networks, said Allan Liska, an analyst with the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. Although analysts reported seeing demands of $5 million and $500,000 for bigger targets, it was apparently demanding $45,000 for most.
“This attack is a lot bigger than they expected and it is getting a lot of attention. It is in REvil’s interest to end it quickly,” said Liska. “This is a nightmare to manage.”
Analyst Brett Callow of Emsisoft said he suspects REvil is hoping insurers might crunch the numbers and determine the $70 million will be cheaper for them than extended downtime.
Sophisticated ransomware gangs on REvil’s level usually examine a victim’s financial records — and insurance policies if they can find them — from files they steal before activating the ransomware. The criminals then threaten to dump the stolen data online unless paid. In this attack, that appears not to have happened.
Dutch researchers said they alerted Miami-based Kaseya to the breach and said the criminals used a “zero day,” the industry term for a previous unknown security hole in software. Voccola would not confirm that or offer details of the breach — except to say that it was not phishing.
“The level of sophistication here was extraordinary,” he said.
When the cybersecurity firm Mandiant finishes its investigation, Voccola said he is confident it will show that the criminals didn’t just violate Kaseya code in breaking into his network but also exploited vulnerabilities in third-party software.
It was not the first ransomware attack to leverage managed services providers. In 2019, criminals hobbled the networks of 22 Texas municipalities through one. That same year, 400 U.S. dental practices were crippled in a separate attack.
One of the Dutch vulnerability researchers, Victor Gevers, said his team is worried about products like Kaseya’s VSA because of the total control of vast computing resources they can offer. “More and more of the products that are used to keep networks safe and secure are showing structural weaknesses,” he wrote in a blog Sunday.
The cybersecurity firm ESET identified victims in least 17 countries, including the United Kingdom, South Africa, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Indonesia, New Zealand and Kenya.
Kaseya says the attack only affected “on-premise” customers, organizations running their own data centers, as opposed to its cloud-based services that run software for customers. It also shut down those servers as a precaution, however.
Kaseya, which called on customers Friday to shut down their VSA servers immediately, said Sunday it hoped to have a patch in the next few days.
Active since April 2019, REvil provides ransomware-as-a-service, meaning it develops the network-paralyzing software and leases it to so-called affiliates who infect targets and earn the lion’s share of ransoms. U.S. officials say the most potent ransomware gangs are based in Russia and allied states and operate with Kremlin tolerance and sometimes collude with Russian security services.
Cybersecurity expert Dmitri Alperovitch of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank said that while he does not believe the Kaseya attack is Kremlin-directed, it shows that Putin “has not yet moved” on shutting down cybercriminals.
___
AP reporters Eric Tucker in Washington, Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin, Jari Tanner in Helsinki and Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-europe-government-and-politics-technology-business-fc0df4c42f8cd6148bf936ca24bb5cbe
Mild COVID-19 symptoms linked to prior exposure to the common cold
By Rich Haridy
July 04, 2021
https://newatlas.com/health-wellbeing/mild-covid19-prior-exposure-common-cold-coronavirus-stanford/
A new study from Stanford University researchers has found previous recent exposure to common coronaviruses could help explain why some people infected with SARS-CoV-2 only suffer mild symptoms. The research showed specific immune cells from patients with mild cases of COVID-19 exhibit signs of prior encounters with common-cold-causing coronaviruses.
One big mystery of SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that appeared in late 2019, is the variability of effects it generates from person to person. Mark Davis, director of Stanford University’s Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection, wondered if the answer lay in a type of immune cell known as a killer T-cell.
“A lot of people get very sick or die from COVID-19, while others are walking around not knowing they have it,” says Davis. “Why?”
A great deal of early work on SARS-CoV-2 immunity focused on antibodies. These are the immune proteins that quickly home in on a virus and stop it from infecting our cells. But antibodies are just one weapon in our immune system’s arsenal, and Davis points out pathogens can quickly evolve ways to evade antibody attacks.
Killer T-cells, on the other hand, are the immune system’s big fighters. They seek out and destroy infected cells.
After an initial encounter with a virus, trained killer T-cells quieten down and enter a kind of memory mode. They can persist in this surveillance state for years, on guard to quickly jump into action as soon as a targeted pathogen reappears.
“Memory cells are by far the most active in infectious-disease defense,” explains Davis. “They’re what you want to have in order to fight off a recurring pathogen. They’re what vaccines are meant to generate.”
The problem is that tracking killer T-cells is a little more difficult than simply measuring antibody levels. And working out which particular pathogen those cells are trained to attack is even harder still.
SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh coronavirus found to affect humans. Four of these are relatively harmless, responsible for many instances of the common cold. However, the others (MERS, SARS and now SARS-CoV-2) are responsible for some of the most concerning viral outbreaks of the past 20 years.
To investigate whether killer T-cells previously trained to target common coronaviruses could explain why some people experience only mild cases of COVID-19 the researchers first needed to develop a new immune cell screening platform. As SARS-CoV-2 is somewhat related to other coronaviruses, the researchers mapped out several peptide sequences that were shared by the viruses.
A panel of 24 different peptide sequences was created. Some of the sequences were unique to SARS-CoV-2, while others were shared with known seasonal coronaviruses.
Blood samples taken from subjects before the pandemic began were analyzed and the researchers discovered some killer T-cells quickly kicked into gear when exposed to SARS-CoV-2, targeting those shared coronavirus peptide sequences. Instead of taking a few days to identify and destroy a novel pathogen, these immune cells swiftly recognized SARS-CoV-2 due to its similarities to other coronaviruses. Davis says this crucial factor could be playing a role in differentiating those mild COVID-19 cases from the more severe ones.
“That lost time can spell the difference between never even noticing you have a disease and dying from it,” says Davis.
The researchers then tested their new screening platform on blood samples from COVID-19 patients. The hypothesis held strong, with those mild cases of disease showing T-cells targeting peptide sequences common to several coronaviruses, while severe cases primarily targeted sequences unique to SARS-CoV-2.
“It may be that patients with severe COVID-19 hadn’t been infected, at least not recently, by gentler coronavirus strains, so they didn’t retain effective memory killer T cells,” hypothesizes Davis.
The new study offers some clues to why children have been less susceptible to severe COVID-19. Prior research has suggested the frequency of recent exposure to common coronaviruses in children could play a role in reducing disease severity, and Davis believes his new findings back up that hypothesis.
“Sniffles and sneezes typify the daycare setting and coronavirus-caused common colds are a big part of the reason,” he says. “As many as 80 percent of kids in the United States get exposed within the first couple of years of life.”
A recent study from researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine found this compelling cross-reactive immune response between SARS-CoV-2 and common coronaviruses could mean COVID-19 vaccines generate a small degree of protection against the common cold. The research again looked at T-cell immunity, finding a robust vaccine-induced response to one specific common-cold-causing strain of coronavirus (HCoV-NL63).
The new study was published in the journal Science Immunology.
Source: Stanford Medicine
https://newatlas.com/health-wellbeing/mild-covid19-prior-exposure-common-cold-coronavirus-stanford/
Amazon backs down after demanding fishmonger remove 'prime day' from his advertising
Robin Moxon said the phrase had been popular among fishmongers before Jeff Bezos 'was a glint in his mother's eye'
By Daily Telegraph reporter
4 July 2021 • 3:10pm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/04/amazon-backs-demanding-fishmonger-remove-prime-day-advertising/
Amazon issued, and subsequently withdrew, a legal threat to a fishmonger over his use of the phrase "prime day" to advertise fish, despite claims it has been used by sellers for centuries.
Robin Moxon, who owns four shops and a fish smokery in London, received an email from lawyers acting on behalf of the online retail giant asking for references to "prime day" boat fish to be "pulled" from Moxon's website to avoid shoppers mistaking it for an Amazon offer.
Following the request to remove the wording, the high street seller said he phoned solicitors at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, and explained that the term had been used by fish sellers for "hundreds of years", a response that has since elicited an apology from both Amazon and the legal practice.
Amazon has registered "prime day" (which is its slogan for an annual two-day event of deals and offers for its Prime members) as a trademark.
But Mr Moxon said "prime day" catch was a "nice, neat little phrase" fishmongers used to advertise they had in stock top quality fish – such as turbot, brill and Dover sole – bought from trawlers that fish sustainably for no longer than a day at a time.
Despite the online retailer backing down, Wandsworth resident Mr Moxon called Amazon's attempt to stifle the use of "prime day" branding "heavy handed", and said the phrase had been popular among fishmongers before billionaire boss Jeff Bezos "was a glint in his mother's eye".
"This phrase has been used by many people probably for hundreds of years, and I've been using it regularly for 30 years.
"This phrase was being well used probably before Amazon existed in this country and before Jeff Bezos was a glint in his mother's eye.
"I have used it and always will use it, and I don't see how it can affect its business. It was heavy handed and offensive," Mr Moxon said.
According to an email seen by PA, Amazon's lawyers wrote to Moxon's on June 21 – the start of its Prime Day sales – expressing "concern" that consumers were "very likely to think that a 'Prime Day' sale event/advertisement coinciding with Amazon's Prime Day is offered in association with Amazon when it is not".
After a telephone conversation with Mr Moxon, the firm followed up with a second email later that day apologising "for any inconvenience" after "clarifying the root of the term 'prime day boat' in the context of the fishing industry".
A spokesman for Amazon said: "This email was sent in error and we apologise for any inconvenience caused."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/04/amazon-backs-demanding-fishmonger-remove-prime-day-advertising/
The Weisselberg Indictment Is Not A “Fringe Benefits” Case
Grasping the Full Scope of the Alleged Criminal Scheme
by Daniel Shaviro
Just Security
July 4, 2021
https://www.justsecurity.org/77331/the-weisselberg-indictment-is-not-a-fringe-benefits-case/
In the days before the July 1, 2021 issuance of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Weisselberg-Trump Organization indictment, public anticipation was positively underwhelming. It would just be a fringe benefits case, we were told – meaning, a dispute, of a picayune sort that almost never yields criminal charges, regarding whether or not an employee’s use of, say, a company car or apartment yielded taxable income, in the face of admitted personal benefit but also with plausible claims of business purpose other than the purely compensatory. Everyone does it, we heard, and it shouldn’t be the basis for a criminal fraud charge. What’s more, this ostensibly would just be a New York State or City income tax issue, not federal, thus limiting the scale and monetary significance of the claimed wrongdoing.
Then the indictment dropped, and it turns out that public expectations could scarcely have fallen further short than they were of the magnitude of what was actually being charged. Let me spell out the particulars under several headings:
1. This is no mere fringe benefits case. It is a straight-out fraud case, claiming that the defendants kept double books: phony ones to show the tax authorities, and accurate ones to be hidden from view. The question of whether a given company apartment or car might in theory (with appropriate supporting facts) have been an excludable fringe benefit turns out to be almost completely irrelevant. A better analogy to what is being charged here is the following: Suppose that your employer pays you monthly, through automatically deposited paychecks that end up being included on your annual W-2. But suppose that each month you could stop by the front office, request an envelope full of cash in unmarked bills, and have your W-2 reduced accordingly. So your true income would be the same as if you hadn’t stopped by, but you’d be reporting less salary. If your employer kept careful records of all the cash it gave you, and also still deducted it all, we would basically have this case. That is far different from simple failure to pay taxes on fringe benefits, which is how the indictment has been widely misunderstood, thanks in part to Trump’s defense lawyers’ laying the groundwork before the charges were made public on Thursday.
2. It is not just a state and local income tax fraud case. It is also – via New York State fraud, conspiracy, and grand larceny statutes – a federal income tax fraud case. The indictment’s first three and longest counts detail a “scheme to defraud” the federal Internal Revenue Service, including through a “conspiracy” with multiple “overt acts,” and the commission of “grand larceny.” In other words, just as the Manhattan DA could indict someone for committing such crimes (within its jurisdiction) against the likes of you or me, so here it has identified the IRS as the main victim of the defendants’ actions. Indeed, the word “federal” appears thirty times in the Manhattan DA’s 24-page charging document.
Given the facts alleged, it is hard to fathom that the IRS – if it agrees that those facts are true – would not promptly indict the defendants for federal income tax fraud. Failing to bring charges would amount to saying that overt and deliberate tax cheating of the most brazen kind need not be addressed criminally. If a private individual, rather than the Manhattan DA had somehow gathered all of this information and reported it to the IRS, he or she would be in a great position to claim a whistleblower award. And while federal authorities often refrain from piling on, by bringing their own charges when state authorities are already prosecuting a case; the indictment here makes explicit that the fraud was, in the main, directed against the federal government itself.
3. If the Manhattan DA can prove the facts asserted, this is not a trivial case, or one that ordinarily would not be brought, or one that bespeaks political bias, or is just about pressuring a witness whom the DA wants to “turn.” It is unimaginable to me that any prosecutor would not bring these or similar charges under the asserted facts. If the case is proven, the DA will not have been criminalizing political disagreement, as critics complain. Rather, it will have been criminalizing crime – and not a moment too soon from a broader enforcement standpoint, given widespread concerns about plunging enforcement, not just against income tax fraud, but against white-collar crime more generally.
* * *
That’s the general overview. However, delving into the details can help to show why all this is so. A clear understanding is best conveyed by turning the indictment’s formal presentation of the charges into more of a straightforward narrative. The rest of this commentary presents the main elements of the story that the indictment tells.
One should keep in mind, of course, that all this is just the Manhattan DA’s case. Crimes are not punished in American law unless they have either been confessed to, or proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. For convenience, I will set forth the prosecutorial version of what happened without repeating (more than sporadically) that it all still needs to be proven.
4. The true economic deal alleged by the indictment – Weisselberg had a fixed economic deal with the Trump Corporation. He was to be paid a fixed amount – which, for the years 2011 through 2018, equaled $940,000 annually, comprised of $540,000 denominated as base salary and $400,000 denominated as an end-of-year bonus. Nothing else in the employment agreement and arrangements between the parties that the indictment discusses would change this fixed bottom line. Any supposed “fringe benefit” – and, as we will see, the term really does not fit well here – that the Trump Organization (through any of its entities) furnished to Weisselberg would be treated as compensation in the company’s internal records, and charged against his $940,000 receipt. Thus, for example, suppose the Organization paid him $50,000 in cash, either directly or through a payment to a third party supplier (including other Trump entities) of consumer benefits to him. In that case, all else equal, Weisselberg would get $890,000, rather than $940,000, with that lower amount being treated as compensation in issued W-2s and1099s, and by him on his own tax returns. But the Organization’s internal records would still show that he had received $940,000 of compensation, including this $50,000.
5. Fraudulent double bookkeeping – Implementing this scheme required having two inconsistent sets of records: (a) the fake ones for tax reporting that excluded a part of his compensation (under the parties’ financial deal and the company’s secret bookkeeping), and (b) the true accounting records that the company maintained privately. Experts on tax enforcement agree that keeping two sets of books, in this fashion, is “a red flag” and “a classic indication of an overt act of evasion,” often causing the government to have a “slam-dunk case.”
6. Additional overt acts to conceal the fraud – Even in the company’s own ledgers, as distinct from those that were disclosed to relevant tax authorities, Weisselberg took steps to conceal his receipt of benefits. Thus, he “directed a staff member in the accounting department to remove the notations ‘Per Allen Weisselberg’ from the entries in Donald J. Trump’s Detail General Ledger relating to tuition payments paid on Weisselberg’s behalf to his family members’ private school” (Second Count; Overt Act #10).
7. A large number of the items that the company funded (and then subtracted from Weisselberg’s reported compensation) had no relationship whatsoever to the sort of items that, under appropriate circumstances, might potentially constitute tax-free employee fringe benefits. It is true that the items for which the company (but actually Weisselberg himself, indirectly) paid, and then secretively excluded from his reported income, included (a) rent [1] for a Manhattan apartment that was nearer to his workplace than the home he owned in Wantagh, New York, and (b) a Mercedes Benz automobile. Under appropriate factual and legal circumstances, the value of lodging that one uses for the convenience of the employer, and the value of using a company car – although the indictment states that this was a “personal car” – can potentially be excluded from taxable income. But the following items that the company paid for, on Weisselberg’s behalf, most emphatically do not fit the profile of potentially excludable fringe benefits:
• private school tuition expenses for Weisselberg’s family members (First Count ¶9). [2]
• a Mercedes Benz automobile that was the personal car of Weisselberg’s wife (First Count ¶10).
• unreported cash that Weisselberg could use to pay personal holiday gratuities (First Count ¶11).
To treat cash as a “fringe benefit” would imply that the term covers all employee compensation. Does this mean that, whenever one is paid with cash off the books and does not report it, the IRS is merely quibbling over fringe benefits? Of course not.
• personal expenses for Weisselberg’s other homes and an apartment maintained by one of his children; these included such items as new beds, flat-screen televisions, the installation of carpeting, and furniture for his home in Florida (First Count, ¶12).
• rent-free lodging and other benefits to a family member of Weisselberg (First Count, ¶13).
In the light of such items, along with the secret double bookkeeping and internal company treatment of all these items as compensation, there are only three possible explanations for calling this a “fringe benefits” case. The first is that one has not read the indictment or otherwise acquainted oneself with the pertinent facts. The second is one that is ignorant, not just of extremely basic aspects of federal and state income tax law, but also of common English language usage. Calling bundles of cash and the provision of flat screen televisions in employees’ vacation homes “fringe benefits” – especially when they are not extra pay, but replace ordinary paycheck salary, dollar for dollar – would appear to leave no employee compensation outside the term’s potential scope. The third is that one has decided to misinform one’s audience.
8. Fraudulent mischaracterization of employee compensation, supported by deceptive bookkeeping – The company also reported Weisselberg’s annual end-year payments ($400,000 for the years 2011-2018) as non-employee compensation, using Form 1099 rather than the W-2 that is used for salary (¶16). He relied on this mischaracterization to make deductible annual contributions out of these amounts to a Keogh plan, which is a tax-deferred pension plan that one can deductibly fund by using self-employment income, but not employee wages (¶¶15 and 17). To help support this characterization (which the indictment asserts Weisselberg knew was false), end-year payments would be made by Trump Organization entities of which he was not an employee, such as the Mar-a-Lago Club and Wollman Rink Operations LLC (¶¶15 and 17). This creation of a false paper trail – since he had not directly performed services for these entities supporting the receipt of such payments from them, even as an independent contractor – fits the alleged pattern of not merely taking incorrect tax positions, but engaging in intentionally misleading overt acts in support of a conspiracy to defraud. [3] It also arguably shows consciousness of guilt.
9. Evasion of New York City income tax by falsely denying local residence status – The indictment states that, from 2005 through 2013, Weisselberg and the other corporate defendants acted to “conceal[] his status as a New York City resident” and thus “enable[d him] to avoid the payment of New York City income taxes” (¶8). It further adds that he “spent most of his days each year in New York City, working in the Trump Organization offices at Trump Tower. He was a New York City resident, and knew that he was a New York City resident, but falsely claimed to his tax preparer and to the tax authorities that he was not a New York City resident.” This course of conduct ceased only when he sold a home in Wantagh, New York that he had owned, presumably reflecting that he could no longer purport to live there, rather than in New York City.
It is a widely-known fact among New York-area taxpayers – and not just those with specific tax and accounting knowledge, like Weisselberg himself – that, if one has an apartment in New York City (as he did) and is in the City for at least a part of more than 183 days in a given year, then one counts for that year as a City resident. This is not an issue that turns on any broader (or other) facts and circumstances. Under the indictment’s stated facts, therefore, Weisselberg unambiguously was a New York City resident for all of the years from 2005 through 2013, based on an objective black-letter rule that is hardly arcane or obscure.
10. What was Donald Trump’s role in all this? The indictment notes that “tuition expenses for Weisselberg’s family members [were]… paid by personal checks drawn on the account of and signed by Donald J. Trump.” It also states that, in 2005, “the Trump Corporation, acting through its president,” entered into the New York City apartment lease on Weisselberg’s behalf” – listed as an overt act in furtherance of the claimed conspiracy to evade federal income tax (Second Count; Overt Act #1).
Otherwise, however, there is little direct discussion of what Donald Trump himself did or knew personally in relation to the facts asserted in the indictment. If Trump is subsequently indicted by the DA in connection with the crimes alleged here or anything else, his conviction would require proof in court, beyond a reasonable doubt, of his requisite criminal actions and intent. In the courtroom of public discussion and debate, however, any claim that the crimes asserted in the indictment could have occurred without his participation and knowledge may be viewed by many as begging credulity.
– – – – – – – – – –
[1] In addition to rent for the apartment as such, the company paid for Weisselberg’s telephone services, internet, and cable television, along with monthly garage expenses. (First Count, ¶7). I will not address here the question of whether these would all potentially fit within the statutory exclusion for certain lodging costs that are provided for the convenience of the employer. However, a scrupulous taxpayer who wanted to ensure compliance with her tax obligations would certainly have checked, when (as here) they are separately charged.
[2] Employer-provided tuition assistance can be a tax-free fringe benefit under appropriate circumstances, but these include the company’s providing it subject to a program that applies to a broad grouping of employees – not just to one of an organization’s top officers via a special deal.
[3] See id., heading in front of ¶18.
About the Author(s)
Daniel ShaviroWayne Perry Professor of Taxation. Follow him on Twitter ( @DanielShaviro).
https://www.justsecurity.org/77331/the-weisselberg-indictment-is-not-a-fringe-benefits-case/
Queen awards George Cross to NHS to mark 70 years of public service
Britain’s highest award for gallantry and heroism recognises ‘courage, compassion and dedication’ of staff
The handwritten letter from the Queen awarding the George Cross to the NHS. Photograph: Crown copyright
Caroline Davies
Sun 4 Jul 2021 19.01 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jul/05/queen-awards-george-cross-to-nhs-to-mark-70-years-of-public-service
The Queen has awarded the George Cross, the UK’s highest award for gallantry and heroism, to the NHS to mark its public service over seven decades, Buckingham Palace has announced.
The NHS marks its 73rd birthday on Monday following a year of unprecedented challenges. It is only the third time the award has been given to a collective body, country or organisation rather than an individual since it was instituted by the Queen’s father, George VI, at the height of the blitz in 1940.
In a handwritten personal message, the Queen said: “It is with great pleasure, on behalf of a grateful nation, that I award the George Cross to the National Health Services of the United Kingdom.
“This award recognises all NHS staff, past and present, across all disciplines and all four nations. Over more than seven decades, and especially in recent times, you have supported the people of our country with courage, compassion and dedication, demonstrating the highest standards of public service.
“You have our enduring thanks and heartfelt appreciation. Elizabeth R.”
The George Cross is granted in recognition of “acts of the greatest heroism or of the most courage in circumstances of extreme danger”. It recognises actions by civilians and military personnel not in the face of the enemy. It is awarded by the Queen on the advice of the George Cross committee and the prime minister.
It was conferred on Malta in 1942 in recognition of the fortitude displayed by islanders during sustained and devastating enemy bombardments in the second world war. In 1999 it was awarded to the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) in recognition of more than 30 years of “the collective and sustained bravery of the force, including families of those serving”.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will celebrate the 73rd anniversary of the NHS at a service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral on Monday before hosting a celebration tea at Buckingham Palace. The service will honour the NHS’s contribution to the country during Covid-19, reflecting on the work and achievement of health staff, volunteers and carers.
At the NHS Big Tea in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, the couple will meet staff ranging from respiratory ward nurses, counsellors and care workers to those in non-clinical roles, including catering managers and housekeeping coordinators.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jul/05/queen-awards-george-cross-to-nhs-to-mark-70-years-of-public-service
A string of top accounts on the new pro-Trump app GETTR were hacked and defaced on its July 4 launch day
Joshua Zitser 27 minutes ago
https://www.businessinsider.com/gettr-trump-allies-get-accounts-hacked-july-4-launch-day-2021-7?r=US&IR=T
* GETTR, founded by former Trump aide Jason Miller, was hacked on the day of its official launch.
* The accounts of Miller, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Mike Pompeo, and other Trump allies were targeted.
* A man claiming responsibility told Insider the hack was "easy" to pull off.
GETTR, the new social media platform set up by allies of former President Donald Trump, was been hacked on the day of its July 4 launch.
The platform's most popular verified users, mostly former Trump aides, had their accounts compromised. GETTR's official support page was also targeted.
Jason Miller, who founded the platform and was formerly a spokesperson to Trump, had his page taken over.
The accounts of Mike Pompeo, Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Harlan Hill, Sean Parnell, and the pro-Trump broadcaster Newsmax were also hacked.
All of these account's profiles were changed to show the same message: "@JubaBaghdad was here :) ^^ free palestine ^^."
The accounts were first hacked at around 8:30 a.m. EST, and the majority of the profiles returned to their previous state by 10:00 a.m. EST.
Insider spoke to the user @JubaBaghdad, who claimed responsibility for the hack, via Twitter direct message.
When asked why he decided to target the social media platform, he said it was "just for fun" and that it had been "easy" from a technical standpoint.
"They should not publish the website before making sure everything, or at least almost everything, is secure," he added. He did not disclose how he took control of the accounts."
Miller, GETTR's CEO, told Insider: "You know you're shaking things up when they come after you. The problem was detected and sealed in a matter of minutes, and all the intruder was able to accomplish was to change a few user names. The situation has been rectified and we've already had more than half a million users sign up for our exciting new platform!"
The platform is off to a bumpy start more broadly.
GETTR was flooded with pornographic images and GIFs on Saturday, Insider reported. Users spammed the platform's first post with graphic hentai videos and images of Hillary Clinton's face photoshopped onto a woman's naked body, Mother Jones reported.
...
MORE IMAGESs
https://www.businessinsider.com/gettr-trump-allies-get-accounts-hacked-july-4-launch-day-2021-7?r=US&IR=T
Pay Arrangement Named In Trump Org Indictment Linked To Ivanka Trump
Allen Weisselberg is in trouble for collecting "non-employee compensation" while company CFO — similar to a reported arrangement involving Ivanka Trump.
By Mary Papenfuss, HuffPost US
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/ivanka-trump-weisselberg-indictments-employee-consultant_n_60dfd5d2e4b068186f4f8f9c?ri18n=true
One of the charges filed this week against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer involves a type of pay strategy reportedly also linked to Ivanka Trump.
Among the 15 felony charges detailed in the indictment against the Trump Organization and CFO Allen Weisselberg involves a scheme to pay Weisselberg as both an employee of the company and as a nonemployee contractor or consultant to other businesses in the Trump Organization, allegedly as a way for both the company and Weisselberg to dodge taxes.
The Trump Organization and Weisselberg on Thursday pleaded not guilty to all charges, which also included allegations of conspiracy, grand larceny, criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records.
The New York Times reported last year that a consultant payment strategy was part of investigations into the Trump Organization by Manhattan’s district attorney and New York state’s attorney general.
The probe involved Trump Organization tax write-offs on “millions of dollars in consulting fees, some of which appear to have gone to Ivanka Trump,” sources told the Times — though there was no indication at the time that the former president’s daughter was a target of the investigation, the newspaper noted.
The Associated Press also reported last year that the attorney general sent a subpoena to the Trump Organization for records related to consulting fees paid to Ivanka Trump while she was also a senior executive at the Trump Organization.
The Times reported Friday that both New York City and state investigators had issued subpoenas last year for information on tax write-offs for “millions of dollars of consulting fees” paid to TTT consulting, a limited liability company set up for Trump’s eldest three children. Only fees paid to Ivanka Trump in the last few years are publicly known, however, because she was required to reveal fees as a White House adviser.
Ivanka Trump could not immediately be reached for comment.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow referred to the Times’ revelation about Ivanka Trump’s consultant fees in light of the indictment against the Trump Organization and Weisselberg on her show Thursday night.
Weisselberg collected both a salary from the Trump Organization and “non-employee compensation” as a “self-employed” contractor for other Trump businesses, such as Wollman Rink in New York’s Central Park. This way both he and the Trump Organization allegedly dodged taxes, and he was able to shelter more of his income in a retirement account as a “self-employed” worker, even though he wasn’t self-employed, prosecutors argued in the indictment.
Maddow called it “exactly the kind of scheme” that The New York Times described involving Ivanka Trump.
The newspaper “described in detail financial records they discovered that showed Ivanka Trump being paid both as an employee of the Trump Organization and as a consultant to the Trump Organization in a way that seemed custom-designed to try to evade taxes both for the company and for her,” Maddow explained. (Check out the video of her discussion of the charges up top.)
Neither Ivanka Trump nor “other executives” beyond Weisselberg who allegedly benefited from “non-employee compensation” are named in the indictment.
The Times reported that Donald Trump reduced his taxable income by deducting about $26 million in fees to “unidentified consultants as a business expense on numerous projects” between 2010 and 2018.
“Some of those fees appear to have been paid” to Ivanka Trump, the newspaper added. On a 2017 disclosure she filed when joining the White House as a presidential adviser, she reported receiving payments from a consulting company she co-owned, totaling $747,622, that “exactly matched consulting fees claimed as tax deductions by the Trump Organization for hotel projects in Hawaii and Vancouver, British Columbia,” the Times reported.
At the time of the payments, Ivanka Trump was an executive officer of the Trump companies that made the payments, meaning she “appears to have been treated as a consultant while also working for the company” as a senior executive, the Times noted.
Times investigative reporter Susanne Craig told Maddow on Thursday it’s a “red flag” that Ivanka Trump was an officer of the Trump Organization while also being paid consulting fees by the company.
Alan Garten, general counsel for the Trump Organization, told the Times in response to the paper’s story last year “this is just the latest fishing expedition in an ongoing attempt to harass the company.”
Donald Trump has denied all wrongdoing, calling the indictments against his company and Weisselberg politically motivated.
Federal prosecutors accuse Weisselberg and the company in the indictment of defrauding tax authorities.
“The purpose of the scheme was to compensate Weisselberg and other Trump Organization executives in a manner that was ‘off the books’: the beneficiaries of the scheme received substantial portions of their income through indirect and disguised means, with compensation that was unreported or misreported by [the Trump Organization] to the tax authorities,” the indictment stated.
“The scheme was intended to allow certain employees to substantially understate their compensation from the Trump Organization, so that they could and did pay federal, state, and local taxes in amounts that were significantly less than the amounts that should have been paid,” it added.
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/ivanka-trump-weisselberg-indictments-employee-consultant_n_60dfd5d2e4b068186f4f8f9c?ri18n=true
Donald Trump Jr. Concedes Felony Count In Indictment Against Dad's Company Is True
Junior acknowledges dad paid tuition for Allen Weisselberg's grandkids -- because he's a "good guy." The 15-felony indictment says it was a tax dodge.
By Mary Papenfuss, HuffPost US
04/07/2021 14:00 BST
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/donald-trump-jr-indictment-allen-weisselberg_n_60e0fbaae4b068186f500d12?ri18n=true
Donald Trump Jr. has come right out and acknowledged that one of the counts in the 15-felony indictment against his dad’s Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, is true.
In a rambling 13-minute video posted to Facebook on Thursday, Junior said that, yes, his father, former President Donald Trump, paid the private school tuition for Weisselberg’s grandkids. “My dad did that,” he said, because he’s a “good guy.”
MSNBC’s Ari Melber said on “The Beat” Friday that Don Jr. may have made things “worse” for the Trump Organization and Weisselberg with his remarks. “This is about off-the-books tax crime allegations,” Melber said. (Check out the video up top.)
A count in the indictment filed Thursday against Weisselberg and the former president’s business details the tuition payments — made in lieu of an equal portion of Weisselberg’s salary — as a part of an alleged wide-ranging scheme to defraud the government of taxes owed by both the Trump Organization and Weisselberg, by paying the CFO some of his earned compensation “off the books.”
According to federal prosecutors, the tuition money was part of Weisselberg’s salary — not charity from Trump. It was paid directly to the school so the Trump Organization could dodge payroll taxes on the money and Weisselberg could shirk income taxes, according to the indictment.
“The payment of tuition expenses for Weisselberg’s family members constituted employee compensation and taxable income” to Weisselberg that was “treated as part of Weisselberg’s annual compensation in internal records maintained by the Trump Corporation,” the indictment says. It was not, however, reported as income, prosecutors noted, and Weisselberg allegedly avoided paying taxes on nearly $360,000 paid directly as tuition.
The tuition was one of many similar “off the books” pay arrangements, the indictment alleges.
Weisselberg and the Trump Organization have pleaded not guilty to the charges.
As for questionable compensation schemes, Trump’s oldest children could also be in trouble.
The New York Times reported Friday that New York City and state investigators issued subpoenas last year for information on Trump Organization tax write-offs for “millions of dollars of consulting fees” paid to TTT Consulting — a limited liability company set up for Trump’s three eldest children.
“Some of those fees appear to have been paid” to Ivanka Trump, the newspaper reported last year.
On a 2017 disclosure she filed when joining the White House as a presidential adviser, Ivanka “reported receiving payments from a consulting company she co-owned, totaling $747,622, that exactly matched consulting fees claimed as tax deductions by the Trump Organization for hotel projects in Hawaii and Vancouver, British Columbia,” the Times reported.
Ivanka Trump was a full-time employee of the Trump companies that made the payments, meaning she “appears to have been treated as a consultant while also working for the company” as a senior executive, the Times noted.
Eric Trump said he isn’t worried about indictments against him or his siblings. “We’ve always lived amazingly clean lives,” he told Newsmax Friday.
Twitter critics couldn’t wait to weigh in on the issue.
....
MORE
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/donald-trump-jr-indictment-allen-weisselberg_n_60e0fbaae4b068186f500d12?ri18n=true
Republican Senators Urge Biden to End Trump-Initiated Trade WarBy
Laura Davison
July 1, 2021, 2:26 PM CDT
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-01/biden-urged-to-end-trump-initiated-trade-war-by-gop-senate-group
Republican senators say conflict caused ‘self-inflicted harm’
Senators ask for Biden to first remove tariffs on allies
A group of Republican lawmakers asked President Joe Biden to end the “self-inflicted harm” his GOP predecessor, Donald Trump, caused in starting a multi-front trade war with China and European allies.
Seven Republican senators sent a letter to the White House asking Biden to repeal tariffs and other trade barriers that Trump implemented during his time in office affecting a wide range of industries, including agriculture, carmakers and manufacturers.
“An important first step would be to reduce barriers to trade with our allies,” the letter said. “By doing so, we can stop damaging actions and retaliation and mend relationships while listening to businesses across the country that have suffered from the negative economic consequences.”
The letter, dated Wednesday, was signed by Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Mike Lee of Utah and Deb Fischer of Nebraska.
Biden campaigned on ending Trump’s trade policies and returning to multi-lateral negotiations with trading partners. In practice, Biden has been slow to remove all of the tariffs with the new administration still evaluating the next generation of policies, in particular toward China.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-01/biden-urged-to-end-trump-initiated-trade-war-by-gop-senate-group
Prosecutors say spreadsheets from Trump Organization offer a road map for its indictment. Where the investigation goes now is the question.
By David A. Fahrenthold, Jonathan O'Connell , Shayna Jacobs and
Josh Dawsey
July 4, 2021 at 11:00 a.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/prosecutors-say-spreadsheets-from-trump-organization-offer-a-road-map-for-its-indictment-where-the-investigation-goes-now-is-the-question/2021/07/03/f7df06f0-db81-11eb-8fb8-aea56b785b00_story.html
In prosecutors’ telling, the Trump Organization provided a road map for its own indictment.
In documents filed in New York Supreme Court last week, prosecutors claimed that the company had spent 15 years paying its chief financial officer “off the books,” giving him cars, an apartment, tuition payments and cash that were hidden from income tax authorities.
But at the same time, according to allegations included in the indictment, the Trump Organization also was keeping internal spreadsheets that tallied the payments that were being hidden.
Prosecutors treated the spreadsheets as the accounting equivalent of a confession. They said the ledgers themselves showed the size of the fraud, estimating that Weisselberg alone had avoided paying more than $900,000 in taxes. And that concealment, they said, showed that the Trump Organization knew it was wrong.
“There is no clearer example of a company that should be held to criminal account,” Carey Dunne, a prosecutor with the office of the Manhattan district attorney, said as authorities charged the company and its CFO, Allen Weisselberg, with 15 felony counts.
Yet Thursday’s indictment left many questions unanswered.
Will anyone else be charged? Has the investigation narrowed to tax evasion alone? What about other topics that prosecutors earlier indicated in court filings they were investigating?
Still, legal experts say, the spreadsheets described on Thursday — and the narrow tax-evasion case they support — could cast a long shadow over Trump and his company.
Prosecutors have long indicated their desire to persuade Weisselberg, people with knowledge of the case have said, to “flip” and reduce his own legal liability by agreeing to testify against Trump and his company. And experts said the spreadsheets — at least as described by prosecutors — made the case against Weisselberg sound daunting for him.
“If you pay your employees under the table, a good rule of thumb is not to write it down,” said Daniel Hemel, a law professor at the University of Chicago.
Hemel said the ledger is likely to have made the decision to bring charges an easy one for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. (D) and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D): “It’s a big amount of money. It’s blatant violation of the law. And it’s well-documented.”
Trump himself has not been charged in the case; in Thursday’s arraignment, Dunne said the company’s “former CEO” — possibly referring to Trump — had personally signed “many of the illegal compensation checks.” The charging documents said Weisselberg orchestrated the scheme with “others” from the company but did not say who.
Since the indictments were handed up by a Manhattan grand jury, Trump and those close to him have derided them as the last fizzle of a failed investigation. They have argued that after not finding any evidence of criminal activity, Vance and James simply dressed up normal corporate behavior — giving out perks to top employees — as a crime to hurt Trump.
At a Saturday night rally in Sarasota, Fla., Trump followed in that vein, accusing prosecutors of “weaponizing” the law against him. But he did not dispute their accusations.
“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,” he said.
“Murder’s okay. Human trafficking, no problem. But fringe benefits — you can’t do that.”
His son Donald Trump Jr. earlier compared the case to the Russian government’s imprisonment of opposition leader and Putin critic Alexei Navalny.
“This is the political persecution of a political enemy,” Trump Jr. said in a Thursday-night television interview on Fox News. “This is what Vladimir Putin does.”
During an arraignment hearing Thursday, prosecutor Dunne told Judge Juan Merchan that the indictments were not driven by partisanship. “Politics has no role in the grand jury chamber,” Dunne said.
Alan Futerfas, a Trump Organization attorney, declined to comment about the internal spreadsheets, as did Mary Mulligan, a Weisselberg attorney.
Spokespeople for Vance and James — whose offices recently teamed up after years of investigating Trump’s business practices separately — also declined to comment.
The case against Trump’s company and Weisselberg could last well into next year and beyond, legal experts said, because the already balky New York state courts have been further slowed by delays and precautions adopted to protect against the spread of coronavirus. In addition, on Thursday, Weisselberg’s attorneys said they would need to review potentially millions of pages of evidence in the case, which could further slow the proceedings.
Futerfas, representing the Trump Organization, said the hard drives turned over Thursday by prosecutors — which represented just the start of document transfers — “might contain literally millions of documents,” and he argued that the defense needed more time to delve into them before beginning to file pretrial motions in the case.
“I can’t begin to fathom how much material that the defense attorneys in this case are going to have to sift through,” New York criminal defense lawyer and former Manhattan prosecutor Mark Bederow said.
The next hearing in the case is set for Sept. 20.
Vance and James have said their investigations will continue in the meantime. But they have not said much about the direction of their further investigations.
In the past, the two offices have indicated in subpoenas and other documents that they were looking at a large number of the Trump Organization’s past transactions — including tax breaks the company obtained by preserving open land at two properties, tax payments on $102 million of forgiven debt and hush-money payments made in the last days of the 2016 presidential campaign.
In some cases, investigators have sought documents about Trump properties with no public explanation of why.
In February, for instance, Vance’s office sent a subpoena for documents to the General Services Administration, which owns the building where Trump operates his downtown Washington hotel. That subpoena, which has not been previously reported on, was detailed in records received as part of a public documents request.
The GSA confirmed that the subpoena was received but would not say what documents Vance requested.
The GSA then twice wrote to Eric Trump, a Trump son and the family member who has been most involved in running the company since his father entered the White House, and asked whether the Trump Organization had any objections to its plan to send files to Vance.
Both times the Trump Organization did not respond, according to a memo written by GSA General Counsel Nitin Shah and laying out the events. The Washington Post obtained a copy of that memo as part of the records request. The GSA on May 25 sent Vance’s office an encrypted thumb drive and an encrypted zip file, the records show.
Trump’s D.C. hotel was not mentioned in Thursday’s indictments. Vance’s office declined to comment about the GSA request.
For now, prosecutors are focusing on Weisselberg, who has spent decades at the Trump Organization, and said in an earlier deposition for an earlier, unrelated case that his oversight of the company’s finances is so detailed that he would notice if a subsidiary was paying too much for pens.
But so far, Weisselberg has shown no interest in cooperating with investigators, according to people familiar with the case. At his arraignment, Weisselberg pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers said he would fight the charges brought against him.
As alleged by prosecutors in the charging documents, the Trump Organization lowered the level of income taxes for at least some of its executives, and payroll taxes for the company, by converting some of their salaries into other benefits.
Then, the documents alleged, they hid those benefits from tax authorities, reporting only the part of the salaries that appeared on paychecks. They said Weisselberg alone got more than $1.7 million of untaxed income.
But at the same time, according to charging documents, the Trump Organization wanted to make sure it did not overpay Weisselberg beyond the $940,000 he was supposed to make every year.
The result was the spreadsheets, in which the company allegedly tracked how much of Weisselberg’s salary had been converted into untaxed pay, the charging documents claimed.
“Weisselberg received the benefit of these payments, and the Trump Organization internally tracked and treated many of them as part of his authorized annual compensation,” prosecutors wrote in the indictment. The goal, they said, was “ensuring he was not paid more than his pre-authorized, fixed amount of gross compensation.”
The indictment did not describe the spreadsheets in detail or say whether the untaxed benefits allegedly given to other executives were tracked in the same way.
Legal experts said it was rare in tax-fraud cases to find that a company had kept clear records of its actions.
“You’ve got to get behind somebody’s mind. Did they understand what they were doing?” said Philip Hackney, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who previously worked in the IRS’s Office of Chief Counsel.
Hackney said that — if prosecutors are accurately describing the Trump Organization’s internal spreadsheets — those records would be strong evidence that Weisselberg knew the untaxed payments were income. “You’ve got a physical manifestation of knowledge,” he said. “Which is a pretty uncommon thing to have.”
It was unclear, from the indictments, how prosecutors obtained the internal spreadsheets. Vance’s office obtained millions of pages of tax returns and related documents from Trump’s accountants earlier this year after a court battle that twice went to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Trump Organization has said it also provided prosecutors documents directly, in some cases, after being subpoenaed.
By David Fahrenthold, Jonathan O'Connell, Shayna Jacobs and Josh Dawsey
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/prosecutors-say-spreadsheets-from-trump-organization-offer-a-road-map-for-its-indictment-where-the-investigation-goes-now-is-the-question/2021/07/03/f7df06f0-db81-11eb-8fb8-aea56b785b00_story.html
Trump appears to acknowledge tax schemes while questioning whether alleged violations are crimes
By Tyler Pager
July 4, 2021 at 4:17 a.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-rally-sarasota/2021/07/03/6965b6b2-dc71-11eb-ae62-2d07d7df83bd_story.html
CORRECTION
An earlier version of this article misstated the pleas entered by Allen Weisselberg and Donald Trump’s businesses, including the Trump Organization. They have pleaded not guilty.
Former president Donald Trump lashed out at Manhattan prosecutors Saturday night for indicting his organization and its chief financial officer for tax fraud, calling it “prosecutorial misconduct” in his most extensive comments on the charges since they were unsealed Thursday.
As Trump criticized the investigation, he appeared to acknowledge the tax schemes while questioning whether the alleged violations were in fact crimes.
“They go after good, hard-working people for not paying taxes on a company car,” he said 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?”
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office charged the Trump Organization and CFO Allen Weisselberg with orchestrating a 15-year scheme to avoid taxes by providing benefits hidden from the federal government. Weisselberg, they said, evaded taxes on $1.7 million in fringe benefits, which included the Trump Organization paying his rent, leasing him cars and other gifts. The Trump Organization and Weisselberg both pleaded not guilty this week, and Trump was not charged in the case.
But Trump excoriated the prosecutors for what he argued was a politically motivated investigation and one that came at the expense of focusing on violent crimes.
“For murder and for selling massive amounts of the worst drugs in the world that kill people left and right, that's okay,” he said. “Think of it, think of how unfair it is. Never before has New York City and their prosecutors or perhaps any prosecutors criminally charged a company or a person for fringe benefits. Fringe benefits. Murders, okay. Human trafficking, no problem — but fringe benefits, you can’t do that.”
Tax experts have said prosecutions centered on fringe benefits are rare, but some have compared the charges to the case against Leona Helmsley, a New York real estate developer who was convicted of evading $1.2 million in taxes in the 1980s.
Yet Trump maintained that he was the victim of “the radical left” who failed to “get him” in Washington with the Mueller investigation and said prosecutors only want to target him and other Republicans.
“Every abuse and attack they throw my way, it's only because I have been fighting for you against the corrupt establishment,” he said. “That's all it is.”
But prosecutors for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office argued Thursday that the business practices were not “standard practice,” attempting to counter Trump’s argument that the investigation is politically motivated.
“There is no clearer example of a company that should be held to criminal account,” said Carey Dunne, a prosecutor working for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. (D).
Trump’s rally was part of his effort to ramp up his political activity ahead of the midterm elections, as he looks to settle scores with political opponents and position himself for a possible 2024 presidential run, which he once again teased Saturday night. Trump also held the rally despite concerns from Florida politicians about the event being a distraction from search-and-rescue efforts after the collapse of a residential building in Surfside, Fla.
Trump held a moment of silence for the victims of the accident, which killed more than 20 people and left more than 100 people missing, before launching into a lengthy list of grievances. He assailed the Biden administration for its immigration policy, made false claims about the 2020 election and called for more information about the death of Ashli Babbitt, who was killed while storming the Capitol on Jan. 6. Trump also questioned why people were being jailed in connection with the insurrection but not for participating in racial justice protests.
1.5k Comments
By Tyler Pager
Tyler Pager is a White House reporter at The Washington Post. He joined the paper in 2021 after covering the White House at Politico and the 2020 presidential campaign at Bloomberg News. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-rally-sarasota/2021/07/03/6965b6b2-dc71-11eb-ae62-2d07d7df83bd_story.html
Capitol, symbol of democracy, off-limits on Independence Day
By LISA MASCARO
today
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-michael-pence-dc-wire-health-coronavirus-pandemic-ca928021462570b840a491a9d80f524d
WASHINGTON (AP) — As it has been for nearly 16 months, longer than any time in the nation’s history, the U.S. Capitol is closed to most public visitors.
The one-two punch of the coronavirus pandemic that shuttered the Capitol’s doors in the spring of 2020 and the deadly insurrection by then-President Donald Trump’s supporters on Jan. 6 has left the icon of American democracy unopen to all but a select few.
As the rest of the nation emerges this July Fourth holiday from the pandemic for cookouts and fireworks that President Joe Biden is encouraging from the White House, the people’s house faces new threats of violence, virus variants and a more difficult moment.
“What is heartbreaking about it is that the Capitol has been forever our symbol of democracy — enduring through the Civil War, through world wars, through strife of all kinds,” said Jane L. Campbell, president and CEO of the United States Capitol Historical Society.
Congressional leaders are working intensely to try to resume public tours at the Capitol in some form, but any reopening probably will come with new protocols for health and safety for the millions of annual visitors, 535 lawmakers and thousands of staff and crew that work under the dome and its surrounding campus.
In the House, lawmakers have been operating under a proxy voting system that has allowed them to avoid travel to Washington, though most now vote in person. The smaller Senate is mostly back to in-person business. Both chambers conduct some committee operations remotely.
The security fencing surrounding the Capitol is about to come down, a gesture toward normalcy. A $1.9 billion emergency spending package to bolster security for the complex was approved by the House, but the Senate is objecting to the increased money.
The conversations in public and private over how to safely reopen are shifting as dangerous coronavirus strains emerge and federal law enforcement officials issue new warnings about about the potential for violence from right-wing extremist groups and those who believe in conspiracies.
White nationalists and other far-right groups loyal to Trump stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, and were among those trying to overturn Biden’s victory. Authorities have been tracking chatter online about groups of people potentially returning to Washington as part of an unfounded and baseless conspiracy theory that Trump would be reinstated in August, according to two officials familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive law enforcement information.
“I want people to feel proud that they can come to the Capitol, and they can talk about its rich history,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the Homeland Security Committee and now chairman of a new select panel that will investigate the riot.
“We shouldn’t ever think about visiting the Capitol and wondering if it’s safe,” he said.
Lawmakers have struggled over the past year with their own mixed emotions over the shuttered doors, wary of returning to the Capitol when a segment of their colleagues, mainly Republicans, refuse to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. Two elected officials have died of COVID-19 complications.
While many lawmakers say they are saddened by the black-metal security fencing, and all it represents, some also view it as a necessary deterrent after having fled to safety from the pro-Trump rioters.
But the quieted hallways now create their own unease, representing all that is being lost. A lawmaker’s children played in the empty Rotunda one recent evening, a reminder of the absence of school groups, tourists and other visitors who typically crowd the summer season to see democracy in action or petition their government.
Congress provides the most direct link between Americans, and their federal government, the representative democracy the founders envisioned. Some 2.5 million people used to visit the Capitol each year and 12 million to the surrounding grounds, according to a House aide. Public tours of the White House tours also remain closed.
“I miss the visitors,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., who said she had escorted some people to the House gallery last week only to find that it closed to onlookers who used to be able to watch some of the day’s legislative session.
“I always find it inspiring that so many people want to come here,” she said.
The Capitol has endured crises before. The public galleries were shut down for about a month during the 1918 pandemic. The grounds were closed for a few months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The public was also unable to visit in 1968 during unrest after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Security was reconsidered at different points, including after shootings on lawmakers and bombings at the building.
But not since the end of the War of 1812, when the British invaded in 1814, has the seat of American democracy seen an attack like the one this year.
Trump’s supporters fought the police, broke through barricades and stormed the halls, threatening to harm former t hen-Vice President Mike Pence and other leaders and lawmakers as the mob tried to stop Congress from certifying the states’ election results for Biden.
All told, five people died stemming from the events, including a Trump supporter shot by police, three people who suffered medical emergencies and a police officer who died later. Two police officers later took their own lives. Hundreds of people have been arrested.
Illinois Rep. Rodney Davis, the top Republican on the House Administration Committee, sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., a letter signed by some 135 other Republican lawmakers calling for a plan to fully reopen.
“There is no reason for the Capitol to be closed,” Davis said in an interview.
He said those involved in the siege should be prosecuted, but it’s time for the House to end proxy voting and resume regular operations. “We’ve got to get back to doing what the people sent us here to do,” he said.
A senior Democratic aide, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said tours have not resumed for both pandemic and security reasons. The House and Senate Sergeants-at-Arms are continually reviewing the situation in consultation with Office of Attending Physician, the aide said.
The Capitol complex is open to official business visitors with limits on the numbers allowed. Most are asked to sign in and provide background information.
“The Capitol has now being closed for the longest stretch in its 228 years history,” said Campbell of the historical society.
“What I would say to all of us is that it’s important for Congress to come together around safety,” she said. “People ought to be able to work together around that.”
___
Associated Press writer Michael Balsamo contributed to this report.
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-michael-pence-dc-wire-health-coronavirus-pandemic-ca928021462570b840a491a9d80f524d
In Case Against Trump’s Company, Echoes of His Father’s Tactics on Taxes
The first criminal prosecution involving the former president’s business hearkens back to Fred Trump’s $16,135 purchase of boilers in the 1990s.
By Mike McIntire and Russ Buettner
July 3, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/us/weisselberg-fred-trump-invoice-scheme.html
Long before Donald J. Trump’s company was accused of plotting detours around the tax code to compensate its chief financial officer with carpeting, televisions and car leases, there were the $16,135 boilers.
The boilers were bought for that amount by Mr. Trump’s father, Fred, in the 1990s for his numerous apartment buildings. But in a bit of financial alchemy that embodied the family ethos of paying as little tax as possible, the elder Mr. Trump used inflated invoices to pay the bill and the extra money was skimmed off for his children — all to avoid gift and inheritance taxes.
Echoes of the earlier scheme could be found in the indictment on Thursday of the Trump Organization and Allen H. Weisselberg, its chief financial officer, who first went to work for Fred Trump in the 1970s. While the amount of tax-free benefits that Mr. Weisselberg reportedly received is significant — $1.76 million over 15 years — the way the company went about doling them out is strikingly small-bore and incremental.
In fact, the first criminal case against the former president’s company features no grand schemes to launder money through Russia, hide millions offshore or commit other offenses commensurate with a self-described global business empire headquartered in a Fifth Avenue skyscraper. Rather, the details of the charges brought by a Manhattan grand jury have a rather low-rent feel that one might associate with a scrappy real-estate operation born in Brooklyn and Queens.
Which, of course, it is.
The Trump Organization, for all the puffery of its leader, has always been essentially a family business, tightly controlled by Mr. Trump and a small number of relatives and trusted associates, including Mr. Weisselberg. Although the company has about 3,500 employees worldwide, most are lower-tier workers at golf resorts and hotels and only 122 made $100,000 or more in 2018, according to tax records for Mr. Trump and his businesses obtained by The New York Times.
The tax records, which The Times reported on last year, also reveal a deep commitment to green-eyeshades maneuvering to winnow taxes to a minimum. Hundreds of millions of dollars in deductions for business expenses ran the gamut, from $6 for food in Uruguay and $10 for using a telephone in Panama to $13.7 million for “sales and marketing” in Las Vegas.
Of course, efficient accountants would not be doing their job if they did not try to maximize tax breaks. But in the indictment unsealed on Thursday, the Trump Organization is accused of being too clever by half, to the point of criminality, in playing the game.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office and New York State’s attorney general are also investigating whether the company intentionally overvalued a 50,000-square-foot mansion in Westchester County to claim a $21 million tax write-off for a conservation easement. Both agencies are also examining the Trump Organization’s practice of deducting millions of dollars in consulting fees, some of which appear to have been paid to at least one of Mr. Trump’s children who was a full-time company employee at the time she received them.
No charges have been filed related to those inquiries, and Mr. Trump himself has not been charged. Both Mr. Weisselberg and the Trump Organization denied the charges in the indictment, and Mr. Trump has called the investigations, which were initiated by elected Democrats, a politically motivated “witch hunt.”
The Trump Organization’s relentless quest for tax avoidance has its roots in Fred Trump’s determination to fend off the taxman at every possible turn. A self-made workaholic who built and sold his first house before he was 20, the elder Mr. Trump eventually passed more than $1 billion to his children while employing legally dubious strategies to avoid nearly $500 million in taxes on the transfers, a 2018 investigation by The Times found.
“My father had always been very much opposed to paying taxes, so to the extent he could pay less in taxes, that was a good thing,” Robert Trump, the former president’s younger brother, said in a legal deposition related to Fred Trump’s estate. (Robert Trump died last year at 71.)
Among the Trump family’s machinations was the creation in 1992 of All County Building Supply & Maintenance, a company that existed mainly on paper. It was co-owned by Donald Trump, his three siblings and a cousin, John Walter.
Vendors who sold goods and services to Trump properties were asked to send invoices to All County, which would pad the actual cost by an additional 20 percent or more and bill Fred Trump, who paid the inflated amount. The extra money was then split among the former president, his siblings and Mr. Walter.
Asked in a deposition why the elder Mr. Trump went to such lengths, which tax experts interviewed by The Times said were improper, if not illegal, Mr. Walter suggested it was to avoid the so-called death tax that would incur if the money were simply left to the Trump children in their father’s will.
“He loved to save taxes,” Mr. Walter said.
It is a lesson fully absorbed by his eager-to-please son Donald, who has bragged about avoiding taxes. When his Democratic opponent in 2016, Hillary Clinton, accused him during a debate of not paying federal income taxes, Mr. Trump replied: “That makes me smart.”
The Times’s 2020 investigation of Mr. Trump’s tax records found that by using hundreds of millions in losses from his businesses, as well as by deducting expenses and taking advantage of tax credits, he was able to pay only $750 in federal income taxes in both 2016 and 2017, and none at all in 10 of the previous 15 years. His aggressive strategies led to an Internal Revenue Service audit, which is believed to be continuing, of the legitimacy of a $72.9 million refund he claimed.
The indictment announced on Thursday accuses the Trump Organization of a new series of off-the-books maneuvers that, in some respects, resemble an updated version of Fred Trump’s model. In Mr. Weisselberg’s case, rather than simply receiving a higher salary, his base pay was set at $540,000 and then augmented with a series of benefits designed to avoid income and payroll taxes, according to the indictment.
Some of the extra benefits to Mr. Weisselberg and other Trump Organization employees came from annual bonuses drawn from various corporate entities controlled by the company and classified as “non-employee” pay, which allowed Mr. Weisselberg to reduce his income taxes by putting the money into a type of retirement account intended for people who are self-employed. The Trump Organization also paid the rent for his apartment, Mercedes-Benz leases and private school tuition, none of which was reported as taxable income.
The indictment says Mr. Weisselberg also “received unreported cash that he could use to pay personal holiday gratuities.”
“Specifically,” it says, “Weisselberg caused the Trump Corporation to issue corporate checks made payable to a Trump Organization employee who cashed the checks and received cash. The cash was given to Weisselberg for his personal use. The Trump Corporation booked this cash as ‘Holiday Entertainment,’ but maintained internal spreadsheets showing the cash to be part of Weisselberg’s employee compensation.”
The indictment charges the Trump Organization with failing to report the cash disbursements as income to the tax authorities, and says Mr. Weisselberg “intentionally caused the receipt of cash payments to be omitted from his personal tax returns.” In addition, the company is accused of writing checks to cover “such items as new beds, flat-screen televisions, the installation of carpeting, and furniture” for Mr. Weisselberg, expenses that were tracked internally at the Trump Organization but not reported as income.
Beyond the case against Mr. Weisselberg, the 25-page indictment hints at potential trouble for others at Mr. Trump’s company, saying the attempts to avoid declaring compensation and paying taxes extended to at least two other employees who are not identified. Prosecutors also take aim at the Trump Organization’s practice of reporting certain income as “non-employee compensation,” which is normally not subject to payroll deductions.
Last year, The Times reported that Mr. Trump’s company routinely declared, as a business expense, millions of dollars in payments it classified as consulting fees, at least some of which appear to have gone to his eldest daughter, Ivanka Trump. At the time of the payments, Ms. Trump was also a full-time executive at her father’s company and drawing a regular salary, raising the question of why she would simultaneously be considered a consultant.
After The Times article was published, the district attorney and state attorney general were reported to have expanded their respective investigations of the Trump Organization to include the consulting payments. The indictment on Thursday did not include anything about them, and it is not clear where that aspect of the inquiries stands.
Mike McIntire is a reporter with the investigations unit. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and has written in depth on campaign finance, gun violence and corruption in college sports. @mmcintire
Russ Buettner is a reporter on The New York Times investigations desk. Since 2016, his reporting has focused on the personal finances of Donald. J. Trump, including articles that revealed large business losses and tax avoidance schemes evidenced on several decades of his tax returns. In 2019, he shared a Pulitzer Prize for work that revealed the vast inheritance Mr. Trump had received from his father. @russbuettner
A version of this article appears in print on July 4, 2021, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Details of Tax Case, Echoes Of a Trump Business Tradition. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/us/weisselberg-fred-trump-invoice-scheme.html
PODCAST How serious are the Trump Organization tax fraud charges?
Norman Eisen and Adrianna PitaFriday, July 2, 2021
The Trump Organization and its CFO, Allen Weisselberg, face felony charges for an alleged 15-year scheme of conspiracy and criminal tax fraud in the state of New York. “When you read through the indictment, through all 15 counts and the 24-page indictment and the stunning level of detail, it really presents a sweeping tax fraud case.” Norman Eisen examines the severity of the charges against the Trump Organization, and evaluates former President Trump’s risk for potential future indictment.
https://www.brookings.edu/podcast-episode/how-serious-are-the-trump-organization-tax-fraud-charges/
Brookings report concludes: Donald Trump at "serious" risk of indictment
The 60-page report identifies five areas where criminal charges against the former president are likely
By BRETT BACHMAN
PUBLISHED JULY 3, 2021 1:04PM (EDT)
https://www.salon.com/2021/07/03/brookings-report-concludes-donald-trump-at-serious-risk-of-indictment/
A blockbuster report from the Brookings Institute this week concluded that former President Donald Trump is at "serious" risk of indictment for a number of alleged crimes, including tax dodging, falsifying records and a variety of business-related fraud.
The 60-page report, released Monday, came just days before criminal indictments against Trump Organization and its longtime finance chief were unsealed Thursday. Both the company and CFO Allen Weisselberg were accused of staging a 15-year-long scheme to avoid payroll taxes for top executives through the use of off-the-books corporate benefits.
Brookings describes the report's four authors as "experts with a broad array of backgrounds as scholars, practitioners, former prosecutors, and defense lawyers, who have served under state or federal administrations headed by leaders of both political parties, and who have substantial relevant experience with the particular investigating offices here." They include Georgetown Law School professor and Deputy Attorney General under George H.W. Bush, Donald Ayer; former federal prosecutor Danya Perry; experienced criminal litigator John Cuti and senior Brookings fellow Norman Eisen, who served as counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee during the process of President Trump's first impeachment trial.
To reach their conclusions, the authors write that they consulted "court filings, media reports, congressional transcripts, and other sources," which were public but had never been compiled in the same place.
In particular, the report finds that Trump's potential criminal liability stems from alleged improperly recorded "business" expenses, including a $130,000 payout to Trump's former personal attorney Michael Cohen, as reimbursement for a hush-money payment to adult film star Stephanie Clifford, a.k.a "Stormy Daniels." The tax-free corporate benefits given to top Trump Organization officials also figure heavily into the analysis of the former commander-in-chief's criminal liability, the authors conclude.
The report identifies five areas where Trump is most at risk of prosecution:
1. Falsifying business records
2. Tax Fraud
3. Insurance Fraud
4. "Scheme to defraud"
5. Enterprise Fraud
You can read the full report below:
Trump Report Final by Brett Bachman on Scribd
https://www.scribd.com/document/514094489/Trump-Report-Final#from_embed
Trump Report Final
Uploaded byBrett Bachman
Description:A Brookings Institute report, which found former President Donald Trump is at "serious" risk of indictment for a number of alleged crimes.Full description
https://www.salon.com/2021/07/03/brookings-report-concludes-donald-trump-at-serious-risk-of-indictment/
11 Arrested in Armed Roadside Standoff in Massachusetts
The men, who wore military-style gear and claimed in a livestream to be “foreign nationals,” were part of an hourslong standoff with police officers.
By Isabella Grullón Paz
July 3, 2021, 1:24 p.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/us/wakefield-ma-lockdown-rise-of-the-moors.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
Eleven suspects were taken into custody on Saturday after a lengthy roadside standoff between police officers in Massachusetts and a group of armed men in tactical gear who claimed to be part of a Moorish American group.
According to the Massachusetts State Police, at about 1:30 a.m. on Saturday, a state trooper stopped to check on two vehicles that had pulled over in the emergency breakout lane of Route 95 in Wakefield. The men were refilling their gas tanks with their own fuel, and they appeared to be wearing military tactical gear and carrying weapons.
Col. Christopher Mason of the Massachusetts State Police said that when the group failed to provide identification and firearm licenses as requested, the trooper asked for backup.
The standoff eventually moved to the wood line by the interstate without any shots being fired. Around 10:15 a.m., the police arrested nine of the men involved. Two suspects were taken in earlier, at approximately 8 a.m. All men surrendered without incident, Colonel Mason said, and “a number” of firearms were seized.
“I attribute the successful resolution of this to both patience, professionalism and partnership,” he said. “At the end of the day, we have the desired outcome, which is a safe resolution.”
According to Colonel Mason, the men involved in the standoff say they are part of a group called Rise of the Moors. They describe themselves as “Moorish Americans dedicated to educating new Moors and influencing our Elders,” according to the group’s website.
“Their self-professed leader wanted very much known their ideology is not anti-government,” the colonel said. “Our investigation will provide us more insight into what their motivation, what their ideology is.”
He said that the group was making its way from Rhode Island to Maine for “training.”
“We are not anti-government,” a man said early Saturday morning on a livestream on the group’s YouTube channel. The man, who was wearing military-style gear, went on to explain that the group had pulled over to fuel up their cars with gas cans to avoid “making any unnecessary stops” while carrying firearms. The man also said they were traveling to “their private land.”
“We do not intend to be hostile, we do not intent to be aggressive,” he added later. “We are not anti-government, we are not anti-police, we are not sovereign citizens and we are not Black identity extremists.”
“We are foreign nationals,” another member of the group shouted from the background.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a Moorish sovereign citizen movement emerged in the early 1990s. It is an offshoot of the antigovernment sovereign citizens movement, which believes that individual citizens hold sovereignty over, and are independent of, the authority of federal and state governments.
It is unclear what affiliation the Rise of the Moors may have, if any, with that movement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/us/wakefield-ma-lockdown-rise-of-the-moors.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
Jim Sciutto @jimsciutto Another state, another heavily-armed militia group. The US has a domestic terrorism problem - and addressing it, or failing to, has become yet one more partisan issue.
Jim Sciutto
@jimsciutto
· 2h
Latest: Police Standoff is Over.
“Remaining suspects on highway have been taken into custody by MSP Special Tactical Operations Team. 7 additional suspects being transported for booking,” MA State Police posted, adding, “We will now conduct sweeps of their 2 vehicles and woods” twitter.com/jimsciutto/sta…
4:22 PM · Jul 3, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
Another state, another heavily-armed militia group. The US has a domestic terrorism problem - and addressing it, or failing to, has become yet one more partisan issue. https://t.co/vfTdFk9Ty9
— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) July 3, 2021
Remaining suspects on highway have been taken into custody by MSP Special Tactical Operations Team. 7 additional suspects being transported for booking. We will now conduct sweeps of their 2 vehicles and woods. Total of 9 in custody counting the initial 2 arrests. https://t.co/eP2KkzZFpo
— Mass State Police (@MassStatePolice) July 3, 2021
Swedish Coop supermarkets shut due to US ransomware cyber-attack
By Joe Tidy
Cyber security reporter, BBC News
Published1 hour ago
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57707530
Some 500 Coop supermarket stores in Sweden have been forced to close due to an ongoing "colossal" cyber-attack affecting organisations around the world.
Coop Sweden says it closed more than half of its 800 stores on Friday after point-of-sale tills and self-service checkouts stopped working.
The supermarket was not itself targeted by hackers - but is one of a growing number of organisations affected by an attack on a large software supplier the company uses indirectly.
Cyber researchers say about 200 businesses have been hit by this "colossal" ransomware attack, which had mainly affected the US.
Cyber-security firm Huntress Labs said the hack targeted Florida-based IT company Kaseya before spreading through corporate networks that use its software. The firm believes the Russia-linked REvil ransomware gang was responsible.
Kaseya said in a statement on its own website that it was investigating a "potential attack".
A spokeswoman for Coop Sweden told the BBC: "We first noticed problems in a small number of stores on Friday evening around 6:30pm so we closed those stores early. Then overnight we realised it was much bigger and we took the decision not to open most of our stores this morning so that our teams could work out how to fix it.
"The whole paying system at our tills and our self-service checkouts stopped working so we need time to reboot the system."
It's understood that Coop doesn't use Kesaya directly on it's systems but that one of their software providers does.
The case highlights the growing concern in the cyber-security world about so-called supply chain attacks where hackers are able to claim multiple victims by attacking their supplier.
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, a federal body, said in a statement that it was taking action to address the attack and urging users of the Kesaya software to shut it down.
The UK's National Cyber Security Centre said: "We are aware of a cyber incident involving Kaseya, and we are working to fully understand its impact.
"Ransomware is a growing, global cyber threat, and all organisations should take immediate steps to limit risk and follow our advice on how to put in place robust defences to protect their networks."
The cyber-breach looks to have been timed for maximum disruption as it emerged on Friday afternoon when companies across the US were clocking off for the long Independence Day weekend.
Kaseya is urging customers that use its VSA tool to immediately shut down their servers.
Kaseya said in its statement that a "small number" of companies had been affected, though Huntress Labs said the number was greater than 200.
It is not clear what specific companies have been affected, and a Kaseya representative contacted by the BBC declined to give details.
Kaseya's website says it has a presence in more than 10 countries and over 10,000 customers.
"This is a colossal and devastating supply chain attack," Huntress Labs' senior security researcher John Hammond said in an email.
At a summit in Geneva last month, US President Joe Biden said he told Russian President Vladimir Putin he had a responsibility to rein in such cyber-attacks.
Mr Biden said he gave Mr Putin a list of 16 critical infrastructure sectors, from energy to water, that should not be subject to hacking.
REvil - also known as Sodinokibi - is one of the most prolific and profitable cyber-criminal groups in the world.
The gang was blamed by the FBI for a hack in May that paralysed operations at JBS - the world's largest meat supplier.
The group sometimes threatens to post stolen documents on its website - known as the "Happy Blog" - if victims don't comply with its demands.
REvil was also linked to a co-ordinated attack on nearly two dozen local governments in the US state of Texas in 2019.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57707530
Russia-based hackers breach more than 1,000 businesses
Axios
Jacob Knutson, Gigi Sukin
https://www.axios.com/russia-hackers-breach-200-msp-1515df7b-5090-4b70-b6b6-e1e3f0c91665.html
A Russia-based hacking group known as REvil has compromised the computer systems of at least 1,000 businesses by targeting managed service providers, according to to the cybersecurity firm Huntress Labs Inc.
Why it matters: It's a large-scale ransomware campaign — the full scope of which is not yet known — and comes on the heels of several other high-profile ransomware attacks this year.
Of note via Bloomberg: "Such attacks can have a multiplying effect, since the hackers may then gain access and infiltrate the MSPs’ customers too."
The affected MSPs, platforms that provide IT management and other core network functions for businesses, and companies have not yet been named.
The latest: Victims have emerged in 11 countries so far, per cybersecurity firm ESET.
Grocery chain Coop’s 800+ stores in Sweden couldn’t open Saturday after the hack led cash registers to malfunction, spokesperson Therese Knapp told Bloomberg.
What they're saying: John Hammond, a cybersecurity researcher at Huntress Labs, said more than 20 MSPs have been impacted. He noted the criminals targeted software supplier Kaseya, using its network-management package to spread the ransomware.
“What makes this attack stand out is the trickle-down effect, from the managed service provider to the small business,” Hammond said. “Kaseya handles large enterprise all the way to small businesses globally, so ultimately, it has the potential to spread to any size or scale business.”
Cybersecurity researcher Jake Williams, president of Rendition Infosec, told AP it's no accident that this happened before a holiday weekend, when IT staffing is generally thin.
Hackers frequently infiltrate widely used software, then spread malware as the software automatically updates.
The privately held Kaseya is based in Dublin, with a U.S. headquarters in Miami. The Miami Herald reported Kaseya's plans to hire as many as 500 workers by 2022 to staff a recently acquired cybersecurity platform.
The big picture: The breach comes after a summit between President Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, during which Biden threatened to use the U.S.' "significant" cyber capabilities to respond if critical infrastructure entities are targeted by Russian hackers.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress in June that cyber threats against U.S. businesses are increasing "almost exponentially."
Go deeper: FBI: Russia-linked REvil behind ransomware attack on meatpacker JBS
https://www.axios.com/russia-hackers-breach-200-msp-1515df7b-5090-4b70-b6b6-e1e3f0c91665.html
Widespread ransomware attack likely hit ‘thousands’ of companies on eve of long weekend
Hackers hit a major IT software provider, allowing their attack to spread downstream into many small businesses, which are now facing ransom payments to unlock their computer networks
By Gerrit De Vynck and Rachel Lerman
July 3, 2021 at 5:17 p.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/02/kaseya-ransomware-attack/
A sprawling ransomware attack that hit hours before the beginning of the July Fourth holiday weekend has already affected hundreds of business and is likely to hit many more, researchers said.
On Saturday morning, information technology company Kaseya confirmed it had been hit by a “sophisticated cyberattack” on its VSA software — a set of tools used by IT departments to manage and monitor computers remotely. The company said only around 40 customers had been hit.
But since Kaseya’s software is used by large IT companies that offer contracted services to hundreds of smaller businesses, the hack could have spread to thousands of victims. Kaseya warned all of its nearly 40,000 customers to disconnect their Kaseya software immediately. Cybersecurity firm Huntress Labs said they had tracked 20 IT companies, known as managed service providers, that had been hit. Over 1,000 of these companies’ clients, mostly small businesses, had been hit by the hack too, Huntress Labs said on Reddit.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if it was thousands of companies," said Fabian Wosar, chief technology officer of Emsisoft, a company that provides software and advice to help organizations defend against ransomware attacks. “We just don’t know yet because of the long weekend in the U.S.”
A major grocery chain in Sweden said Saturday that its IT provider had been hit by an attack, meaning its cash registers were locked up. It had to shut down hundreds of stores, the company, Coop Sweden, said on its Facebook page.
Because of the sheer number of companies potentially affected, the attack could prove to be one of the biggest in history. Researchers said REvil, the same hacker group that attacked JBS Meats earlier this year, was behind the attack.
The assault could ratchet up tensions between the U.S. and Russia, as it comes just weeks after President Biden met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva, warning him that the United States would hold Moscow accountable for cyber attacks that emanate from Russia. Many cybersecurity threat analysts believe that REvil operates largely out of Russia. The recent spate shows underscores the challenge facing the Biden administration in deterring ransomware attacks conducted by criminals given safe harbor in countries like Russia.
Instead of a careful, targeted attack on a single large company, this hack seems to have used managed service providers to spread indiscriminately through a huge network of smaller companies. Unlike most ransomware attacks, it doesn’t look like REvil tried to steal sensitive data before locking out its victims, Wosar said.
“At this point, at least it seems it was more a spray and pray attack, they didn’t try to exfiltrate data from all the victims," he said. “It was more like carpet bombing."
“We believe that we have identified the source of the vulnerability and are preparing a patch to mitigate it,” Kiyesa CEO Fred Voccola wrote in a statement Friday night.
Researchers said cybercriminals were sending two different ransom notes on Friday — demanding $50,000 from smaller companies and $5 million from larger ones.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency urged companies in a statement to follow Kaseya’s advice and said it is “taking action to understand and address the recent supply-chain ransomware attack.”
“It is absolutely the biggest non-nation state supply-chain cyberattack that we’ve ever seen,” Allan Liska, a researcher with cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, said Friday. “And it’s probably the biggest ransomware attack we’ve seen, at least the biggest since WannaCry.”
He noted it could be the largest number of companies one ransomware attack has hit. The companies affected could be a wide range of small to large firms, and many are likely to be small to midsized businesses that use managed IT services. Kaseya also counts a number of state and local governments as customers, Liska said.
The WannaCry computer worm affected hundreds of thousands of people in 2017. The National Security Agency eventually linked the North Korean government to the creation of the worm.
Ransomware is a national security threat and a big business — and it’s wreaking havoc
Ransomware attacks increased significantly in frequency and severity during 2020. A report from a task force of more than 60 experts said nearly 2,400 governments, health-care systems and schools in the country were hit by ransomware in 2020. Organizations paid attackers more than $412 million in ransom payments last year, according to analysis firm Chainalysis.
After a May attack on Colonial Pipeline — which spurred panicked lines at gas pumps and empty fuel stations — the U.S. government increased its emphasis on addressing cybersecurity issues, and urged corporate America to strengthen its computer security.
Ransomware attacks have been on the rise as hackers band together and form cybercriminal gangs to extort companies for payment. The attacks are often carried out by attackers in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Hackers gain access to a company’s computer system using tactics such as sending “phishing” emails, which are designed to trick employees into inadvertently installing malware on their computers.
Once inside, cybercriminals will lock down parts of the companies’ networks and demand payment to release them back to the owner. Additionally, hackers often steal private company information and threaten to leak it online if they are not paid.
It is still unclear how attackers gained access to Kaseya’s system. The company has been a popular target of REvil, Liska said, probably because it serves so many other organizations as customers.
The attackers included a ransom note directing victims to a website to pay a ransom, although Liska said the site had been down all afternoon and evening.
Kaseya spokesperson Dana Liedholm said its investigation of the incident is ongoing, and pointed to the company’s earlier statement.
Ransomware attacks could reach ‘pandemic’ proportions. What to know after the pipeline hack.
Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.
1.2k Comments
By Gerrit De Vynck
Gerrit De Vynck is a tech reporter for The Washington Post. He writes about Google and the algorithms that increasingly shape society. He previously covered tech for seven years at Bloomberg News. Twitter
By Rachel Lerman
Rachel Lerman covers breaking news in technology for The Washington Post. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/02/kaseya-ransomware-attack/
FBI launches flurry of arrests over attacks on journalists during Capitol riot
By Devlin Barrett
July 3, 2021 at 11:00 a.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/capitol-riot-media-attacks/2021/07/02/8af871d2-daa7-11eb-bb9e-70fda8c37057_story.html
Nearly six months after the U.S. Capitol riot, the Justice Department has begun arresting a new category of alleged criminals — those who attacked reporters or damaged their equipment as journalists documented the violence perpetrated by supporters of President Donald Trump.
The first such charge came last week, when 43-year-old Shane Jason Woods of Illinois was charged with engaging in violence on the Capitol grounds Jan. 6, as well as assaulting a law enforcement officer. Authorities say Woods was caught on video knocking down a cameraman.
The arrests come at a contentious moment for the Justice Department and First Amendment advocates, who have sharply criticized federal law enforcement for secretly issuing subpoenas of reporters’ phone records during the Trump administration.
The new attorney general, Merrick Garland, has ordered the drafting of new rules for prosecutors when trying to identify who may have leaked classified information, but critics of the long-standing Justice Department policy say it should not have taken another set of controversial subpoenas for law enforcement officials to stop using such secretive measures to hunt for reporters’ sources.
Amid that ongoing tension, the Justice Department has begun arresting some of those who allegedly surrounded a group of reporters outside the Capitol, ran them off and then set out to destroy tens of thousands of dollars worth of their gear.
On Thursday, FBI agents arrested a Covington, Va., man for allegedly destroying journalists’ equipment. Joshua Dillon Haynes was charged with smashing their gear outside the Capitol and bragging about it in a text to a friend. Haynes was the fifth person arrested in connection with attacks on the media in a little more than a week.
“We attacked the CNN reporters and the fake news and destroyed tens of thousands of dollars of their video and television equipment here’s a picture behind me of the pile we made out of it,” he allegedly messaged the person, according to court papers.
Court papers filed in the “attacks on media” cases suggest that charging someone with assaulting a journalist or vandalizing their equipment is a bit more complex than other rioting charges.
There is no federal law specifically against attacking a journalist, so the Justice Department has charged those who went after reporters or their gear on Jan. 6 with committing violence in the restricted grounds of the Capitol, or destroying property on the Capitol grounds. More such arrests are expected, according to officials.
“We welcome the Justice Department’s steps to hold people accountable for assaulting journalists and damaging their equipment as they documented one of the worst attacks on our democracy in recent times. These charges send a very clear message that the Justice Department will protect journalists who are doing their jobs to keep us informed,” said Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Other advocates said the issue of journalist safety is bigger than Trump, the 2020 election and American politics. “It’s heartening that the Justice Department is taking attacks against reporters seriously,” said Katherine Jacobsen, a researcher at the Committee to Protect Journalists, which had called for investigations of Jan. 6 attacks on the press. Bringing such cases, she said, “sends a signal that journalists do play an essential role in our democracy.”
While Congress was the central focus of the rioters’ anger that day, many in the mob expressed disgust for journalists, with one person scrawling “murder the media” on a congressional door.
“The vilification of the media that we saw from the previous administration was incredibly concerning, and that played into a longer arc of rising anti-press sentiment across the country,” she said. “Jan. 6 showed that what the administration says about the media does matter, words do matter, and can have very negative, very real impact on reporters and their ability to do their jobs safely.”
Chase Kevin Allen, a 25-year-old man from Seekonk, Mass., was arrested this week on charges of engaging in violence and destroying property on the grounds of the Capitol. According to FBI papers filed in court against Allen, he was seen on video stomping on reporting equipment as a large group of individuals swarmed several reporters and drove them away. In one video, a person who appears to be Allen is seen cursing and yelling for the journalists to leave the area.
After his arrest, Allen spoke to reporters outside his home, saying he was a documentarian who went to the Capitol on Jan. 6 to observe and record what happened, and compared himself to a reporter. Speaking without a shirt, revealing a chest tattoo that said, “Vanilla,” Allen declined to comment about the specific allegations against him. “I’m working everything out with the courts and whatnot,” he said.
Earlier in the week, the Justice Department charged a woman with disorderly conduct and trespassing after videos showed her egging on an attack on a New York Times photographer inside the Capitol during the rioting. Investigators say that in one of the videos, Sandra Pomeroy Weyer of Mechanicsburg, Pa., can be heard calling the photographer a traitor and urging others to “get her out” and “mace her.”
Separately, two men from Long Island were charged with destroying media equipment. According to court papers, much of the key evidence against Gabriel Brown and Zvonimir Jurlina was contained in videos they took of themselves that day.
The FBI affidavit filed against Brown describes video of him denouncing the media as he and a group of others surround journalists’ television equipment and try to damage it.
“Smash that [expletive],” Brown said in one video, according to the court papers. “You know what, the media did not want to do its job so now they [expletive] can’t.”
After he was taken into custody Monday in Texas, Jurlina posted a video online in which he called himself a “political prisoner.” On the video, which has since been taken down, Jurlina said: “Donald Trump, please pay for my legal fees because this all happened because of you ... and I did nothing wrong.”
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/capitol-riot-media-attacks/2021/07/02/8af871d2-daa7-11eb-bb9e-70fda8c37057_story.html
The big picture: Conservatives have been looking to build an alternative social media app for months, following the de-platforming of President Trump and far-right figures in the aftermath of the Capital insurrection.
Earlier this year, Axios reported that Trump’s team was in touch with a relatively unknown platform called FreeSpace to build its own social network.
Gettr appears to be developed by a company listed as Chainnov Inc., formed last summer. Data from Apptopia suggests that the group has also registered an app called “Getome” with the same social descriptions as the Gettr app.
Data shows that almost every major conservative social network has seen a dramatic decrease in downloads since the Capitol insurrection.
Donald Trump launched his own blog in May, but Miller confirmed weeks later that he shut it down.
https://www.axios.com/jason-miller-social-media-gettr-donald-trump-46b0da7e-0d24-41f7-b7a0-6114e117f6f2.html
CHAINNOV, INC.
Delaware Secretary Of State Business Registration · Updated 7/13/2020
spacer
Chainnov, Inc. is a Delaware Corporation filed On July 13, 2020. The company's filing status is listed as Active and its File Number is 3227826.
The Registered Agent on file for this company is Legalinc Corporate Services Inc. and is located at 651 N Broad St Suite 206, Middletown, DE 19709.
Company Information
Company Name: CHAINNOV, INC.
Entity Type: CORPORATION
File Number: 3227826
Filing State: Delaware (DE)
Filing Status: Active
Filing Date: July 13, 2020
Company Age: 1 Years
Registered Agent Phone: (302) 894-8922
Registered Agent:
Legalinc Corporate Services Inc.
651 N Broad St Suite 206
Middletown, DE 19709
Source: Delaware Secretary of State
https://www.bizapedia.com/de/chainnov-inc.html
Ex-Trump Adviser Jason Miller Says New Social App Gettr Is Backed by Foundation Tied to Guo Wengui
Political operative says his free-speech-focused platform has secured financial support from entity close to fugitive Chinese businessman
By Keach Hagey and Brian Spegele
July 2, 2021 12:12 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ex-trump-adviser-jason-miller-new-social-app-gettr-backed-by-guo-wengui-tied-foundation-11625199130
Former Trump adviser Jason Miller says a new, free-speech-focused social-media platform he is leading has received financial backing from a foundation tied to fugitive Chinese businessman Guo Wengui.
Called Gettr—a portmanteau of “getting together”—the Twitter -like platform appeared in app stores last month and will formally launch on July 4, Mr. Miller said.
Mr. Miller, who recently left Mr. Trump’s office to serve as chief executive of the venture, said Gettr—registered in Delaware and headquartered in New York—was backed by international investors that include “the Guo family foundation.” He added Mr. Guo doesn’t have a direct financial stake or direct role in Gettr, nor did he identify the foundation that made the investment.
The Wall Street Journal wasn’t able to independently identify the foundation, and Mr. Miller didn’t comment further on it.
‘I think a lot of people understand, with the United States, the desire for a new social-media platform that’s really founded on these principles of free speech, independent thought, rejecting censorship and cancel cultures.’
— Jason Miller, former Trump adviser
In an online video last week that was viewed by the Journal, Mr. Guo said he was an adviser to the social-media platform but wasn’t involved as a member of its management. An account under the name of Mr. Guo, an avowed critic of China’s Communist Party, that is marked as verified by Gettr indicates that it was set up in July 2021.
“We truly view this as a global platform,” Mr. Miller said. “I think a lot of people understand, with the United States, the desire for a new social-media platform that’s really founded on these principles of free speech, independent thought, rejecting censorship and cancel cultures.”
Mr. Miller declined to discuss finances or staff head count, but people familiar with the matter said that he has so far raised about $30 million and that the company employs more than 100 people.
The Daily Beast earlier reported Mr. Guo’s ties to Gettr.
A onetime property developer in Beijing, Mr. Guo has been wanted by China’s government for several years, for alleged crimes including money laundering and fraud. He has denied any wrongdoing and portrays himself as a global leader in fighting against China’s ruling Communist Party.
Mr. Guo has worked closely with former Trump political adviser Steve Bannon and is involved with other business ventures, including a website called GTV where Mr. Guo regularly broadcasts lengthy videos in Chinese for his supporters.
For months, Mr. Miller has led an effort to find a new social-media home for the former president after Mr. Trump was kicked off Twitter and Facebook following the Jan. 6 riot, when a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Mr. Trump’s office took dozens of meetings with alternative social-media platforms in hopes of launching something by July 4, the Journal previously reported.
In those discussions, Mr. Trump expected to be paid in some way for the followers he would bring to any upstart social network, the Journal has reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Mr. Trump had nearly 89 million Twitter followers.
Mr. Miller said that Mr. Trump isn’t on Gettr but he hopes he will be someday soon. “We obviously are holding ‘realDonaldTrump’ for him. It’s up to him if he wants to join at some point. He has a number of different offers.”
A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Although Gettr’s scrolling posts and verified accounts closely resemble Twitter’s, there are a number of features that set it apart, Mr. Miller said. Posts will be longer, up to 777 characters.
While any user can post videos up to three minutes long, social-media influencers, such as broadcasters, will be able to post segments up to 10 minutes long, he said. Users will be able to import their existing tweets as part of setting up their account. “People own their own tweets,” Mr. Miller said.
A Twitter spokeswoman declined to comment.
Later this year, Gettr is planning to roll out an “online appreciation” function that will let users donate to politicians directly, Mr. Miller said. Rather than advertising, Mr. Miller said the platform is looking to make money from e-commerce.
While billing itself as a free-speech app, Gettr bars threats, bullying, stalking, hate speech, harassment, sexually explicit content and a number of other behaviors. It will use a combination of human and artificial-intelligence moderators to police the platform, Mr. Miller said.
“We want to make sure that this is a marketplace of ideas, and people can feel free to express their ideas without the fear of being deplatformed,” he said. When it comes to “behavior that becomes illegal or threatening to other people,” he said, “we want to make sure that’s avoided.”
Write to Keach Hagey at keach.hagey@wsj.com and Brian Spegele at brian.spegele@wsj.com
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ex-trump-adviser-jason-miller-new-social-app-gettr-backed-by-guo-wengui-tied-foundation-11625199130
Trump allies' new anti-censorship app for conservatives has already been overrun with porn, reports say
Joshua Zitser 4 hours ago
https://www.businessinsider.com/gettr-trump-allies-anti-censorship-app-flooded-with-porn-reports-2021-7?r=US&IR=T
* GETTR, a social media app set up by a former Trump aide, officially launches on July 4.
* The anti-Twitter platform has already been flooded with pornographic spam comments, reports say.
* Despite its objection to censorship, GETTR said it reserves the right to "address" lewd content.
A new, anti-censorship social media platform set up by Donald Trump's former aides has already been overrun with porn, reports say.
GETTR, which is led by former Trump spokesman Jason Miller, advertises itself as holding freedom of speech as a "core value." But users have already taken advantage of the website's lax approach to moderation, according to reports.
According to Politico, the app went live in app stores in mid-June but is set to launch officially on July 4.
Comments under the platform's welcome message currently include pornographic images and GIFs, Mother Jones reported. Users have also spammed the platform's first post with graphic hentai videos and images of Hillary Clinton's face photoshopped onto a woman's naked body, the outlet said.
There are also comments including images of old men wearing diapers, Gizmodo reported.
The platform's QAnon hashtag was also flooded with obscene memes, according to the Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer.
It is not clear who the posters of the memes and lewd messages are. Neither GETTR nor Miller immediately responded to Insider's request for comment.
Will Sommer @willsommer ·Jul 1
QAnon fans were initially excited about new MAGA social app Gettr, but they're growing irate as moderators fail to keep lewd anime pics and the "pig poop balls" meme out of the QAnon hashtag. One of the top results now features Sonic the Hedgehog crushing a guy with his feet.
THREAD
QAnon fans were initially excited about new MAGA social app Gettr, but they're growing irate as moderators fail to keep lewd anime pics and the "pig poop balls" meme out of the QAnon hashtag. One of the top results now features Sonic the Hedgehog crushing a guy with his feet.
— Will Sommer (@willsommer) July 1, 2021
BeachPretzel @BeachPretzel2 ·2h - Not looking good for Ivanka or dad: Rachel Maddow compares tax scheme described in Weisselberg indictment as involving "certain Trump Org executives, including but not limited to Weisselberg," to reporting in the NYT about payments made to Ivanka Trump.
Rachel Maddow compares the tax scheme described in the Allen Weisselberg indictment as involving "certain Trump Organization executives, including but not limited to Weisselberg," to reporting in the New York Times about payments made by Trump Org to Ivanka Trump, and talks with Susanne Craig, investigative reporter for the New York Times, and Mary Trump, the niece of Donald Trump, for insights.
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/tax-scheme-outlined-in-weisselberg-indictment-echoes-nyt-reporting-on-ivanka-trump-payouts-115880517926
7:51 PM · Jul 2, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
Not looking good for Ivanka or dad: Rachel Maddow compares tax scheme described in Weisselberg indictment as involving "certain Trump Org executives, including but not limited to Weisselberg," to reporting in the NYT about payments made to Ivanka Trump.
— BeachPretzel (@BeachPretzel2) July 2, 2021
https://t.co/2Lu3rWCMHA
The Daily 202: Trump Org allegedly kept spreadsheets of grift
By Olivier Knox National Political Correspondent and Anchor of The Daily 202
July 2, 2021 at 4:11 p.m. GMT+1
with Mariana Alfaro
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/02/daily-202-trump-org-allegedly-kept-spreadsheets-grift/
Imagine regularly engaging in potentially illegal activities online for years, and saving a detailed record of them in a computer folder marked “Red Flags.”
The indictment against former president Donald Trump’s eponymous business and its 73-year-old chief financial officer, unveiled yesterday, makes for riveting reading, partly because of its portrayal of scrupulously unscrupulous record-keeping.
One of the accusations against Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, detailed on page nine, describes a relatively simple scheme for that executive to pocket cash he allegedly did not report to the Internal Revenue Service.
In the charging document’s narrative, the business cut checks to an employee, who cashed them, then gave the cash to Weisselberg.
“The Trump Corporation booked this cash as ‘Holiday Entertainment,’ but maintained internal spreadsheets showing the cash to be part of Weisselberg’s employee compensation,” the indictment says.
In another section, the indictment says the Trump Organization was paying Weisselberg’s rent, electricity, telephone services, Internet, cable TV and garage fees.
“These payments were not booked in the Trump Corporations’ general ledger as employee compensation, but were instead labeled and deducted as ‘rent expense’ in the general ledger. However, for certain years, the Trump Organization maintained internal spreadsheets that tracked the amounts it paid for Weisselberg’s rent, utility, and garage expenses.”
It goes on to say “[s]imultaneously, 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.”
In another section, the indictment says, Weisselberg requested the Trump corporation pay for items for his homes and the apartment of one of his children.
“These requests included such items as new beds, flat-screen televisions, the installation of carpeting, and furniture for Weisselberg’s home in Florida.
When Weisselberg made such requests, the Trump Corporation issued checks to pay the expenses and tracked the payment of the expenses internally as part of Weisselberg’s annual compensation.”?
Those are just some of the things prosecutors detailed as they accused Trump’s business of a “scheme to defraud” the government and Weisselberg of larceny and tax fraud by ducking IRS payments on more than $1.7 million of income.
My colleagues Shayna Jacobs, David A. Fahrenthold, Josh Dawsey and Jonathan O’Connell report:
“In charging papers, prosecutors alleged that the Trump Organization effectively kept two sets of books. In one — for internal use — it carefully tallied the value of benefits given to executives as part of their compensation: apartments, cars, furniture, tuition payments, even money for holiday gifts.
But in the documents that the Trump Organization sent to tax authorities, prosecutors said, those benefits were omitted. Prosecutors said the result was that the Trump Organization and its executives avoided taxes on their full compensation: [Weisselberg], they said, avoided paying more than $900,000.”
How much trouble there is for Trump’s company and Weisselberg – both pleaded not guilty – isn’t clear.
Here’s Josh:
“Whether charges that his company evaded taxes by hiding payments to employees will do any political damage to Trump is unclear as he teases another presidential run in 2024 and looks to play a starring role in the 2022 midterm elections. He has retained the strong support of the Republican Party through a series of potentially damaging episodes, including bragging of sexual assault on tape, being impeached twice and spreading falsehoods about the 2020 election that served as fuel for the mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6.
But Trump weathered those political storms by fighting back with the power and the staff of the White House behind him as well as a Twitter account that could immediately set the news agenda for the day. Those resources are now gone, testing Trump’s ability to turn allegations against him into political rallying cries. Current and former advisers also said that Trump was often most disturbed by threats to his businesses as opposed to political showdowns.”
And here are Shayna, David, Josh and Jonathan again:
“The most serious charge against Weisselberg, grand larceny in the second degree, carries a maximum sentence of five to 15 years in prison. But none of the charges carry a mandatory prison sentence, meaning that — even if convicted on all counts — he would not necessarily face jail.
If Trump's companies were convicted, they could face hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.”
Over at NPR, Andrea Bernstein, Ilya Marritz, Brian Naylor, and Hansi Lo Wang report:
“Of the charges levied in New York State Supreme Court, the most serious one facing Weisselberg is second-degree grand larceny, a Class C felony that carries a maximum sentence of 15 years.
The most serious charge for the Trump Organization is criminal tax fraud. A corporation found guilty of criminal tax fraud?under New York law?may be fined ‘double the amount of the underpaid tax liability resulting from the commission of the crime’ or $250,000” whichever is larger.
At the Associated Press, Bernard Condon reports:
“The criminal tax fraud charges unsealed against Donald Trump’s company Thursday are a blow to a business already reeling from canceled deals following the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on hotels and clubs.
The indictment may make it harder for Trump to strike new deals, get back loans and bring in new money to his sprawling and indebted business.”
Bernard strikes this cautionary note:
“Although some companies have collapsed after criminal indictments, others have survived or even thrived, including Bank of America, which was convicted for reckless mortgage lending practices. Others that received what’s called deferred criminal charges have done well afterward, including drug giant Bristol-Myers Squibb, which was accused of accounting fraud, and JPMorgan Chase & Co., which was caught up in connection with Bernard Madoff’s massive fraud.
Stocks in all three companies are at or near all-time highs.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/02/daily-202-trump-org-allegedly-kept-spreadsheets-grift/
What was Jim Crow
https://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm
Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the status of second class citizens. Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-black racism. Many Christian ministers and theologians taught that whites were the Chosen people, blacks were cursed to be servants, and God supported racial segregation. Craniologists, eugenicists, phrenologists, and Social Darwinists, at every educational level, buttressed the belief that blacks were innately intellectually and culturally inferior to whites. Pro-segregation politicians gave eloquent speeches on the great danger of integration: the mongrelization of the white race. Newspaper and magazine writers routinely referred to blacks as niggers, coons, and darkies; and worse, their articles reinforced anti-black stereotypes. Even children's games portrayed blacks as inferior beings (see "From Hostility to Reverence: 100 Years of African-American Imagery in Games"). All major societal institutions reflected and supported the oppression of blacks.
The Jim Crow system was undergirded by the following beliefs or rationalizations: whites were superior to blacks in all important ways, including but not limited to intelligence, morality, and civilized behavior; sexual relations between blacks and whites would produce a mongrel race which would destroy America; treating blacks as equals would encourage interracial sexual unions; any activity which suggested social equality encouraged interracial sexual relations; if necessary, violence must be used to keep blacks at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. The following Jim Crow etiquette norms show how inclusive and pervasive these norms were:
* A black male could not offer his hand (to shake hands) with a white male because it implied being socially equal. Obviously, a black male could not offer his hand or any other part of his body to a white woman, because he risked being accused of rape.
* Blacks and whites were not supposed to eat together. If they did eat together, whites were to be served first, and some sort of partition was to be placed between them.
* Under no circumstance was a black male to offer to light the cigarette of a white female -- that gesture implied intimacy.
* Blacks were not allowed to show public affection toward one another in public, especially kissing, because it offended whites.
* Jim Crow etiquette prescribed that blacks were introduced to whites, never whites to blacks. For example: "Mr. Peters (the white person), this is Charlie (the black person), that I spoke to you about."
* Whites did not use courtesy titles of respect when referring to blacks, for example, Mr., Mrs., Miss., Sir, or Ma'am. Instead, blacks were called by their first names. Blacks had to use courtesy titles when referring to whites, and were not allowed to call them by their first names.
* If a black person rode in a car driven by a white person, the black person sat in the back seat, or the back of a truck.
* White motorists had the right-of-way at all intersections.
Stetson Kennedy, the author of Jim Crow Guide (1990), offered these simple rules that blacks were supposed to observe in conversing with whites:
1. Never assert or even intimate that a white person is lying.
2. Never impute dishonorable intentions to a white person.
3. Never suggest that a white person is from an inferior class.
4. Never lay claim to, or overly demonstrate, superior knowledge or intelligence.
5. Never curse a white person.
6. Never laugh derisively at a white person.
7. Never comment upon the appearance of a white female.
....
MUCH MORE
https://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm
Some call voting restrictions upheld by Supreme Court ‘Jim Crow 2.0.’
Here’s the ugly history behind that phrase.
By Gillian Brockell
July 2, 2021 at 12:00 p.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/07/02/jim-crow-voting-restrictions-supreme-court/
When northern newspapers complained about Mississippi’s new state constitution in 1890, charging that new anti-fraud voting restrictions were meant to disenfranchise Black voters, a White state senator defended it, saying, “I deny that the educational test was intended to exclude Negroes from voting … That more Negroes would be excluded is true … but that is not our fault.”
By 1903, as the “Mississippi Plan” spread throughout the South, Mississippi Gov. James Vardaman was less discreet about it. “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter,” he said. “Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the n----- from politics.”
More than a century later, the Supreme Court has upheld new voting restrictions in Arizona, after a lower court said the restrictions discriminated against minority voters. In a 6-to-3 opinion critics say is reminiscent of the Jim Crow era, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. acknowledged that these restrictions could have a disproportionate effect on 0.5 percent of Black, Latino and Native American voters. Though Joe Biden beat President Donald Trump by 0.4 percentage point in Arizona and 0.3 points in Georgia, Alito argued that 0.5 percent of voters was too “small in absolute terms” to outweigh the state’s interests in protecting the vote from fraud.
The decision Thursday paves the way for other states that are considering — or have already passed — new voting restrictions in the wake of Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. The rush of new laws have earned the moniker “Jim Crow 2.0” from voting rights activists.
But what about Jim Crow 1.0? How did white supremacist lawmakers get around the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed Black men the right to vote, and later, the 19th Amendment, which should have secured the vote for Black women? Here’s a look at their legal and illegal methods.
Poll taxes
Nearly every Southern state instituted poll taxes during the Jim Crow era. In most states, the tax was “just” one or two dollars (the equivalent of about $30 to $60 today) — an amount easy enough for middle- and upper-class voters to pay, but much harder for the poor, then and now. The tax disproportionately excluded Black voters. Plus, a lot of these laws required the tax be paid well before voting day and to produce multiple receipts, extra steps that made voting even harder.
That was the case in Ocoee, Fla., in 1920, where a local White judge held training sessions for potential Black voters on how to pay the poll tax beforehand and prove it on Election Day.
Poll taxes were banned in 1964 at the federal level by the 24th Amendment, and at the state level by the Supreme Court in 1966.
Literacy tests
Laws requiring literacy tests were an even bigger challenge to overcome. Again, they disproportionately affected Black voters, many of whom were denied education while they were enslaved. And even if they could read, the laws were still rigged against them. In Mississippi, the county clerk would demand a passage to be read from the state constitution and then decide if the prospective voter passed. For Black voters, they would read dense, difficult sections; for White voters, easier ones.
That’s what happened to Fannie Lou Hamer in 1962, when she attempted to register to vote in Indianola, Miss. Hamer, 44 at the time, had only recently learned from organizers for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that Black people were even eligible to vote. The first two times she took the literacy test, she failed, prompting her to tell the clerk, “You’ll see me every 30 days till I pass.”
Civil rights crusader Fannie Lou Hamer defied men — and presidents — who tried to silence her
‘Grandfather’ clauses
Lawmakers argued that since poll taxes and literacy tests could also prevent White people from registering to vote, the laws were not racist. But by adding “grandfather” clauses, exempting anyone whose grandfather could vote from taxes and tests, poor or illiterate Whites had a way around the law.
The Supreme Court unanimously (with one abstention) struck down grandfather clauses in 1915, after Oklahoma officials who enforced it were prosecuted in federal court. Chief Justice Edward Douglass White said the clauses were “repugnant to the prohibitions of the 15th Amendment.”
Whites-only primaries
Because political parties were not government entities, their primaries did not have to abide by the 14th (equal protection) or 15th amendments, so in many counties and states, Southern Democrats held Whites-only primaries. Since White voters were overwhelmingly Southern Democrats, whoever won the primary was all but guaranteed to win the election.
A federal court struck down Whites-only primaries in Georgia, spurring Maceo Snipes, a Black man who had just returned from fighting in World War II, to cast a ballot in a Democratic primary on July 17, 1946. He was the only Black person in Taylor County, Ga., to do so.
That’s where the last method comes in.
Intimidation and violence
If White supremacists’ legal moves failed, there was always violence, and the threat of it, to keep Black voters from exercising their rights.
After the federal court decision in 1946, White politicians in Georgia had warned “wise Negroes will stay away from White folks’ ballot boxes.” Within days of Snipes voting in the primary, he was shot on his front porch by a White man. At the hospital, he was denied medical care because of his race and died of his injuries. The man who admitted to shooting him was acquitted.
And even though the county clerk said Hamer failed her literacy test, just her attempt to register in Mississippi in 1962 led to frightening retaliation. She was harassed by police on her way home, where her husband was fired from his job and she had to flee for her life. Someone fired 16 bullets into the house where she was staying; fortunately, no one was hurt.
Hamer persisted and passed her literacy test on the third attempt. Then she was told she still couldn’t vote until she could provide two poll tax receipts.
And in Ocoee in 1920, when Black men and women showed up to vote with their poll tax receipts, White residents retaliated, burning down Black homes and churches and chasing Black families out of town. One of the voters, July Perry, was lynched, and his mutilated body was strung up in front of the home of the White judge who had trained him.
Nowadays, these “Jim Crow 1.0” methods have all been struck down or banned. And for decades, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prevented many local officials from imposing any other voting restrictions without first getting “pre-clearance” from the Justice Department. But the Supreme Court struck down the pre-clearance provision in 2013, arguing that it had worked so well it was no longer necessary. Thursday’s decision by the Supreme Court further weakens the Voting Rights Act.
By Gillian Brockell
Gillian Brockell is a staff writer for The Washington Post's history blog, Retropolis. She has been at The Post since 2013 and previously worked as a video editor. Twitter
MORE FROM THE POST
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/07/02/jim-crow-voting-restrictions-supreme-court/
Tim Latimer @TimMLatimer More big news in the geothermal world today (I feel like I’ve been saying that a lot lately).
GM announces deal to source lithium for their electric vehicle program from Controlled Thermal Resources geothermal project in Salton Sea, CA.
https://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2021/jul/0702-ultium.html#.YN8CPYC0JLA.twitter
2:09 PM · Jul 2, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
More big news in the geothermal world today (I feel like I’ve been saying that a lot lately).
— Tim Latimer (@TimMLatimer) July 2, 2021
GM announces deal to source lithium for their electric vehicle program from Controlled Thermal Resources geothermal project in Salton Sea, CA.https://t.co/S254297hE2