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New £50 note featuring Alan Turing goes into circulation
Note honouring mathematician, computer pioneer and codebreaker contains advanced security features
The new £50 note, which features Alan Turing, contains advanced security features including two windows and a two-colour foil, making it very difficult to counterfeit. Photograph: WPA/Getty Images
Rupert Jones
Tue 22 Jun 2021 19.01 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/jun/23/new-50-note-alan-turing-uk-security-features
The new £50 note goes into circulation on Wednesday – but with consumers increasingly going cashless, for millions of people it may be months or even years before they see or touch one.
It’s been around for 40 years, but the £50 note doesn’t have a great image: there is a perception that aside from some overseas tourists, the only people who use them are criminals, tradespeople looking to evade tax and gamblers.
ATMs rarely give them out, and some shops don’t like taking them, either because they are worried about counterfeit notes or it would mean handing over all the change in their till.
When they do make an appearance in the news, it’s usually not for the best reasons: the police warning local residents to watch out for fake ones; footballer Phil Bardsley prompting anger after being photographed lying on a casino floor covered in £50 notes (that was in 2013); or Sports Direct founder Mike Ashley being left red-faced after he pulled a wad of fifties out of his pocket when he went through a security screening at his company’s warehouse (in 2016).
However, perhaps the new-look £50 – featuring Alan Turing, the scientist best known for his codebreaking work during the second world war – will give the note’s image a makeover.
Its arrival is notable as it means the Bank of England has now completed its switch away from paper money.
The Turing £50 will join the Churchill £5, the Austen £10 and the Turner £20, all of which are printed on polymer, a thin and flexible plastic material that is said to last longer and stay in better condition than paper.
As part of this week’s publicity drive, it was announced that Snapchat had teamed up with the Bank of England to turn the new note into an interactive celebration of Turing, creating an augmented reality lens that brings the banknote to life when seen through a smartphone camera.
However, even before the pandemic, many people only rarely encountered a £50 note, and the coronavirus crisis has triggered a slump in the use of cash which could end up being permanent.
The banking trade body UK Finance said last week that the number of payments made using notes and coins fell by 35% in 2020 as contactless payment exploded in popularity and some people deliberately avoided contact with cash because of Covid fears.
In 2013, a Bank of England survey found that 27% of respondents had used a £50 the previous year, while 29% had never used one.
Yet some may be surprised at just how many £50 notes are out there. Reintroduced in 1981, there are currently 357m in circulation – up from 221m in 2014 – which is only a little less than the total number of £5 notes (407m). That suggests there is a demand. Those 357m £50 notes have a combined value of just over £17.8bn.
The launch of the new banknote represents a big bounce-back, as only a few years ago it looked as if £50 notes might be axed.
In 2016, Peter Sands, a former chief executive of the bank Standard Chartered, published a paper in which he proposed “eliminating” high-denomination currency such as the £50 note because they “are the preferred payment mechanism of those pursuing illicit activities”, and also played an important role in tax-dodging.
“Ask people in the UK when they last used a £50 note … and the most common answer is to pay a builder or plumber. The incentive is tax evasion, since payment in cash makes it easier for the individual to avoid VAT of 20%,” he wrote at the time.
It appears ministers read his paper: in early 2018, the government indicated it was considering ditching the notes. In a call for evidence, the Treasury said the £50 note “is believed to be rarely used for routine purchases, and is instead held as a store of value,” adding: “There is also a perception among some that £50 notes are used for money laundering, hidden economy activity and tax evasion.”
But just a few months later, ministers committed to keeping them.
Nikki Strickland, the head of product marketing at De La Rue, which prints notes for the Bank of England, said people would find the new £50 easier to authenticate because many of the design elements such as the security features were consistent across all the polymer notes. It will be “a less alien note when they get hold of it”, she said.
Many people have never received a £50 note from an ATM. The Link cash machine network said that in the past, “there have been comparatively few ATMs which dispense £50 notes, and many of those were in locations like casinos and nightclubs”.
However, the Link chief executive, John Howells, added: “With the new smaller design and extra security features, in time we may see more people using them for payments and therefore more ATMs dispensing them.”
The design of the new note, which incorporates several features relating to Turing, was unveiled in March.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/jun/23/new-50-note-alan-turing-uk-security-features
The ex-Amazon worker who helped expose the millions of items of unwanted stock being destroyed in the UK by online giant
Monday 21 June 2021, 11:36am
Richard Pallot ITV News Correspondent
https://www.itv.com/news/2021-06-18/the-ex-amazon-worker-who-helped-expose-the-millions-of-items-of-unwanted-stock-being-destroyed-in-the-uk-by-online-giant
An ITV News investigation has uncovered how Amazon is destroying millions of items of unsold stock every year - products that are often new and unused - in one of its UK warehouses. Here is how our investigation unfolded.
ITV News' exposé all comes down to one man. Our eyes within. We will call him Peter.
He contacted ITV News directly after seeing an earlier investigation we did into working practices at Amazon.
Peter felt angry about that, but he felt even more angry about what he was seeing every day while working in Amazon’s Dunfermline warehouse, the main UK centre for the return of unwanted stock.
For months, he had been documenting the astonishing amount of this unwanted stock heading for recycling or landfill.
Peter secretly filmed footage on his phone that showed TVs, laptops, shavers, drones, books, face masks, the list is almost endless, many new, almost all reusable and redistributable, every single one marked “destroy.”
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MUCH MORE
https://www.itv.com/news/2021-06-18/the-ex-amazon-worker-who-helped-expose-the-millions-of-items-of-unwanted-stock-being-destroyed-in-the-uk-by-online-giant
'It happens, trust me': Second Amazon whistleblower claims 'brand new' goods being 'binned' across multiple sites
Tuesday 22 June 2021, 11:17pm
https://www.itv.com/news/2021-06-22/government-confronts-amazon-directly-over-mountains-of-waste-itv-news-understands
Another whistleblower has come forward alleging Amazon dumps thousands of unsold items, one day after ITV News revealed the scale of the retail giant's waste.
Unsold items, most being perfectly useable, have been marked out for destruction, which has compelled the government to speak to Amazon directly.
It has also drawn the attention of environmental activist Greta Thunberg and Prime Minister Boris Johnson publicly expressed his concern.
Speaking anonymously, a former Amazon employee at a Hertfordshire centre said the issue is widespread in the company.
"Lots of things from brand new iPhones to PlayStations, we got rid of brand new books," he told ITV News.
"You felt like you just wanted to say to them 'look, this should be going to people that need it not going into a bin.'"
Asked if he believes unsold items are dumped across other centres, he said: "In every single facility it happens, trust me, it does.
"I worked in one specific facility, but I knew other people who worked in others and they said exactly the same thing."
...
'It is a scandal': Chairman of the Environmental Audit Committee Philip Dunne says Amazon must address the issue
Amazon says its policy is that all electronic products that cannot be sold or donated are sent for recycling, not for energy recovery.
Philip Dunne, who is the chairman of the Environmental Audit Committee, slammed Amazon over its "scandal".
He told ITV News: "Amazon appeared before the Environmental Audit Select Committee last year and proclaimed their sustainability credentials.
"What your report uncovers is a truly astonishing degree of waste of resources. And if true, it is a scandal that Amazon have got to address."
He added: "What this reveals, if true, is that this global online giant is consuming resources on this planet in a completely unsustainable way.
"Of course, some products get returned and need to be dealt with but to have pristine product in its packaging, never sold to consumers and then destroyed either to incineration or potentially to landfill is a completely outrageous, despoilation of the planet.
"Quite frankly, Mr Bezos should spend less time daydreaming about going into space and more time sorting out the environmental damage his company is doing to the planet."
...
https://www.itv.com/news/2021-06-22/government-confronts-amazon-directly-over-mountains-of-waste-itv-news-understands
Angela Rayner @AngelaRayner ·Jun 21 If @amazon & @AmazonUK can afford to send laptops, iPads and thousands of other items to a landfill, they can certainly afford to pay their fair share of taxes in the UK & they can give their workers a pay rise and treat them with dignity and respect.
THREAD
If @amazon & @AmazonUK can afford to send laptops, iPads and thousands of other items to a landfill, they can certainly afford to pay their fair share of taxes in the UK & they can give their workers a pay rise and treat them with dignity and respect.https://t.co/uJmUjOilLH
— Angela Rayner 🌹 (@AngelaRayner) June 21, 2021
Amazon destroying millions of items of unsold stock in one of its UK warehouses every year, ITV News investigation finds
Tuesday 22 June 2021, 1:38pm
https://www.itv.com/news/2021-06-21/amazon-destroying-millions-of-items-of-unsold-stock-in-one-of-its-uk-warehouses-every-year-itv-news-investigation-finds
VIDEO - Richard Pallot reveals the millions of stock items Amazon destroys each year
Online giant Amazon is destroying millions of items of unsold stock every year, products that are often new and unused, ITV News can reveal.
Footage gathered by ITV News shows waste on an astonishing level.
And this is from just one of 24 fulfilment centres they currently operate in the UK.
Undercover filming from inside Amazon's Dunfermline warehouse reveals the sheer scale of the waste: Smart TVs, laptops, drones, hairdryers, top of the range headphones, computer drives, books galore, thousands of sealed face masks – all sorted into boxes marked “destroy”.
Products that were never sold, or returned by a customer. Almost all could have been redistributed to charities or those in need. Instead, they are thrown into vast bins, carried away by lorries (which we tracked), and dumped at either recycling centres or, worse, a landfill site.
An ex-employee, who asked for anonymity, told us: "From a Friday to a Friday our target was to generally destroy 130,000 items a week.
"I used to gasp. There's no rhyme or reason to what gets destroyed: Dyson fans, Hoovers, the occasional MacBook and iPad; the other day, 20,000 Covid (face) masks still in their wrappers.
"Overall, 50 percent of all items are unopened and still in their shrink wrap. The other half are returns and in good condition. Staff have just become numb to what they are being asked to do.”
In one week in April, a leaked document from inside the Dunfermline warehouse showed more than 124,000 items marked 'destroy'. To repeat, that's just for seven days. In contrast, just 28,000 items in the same period were labelled 'donate'.
The same manager admitted to us that in some weeks, as many as 200,000 items could be marked 'destroy'.
Why are hundreds of thousands of products being destroyed in this way? The answer is Amazon’s hugely successful business model. Many vendors choose to house their products in Amazon’s vast warehouses.
But the longer the goods remain unsold, the more a company is charged to store them. It is eventually cheaper to dispose of the goods, especially stock from overseas, than to continue storing the stock.
Greenpeace's Sam Chetan Welsh told us: “It's an unimaginable amount of unnecessary waste, and just shocking to see a multi-billion pound company getting rid of stock in this way.
"Stuff that’s not even single use but not being used at all, straight off the production line and into the bin. As long as Amazon’s business model relies on this kind of disposal culture, things are only going to get worse. The government must step in and bring in legislation immediately.”
In an interview before he knew about our investigation, Amazon’s UK boss John Boumphrey told ITV News the amount the company destroys is “extremely small.”
What Amazon is doing is not illegal. In a response to the findings of our investigation, the company said: “We are working towards a goal of zero product disposal and our priority is to resell, donate to charitable organisations or recycle any unsold products. No items are sent to landfill in the UK. As a last resort, we will send items to energy recovery, but we're working hard to drive the number of times this happens down to zero.”
Go forty miles southwest from Dunfermline and you’ll arrive in Glasgow, where the UK will host the world’s biggest ever climate conference in November. And yet, just up the road, Amazon is producing huge amounts of environmental waste.
Leaders could do worse than begin by telling the world’s biggest online retailer to set an example.
What has the response been to ITV News' investigation?
The Business Secretary has spoken to Amazon about ITV News' exclusive investigation, the prime minister's spokesperson has said.
When asked if the UK was considering changing regulations to stop actions like those of Amazon, the spokesperson said: "We are looking at the regulations to see how we can increase reusing and recycling for things like electrical goods."
Boris Johnson has said the investigation "sounds incredible" to him, before adding: "an indictment of a consumerist society, if it's as you say, we will look into it".
He said: "Obviously we don't like stuff going to landfill under any circumstances that's why we have the landfill tax and landfill credit scheme, and everything else."
The prime minister said: "I'm afraid it's one of those things we're just going to have to look into and get back to you."
"We want to see more reuse, we want to see more recycling but above all we want to stop people using things that are going to be, ultimately, polluting our seas, our world and that means cutting down our use of plastics - you name it," he added.
Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told ITV News he was "very surprised" about the findings of our investigation and said he wanted "to get to the bottom of what is actually happening".
"I know that Amazon is committed to net zero, they’ve committed huge amounts of investment to the rainforest, to keeping the rainforest going and I’m surprised," Mr Kwarteng said.
"I haven’t read the report so I need to look at the report to see what my response is. But I think Amazon should do the right thing and it would be very disappointing if this is true."
https://www.itv.com/news/2021-06-21/amazon-destroying-millions-of-items-of-unsold-stock-in-one-of-its-uk-warehouses-every-year-itv-news-investigation-finds
Wind turbines: How UK wants to become 'Saudi Arabia of wind'
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said he wants the UK to become "the Saudi Arabia of wind" and – off the coast of Yorkshire – the North Sea is now home to the world's largest offshore wind farm.
Danish renewable energy giant Orsted has installed about half of the UK's offshore wind capacity.
The company invited the BBC's chief environment correspondent, Justin Rowlatt, to watch as its thousandth UK wind turbine was erected.
Published 7 hours ago Section BBC NewsSubsectionScience & Environment
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-environment-57519392
Facing global pressure, the United Arab Emirates to begin fining violators of new corporate transparency rules
Advocates question whether the country’s new rules for reporting companies’ beneficial ownership are enough to crack down on money laundering.
By Anisha Kohli
June 21, 2021
https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/facing-global-pressure-the-united-arab-emirates-to-begin-fining-violators-of-new-corporate-transparency-rules/
The United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s top emerging tax havens, will begin collecting penalties and fines on its requirement for reporting of company beneficial ownership information, as it faces international pressure to address money laundering concerns. However, questions remain about numerous exemptions and loopholes in the new rules.
Companies may use brokers or banks as the legal owners, but the new laws that require the reporting of beneficial owners is focused on recording the true owners who reap the benefits of ownership, have 25% or more of the company’s shares and voting rights at the company or the power to dismiss and appoint directors.
“Beneficial ownership truthfully provides you who is behind the company and gives you an individual to go after. It allows enforcement agencies that are genuinely invested in understanding and uncovering illicit financial flows to identify an individual,” Lakshmi Kumar, policy director of Global Financial Integrity, said.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the UAE has come under spotlight because of the role its banks and airports played in facilitating transfer of cash, weapons and other material to alleged terrorist groups, according to the Chicago Tribune. The tiny gulf country, which is a federation of seven emirates, is ruled by a mix of federal and local laws in addition to laws governing its sprawling free zones. The legal environment, along with the absence of a single and centralized register and weak regulations, critics say, have turned the UAE to a safe haven for illicit activity, Transparency International said in a report last year.
“What makes the UAE attractive to illicit business is the absence of any kind of oversight, questioning [or] requirements,” Kumar said. “In a lot of other countries they may not have the technological capacity, but that is not Dubai’s problem. Look at how the UAE monitors civil society groups, people who advocate against human rights violations with migrant labor. [The UAE] does an excellent job monitoring, enforcing and prosecuting [them]. There’s a lack of interest behind this [beneficial ownership law].”
In 2020, the UAE was placed under a year-long observation by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force for concerns over money laundering, terrorism financing, weapons of mass destruction, loopholes in the property and precious metal industries and the lack of legal action against money laundering. According to Kumar, this law, among others, may alter the perception among foreign investors that the UAE is a hub for illegal money movement. The decision affects 513,000 non-financial businesses, according to Gulf News.
The minister of economy has yet to decide who the enforcement authorities of the law will be, according to the cabinet decision issued earlier this year. The law applies to the entire country with the exception of the financial free zones of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Government-owned corporations and publicly traded entities are also excluded from the ownership reporting requirement. It’s unclear how this data will be stored, and the information will not be publicly available.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists investigations such as the 2016 Panama Papers have helped prompt numerous countries to enact beneficial ownership registries in recent years, including in Cyprus, Ghana and Kenya earlier this year. More recent exposés by ICIJ, such as FinCEN Files and Luanda Leaks, have highlighted Dubai’s rise as a go-to secrecy haven for people looking to hide illicit wealth.
Administrative penalties and fines of up to 100,000 UAE dirhams for companies that don’t comply with reporting beneficial ownership information will begin July 1.
Contributors
Maggie Michael
https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/facing-global-pressure-the-united-arab-emirates-to-begin-fining-violators-of-new-corporate-transparency-rules/
Watchdog says almost 900 Secret Service employees were infected with COVID
Politics Jun 22, 2021 2:26 PM EDT
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watchdog-says-almost-900-secret-service-employees-were-infected-with-covid
WASHINGTON (AP) — Roughly 900 U.S. Secret Service employees tested positive for the coronavirus, according to government records obtained by a government watchdog group.
Secret Service records show that 881 people on the agency payroll were diagnosed with COVID-19 between March 1, 2020 and March 9, 2021, according to documents obtained by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
The records received through a Freedom of Information Act request did not include the names or assignments of those who tested positive. But more than half — 477 — worked in the special agent division, which is responsible for protecting the president and vice president, as well as the families of these leaders and other government officials.
CREW noted that the Trump administration took actions that risked exposure to Secret Service workers, but it could not verify a direct connection to possible infections because the identities of those infected remains private.
After President Donald Trump contracted COVID-19, he took a drive in his presidential vehicle as Secret Service personnel drove and protected him. The former president also held multiple large rallies and events, including the announcement of Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court, despite restrictions on public gatherings.
The Secret Service employs approximately 3,200 special agents, 1,300 Uniformed Division officers, and more than 2,000 other technical, professional and administrative support personnel.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watchdog-says-almost-900-secret-service-employees-were-infected-with-covid
Trump Wanted His Justice Department to Stop ‘SNL’ From Teasing Him
Asawin Suebsaeng, Adam Rawnsley
Tue, 22 June 2021, 8:41 am·7-min read
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/trump-wanted-justice-department-stop-074151566.html
It was the middle of Donald Trump’s presidency, and he was—yet again—mad at Saturday Night Live. And he wanted the federal government to help him settle the score.
In March 2019, the then-president of the United States had just watched an episode of the long-running, liberal-leaning NBC sketch comedy series (it wasn’t even a new episode, it was a rerun), and grew immediately incensed that the show was gently mocking him.
“It’s truly incredible that shows like Saturday Night Live, not funny/no talent, can spend all of their time knocking the same person (me), over & over, without so much of a mention of ‘the other side,’” Trump tweeted, long before he was banned from Twitter for inspiring a violent mob. “Like an advertisement without consequences. Same with Late Night Shows. Should Federal Election Commission and/or FCC look into this?”
It was, on its face, a ridiculous question and threat, as SNL is obviously satire, and therefore a form of protected speech in America that pissed-off commanders-in-chief have no authority to directly subvert. However, then-President Trump went farther than simply tweeting his displeasure with the late-night comedians and SNL writers’ room. The internal discussions that followed, between the former leader of the free world and some of his political and legal advisers, once again underscored just how much Trump wanted to use the full weight and power of the U.S. government to punish his personal enemies.
According to two people familiar with the matter, Trump had asked advisers and lawyers in early 2019 about what the Federal Communications Commission, the courts systems, and—most confusingly to some Trump lieutenants—the Department of Justice could do to probe or mitigate SNL, Jimmy Kimmel, and other late-night comedy mischief-makers.
To those who heard it, Trump’s inquiries into what federal regulations could be used to bust the likes of Kimmel and SNL was more of a nuisance than a constitutional crisis. “It was more annoying than alarming, to be honest with you,” one of these sources recalled. However, the conversations further showed, in the pettiest of ways, how the 45th U.S. president was keen on turning the country’s top law enforcers into something more akin to his own personally retained law firm.
Emails released by the House Oversight committee, first reported by The New York Times, also show how Trump tried to enlist the Justice Department in his attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory with demands to investigate a number of wild conspiracy theories.
In one case, Trump tried to spark the Justice Department’s interest in the “ItalyGate” conspiracy theory, which claimed that an Italian defense contractor had somehow used a military satellite to hack voting machines and swing the election for Biden.
In another case, Trump’s assistant emailed acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen a series of talking points intended to defend a bizarre and since-debunked “audit” of Dominion voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, by the security firm Allied Security Operations Group. The talking points released by the House Oversight committee bore no signs of authorship but on the same day Trump’s assistant sent them to Rosen, conservative outlets ran excerpts from the same document as a release by the “Trump legal team in conjunction with [Allied Security Operations Group].”
And as was the case in his crusade against liberal late-night television, most of these operations fell apart or didn’t provide Trump with his desired result of devastating retribution or the complete subversion of American democratic norms.
In early 2019, Trump had to be repeatedly advised that the “equal-time” rules to which he appeared to refer wouldn’t even apply in this situation, given that late-night shows and NBC sketch comedy are clearly staged satire, and thus not bound by the same requirements of other forms of broadcast TV and radio.
The other source, who has a law degree, said that when they briefly discussed this with Trump more than two years ago, they made a point of saying that the Justice Department, in particular, doesn’t handle these matters, anyway. Trump seemed disappointed to hear that there was no actual legal recourse or anything that the FCC or DOJ could do to punish late-night, anti-Trump comedy.
“Can something else be done about it?” Trump replied, according to this source, to which they responded with some version of “I’ll look into it.” (This person says that to this day, they have not, in fact, “looked into it.”)
Representatives for SNL, Kimmel, and Trump did not provide comment on this story as of Monday evening.
In any case, Trump seems to have confused the FCC rules he was invoking in fury, explains Paul Matzko, a scholar on technology policy at the Cato Institute.
The “equal time” rule refers to a specific FCC that wouldn’t apply to SNL. “Equal time meant that if a radio or TV station offered time to one political candidate they had to offer comparable time on the same terms to an opposing candidate,” later broadened to “not only to candidates themselves and their campaigns directly but any kind of allied group,” says Matzko.
Instead, Matzko says Trump is likely confusing the equal time rule with the “fairness doctrine,” a practice which demanded that broadcasters provide “fair and balanced” coverage of controversial issues of public importance. The FCC, however, stopped enforcing the doctrine in 1987 and formally revoked it in 2011.
And in the years since 2019, Trump has not lost his interest in casually monitoring or denouncing the American late-night comics who he feels have been mean to him. Trump will take the time to do this even when he’s consumed with following the ongoing, conspiracy-theory-fueled efforts to show that Trump won the 2020 election that he clearly lost to Joe Biden. In an interview early this month, MyPillow CEO and diehard Trump ally Mike Lindell told The Daily Beast that the ex-president recently called the MAGA pillow magnate to congratulate him for appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and for sticking it to the anti-Trump talk show host.
In the past, Trump made no secret of his distaste for SNL or Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of him (“unwatchable,” “stinks,” and “not funny”) during his time in office. Throughout a series of thumb-launched missives at the show on Twitter, Trump appeared to have convinced himself that SNL writers were legally obligated to distribute their satirical barbs with “equal time” to both Democrats and Republicans.
The show amounted to “nothing less than unfair news coverage and Dem commercials,” Trump tweeted in 2018, and wondered if that observation “should be tested in courts, can’t be legal?”
The relationship between Trump and NBC, in particular, soured early on in his presidential campaign when the channel dropped his beauty pageants following racist remarks by the then-candidate calling Mexican immigrants “rapists.”
Through his administration, the specific flashpoints for Trump’s ire with NBC shifted—SNL, MSNBC (“Comcast slime”), NBC news, and NBC chairman Andy Lack—but the threats against the channel remained focused on Comcast’s acquisition of the company, a regulatory chokepoint that gave the Trump administration at least theoretical leverage over the channel. Comcast acquired a majority stake in NBC during a deal approved under the Obama administration. Like his threats against tech companies for their moderation of election misinformation, Trump used the guise of consumer protection and antitrust enforcement to register his displeasure with the channel’s programming.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump enjoyed much-criticized softball appearances on major NBC shows like SNL and Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show. Despite the olive branches, then-candidate Trump still held a grudge against the channel and its parent company.
Comcast’s purchase of NBC “concentrates far too much power in one massive entity that is trying to tell the voters what to think and what to do,” Trump said during an October 2016 policy speech threatening media conglomerates with antitrust action. Deals like Comcast’s acquisition of NBC “destroy democracy” and “poison the mind of the American voter,” Trump complained.
In 2018, Trump caused a brief panic in trading of Comcast shares when he fired off a tweet warning that the “American Cable Association has big problems with Comcast. They say that Comcast routinely violates Antitrust Laws.”
But like his constant threats to break up Big Tech, they were nothing more than rage-tweets.
By 2020, when Trump threatened to “do everything possible to destroy [Comcast’s] image because they are terrible” during a rally in South Carolina, the markets barely noticed.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/trump-wanted-justice-department-stop-074151566.html
Bitcoin crackdown sends graphics cards prices plummeting in China after Sichuan terminated mining operations
Graphics cards from companies including Nvidia and Asus saw prices fall by as much as two-thirds on e-commerce platforms amid China’s sweeping bitcoin crackdown
Sichuan, which relies heavily on renewable hydropower, has ordered cryptocurrency mining operations to close down, following Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang
Coco Feng in Beijing
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Published: 2:00pm, 21 Jun, 2021
https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3138130/bitcoin-crackdown-sends-graphics-cards-prices-plummeting-china-after?mc_cid=ed868b88ff&mc_eid=bac78de23e
Anti-vax group mounts legal blitz to sow disinformation against vaccinations
Texas group the Informed Consent Action Network has capitalized on fear surrounding supposed vaccine mandates
Alexandra Villarreal in Austin
Tue 22 Jun 2021 02.20 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/22/anti-vax-group-legal-blitz-deter-vaccinations
Just as the Covid-19 vaccine rollout began in earnest in the United States, the Informed Consent Action Network (Ican) sent its subscribers a “legal update” on its war against employers and schools planning to require the shots.
An unspecified number of organizations had supposedly dropped their mandates – one just after Ican took them to court – and the Texas-based anti-vaccination nonprofit was prowling for more plaintiffs.
“If you or anyone you know is being required by an employer or school to receive a Covid-19 vaccine, Ican is pleased to offer to support legal action on your behalf to challenge the requirement,” read the January email.
Ican was founded in 2016 by one of the loudest voices in the US anti-vaccine movement, Del Bigtree, who produced the widely discredited propaganda movie Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe. For the last year, the nonprofit has capitalized on fear surrounding supposed vaccine mandates, going on the offensive months before any lifesaving vaccines became available to the public. Now, as vaccine hesitancy persists, Ican’s legal blitz has fueled disinformation, using costly legal threats to deter schools and businesses from implementing vaccination requirements.
“If you have a limited budget to deal with litigation, it doesn’t matter if you might win at the supreme court level,” said Margaret Foster Riley, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. “The costs of that litigation are so existentially threatening that you’re not going to take the risk.”
Ican did not return the Guardian’s request for comment.
The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has already given the go-ahead to employers who want to require vaccines for employees in the workplace, according to recent guidance. However, the idea of a “vaccine mandate” is misleading, as students and workers still have the right to refuse a jab and won’t be involuntarily vaccinated, said Y Tony Yang, a professor of health policy at George Washington University.
Those who forgo a shot may be barred from some opportunities, although there’s still the possibility of waivers, exemptions and other work-arounds. Plus, they’ll likely have the ability to choose education or employment alternatives that don’t require vaccines.
“Sure, that’s a different school, might not be the school you want,” Yang said. “That’s the option.”
Vaccine requirements are already commonplace in academic settings and among healthcare workers in the US. But the specter of Covid-19 vaccine mandates nevertheless became a “calling card” for anti-vax groups like Ican – a lightning rod to “rally people” and “sow a lot of contentiousness”, said Rekha Lakshmanan, director of advocacy and public policy at the Immunization Partnership.
“There’s a theme of being very pre-emptive and opportunistic to sort of lay this foundation and seeds of doubt,” Lakshmanan said.
In fact, Ican may have targeted mandates so strongly because the Covid-19 vaccine – which has already reached more than 64% of US adults – represents “an existential threat” to its mission, Riley said.
“The more used to vaccination people are – and this is a population-wide experience – the less traction Ican has as an anti-vax organization,” she added.
If the anti-vax movement is a pyramid scheme, Ican sits at the top among the well-funded organizers and creators of misinformation, explained Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.
Some of the nonprofit’s staff may be “true believers”, Reiss allowed. But as a whole, the institution is largely “cynical” and “manipulative”, far removed from the grassroots activists who act as door-to-door salesmen, spreading misinformation to friends and neighbors.
Since Ican’s inception, its leaders have attracted a substantial fan base through its pseudo-talk show hosted by Bigtree, established a strong relationship with the New York-based attorney Aaron Siri and fundraised millions for their mission.
“They are much better at promoting their message comparatively than many of the organizations that are in the public health space,” said Ana Santos Rutschman, an assistant professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law.
“They have resources directed at them. They are savvier.”
The nonprofit has made a home in Texas, where deeply rooted conservative beliefs around liberty and freedom have sprouted an active, sizable anti-vax community, including a political action committee that advocates for “vaccine choice”.
This week, a federal judge in Texas dismissed a lawsuit brought by employees of Houston Methodist hospital who had challenged the hospital’s Covid-19 vaccination requirement, in one of the first rulings of its kind. The hospital suspended 178 staff for refusing the shot, which some have described as “venom”.
“The political environment here was unfortunately prime and ripe for individuals and organizations like Ican to kind of set up shop in Texas,” Lakshmanan said.
Ican’s tactics and reliance on expensive legal services predates the pandemic, but threats of litigation became central to its strategy as it took on Covid-19 vaccine requirements.
In 2019, $1.26m of the nonprofit’s $3.5m total expenses went to Siri’s law firm, Siri and Glimstad, and this year, the nonprofit described Siri as its legal team leader. In February, Siri published a warning that organizations with Covid-19 vaccine requirements would “run afoul of the law”, which could land them in court.
“Such potentially costly lawsuits can be avoided by refraining from adopting policies that require vaccination or penalize members for choosing not to be vaccinated,” he wrote for Stat, a health-focused outlet produced by Boston Globe Media.
Siri’s incendiary op-ed focused on the vaccines’ emergency use authorizations (EUAs), which have allowed Americans to access the shots for months even though the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has yet to fully approve them.
As with any products approved for emergency use, US code requires that patients be informed of their choice to “accept or refuse administration” of the Covid-19 vaccines, and “of the consequences, if any, of refusing”.
In recent months, Siri’s firm has leaned on that provision along with other, weaker claims to lodge a barrage of attacks against an eclectic group of organizations requiring Covid-19 vaccinations, including New Jersey universities, a Wisconsin nursing home and a North Carolina sheriff’s department, the Washington Post reported.
“It’s these subliminal messages that are being issued out to entities,” Lakshmanan said. “‘Hey, if you’re going to even consider this, this is what we’re going to do, and this is what we already started to put into motion.’”
But in May, Ican at least pressed pause on actively recruiting plaintiffs and announced it would no longer accept cases fighting vaccine requirements. Although there’s still a legal grey area around mandates for EUA-authorized vaccines, experts are increasingly confident that, on balance, the courts would likely uphold them.
Meanwhile, with Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna already applying to get their vaccines fully approved by the FDA, companies and institutions will likely benefit from over a century of judicial precedent defending mandatory vaccinations in coming months.
And, for employers, the prospect of a Covid-19 outbreak after a year of unexpected closures may now outweigh any hypothetical litigation.
“The risk of losing the lawsuit is probably smaller, even if it means that the mandate will only be in place for six months,” Reiss said. “That’s already a lot.”
Still, Ican isn’t going away. During this legislative session, Bigtree testified in front of Texas lawmakers to push for a bill that would have scared and confused patients. More recently, the nonprofit has tried to discredit Dr Anthony Fauci after obtaining a series of his emails through the Freedom of Information Act.
“They attract a lot of traffic,” Santos Rutschman said, “wherever they decide to go.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/22/anti-vax-group-legal-blitz-deter-vaccinations
Leader behind bleach ‘miracle cure’ claims Trump consumed his product
Mark Grenon says in interview from prison he gave Trump the product and was the source of Trump’s fixation with disinfectant
Ed Pilkington
@edpilkington
Tue 22 Jun 2021 05.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/22/bleach-miracle-cure-donald-trump
The leader of a spurious church which peddled industrial bleach as a “miracle cure” for Covid-19 is claiming that he provided Donald Trump with the product in the White House shortly before the former president made his notorious remarks about using “disinfectant” to treat the disease.
Mark Grenon, the self-styled “archbishop” of the Genesis II “church”, has given an interview from his prison cell in Colombia as he awaits extradition to the US to face criminal charges that he fraudulently sold bleach as a Covid cure. In the 90-minute interview he effectively presents himself as the source of Trump’s fixation with the healing powers of disinfectant.
“We were able to give through a contact with Trump’s family – a family member – the bottles in my book,” Grenon says. “And he mentioned it on TV: ‘I found this disinfectant’.”
Grenon had previously revealed that he had written to Trump in the White House in the days leading up to the disinfectant episode, urging him to promote the healing powers of chlorine dioxide. But in the new interview Grenon goes considerably further, claiming that the bleach, which carries serious health warnings from federal agencies, was actually put into the hands of the then president who consumed it.
Trump’s comments about disinfectant, made at the White House on 23 April 2020 as coronavirus was tearing through the US, reverberated around the world. They caused astonishment in scientific circles, attracted widespread ridicule, and have come to symbolize the maverick response of the Trump administration towards the pandemic.
At the press conference Trump hailed disinfectant as a potential cure for Covid, saying it “knocks it out in a minute, one minute”. He went on to muse whether “we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning”.
Why Trump suddenly embraced bleach as a possible Covid treatment has remained one of the mysteries of his presidency. Now Grenon claims that it was his product, marketed as Miracle Mineral Solution or “MMS”, that lay behind it.
The Guardian asked Trump’s office to clarify whether he had received and drank “MMS” bleach while in the White House, but received no immediate response.
Grenon made his claim that he supplied Trump with bleach solution to Zakariya Adeel, a London-based astrologer and psychic. The interview was conducted apparently over a prison telephone line.
Grenon and his son Joseph are both being held in Colombia as they await extradition. In April a federal grand jury sitting in Miami indicted them, along with two other sons, Jonathan and Jordan who are also in jail in Miami.
The four Grenon family members face charges of fraudulently marketing and selling industrial bleach as a cure for Covid, cancer, malaria and a host of other serious medical conditions. A criminal trial is expected in Miami later this year.
The US Food and Drug Administration has made it clear that drinking MMS is the same as drinking bleach. It warns that consumption can cause severe vomiting, diarrhea and low-blood pressure that can be life-threatening.
The FDA describes MMS as a “powerful bleach typically used for industrial water treatment or bleaching textiles, pulp and paper”.
In the video, Grenon repeats false claims that chlorine dioxide solution cures Covid. “We tried it with Covid – six drops every two hours for the first and second day. Boom! Gone, negative. You’re feeling great from feeling like you’re going to die – it works great,” he says.
Use of bleach as a miracle cure has proliferated across Latin America during the pandemic. Fiona O’Leary, a campaigner against pseudoscience, told the Guardian that MMS peddlers were using Trump’s comments on disinfectant as a marketing tool.
“You have the president of the United States telling people they can ingest bleach to treat Covid – so the response is hardly surprising. There’s been a dramatic increase in the use of the product in several Latin American countries after he made those comments,” she said.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/22/bleach-miracle-cure-donald-trump
Trump Sues N.Y.C. for Ending Golf Course Contract After Capitol Riot
The Trump Organization, which had a 20-year contract to operate a public golf course in the Bronx, claims it was unfairly targeted.
By Jonah E. Bromwich
June 21, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/21/nyregion/trump-golf-course-lawsuit-bronx.html
The Trump Organization sued New York City on Monday, saying the city had wrongly terminated a lucrative golf course contract for political reasons after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol in Washington.
The suit, filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan on the eve of the mayoral election, argued that the January decision by Mayor Bill de Blasio to end the company’s 20-year contract to run the public golf course in the Bronx had no legitimate legal basis and was meant only to punish former President Donald J. Trump.
“Mayor de Blasio had a pre-existing, politically-based predisposition to terminate Trump-related contracts, and the city used the events of January 6, 2021 as a pretext to do so,” the suit said.
In a statement, the company said that the course was “widely recognized as one of the most magnificent public golf experiences anywhere in the country.”
A spokesman for the mayor, Bill Neidhardt, responded, saying: “Donald Trump directly incited a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. You do that, and you lose the privilege of doing business with the City of New York.”
Mr. Trump was impeached this year for inciting the riot, his second impeachment, but was acquitted by the Senate after leaving office.
After the attacks on the Capitol, the city abruptly ended several contracts with the Trump Organization, including agreements that allowed the company to operate the Central Park Carousel and two ice-skating rinks in the park.
The move came as a wave of other businesses also backed away from Mr. Trump after the attacks on the Capitol, including the P.G.A. of America, which announced it would no longer hold one of its major tournaments at a New Jersey golf club owned by the president.
The contracts in Central Park had already been set to expire in April. The lawsuit centers on a city-owned course in the Ferry Point section of the Bronx, called Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point. The Trump Organization was in its sixth year of running the course, which opened in 2015.
Overall, the contracts had garnered the Trump Organization about $17 million a year, Mr. de Blasio said in January.
Although Mr. de Blasio said then that the decision to sever ties was made because Mr. Trump incited rioters at the Capitol, the city offered a more contractual basis for the decision: The Trump Organization had defaulted in its agreement on the golf course because it had not attracted a major tournament and was unlikely to do so in the future, given the P.G.A.’s decision.
The mayor insisted at the time that the city was on “strong legal ground,” but the Trump Organization vowed to fight back, saying the move was a form of political discrimination.
Now, the organization has made its case in an 18-page petition saying that it was never obliged to attract an actual tournament but merely to maintain “a first class tournament quality daily fee golf course.” The petition included several statements from professional golfers, including Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau, attesting to the course’s being “first class” and “tournament quality.”
A spokesman for the city’s law department said that it would “vigorously defend” its decision to terminate the contract and that it “looked forward to selecting a new vendor for Ferry Point.”
There is little love lost between Mr. Trump and Mr. de Blasio. The former president has called the Democratic mayor and 2020 presidential contender “the worst mayor in the history of New York City.” Mr. de Blasio, in turn, embraced Mr. Trump as a foil during his own ill-fated presidential run, even attempting to give the president a nickname, “Con Don.”
The city initially celebrated its collaboration with Mr. Trump when the rising real estate developer first won the contract to refurbish Wollman Rink in Central Park in the 1980s. Mr. Trump’s company finished the project under budget and ahead of its deadline, and city officials embraced him; one even joked about planting a “Trump tree” in the park.
“I’m not used to having nice things said about me,” Mr. Trump said at the time.
The contracts were renewed during the tenure of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. But Mr. de Blasio, a progressive Democrat, staked out a position against Mr. Trump, one that put him in line with his many liberal constituents.
The lawsuit comes as Mr. Trump and his company are facing an unrelated criminal investigation from the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is examining whether the former president and his employees committed financial fraud in recent years.
Prosecutors appear to be in the final stages of investigating Allen H. Weisselberg, Mr. Trump’s long-serving chief financial officer, and could criminally charge him this summer, The New York Times previously reported.
Mr. Weisselberg, who has worked for the Trump family since 1973, was listed as the contact for the company on the city’s contract for the Central Park carousel.
Ben Protess contributed reporting.
Jonah E. Bromwich is a courts reporter for the Metro desk. @jonesieman
A version of this article appears in print on June 22, 2021, Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump, Citing Political Bias, Sues New York City for Ending Golf Course Contract. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/21/nyregion/trump-golf-course-lawsuit-bronx.html
The Limits of the “Sustainable” Economy
by Kieren Mayers, Tom Davis, and Luk N. Van Wassenhove
June 16, 2021
https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-limits-of-the-sustainable-economy
Summary.
Faced with compelling evidence that the world is approaching climate and ecologic tipping points, urgent solutions and actions are a priority. Transitioning to a so-called Circular Economy (CE) has been put forward as a possible solution, and enthusiastically seized upon by both industry and policy makers. CE presents an enticing idea based on three core principles: to design out waste and pollution, keep products and materials in use, and regenerate natural systems by using renewable materials and energy. But CE is not without its critics. While praising the objectives promoted by CE, many question its practicability. In particular, the ability of recycling, designing for durability, use of renewable production inputs, and adoption of alternative usage models to limit society’s consumption of raw materials and energy is not guaranteed, given practical and environmental constraints and people’s economic and quality-of-life expectations.
Faced with compelling evidence that the world is approaching climate and ecologic tipping points, urgent solutions and actions are a priority. Transitioning to a so-called “circular economy” (CE) has been put forward as a possible solution, and enthusiastically seized upon by both industry and policy makers.
The concept gained attention in the late eighties, after researchers at General Motors first envisioned a “closed loop” approach to production processes. In 2009, Dame Ellen MacArthur (the famous round-the-world solo sailor) launched the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which has very successfully popularized the CE manifesto. Today the foundation has an impressive list of around 180 partner and member organizations, and regulators in some regions of the world, particularly the EU, are actively implementing CE agendas.
CE presents an enticing idea based on three core principles: design out waste and pollution, keep products and materials in use, and regenerate natural systems by using renewable materials and energy. Industry is invited to rip up the rule book by moving away from the linear make-use-dispose tradition to an idealized and more sustainable approach where products are made more durable, continually repaired, remanufactured, reused, and finally recycled. The proposition is compelling: as CE endeavors tend to be labor intensive, and therefore aim to ensure resource efficiency, it is argued that their adoption will help to create employment and increase economic growth (for example, the EU estimates 700,000 new jobs and an increase in GDP of 0.5%).
But CE is not without its critics. While praising the objectives promoted by CE, many question its core premises, its effectiveness, and its practicability. In particular, the ability of recycling, designing for durability, use of renewable production inputs, and adoption of alternative usage models to limit society’s consumption of raw materials and energy is not guaranteed, given practical and environmental constraints and people’s economic and quality-of-life expectations.
The Limits of Recyclability
All materials degrade and disperse over time and with use. Textile and paper fibers, for example, are shortened by recycling; trace copper in steel prevents it being used in sheet metal; silicon in aluminum limits its use in cast alloys; and so on. Consequently, it is important to understand that materials can never progress through life purely in “lines” or “circles.” Instead, they move through highly complex supply networks, and the popularly conceived repeating circular motion of reuse and recycling is in fact a downward spiral.
What’s more, collecting end-of-life products and materials and restoring them to a re-usable state itself requires energy inputs and new materials. In some cases, recycling and reuse can have even greater environmental impacts than production using virgin resources. For example, the use of recycled crushed concrete in cement can be better or worse for the environment, depending on the specifics of each situation (including where the materials are produced and where they are used).
Given the limitless variety of products and materials in waste, scaling-up collection and recycling operations to deliver materials back for their original use and purpose can involve insurmountable complexity. The EU alone has identified 650 different types of waste, many of which themselves are complex mixes of different products from hundreds of producers, as in, for example, electronic equipment.
This complexity does not decrease if greater volumes are diverted to recycling. Consequently, closed-loop approaches tend to be limited to commonly used and simple materials such as aluminum beverage cans, PET bottles, and lead-acid batteries. Key obstacles are:
Consumers: The number of different types of waste materials consumers can reasonably be expected to separate for collection, or at drop-off points (for example, one borough in the UK, Newcastle-under-Lyme, has provided residents with no less than nine separate waste bins).
Collection: The number of different waste materials that can be collected separately. Collection points have limited space, few safeguards against cross-contamination, and, of course, waste needs to be bulked-up for efficient and cost-effective transport.
Sorting: Separating waste for specific manufacturers or even specific technical applications during recycling is often impractical and unaffordable since the desired waste materials arise over wide geographic areas globally, and perhaps many years after they were produced.
Transportation: For many industries, adopting the closed-loop approach to recycling preferred under a CE approach would involve returning materials to original factories as far away as China. This can lead to greater environmental impacts than recycling materials for lower grade applications, or even than by using virgin materials.
The effect of these factors is that waste materials are inevitably commingled and processed mechanically in bulk. If any link in the recycling chain becomes too complex or expensive, or simply not viable, there is a danger that the whole flow will divert to landfill.
The Limits of Durability
In order to reduce the overall energy and materials required for original production, CE advocates argue that products should be designed to be longer-lasting, and that they should be reused and repaired wherever possible, with recycling being seen only as a last resort. But these solutions can have unintended adverse consequences.
Making products more durable is intended to prolong their life, thus reducing the total number manufactured over their working lifetime. However, consumers can be fashion conscious and tire of a product long before its end of life; new technology can make perfectly functioning products obsolete (music and film streaming services, wirelessly connected smart speakers, connected home systems, and so forth); consumer demand can dictate size and or weight considerations that preclude more efficient design. In fact, to meet climate targets it will be necessary to replace products entirely where new technology is more efficient or is part of a renewable energy infrastructure (such as electric cars and solar panels).
What’s more, durability can be difficult to estimate. EU policy makers are considering requiring producers to provide information on the expected average lifetime of electrical and electronic goods to consumers — for example, through product labels or instructions. This approach certainly can be useful in some cases (mechanical devices and foodstuffs, for example). But there is no way to accurately predict or collect any statistics on the lifetime of newly-designed complex electronic products such as TVs or computers in advance — the failure rate of electronic circuitry is truly random, and such products cannot be subjected to accelerated testing.
CE advocates argue that “upgradeable” modular product designs could allow for technology development, as used for complex manufactured systems like computers. However, this can have severe limitations with consumer products. New technology often needs an entirely different architecture (for example, it is not possible to fit a flat screen to an old CRT TV). In addition, components are becoming more integrated rather than modular in order to reduce power demands (for example, mobile phone circuitry and “system on a chip” computer processors). Modular designs can also require additional materials to allow easy and safe interchange of modules (for example, providing battery compartments in electronic products).
Manufacturing more durable products typically requires additional and/or different materials. These materials will be wasted if consumers insist on taking advantage of new design features, for example, ice makers in refrigerators, the latest fashions in clothing, eco-cycles in dishwashers, and the latest large LED screens in TVs, and so discard their less up-to-date products anyway. Consumer behavior issues cannot simply or easily be resolved through incentives, education, or even legislation: for example, most consumers buying “bags for life” forget to reuse them despite information campaigns and bag charges.
It is true that manufacturing new products typically has higher environmental impacts than repair or reuse of existing ones. However, repair and reuse do not always substitute for new product sales. Consumers who would not otherwise buy a new item may only buy a second-hand one because it is cheap. In this situation no resources have been “saved.” Furthermore, the seller may then use the proceeds towards buying a new product (a “rebound effect”), with the net result that more products are then in circulation. For products that depend on materials and energy to operate, such as printers, cars, or dishwashers, increased ownership means even more resources and energy will be consumed as the products are used.
Another challenge with repair and remanufacturing is that manufacturing low volumes of highly technical parts on demand is unfeasible, so the quantity of parts that will eventually be needed must be predicted, manufactured in advance, and stored in warehouses (all energy consuming processes). Overestimates may be highly costly and lead to waste, and underestimates to otherwise repairable products reaching end of life prematurely. Alternative CE-type approaches may be more effective: spare parts can be recovered when needed from unrepairable or discarded and unwanted equipment or produced using 3D printing for more simple parts.
The Limits of Renewable Inputs
CE advocates claim the approach will regenerate nature by preserving and enhancing renewable resources in place of non-renewables. However, renewable resources can result in substantial environmental impacts of their own, and so should be used judiciously.
For example, the use of nutrients from waste in agriculture or in nature regeneration also will cause ecological damage if used in excess, such as fish-killing green algae blooms (eutrophication); some renewable materials can degrade into harmful by-products as waste (such as oxy-degradable bio-plastics which are soon to be banned by the EU); and the burning of wood fuel is a major cause of air pollution (responsible for an estimated 38% of air pollution in the UK).
Furthermore, using renewables in place of non-renewables can have substantial knock-on effects. For example, substituting bamboo for plastic has been criticized for issues such as intensive chemicals usage; although the movement to ban plastic bags is certainly a good step towards reducing littering and pollution and protecting marine bio-diversity, replacing plastic bags entirely with paper bags can actually increase overall environmental impact. Such complicated trade-offs must be given proper consideration.
Regeneration of ecosystems is a complex issue which cannot be solved by renewables alone. Addressing the decline in the earth’s natural systems and biodiversity requires careful stewardship, conservation, and the protection of vast areas of land and natural forest in perpetuity.
The Limits of Alternative Usage Models
An important feature of the CE approach is the trend away from physical ownership towards pay-per-use services. Examples include, leasing products rather than buying them (as with automobiles and photocopiers) and sharing through platforms (such as bike and ride sharing). The assumptions behind these ideas are that because businesses would be responsible for the entire life-cycle costs of products, they would act to design more durable, repairable, and recyclable products, take-back products efficiently at end-of-use, and regard them as valuable assets to be utilized to the maximum extent. However, these solutions come with problems.
To begin with, even a quick look at the automobile market casts a dubious searchlight on the environmental benefits of leasing. The car manufacturer sells the car to the leasing company and then loses interest. The leasing company customer uses the car for 2-4 years, and hands it back in exchange for a new model. The car is then passed to auction, and eventually sold on the used car market, and demand and consumption are increased — more cars on the road consuming more fuel. In some cases, leasing services (which are a form of “pay per use”) actually drive-up demand for new products. Indeed, leasing can be viewed as another approach to selling – a form of credit agreement that gives access to otherwise unaffordable goods.
Sharing schemes, as opposed to individual ownership, such as for city bicycles or garden and DIY tools, can help lower demand for new products and consequently reduce materials consumption. However, due to lower cost and increased convenience, they can also have perverse effects. As an example, the use of ride-hail services as a substitute for public transport can increase car usage. In addition, recent research has found bike sharing schemes come with an unexpected carbon impact vs individual ownership as vans are used to bring bikes back to busy transport hubs at peak times.
***
As noted in an HBR article in the July/August 2021 issue, there is no doubt whatsoever of the substantial potential that product life extension, re-use, repair, and recycling can have for improving resource efficiency when used appropriately. Unfortunately, contemporary research has revealed that the CE manifesto can lead to unintended and counter-productive outcomes if not properly assessed in terms of environmental impacts and practical feasibility. As Gifford Pinchot, a founding conservationist, explained over a century ago: “Conservation means the wise use of the earth and its resources for the lasting good.”
The total mass of human made materials is now estimated to outweigh all natural biomass on the planet, and the total amount of waste disposed of each year is simply dwarfed by the quantities consumed for new production. Focusing entirely on product end-of-life management without also addressing the greater and growing problem of over-consumption would be to miss the point entirely. Greater wisdom can help us plot a course towards a more sustainable industrial ecology. To be sure, we should build on the momentum of the CE movement but let us also be fully aware of its limitations.
Read more on Sustainability
KM
Kieren Mayers is an executive-in-residence at INSEAD
TD
Tom Davis is a former manager in Environment, Health and Safety for Hewlett Packard Europe, Middle East and Africa.
LW
Luk N. Van Wassenhove is the Henry Ford Chaired Professor of Manufacturing, Emeritus, at INSEAD and leads its Humanitarian Research Group and its Sustainable Operations Initiative.
https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-limits-of-the-sustainable-economy
Here are 5 disturbing bombshells from a new book on Trump's 'rudderless' pandemic response
Alex Henderson
June 21, 2021
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-response-team/
The United States recently passed yet another grim milestone in the 2020/2021 pandemic when Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore reported that the COVID-19 death count had passed 600,000 in the United States. Nonetheless, there is reason for optimism where the pandemic is concerned. Around 65% of U.S. adults, according to the New York Times, have been at least partially vaccinated for COVID-19, and President Joe Biden — who has been promoting vaccination aggressively — hopes to get that number up to 70% by July 4. Biden obviously takes the pandemic much more seriously than former President Donald Trump, who repeatedly downplayed its severity in 2020.
Trump's dysfunctional response to the worst global health crisis in more than 100 years is the focus of a new book by Washington Port reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta: "Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration's Response to the Pandemic That Changed History," which Post reporter Dan Diamond discusses in detail in an article published on June 21.
Here are five bombshells in the book, according to Diamond.
1. Trump wanted to quarantine infected Americans at Guantánamo Bay
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba is where is where the Bush Administration kept suspected terrorists following the 9/11 attacks. And it is also where, according to Abutaleb and Paletta, Trump wanted to keep Americans who tested positive for COVID-19. In February 2020, Abutaleb and Paletta report, Trump asked aides, "Don't we have an island that we own? What about Guantánamo?"
2. Kushner had a meltdown after learning about a delay in mask shipments
In late March 2020, according to Abutaleb and Paletta, Robert Kadlec — preparedness chief at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — informed then-White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner that there would be a delay in shipments of protective face masks, which wouldn't be available until June. And Kushner reportedly became unglued, shouting at Kadlec, "You fucking moron! We'll all be dead by June!"
3. Trump feared that COVID-19 testing would cause him to lose the election
In March 2020, the month in which the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a global pandemic, the United States wasn't doing nearly as much testing as it should have been. But Trump, according to Abutaleb and Paletta, believed the U.S. was doing too much — and his reason was entirely political. Trump, during a March 18, 2020 phone conversation with then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, reportedly shouted, "Testing is killing me! I'm going to lose the election because of testing! What idiot had the federal government do testing?"
4. No one knew exactly who was in charge of Trump's COVID-19 response
Trump had two separate COVID-19 task forces in 2020: a White House task force led by then-Vice President Mike Pence, and a task force led by Kushner that focused on private sector efforts in response to the pandemic. According to Abutaleb and Paletta, the Trump Administration's COVID-19 response was so chaotic that it was hard to know who exactly was in charge.
In their book, Abutaleb and Paletta, "One of the biggest flaws in the Trump Administration's response is that no one was in charge of the response. Was it (Dr. Deborah) Birx, the task force coordinator? Was it Pence, head of the task force? Was it Trump, the boss? Was it Kushner, running the shadow task force until he wasn't? Was it Marc Short or Mark Meadows, often at odds, rarely in sync? Ultimately, there was no accountability, and the response was rudderless."
5. Mark Meadows berated a top HHS official
After former Rep. Mark Meadows replaced Mick Mulvaney as White House chief of staff, he became — according to Abutaleb and Paletta — a source of misery for Kadlec. When there was a delay with the rollout of remdesivir (a drug used to treat COVID-19), Meadows reportedly screamed at Kadlec, "I'm going to fire your ass if you can't fix this." According to Abutaleb and Paletta, "That was what the response had turned into: a toxic environment in which no matter where you turned, someone was ready to rip your head off or threatening to fire you."
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-response-team/
Downing Street decision-making is ‘blind leading blind’, says Dominic Cummings
If public could see what went on inside No 10, ‘everyone would sell everything and head for the bunker in the hills’, claims former aide
By Lucy Fisher,
DEPUTY POLITICAL EDITOR
21 June 2021 • 9:05pm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/06/21/downing-street-dominated-blind-leading-blind-says-dominic-cummings/
Dominic Cummings has said Downing Street is dominated by “the blind leading the blind” and if the public could see how decisions were made, “everyone would sell everything and head for the bunker in the hills”.
The Prime Minister’s former chief adviser used an online question and answer session on Monday to unleash a fresh salvo of criticism at the Government. It built on a wave of attacks launched since he left Number 10 in the wake of a bitter power struggle last November.
He derided Number 10 as “just a branch of [the] entertainment industry” and also heaped criticism on the Tory party as “hideous”. Elsewhere he claimed: “All the parties are rotten to the core, old decrepit entities literally dying on their feet.”
The crop of mandarins at the helm of Whitehall departments when he entered the Government were “shockingly bad” and peppered by an “incredible number of utter duffers”, Mr Cummings claimed, adding: “We cleared some out but still…”
He heaped scorn on Whitehall’s “appalling” record on science and technology in recent decades, which he claimed was “a big part of our problem with productivity, education, and defence procurement”.
Sir Keir Starmer was meanwhile branded “just another not great lawyer” who is “content to fail in all the usual ways”. Labour should aim to “kick Tories up and down the street on violent crime”, suggested Mr Cummings, but he added: “Starmer is fixated on media/bubble, he won't reorient to public.”
The barrage of condemnations came in response to hundreds of reader questions, after Mr Cummings urged subscribers to his new £10-a-month newsletter, hosted on the platform Substack, to “ask me anything”.
Alongside his wide-ranging denunciations, he commented on the Government's handling of the coronavirus epidemic and highlighted the use of “do not resuscitate” (DNR) orders, after their inappropriate use on patients with learning disabilities was exposed by The Telegraph.
Asked whether there had been conversations about DNR notices being deployed in a blanket fashion on such groups, he said: “Not in front of me... But I think this whole issue does need urgently addressing now, clearly some terrible stuff happened.”
Another reader quizzed him on what it was like to be close to power, to which he replied: “Fascinating but very troubling… When you watch the apex of power you feel like ‘if this were broadcast, everyone would sell everything and head for the bunker in the hills’.”
He continued: “It’s impossible to describe how horrific decision-making is at the apex of power and how few people watching it have any clue how bad it is or any sense of how to do it better, it’s generally the blind leading the blind with a few non-blind desperately shoving fingers in dykes and clutching their heads…”
Mr Cummings suggested that Mr Johnson would eschew focusing on issues like the international race to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), which he warned could “destroy us all”.
AGI could “easily be much worse than even total nuclear war” and “ought to be a massive focus of government thinking but it is not”, he said.
The latest shots fired in his sustained assault on his former boss and ally came after he called Mr Johnson a “gaffe machine” on Twitter last week and released personal texts that showed the Prime Minister had described Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, as “totally f------ hopeless” during the early phase of the pandemic last year.
Asked on Monday whether he had any additional material to underpin his unsubstantiated allegations against Mr Hancock, whom he has repeatedly accused of dishonesty, Mr Cummings evaded answering, leaving open the door to the publication of further documents or messages.
The ex-aide claimed that “people don’t seem to realise that lots of people will swear under oath what I’ve said about Hancock is true!” and accused the Health Secretary of saying “nonsense things all the time”.
Mr Hancock has said the claims against him are “not true” and that he and Mr Johnson work “very strongly together”.
Mr Cummings admitted that in the past he “screamed at the PM a few times” as he exhorted him to ignore the media.
In another barb, he claimed that Mr Johnson was “not that interested” in the Union, unless there was media scrutiny or “immediate pressure”.
Harking back to his time in Number 10, Mr Cummings said he had devised a plan to overlook MPs for crucial Cabinet posts and instead appoint “executive figures” from industry.
He said: “Our constitution is flexible enough to do this as we showed putting [Kate] Bingham in charge of vaccines – the PM cd [could] pick who they want, shove em [them] in Lords if you want, there's no constitutional requirement for ministers to be MPs…
“I intended to try a big move in this direction straight after [the] election. Obviously Covid intervened though I think Boris wdn't [wouldn’t] have dared do it anyway”.
Many of the reader questions put to him touched on Brexit and his role leading the Vote Leave campaign ahead of the EU referendum.
He claimed that he “never thought trade deals much important”, adding that he disagreed with Brexiteer MPs at the time over whether free trade agreements would be a benefit of leaving the bloc.
He said that he thought Mr Johnson's vision for a post-Brexit Global Britain was “a c--p slogan that five years later still means nothing”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/06/21/downing-street-dominated-blind-leading-blind-says-dominic-cummings/
Boris Johnson a pundit who stumbled into politics, says Cummings
Former aide says in Substack Q&A that No 10 is now ‘just a branch of the entertainment industry’
Peter Walker Political correspondent
@peterwalker99
Mon 21 Jun 2021 11.49 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jun/21/boris-johnson-a-pundit-who-stumbled-into-politics-says-dominic-cummings
Downing Street under Boris Johnson is “a branch of the entertainment industry” and nothing will get done in terms of serious policy focus until he leaves, Dominic Cummings has said in his latest blast at his former boss.
In a question and answer session with paid subscribers to his Substack newsletter, Johnson’s former chief adviser described the prime minister as “a pundit who stumbled into politics and acts like that 99% of the time”.
Giving evidence to MPs last month, Cummings criticised Johnson as completely unfit to be prime minister, describing him as media obsessed and “like a shopping trolley smashing from one side of the aisle to the other”.
On Monday, answering a question on the potential cybersecurity threat to the UK if another country develops human-level artificial general intelligence, or AGI, Cummings wrote that this would be huge, potentially giving those with AGI “the power to subdue everyone – and destroy us all”.
Cummings said that if he had stayed at No 10 – he was dismissed in November – he would have ordered a focus on the threat, but this would not happen under Johnson.
“NOTHING like this now will get serious focus in no10 – no10 now is just a branch of entertainment industry and will stay so til BJ gone, at earliest,” he wrote.
“The most valuable commodity in gvt is focus and the PM literally believes that focus is a menace to his freedom to do whatever he fancies today, hence why you see the opposite of focus now and will do til he goes …”
Earlier in the lengthy thread, Cummings was asked if he saw Johnson more as a hedgehog or fox, a reference to a celebrated Isaiah Berlin essay that categorised people into those who inhabit one central idea and those with a broader view.
He replied: “Neither, he’s a pundit who stumbled into politics and acts like that 99% of the time but 1% not – and that 1% is why pundits misunderstand him/underestimate him.”
Among a string of answers covering everything from his admiration for the 19th-century German statesman Otto von Bismarck to lessons from the 2016 Vote Leave campaign, Cummings also talked about what he had learned from proximity to power.
He wrote: “When you watch the apex of power you feel like, ‘If this were broadcast, everyone would sell everything and head for the bunker in the hills’.
“It’s impossible to describe how horrific decision-making is at the apex of power and how few people watching it have any clue how bad it is or any sense of how to do it better, it’s generally the blind leading the blind with a few non-blind desperately shoving fingers in dykes and clutching their heads …”
Cummings found time to further insult Matt Hancock, having claimed during his evidence to MPs that the health secretary lied to colleagues amid the Covid pandemic, later releasing screenshots of a message in which Johnson called Hancock “totally hopeless”.
Asked by one reader about some statements made by Hancock about Covid, and whether these revealed a particular philosophical approach within government, Cummings said: “Hancock just says nonsense things all the time, I would not infer there is some complex moral reasoning going on!”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jun/21/boris-johnson-a-pundit-who-stumbled-into-politics-says-dominic-cummings
Iran’s hard-line president-elect says he won’t meet Biden
By ISABEL DEBRE and JON GAMBRELL
today
https://apnews.com/article/iran--president-elect-ebrahim-raisi-biden-63db1fbbdb1ff9fe40aca40f3f8046a2
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran’s president-elect said Monday he would not meet with President Joe Biden or negotiate over Tehran’s ballistic missile program and its support of regional militias, sticking to a hard-line position following his landslide victory in last week’s election.
Judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi also described himself as a “defender of human rights” when asked about his involvement in the 1988 mass execution of about 5,000 people. It marked the first time he’s been put on the spot on live television over that dark moment in Iranian history at the end of the Iran-Iraq war.
“The U.S. is obliged to lift all oppressive sanctions against Iran,” Raisi said at his first news conference after Friday’s election, a contest widely seen as a coronation after his strongest competition found themselves barred from running.
Raisi, 60, sat in front of a sea of microphones, most from Iran and countries home to militias supported by Tehran. He looked nervous at the beginning of his comments but slowly became more at ease over the hourlong news conference.
Asked about Iran’s ballistic missile program and its support of regional militias, Raisi described the issues as “nonnegotiable.”
Tehran’s fleet of attack aircraft date largely back to before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, forcing Iran to instead invest in missiles as a hedge against its regional Arab neighbors, who have bought billions of dollars in American military hardware over the years. Those missiles, with a self-imposed range limit of 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles), can reach across the Mideast and U.S. military bases in the region.
Iran also relies on militias like Yemen’s Houthi rebels and Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group for counterbalance against enemies such as Saudi Arabia and Israel, respectively.
On a possible meeting with Biden, Raisi curtly answered: “No.” His moderate competitor in the election, Abdolnasser Hemmati, had suggested during campaigning that he might be willing to meet Biden.
The White House did not immediately respond to Raisi’s statements. Raisi will become the first serving Iranian president sanctioned by the U.S. government even before entering office, in part over his time as the head of Iran’s internationally criticized judiciary.
The victory of Raisi, a protégé of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, came amid the lowest voter turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history. Millions of Iranians stayed home in defiance of a vote they saw as tipped in Raisi’s favor after a panel under Khamenei disqualified prominent reformist candidates.
Of those who did vote, 3.7 million people either accidentally or intentionally voided their ballots, far beyond the amount seen in previous elections and suggesting some wanted none of the four candidates. In official results, Raisi won 17.9 million votes overall, nearly 62% of the total 28.9 million cast. Tehran had a 34% turnout, far lower than previous years, with many polling stations across the capital noticeably empty.
Raisi’s election puts hard-liners firmly in control across the government as negotiations in Vienna continue to try to save a tattered deal meant to limit Iran’s nuclear program.
Then-U.S. President Donald Trump unilaterally withdraw America from the landmark agreement in 2018, setting in motion months of tensions across the region. In response, Iran has abandoned the limits of the deal and is now enriching uranium at 60%, its highest levels ever, though still short of weapons-grade levels. Representatives of the world powers party to the deal returned to their capitals for consultations following the latest round of negotiations on Sunday.
Raisi’s victory has raised concerns that it could complicate a possible return to the nuclear agreement. In his remarks Monday, Raisi called sanctions relief as “central to our foreign policy” and exhorted the U.S. to “return and implement your commitments” in the deal.
“No matter the timing, a U.S.-Iran agreement in Vienna leaves unanswered whether the United States can achieve a broader rapprochement with an Iran led by an avowed proponent of the core tenets of Iran’s Islamic Revolution,” the New York-based Soufan Center said in an analysis Monday.
On Sunday, Iran’s sole nuclear plant at Bushehr underwent an unexplained emergency shutdown. Previously, Iranian officials had warned that U.S. sanctions affected their ability to get parts for the facility.
On Saudi Arabia, which has recently started secret talks with Iran in Baghdad over several points of contention between the regional heavyweights, Raisi said that Iran would have “no problem” with a possible reopening of the Saudi Embassy in Tehran and that the “restoration of relations faces no barrier.” The embassy was closed in 2016 as relations deteriorated.
Raisi struck a defiant tone, however, when asked about the 1988 executions, which saw sham retrials of political prisoners, militants and others that would become known as “death commissions.”
After Iran’s then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a U.N.-brokered cease-fire, members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, heavily armed by Saddam Hussein, stormed across the Iranian border from Iraq in a surprise attack. Iran ultimately blunted their assault.
The trials began around that time, with defendants asked to identify themselves. Those who responded “mujahedeen” were sent to their deaths, while others were questioned about their willingness to “clear minefields for the army of the Islamic Republic,” according to a 1990 Amnesty International report.
International rights groups estimate that as many as 5,000 people were executed. Raisi served on the commissions.
“I am proud of being a defender of human rights and of people’s security and comfort as a prosecutor wherever I was,” he said. “All actions I carried out during my office were always in the direction of defending human rights.”
He added: “Today in the presidential post, I feel obliged to defend human rights.”
https://apnews.com/article/iran--president-elect-ebrahim-raisi-biden-63db1fbbdb1ff9fe40aca40f3f8046a2
Ransomware gangs get paid off as officials struggle for fix
By FRANK BAJAK
today
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-europe-government-and-politics-technology-business-3b81e8116c42439566040a052617ad55
BOSTON (AP) — If your business falls victim to ransomware and you want simple advice on whether to pay the criminals, don’t expect much help from the U.S. government. The answer is apt to be: It depends.
“It is the position of the U.S. government that we strongly discourage the payment of ransoms,” Eric Goldstein, a top cybersecurity official in the Department of Homeland Security, told a congressional hearing last week.
But paying carries no penalties and refusing would be almost suicidal for many companies, especially the small and medium-sized. Too many are unprepared. The consequences could also be dire for the nation itself. Recent high-profile extortive attacks led to runs on East Coast gas stations and threatened meat supplies.
The dilemma has left public officials fumbling about how to respond. In an initial step, bipartisan legislation in the works would mandate immediate federal reporting of ransomware attacks to assist response, help identify the authors and even recoup ransoms, as the FBI did with most of the $4.4 million that Colonial Pipeline recently paid.
Without additional action soon, however, experts say ransoms will continue to skyrocket, financing better criminal intelligence-gathering and tools that only worsen the global crime wave.
President Joe Biden got no assurances from Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva last week that cybercriminals behind the attacks won’t continue to enjoy safe harbor in Russia. At minimum, Putin’s security services tolerate them. At worst, they are working together.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said this month that she is in favor of banning payments. ”But I don’t know whether Congress or the president is” in favor, she said.
And as Goldstein reminded lawmakers, paying doesn’t guarantee you’ll get your data back or that sensitive stolen files won’t end up for sale in darknet criminal forums. Even if the ransomware crooks keep their word, you’ll be financing their next round of attacks. And you may just get hit again.
In April, the then-top national security official in the Justice Department, John Demers, was lukewarm toward banning payments, saying it could put “us in a more adversarial posture vis-à-vis the victims, which is not where we want to be.”
Perhaps most vehement about a payment ban are those who know ransomware criminals best — cybersecurity threat responders.
Lior Div, CEO of Boston-based Cybereason, considers them digital-age terrorists. “It is terrorism in a different form, a very modern one.”
A 2015 British law prohibits U.K.-based insurance firms from reimbursing companies for the payment of terrorism ransoms, a model some believe should be applied universally to ransomware payments.
“Ultimately, the terrorists stopped kidnapping people because they realized that they weren’t going to get paid,” said Adrian Nish, threat intelligence chief at BAE Systems.
U.S. law prohibits material support for terrorists, but the Justice Department in 2015 waived the threat of criminal prosecution for citizens who pay terrorist ransoms.
“There’s a reason why that’s a policy in terrorism cases: You give too much power to the adversary,” said Brandon Valeriano, a Marine Corps University scholar and senior adviser to the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, a bipartisan body created by Congress.
Some ransomware victims have taken principled stands against payments, the human costs be damned. One is the University of Vermont Health Network, where the bill for recovery and lost services after an October attack was upwards of $63 million.
Ireland, too, refused to negotiate when its national healthcare service was hit last month.
Five weeks on, healthcare information technology in the nation of 5 million remains badly hobbled. Cancer treatments are only partially restored, email service patchy, digital patient records largely inaccessible. People jam emergency rooms for lab and diagnostic tests because their primary-care doctors can’t order them. As of Thursday, 42% of the system’s 4,000 computer servers still had not been decrypted.
The criminals turned over the software decryption key a week after the attack — following an unusual offer by the Russian Embassy to “help with the investigation” — but the recovery has been a painful slog.
“A decryption key is not a magic wand or switch that can suddenly reverse the damage,” said Brian Honan, a top Irish cybersecurity consultant. Every machine recovered must be tested to ensure it’s infection-free.
Data indicate that most ransomware victims pay. The insurer Hiscox says just over 58% of its afflicted customers pay, while leading cyber insurance broker Marsh McLennan put the figure at roughly 60% for its impacted U.S. and Canadian clients.
But paying doesn’t guarantee anything near full recovery. On average, ransom-payers got back just 65% of the encrypted data, leaving more than a third inaccessible, while 29% said they got only half of the data back, the cybersecurity firm Sophos found in a survey of 5,400 IT decision-makers from 30 countries.
In a survey of nearly 1,300 security professionals, Cybereason found that 4 in 5 businesses that chose to pay ransoms suffered a second ransomware attack.
That calculus notwithstanding, deep-pocketed businesses with insurance protection tend to pay up.
Colonial Pipeline almost immediately paid last month to get fuel flowing back to the U.S. East Coast — before determining whether its data backups were robust enough to avoid payment. Later, meat-processing goliath JBS paid $11 million to avoid potentially interrupting U.S. meat supply, though its data backups also proved adequate to get its plants back online before serious damage.
It’s not clear if concern about stolen data being dumped online influenced the decision of either company to pay.
Colonial would not say if fears of the 100 gigabytes of stolen data ending up in the public eye factored into the decision by CEO Joseph Blount to pay. JBS spokesman Cameron Bruett said “our analysis showed no company data was exfiltrated.” He would not say if the criminals claimed in their ransom note to have stolen data.
Irish authorities were fully aware of the risks. The criminals claim to have stolen 700 gigabytes of data. As yet, it has not surfaced online.
Public exposure of such data can lead to lawsuits or lost investor confidence, which makes it manna for criminals. One ransomware gang seeking to extort a major U.S. corporation published a nude photo of the chief executive’s adult son on its leak site last week.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, has asked in written requests to know more about the JBS and Colonial cases as well as CNA Insurance. Bloomberg News reported that CNA Insurance surrendered $40 million to ransomware criminals in March. The New York Democrat said “Congress needs to take a hard look at how to break this vicious cycle.”
Recognizing a lack of support for a ransom ban, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., and other lawmakers want at least to compel greater transparency from ransomware victims, who often don’t report attacks.
They are drafting a bill to make the reporting of breaches and ransom payments mandatory. They would need to be reported within 24 hours of detection, with the executive branch deciding on a case-by-case basis whether to make the information public.
But that won’t protect unprepared victims from potentially going bankrupt if they don’t pay. For that, various proposals have been put forward to provide financial assistance.
The Senate this month approved legislation that would establish a special cyber response and recovery fund to provide direct support to the most vulnerable private and public organizations hit by major cyberattacks and breaches.
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-europe-government-and-politics-technology-business-3b81e8116c42439566040a052617ad55
The rogue department: how the Trump DoJ trashed legal and political norms
Peter Stone
Mon 21 Jun 2021 04.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/21/trump-doj-bill-bar-attorney-general-justice-department
New investigations will examine the scale of wrongdoing – and experts say there could be more revelations of abuse to come
Donald Trump never did much to hide his dangerous belief that the US justice department and the attorneys general who helmed it should serve as his own personal lawyers and follow his political orders, regardless of norms and the law.
Former senior DoJ officials say the former president aggressively prodded his attorneys general to go after his enemies, protect his friends and his interests, and these moves succeeded with alarming results until Trump’s last few months in office.
But now with Joe Biden sitting in the Oval Office, Merrick Garland as attorney general, and Democrats controlling Congress, more and more revelations are emerging about just how far Trump’s justice department went rogue. New inquiries have been set up to investigate the scale of wrongdoing.
Trump’s disdain for legal principles and the constitution revealed itself repeatedly – especially during Bill Barr’s tenure as attorney general, during most of 2019 and 2020. During Barr’s term in office, Trump ignored the tradition of justice as a separate branch of government, and flouted the principle of the rule of law, say former top justice lawyers and congressional Democrats.
In Barr, Trump appeared to find someone almost entirely aligned with the idea of doing his bidding. Barr sought to undermine the conclusions of Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, independent congressional oversight, and Trump critics in and out of government, while taking decisions that benefitted close Trump allies.
But more political abuses have emerged, with revelations that – starting under attorney general Jeff Sessions in 2018 – subpoenas were issued in a classified leak inquiry to obtain communications records of top Democrats on the House intelligence committee. Targets were Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, who were investigating Kremlin election meddling, and also several committee staffers and journalists.
Democrats in Congress, as well as Garland, have forcefully denounced these Trumpian tactics. Garland has asked the department’s inspector general to launch his own inquiry, and examine the subpoenas involving members of Congress and the media. Congressional committees are eyeing their own investigations into the department’s extraordinary behavior.
“There was one thing after another where DoJ acted inappropriately and violated the fundamental principle that law enforcement must be even-handed. The DoJ must always make clear that no person is above the law,” said Donald Ayer, deputy attorney general in the George HW Bush administration.
Ayer thinks there could be more revelations to come. “The latest disclosure of subpoenas issued almost three years ago shows we don’t yet know the full extent of the misconduct that was engaged in.”
Similarly, ex-justice department inspector general Michael Bromwich said: “I think it’s pretty clear Trump had little respect for some of the true bedrock principles that define this country – judicial independence and separation of powers, among others. He also never showed any understanding or appreciation for norms that have historically gone unchallenged – the importance of free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power.”
In a blistering Washington Post op-ed, Schiff summed up the latest disclosures about the DoJ subpoenas, and the broader politicization at the DoJ under Trump.
“The rules established after Watergate to ensure the independence of the justice department served our nation well for half a century, until another president shattered them,” Schiff, now the head of the House intelligence committee, wrote. “Donald Trump had his own enemies list, which included members of the media, elected officials and congressional staff.”
But Trump’s repeated strong-arming of his attorneys general were not complete successes, even with Barr.
Trump’s desperate drive to overturn Joe Biden’s win reached a fruitless climax when Barr publicly disagreed with Trump’s baseless claims that he lost the election due to massive fraud. Acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, who succeeded Barr last December, also resisted Trump’s strong arm tactics to open conspiracy driven inquiries into election results in states Biden won.
But the late resistance Trump met at the department was largely an exception, although Trump’s first attorney general Sessions incurred Trump’s wrath for recusing himself from the Russia investigations because of a conflict of interest.
Trump’s pressure tactics were palpable when Sessions resigned in late 2018. Barr succeeded him in early 2019.
Barr spun and distorted the some of the key findings of Mueller’s two-year inquiry into Russian meddling before it was officially released, to sway public opinion and undercut the report’s conclusion that Russia interfered in “sweeping and systematic” ways with an eye to helping Trump win in 2016.
Barr publicly tapped Connecticut US attorney John Durham to investigate the origins of the FBI’s 2016 inquiry into Russian meddling, a move several ex DoJ officials criticized as redundant and politically driven, since a similar inquiry was already under way by the DoJ’s own inspector general, but that prompted Trump to exclaim: “I think it’s great.”
Last year, Barr drew fire for sentencing decisions that were widely viewed as favoring two Trump associates: long-time Trump confidante and self styled “dirty trickster” Roger Stone, and ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn, both of whom had been convicted in the Russia investigations.
In the case of Flynn, who twice admitted lying to the FBI, Barr opted to drop all charges on the grounds that the lies were not material, and Barr sharply reduced a sentence that Stone was supposed to serve. Trump commuted Stone’s sentence before he served any time, and later pardoned both men.
“Barr may not have fully appreciated how far Trump was willing to go in turning the DoJ into a plaything for the White House, to protect the president’s friends and pursue his enemies,” said Bromwich. “But Barr proved a willing accomplice on issues ranging from distorting the Mueller report to taking insupportable positions in cases in which Trump took a personal interest.”
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a top Democrat on the chamber’s judiciary committee, said in a statement: “Barr played the role of Trump’s personal fixer, and degraded the Department of Justice – long a citadel of the law – to the role of Trump’s personal law firm. He stonewalled Congress at every turn.”
He added: “He trashed Department rules and norms when inconvenient to the president. And he ran political errands for Trump, even if it meant a hit to the Department’s credibility. He left behind a colossal mess that will take lots of time and hard work to clean up.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/21/trump-doj-bill-bar-attorney-general-justice-department
An inshore–offshore sorting system revealed from global classification of ocean litter
The surge of research on marine litter is generating important information on its inputs, distribution and impacts, but data on the nature and origin of the litter remain scattered. Here, we harmonize worldwide litter-type inventories across seven major aquatic environments and find that a set of plastic items from take-out food and beverages largely dominates global litter, followed by those resulting from fishing activities. Compositional differences between environments point to a trend for litter to be trapped in nearshore areas so that land-sourced plastic is released to the open ocean, predominantly as small plastic fragments. The world differences in the composition of the nearshore litter sink reflected socioeconomic drivers, with a reduced relative weight of single-use items in high-income countries. Overall, this study helps inform urgently needed actions to manage the production, use and fate of the most polluting human-made items on our planet, but the challenge remains substantial.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00720-8.pdf
Floating macrolitter leaked from Europe into the ocean
Daniel González-Fernández, Andrés Cózar, […]Myrto Tourgeli
Nature Sustainability volume 4, pages474–483 (2021)Cite this article
Abstract
Riverine systems act as converging pathways for discarded litter within drainage basins, becoming key elements in gauging the transfer of mismanaged waste into the ocean. However, riverine litter data are scarce and biased towards microplastics, generally lacking information about larger items. Based on the first ever database of riverine floating macrolitter across Europe, we have estimated that between 307 and 925 million litter items are released annually from Europe into the ocean. The plastic fraction represented 82% of the observed litter, mainly fragments and single-use items (that is, bottles, packaging and bags). Our modelled estimates show that a major portion of the total litter loading is routed through small-sized drainage basins (<100?km2), indicating the relevance of small rivers, streams and coastal run-off. Moreover, the major contribution of high-income countries to the macrolitter inputs suggests that reducing ocean pollution cannot be achieved only by improving waste management, but also requires changing consumption habits and behaviour to curb waste generation at source. The inability of countries with well-developed recovery systems to control the leakage of waste into the environment further supports the need to regulate the production and use of plastic on a global scale.
Article Published: 10 June 2021
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00722-6
Research on ocean plastic surging, U.N. report finds
By Tania RabesandratanaJun. 10, 2021 , 6:01 PM
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/06/research-ocean-plastic-surging-un-report-finds?utm_campaign=news_daily_2021-06-11&et_rid=17049008&et_cid=3806735
Plastic winds up everywhere—from the top of Mount Everest to remote corners of Antarctica. Every year, millions of tons of discarded plastic also wash into the ocean. Some of it floats in giant garbage patches, whereas other bits drop to the sea floor, even turning up in the hindguts of crustaceans in deep ocean trenches.
Research about ocean plastic is swelling, too, from just 46 papers in 2011 to 853 in 2019, according to a U.N. report published today on the state of global science. This year’s edition of the report, which UNESCO publishes every 5 years, found that the growth in ocean plastic research outstripped that of the other 55 development-related topics it tracked (see chart, below). “It has really skyrocketed in recent years,” says Erik Van Sebille, an oceanographer and climate scientist at Utrecht University who uses plastic particles as tracers to study the ocean’s dynamics.
Carmen Morales, an ecotoxicologist at the University of Cádiz’s Marine Litter Lab, says plastic is more conspicuous than contaminants such as metals or organic compounds, and it draws more attention from the public and policymakers. “It’s an eyesore to have all this plastic on beaches,” adds Bart Koelmans, an aquatic ecologist at Wageningen University. “For many people, that is enough to be concerned.” Scientists are delving into where the plastic comes from, where it goes, and how it affects the environment and human health.
But gaps remain in the research. Journals “still get many papers dealing with exactly the same topics: the presence of plastic on beaches, on the seabed, or in animals, but not [many] about sources or solutions,” says Ángel Borja, a marine ecologist at the AZTI research centre in Pasaia, Spain.
In a study published today, Morales pinned down sources by combining data from scattered studies into an inventory of 12 million litter items larger than 2 centimeters. Her team found that takeout food and drink packaging was the most pervasive: Single-use bags, bottles, containers, and wrappers accounted for 44% of all waste across environments.
Researchers are also trying to understand the ecological effects of plastic pollution. Plastic itself is inert, but often contains toxic additives such as flame retardants, pigments, or chemicals to make plastic more flexible and durable. “These additives are what we’re worried about,” Morales says. Other harmful substances, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, can enter ecosystems by sticking to drifting plastic.
Microplastic particles eroded from larger objects can end up the same size as plankton, so marine animals eat them without deriving any nutrition. Smaller, nanoplastic particles may be the most harmful: They can be tiny enough to penetrate tissues, where their shape may make a difference, Koelmans says: Fibrous particles seem to cause more inflammation than spherical ones. Yet the overall ecotoxicological effects of plastic are poorly understood; it’s difficult for labs to reproduce the cocktail of particles that organisms are exposed to in the environment.
To stem the buildup of debris, many countries have moved to phase out single-use plastics; as of 2018, 127 had passed legislation to regulate plastic bags, UNESCO says. But given low recycling rates, the report says, bans will not be enough: Biodegradable alternatives will be needed.
Sticking out
In the past decade, scientific output on plastic debris in the ocean has grown faster than any other research topic relevant to the United Nations’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Plastic debris in the ocean
5.14
Climate-ready crops
1.87
Greater battery efficiency
1.79
Eco alternatives to plastics
1.65
Water harvesting
1.55
Antibiotic resistance
1.47
Hydrogen energy
1.31
New or re-emerging viruses
1.2
Carbon capture and storage
1.06
HIV
1.02
1.16
Average growth, all areas
This chart shows 10 out of 56 topics related to the SDGsanalyzed in the 2021 UNESCO Science Report. A growthrate of 1.16 indicates a 16% increase in publications betweenthe periods 2012–15 and 2016–19.
C. BICKEL/SCIENC
Cristiano Ronaldo is selling his Trump Tower apartment at a huge $10 million loss, report says
Joshua Zitser 5 hours ago
https://www.insider.com/cristiano-ronaldo-selling-trump-tower-condo-at-huge-10m-loss-2021-6
* Cristiano Ronaldo is selling his Trump Tower apartment for $7.75 million.
* The soccer star bought the 2,500-square-foot pad for $18.5 million in 2015.
* Trump-branded Manhattan properties have lost more than 20 percent of their value since 2017.
Cristiano Ronaldo is preparing to sell his Trump Tower apartment at a major loss, according to The Sun.
The soccer star paid $18.5 million for the 2,500-square-foot pad in 2015, Insider previously reported.
Ronaldo then put the luxury property on the market in 2019 for $9 million after fans signed a petition urging him to distance himself from former President Donald Trump, Vanity Fair said.
However, due to the pandemic and a lack of offers, he has dropped the price further.
Ronaldo slashed the price by more than half of its purchase price, listing it at $7.75 million in May 2021, Vanity Fair reported.
Read more: I tried to buy a house in my home state of Montana, but out-of-towners have driven prices through the roof. Now I have a new plan.
As Insider previously reported, Ronaldo's property was designed by Juan Pablo Molyneux, who is well-known for his "maximalism" style.
It has three bedrooms and 360-degree views of New York's Central Park.
The soccer star's inability to sell the luxury apartment is less to do with its interior design and more to do with how radioactive the Trump brand has become since his tumultuous one-term president.
According to Curbed's January 2021 analysis of a report from real-estate data firm UrbanDigs, Trump-branded Manhattan properties have lost more than 20 percent of their value since Trump took office.
By comparison, the overall price per square foot decline in Manhattan over the same period was just 9 percent, Insider's Juliana Kaplan reported.
https://www.insider.com/cristiano-ronaldo-selling-trump-tower-condo-at-huge-10m-loss-2021-6
Sen. Ron Johnson, who stalled the passing of Juneteenth as a federal holiday, was booed at an event commemorating the day
Sarah Al-Arshani 12 hours ago
https://www.businessinsider.com/senator-ron-johnson-heckled-during-juneteenth-speech-in-wisconsin-2021-6?r=US&IR=T
* GOP Sen. Ron Johnson stalled the passing of making Juneteenth a holiday.
* He conceded his efforts on Tuesday and the effort unanimously passed in the Senate.
* On Saturday, June 19, he was booed at an event commemorating the holiday in Wisconsin.
Sen. Ron Johnson was booed at an event celebrating Juneteenth in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Saturday, WDJT reported.
A bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday unanimously passed in the Senate on Tuesday, but only made it through after Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin ended his efforts to block it.
Johnson said it would be too costly to give federal employees another day off, but conceded on Tuesday and said few of his colleagues wanted to debate the idea.
June 19th, or Juneteenth, is commemorated by many Black Americans as an independence day that celebrates the day that Union soldiers informed the last enslaved African Americans that the Emancipation Proclamation had established their freedom. It was signed by President Abraham Lincoln two years earlier.
WDJT reported that Johnson was also heckled by a crowd while speaking to reporters.
"We don't need you out here," one person can be heard saying about Johnson in a video of the event.
https://www.businessinsider.com/senator-ron-johnson-heckled-during-juneteenth-speech-in-wisconsin-2021-6?r=US&IR=T
Do not go gentle into that good night
Dylan Thomas - 1914-1953
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night
Exclusive: Matt Hancock kept Boris Johnson in dark over Covid vaccines success
Health Secretary sat on positive data for three days prior to meeting that ruled unlocking must be delayed
By Edward Malnick, SUNDAY POLITICAL EDITOR
19 June 2021 • 9:30pm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/06/19/exclusive-matt-hancock-kept-boris-johnson-dark-covid-vaccines/
Matt Hancock failed to tell Boris Johnson about a major Public Health England (PHE) study showing the effectiveness of vaccines against the Indian or delta variant during a key meeting to decide whether to extend Covid restrictions, The Telegraph can disclose.
The Telegraph understands that the Health Secretary had known about the PHE data three days before the "quad" of four senior ministers, led by the Prime Minister, met last Sunday to decide whether to postpone the planned June 21 reopening until July 19.
However, multiple sources familiar with the meeting said it was not raised by Mr Hancock or discussed at all during the course of the talks.
The data was also not included in briefing papers given to Mr Johnson, Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor and Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, in advance of the meeting.
The bombshell disclosure raises the possibility that the quad could have opted to press ahead with lifting the restrictions on Monday if they had been aware of the study, which showed that both the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines were more effective at preventing hospitalisation with the variant than they were against previous strains.
It comes after it emerged last week that Mr Johnson had called Mr Hancock "hopeless" over his handling of the pandemic last year.
On Saturday night, senior Tories asked whether the Health Secretary had "bounced" the Prime Minister into extending the current measures.
The disclosure will fuel calls for the measures to be lifted on July 5 – the halfway point before July 19 at which Mr Johnson said the Government could decide to lift them early.
One Cabinet minister insisted there must now be a "political decision" to allow businesses to operate fully again due to concerns about severe harm being done to the economy with relatively "little benefit".
On Saturday night Steve Baker, the deputy chairman of the Covid Recovery Group of Conservative MPs, said: "Either Matt Hancock thought this data was insignificant or he thought it should be withheld from the Prime Minister and other key ministers.
"Either way, the mind boggles at what conversation must now be necessary with the Prime Minister, and I feel confident it will be a matter of interest to my colleagues on the relevant select committees. If Matt Hancock was deliberately withholding relevant information, what was he trying to gain? Was the Prime Minister bounced?"
A Department of Health spokesman denied that Mr Hancock "bounced" the Prime Minister.
Senior ministers were said to be furious with how the decision-making process was handled. Sources close to members of the "quad" also said they were not provided with the usual explanations that accompany modelling by Sage scientists presented at the meeting, which showed that a June 21 reopening would lead to a large resurgence in hospital admissions.
A source close to the "quad" said: "They were presented with the [Sage] data without the assumptions that it was based on." Members of the quad were said to be "very annoyed". The claim was denied by other Government sources.
The Telegraph understands that Mr Hancock was briefed on the overall findings of the data on Thursday June 10, before PHE went on to send its written analysis to the Health Secretary on Saturday June 12.
On the Saturday, Mr Johnson hosted a brief virtual meeting of the quad from the G7 summit on Cornwall, ahead of the longer meeting following his return to Downing Street the next day.
However, the first notification that Number 10 received of the results was in an email to aides at around 3pm on Sunday June 13, shortly before the meeting that evening at which ministers decided to extend the restrictions.
Sources with the talks said an email sent so close to the meeting did not amount to a meaningful attempt to inform Mr Johnson of the data.
Mr Baker added: "To send an email so late in the day is an act of opposition. It's the sort of thing we do to Labour MPs before appearing in their constituencies to campaign. It's not what a Health Secretary should do to a Prime Minister."
A Government source insisted that "equivalent data" to the PHE study was shown to the quad. The "equivalent" data was said to have been drawn up by Sage's Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (Spi-M) and to have included similar figures to the PHE's findings on the efficacy of the vaccines.
The source said: "When the decision was made to delay, ministers knew that the vaccines work. That is why we are buying more time to get more jabs in arms."
But the PHE data, which was only made public on Monday evening after Mr Johnson announced the delay, was based on an analysis of 14,019 cases of the delta variant as recent as June 4, looking at emergency hospital admissions in England.
It was described by PHE as "hugely important findings" which "confirm that the vaccines offer significant protection against hospitalisation from the delta variant".
Real world data showed that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was 94 per cent effective against hospital admission from the variant after one dose, rising to 96 per cent after two jabs. The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was found to be 71 per cent effective against hospital admission after one dose, rising to 92 per cent after two jabs.
The data showed that both vaccines are more effective at preventing hospitalisation against the variant than they had been against previous types.
Meanwhile, separate analysis by The Telegraph shows that hospital admissions in regions with the highest outbreaks of the delta variant are rising at a third of the pace of last September, while a third of hospitals in England have no Covid patients at all.
Mr Hancock also told MPs this week that people who catch the virus are now spending 20 per cent less time in hospital beds, with the average stay being cut from 10 to eight days.
A Government source said: "The reason we need more time is because of the increased transmissibility of the delta variant, not because of vaccine escape."
A Department of Health spokesman said any suggestion that Mr Hancock "bounced" Mr Johnson was "categorically untrue". He added: "Information which was provided by PHE was shared across Government before the meeting. Analysis and work on the scientific paper continued over the weekend before it was published as soon as it was ready on Monday."
A source close to the "quad" said: "They were presented with the [Sage] data without the assumptions that it was based on." Members of the quad were said to be "very annoyed". The claim was denied by other Government sources.
The Telegraph understands that Mr Hancock was briefed on the overall findings of the data on Thursday June 10, before PHE went on to send its written analysis to the Health Secretary on Saturday June 12.
On the Saturday, Mr Johnson hosted a brief virtual meeting of the quad from the G7 summit on Cornwall, ahead of the longer meeting following his return to Downing Street the next day.
However, the first notification that Number 10 received of the results was in an email to aides at around 3pm on Sunday June 13, shortly before the meeting that evening at which ministers decided to extend the restrictions.
Sources with the talks said an email sent so close to the meeting did not amount to a meaningful attempt to inform Mr Johnson of the data.
Mr Baker added: "To send an email so late in the day is an act of opposition. It's the sort of thing we do to Labour MPs before appearing in their constituencies to campaign. It's not what a Health Secretary should do to a Prime Minister."
A Government source insisted that "equivalent data" to the PHE study was shown to the quad. The "equivalent" data was said to have been drawn up by Sage's Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (Spi-M) and to have included similar figures to the PHE's findings on the efficacy of the vaccines.
The source said: "When the decision was made to delay, ministers knew that the vaccines work. That is why we are buying more time to get more jabs in arms."
But the PHE data, which was only made public on Monday evening after Mr Johnson announced the delay, was based on an analysis of 14,019 cases of the delta variant as recent as June 4, looking at emergency hospital admissions in England.
It was described by PHE as "hugely important findings" which "confirm that the vaccines offer significant protection against hospitalisation from the delta variant".
Real world data showed that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was 94 per cent effective against hospital admission from the variant after one dose, rising to 96 per cent after two jabs. The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was found to be 71 per cent effective against hospital admission after one dose, rising to 92 per cent after two jabs.
The data showed that both vaccines are more effective at preventing hospitalisation against the variant than they had been against previous types.
Meanwhile, separate analysis by The Telegraph shows that hospital admissions in regions with the highest outbreaks of the delta variant are rising at a third of the pace of last September, while a third of hospitals in England have no Covid patients at all.
Mr Hancock also told MPs this week that people who catch the virus are now spending 20 per cent less time in hospital beds, with the average stay being cut from 10 to eight days.
A Government source said: "The reason we need more time is because of the increased transmissibility of the delta variant, not because of vaccine escape."
A Department of Health spokesman said any suggestion that Mr Hancock "bounced" Mr Johnson was "categorically untrue". He added: "Information which was provided by PHE was shared across Government before the meeting. Analysis and work on the scientific paper continued over the weekend before it was published as soon as it was ready on Monday."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/06/19/exclusive-matt-hancock-kept-boris-johnson-dark-covid-vaccines/
Though her name was not mentioned in either document, both Virginia organizations are led by Michele Roosevelt Edwards, according to state corporate filings reviewed by The Washington Post. Edwards is a former Republican congressional candidate who built a reputation as an advocate for the Somali people and as someone who could negotiate with warlords and pirates in the war-torn region.
Edwards was formerly known as Michele Ballarin but changed her name last year, court records show. In 2013, The Post’s magazine explored how Edwards, once a struggling single mom, had reinvented herself as a business executive and then as a well-connected horse-country socialite who cultivated ties with senior Somali officials.
Mark Mazzetti @MarkMazzettiNYT · 13h This story is completely bonkers, and I got it because I still have a Google news alert for “Michele Ballarin.” Why?
‘Italygate’ election conspiracy theory was pushed by two firms led by woman who also falsely claimed $30 million mansion was hers
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/italygate-michele-edwards-meadows-trump/2021/06/19/2f6314d2-d05f-11eb-8014-2f3926ca24d9_story.html
9:50 PM · Jun 19, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
Because I wrote about her and her past schemes in my book. Her backstory is *wild* Excerpt from book is here https://t.co/0lrHfSw6ZO
— Mark Mazzetti (@MarkMazzettiNYT) June 19, 2021
Late last December, as President Donald Trump pressed senior officials to find proof of election fraud, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows emailed acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen a letter detailing an outlandish theory of how an Italian defense contractor had conspired with U.S. intelligence to rig the 2020 presidential contest.
The letter, which was among records released by Congress this past week, was printed under the letterhead of USAerospace Partners, a little-known Virginia aviation company. In early January, a second Virginia firm, the Institute for Good Governance, and a partner organization released a statement from an Italian attorney who claimed that a hacker had admitted involvement in the supposed conspiracy.
southpaw @nycsouthpaw When he sat down to write it, Jeffrey Rosen knew we would one day be reading this email.
2:29 PM · Jun 15, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
“Illustrious Mr. President: ...” pic.twitter.com/NFL20zuT0R
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) June 15, 2021
‘Italygate’ election conspiracy theory was pushed by two firms led by woman who also falsely claimed $30 million mansion was hers
By Jon Swaine and Emma Brown
June 19, 2021 at 8:47 p.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/italygate-michele-edwards-meadows-trump/2021/06/19/2f6314d2-d05f-11eb-8014-2f3926ca24d9_story.html
Late last December, as President Donald Trump pressed senior officials to find proof of election fraud, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows emailed acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen a letter detailing an outlandish theory of how an Italian defense contractor had conspired with U.S. intelligence to rig the 2020 presidential contest.
The letter, which was among records released by Congress this past week, was printed under the letterhead of USAerospace Partners, a little-known Virginia aviation company. In early January, a second Virginia firm, the Institute for Good Governance, and a partner organization released a statement from an Italian attorney who claimed that a hacker had admitted involvement in the supposed conspiracy.
According to the conspiracy theory known as “Italygate,” people working for the Italian defense contractor, in coordination with senior CIA officials, used military satellites to switch votes from Trump to Joe Biden and swing the result of the election.
Though her name was not mentioned in either document, both Virginia organizations are led by Michele Roosevelt Edwards, according to state corporate filings reviewed by The Washington Post. Edwards is a former Republican congressional candidate who built a reputation as an advocate for the Somali people and as someone who could negotiate with warlords and pirates in the war-torn region.
Edwards was formerly known as Michele Ballarin but changed her name last year, court records show. In 2013, The Post’s magazine explored how Edwards, once a struggling single mom, had reinvented herself as a business executive and then as a well-connected horse-country socialite who cultivated ties with senior Somali officials.
The Institute for Good Governance’s registered headquarters since late last year has been the historical North Wales Farm, a 22-bedroom mansion in Warrenton, Va., state records show. The property is listed for sale at just under $30 million.
On the day after the 2020 election, Edwards sat for an interview at North Wales with a television crew from Iceland, where she has business interests. Edwards told the crew that the estate was her property, according to their footage. “This is my bedroom,” she said, showing the crew around. “This is very private space.”
She was pressed on the lack of personal items in the house.
“So this is where you live?” she was asked.
“Yes.”
“This is your property?”
“Yes.”
When the interviewer noted that website listings showed the property for sale, Edwards said it was a “recent acquisition for us.” She said it was not for sale.
But North Wales was then — and is now — owned by a company formed by David B. Ford, a retired financier who died in September. Ford’s widow said in an interview that she did not know Edwards. The Post showed her the footage of Edwards inside the property.
“She’s in my house,” the widow said. “How is she in my house?”
The North Wales mansion was for sale at the time, and Edwards was a licensed Realtor in the area, according to the firm’s website. Hers was not the firm Ford’s widow had hired to sell the property.
Edwards declined to comment. “I am not giving media interviews at this time,” she said in a text message.
The discovery of the role Edwards’s two firms had in spreading the Italygate conspiracy theory, as well as the roles others played, sheds new light on its origins and on how the claims made their way from feverish online speculation to some of the most powerful figures in the government. As Trump refused to concede defeat, his die-hard supporters pushed the conspiracy theory on social media and other channels as part of an effort to discredit Biden’s presidency that continues today.
Prosecutors in Rome told The Post that they are now investigating whether false claims were made against the Italian defense contractor. The prosecutor’s office said it was examining “various subjects, both Italian and non-Italian.” A conservative Italian news site owned by a politician who has written about Italygate reported this month that the politician and Edwards are among those under investigation.
Italygate appears to be partly rooted in a news article published on Dec. 1 by the Italian newspaper La Verità. In the article, Daniele Capezzone, a reporter and TV commentator described as “the Sean Hannity of the Italian press” by some Italygate proponents, wrote that Trump’s team was investigating whether an official in the U.S. Embassy in Rome conspired with an unnamed Italian defense contractor to manipulate the U.S. election.
Bradley Johnson, a Virginia-based commentator on intelligence matters who says he is a retired senior CIA officer, then advanced a version of the theory in a video interview recorded on Dec. 5 and later posted online. Johnson identified the defense contractor involved as Leonardo, an Italian firm that was coincidentally in the news that day because two men had been arrested in an unrelated hacking case involving the company.
Leonardo did not respond to questions from The Post.
Johnson cited Capezzone as his source. But Capezzone told The Post in an email that he did not identify Leonardo as the contractor in his reporting, and said that Johnson had not contacted him.
Johnson did not respond to phone calls, messages sent via LinkedIn and the website of his nonprofit, Americans for Intelligence Reform, or to a letter left at the nonprofit’s office in Manassas, Va.
In the wake of Johnson’s video, Italygate began to gather momentum. Maria Strollo Zack, a Republican operative from Georgia who has embraced the conspiracy theory, told The Post that she has been in contact with Johnson about it.
Zack, 57, has said in interviews with right-wing media outlets that she told Trump about the conspiracy theory on Christmas Eve at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private club in Palm Beach, Fla.
Zack, who formed a super PAC that backed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) in the 2016 presidential campaign, said on a conference call with supporters that Trump’s second wife, Marla Maples, and their daughter, Tiffany, helped Zack and her husband obtain invitations to the club. A woman who identified herself as Maples was on the call.
Representatives for Maples and Tiffany Trump did not respond to questions. Zack told The Post that she had a “personal friendship” with them.
In Zack’s telling, Trump wished her a Merry Christmas, and she used that opening to pass him a written note about Italy and the promise of a whistleblower who knew of the scheme to flip votes. “We know the guy who did it and how he did it,” she said she told Trump, according to an interview on a talk show broadcast by the Reno, Nev.-based outlet America Matters Media.
On Christmas Eve, Zack’s husband posted a photograph of Trump to Facebook that he indicated was taken at Mar-a-Lago, but The Post was unable to confirm Zack’s version of events there. Zack claimed in a second media interview that Rudolph W. Giuliani, then Trump’s personal attorney, called her the following morning to set up a meeting to discuss her claims.
A spokeswoman for Trump did not respond to a request for comment. Messages left for Giuliani’s attorneys seeking comment were not returned.
On Dec. 29, Meadows sent Rosen the letter from Edwards’s company, USAerospace Partners. The letter was written in Italian and signed by Carlo Goria, who was identified in past news releases as a company contact. USAerospace said last year that it was interested in buying the troubled Italian airline Alitalia, and suggested it would “make Alitalia great again.”
Goria did not respond to messages. In a story published Saturday, Talking Points Memo reported that, in a brief interview, Edwards denied any knowledge of the letter.
Several current and former Trump advisers said they were shocked that Meadows would pass along such a fantastical conspiracy theory, but one former senior administration official said Meadows “bought into some of the more bizarre claims and would push them to the president as well.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
It was not clear from the emails released by Congress how Meadows obtained the USAerospace letter. A spokesman for Meadows declined to comment.
On New Year’s Day, Meadows sent Rosen a link to a video of Johnson, who has said he served as a CIA station chief, discussing Italygate. On Jan. 4, Zack held the conference call with supporters, the audio of which was posted online. Zack told The Post that the call was with volunteers for her Florida-based nonprofit, Nations in Action.
On the call, Zack claimed that she had also supplied documents to senior White House adviser Peter Navarro. In an email to The Post, Navarro said this was “not accurate.”
On Jan. 6, Zack’s nonprofit released a statement claiming that it had conducted an election-fraud investigation with the Institute for Good Governance — Edwards’s Virginia-based group — and that their efforts had “yielded the long awaited proof that a flawless plot to take down America was executed with extraordinary resources and global involvement.”
Edwards, 65, has charted a colorful path in and around Washington. She has founded several businesses in fields including security, investment management and aviation.
After she married Edward Golden, a real estate executive, and had a son, Edwards ran for Congress as a Republican in West Virginia in 1986 but lost in the general election.
After that marriage ended, she married Iginio Ballarin, a New York restaurant maitre d’, with whom she owns a farmhouse in Markham, Va. Edwards is registered to vote as a Republican at a condominium in Palm Beach, Fla., state records show.
Because of her efforts to bring stability to Somalia, beginning nearly two decades ago, Somalis came to refer to her as Amira, which means “princess” in Arabic, The Post’s magazine story reported. In 2009, the Somali president named her “presidential advisor for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.” She claimed to have played pivotal roles in securing the release of hostages.
Yet a diplomatic cable released as part of a trove posted online by WikiLeaks revealed that, in 2009, Ukraine’s foreign minister had complained to U.S. officials that Edwards was hindering efforts to negotiate with Somali pirates who had captured a ship and its crew. One retired naval intelligence officer who partnered with Edwards during the 2008 to 2010 period was quoted in The Post story as saying: “The problem with Michele is separating fact from fiction. What is real, and what is made up?”
In September 2019, Edwards announced that her USAerospace group had bought the assets of Iceland’s bankrupt airline Wow Air and said it would soon resume flights. It has not.
Asked by The Post how she came to work with Edwards, Zack said in an email: “This is an ongoing investigation and we do not disclose information on our methods and sources.”
Their joint news release linked to a copy of a sworn statement signed by a Sicily-based lawyer, Alfio D’Urso. In that document, D’Urso said he knew from a “high level army security services official” that one of the alleged hackers in the unrelated case had told a judge that he had undertaken an operation to flip votes from Trump to Biden — and that he had done so at the direction of Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Rome.
Nicola Naponiello, an attorney for the alleged hacker, told The Post that this was false and that neither he nor his client had ever heard of D’Urso. “He’s not accused of anything connected to that,” Naponiello said of his client. Naponiello, who previously spoke to Reuters, said the whole story was a “classic fake” into which his client had inexplicably been dragged.
D’Urso did not respond to emails and messages left with his office.
The news release from the Zack and Edwards groups also linked to a PDF copy of a story about Italygate from an Italian news site. Edwards’s name appears in the PDF’s metadata as the creator.
Chatter about the conspiracy theory exploded among Trump’s base. Among other influential figures, the former Trump advisers Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos — both of whom Trump pardoned for lying to the FBI during the inquiry into Russia’s 2016 election interference — posted about the conspiracy theory on Twitter. “Italy did it,” Flynn wrote.
In appearances on right-wing online media, Zack has said she tried to raise the alarm by reaching out to members of Congress and others in Washington, including Christopher C. Miller, then the acting defense secretary. Miller was “very involved,” Zack claimed in an interview with America Matters Media in April. “There were a lot of people working hard to help us,” she said.
Miller was aware of the claims but did not believe them and considered them “fabricated,” according to a former Defense Department official familiar with the situation. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
Zack said she is still pushing for law enforcement to investigate the allegations. “It is the duty of the Department of Justice to ensure the US election was free of foreign interference and election fraud,” she said in an email.
Others, however, are unconvinced.
“Pure insanity,” Justice Department official Richard Donoghue wrote to his boss, Rosen, after Meadows sent his emails containing the claims, the records released by Congress show.
Even Capezzone, the Italian journalist whose Dec. 1 article set off speculation about the conspiracy theory, said he has since concluded that it was false. In an email to The Post, Capezzone said Italygate was “fake news, a conspiracy theory, [a] poisoned chalice.”
Chico Harlan and Stefano Pitrelli in Rome and Alice Crites, Julie Tate, Josh Dawsey and Ellen Nakashima in Washington contributed to this report.
2933 Comments
By Jon Swaine
Jon Swaine joined The Washington Post's investigative team in 2019. He previously worked for the Guardian from 2014 to 2019 and the Daily Telegraph from 2007 to 2014. Twitter
By Emma Brown
Emma Brown is a reporter on the investigative team who joined The Washington Post in 2009. Previously, she wrote obituaries and covered local and national education. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/italygate-michele-edwards-meadows-trump/2021/06/19/2f6314d2-d05f-11eb-8014-2f3926ca24d9_story.html
The Spectacular Failure of the MyPillow Guy’s Mask Operation
Roger Sollenberger
Sat, June 19, 2021, 5:32 AM·10 min read
https://news.yahoo.com/spectacular-failure-mypillow-guy-mask-043244823.html
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s charity and business combo venture to make and sell COVID-19 masks has cost him millions of dollars, according to the increasingly far-right conservative figure.
Today his company is sitting on millions of unsold face coverings, which he now despises and wants to burn.
“I can’t give them away,” Lindell told The Daily Beast in a phone interview this week. “I tried to. No one wants the things anymore.”
Lindell, who claims to have retrofitted about 75 percent of MyPillow’s manufacturing line to sew cloth masks, said the machinery and space he’d invested in now sits idle and empty. The CEO estimates he was able to offload about 5 percent of his mask inventory, and that all told, the operation cost his company and him personally a combined $7 million.
“How many of those do we have, that we ought to just burn?” Lindell asked an aide during the interview. The assistant confirmed the number was about two million.
Lindell chalks up his losses to various parties, including “many bad people in the mask industry,” Google, the media, and politically motivated boycotts. But the biggest hit came when foreign competitors undercut prices and flooded the market.
“All of a sudden, there was masks everywhere, almost as if the industry knew it was coming and waited for prices to go up,” the businessman said. “Now I probably got $7 million out of my pocket that we’re just stuck with.”
A born-again Christian and fevered MAGA apostle, Lindell frames the failed venture as a charitable giving effort and point of pride. And to an extent, it is. But he offered contradictory narratives, blurring altruism with capitalism, failure with success.
Ultimately, the operation appears to have been a failed charity effort that Lindell then turned into a failed business venture, which he then turned back into a charity.
Throughout the interview, Lindell predicted this article would unfairly spin his mask enterprise as a “failure.” But he invariably fell back to bitter lamentations and gripes about all the things that went wrong. And even though he has since converted into a virulent anti-masker, Lindell was conspicuously unconcerned about the idea that he was misled into embarking on a charitable venture which would have caused more harm than good. Instead, he laid the blame on a multitude of commercial and regulatory hang-ups that plagued the endeavor. He even defended his products as totems of comfort that carried Americans through a dark time. “I don’t mind, because it helped so many people back then,” he said.
Lindell first announced the project last March, during a televised Rose Garden press event alongside President Donald Trump and a number of corporate executives. Trump had at the time called on American companies to boost the government’s anemic capacity to manufacture and distribute protective gear for desperate hospitals and frontline workers. When the president gave the podium to the pillow tycoon, Lindell delivered a short, bizarre speech during which he said Trump had been “chosen by God” for the moment.
According to Lindell, MyPillow had intended only to donate its masks to frontline workers. In the opening stages, he said, the company produced about 50,000 masks a week, cutting its cotton sheet fabric into face coverings and stitching in sourced elastic. But the plan soon hit roadblocks. For one, the cloth masks didn’t meet Food and Drug Administration standards.
“We were only gonna donate to VA hospitals, nursing homes, but the FDA and [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] made it that you could only use certain masks from certain factories,” Lindell said, referring to regulations that set the bar at N95-grade masks or higher.
And soon, the market for FDA-approved masks grew saturated. Foreign competitors flooded the country with cheaper products and choked out domestic manufacturers. Middlemen swept in to gouge companies and consumers alike. Two major fabric companies who initially pledged to pitch in to the greater cause—Hanes and Fruit of the Loom—dropped their commitments.
But MyPillow persevered. Lindell began outsourcing N95 and KN95 masks himself, purchasing them from other distributors with his personal funds and then donating them or selling them at cost. Beneficiaries included municipalities, police departments, nursing homes, overseas ministries, the state of Minnesota, and the Arizona Navajo Nation.
“I flew down to visit the Navajo Indians in Arizona and met with the vice president of the Navajo Nation,” Lindell said. “There were about 268,000 people in the tribe, and they really needed help, you know, and I donated a million masks to them alone.”
Costs for the sourced masks ran between $1.50 and $2.50 apiece, Lindell said, and ultimately, set him back roughly $4 million.
“I don’t know where we got them,” Lindell said of his sourcing. “We got them from distributor people, so I would buy them and I would give them out. We did a lot of coordination type stuff for people—‘you can take your mask and go over here.’ I have some of the surgical masks left.”
Still, MyPillow had a bumper crop of cloth masks, and a newly-purchased building full of “hundreds” of newly purchased sewing machines. Though the company had initially planned to donate its masks, Lindell saw an opportunity. He began selling them to the public and promoting the items online and in media appearances. And while Lindell vowed he was not gunning for a profit and only sold masks at or below the $1.50 cost of production, that’s only the most recent discounted rate. The MyPillow website once priced them as much as three times that rate, and in a June 2020 radio interview, Lindell marked them up four dollars a pop.
Sensing a budding demand, Lindell ramped up production. “I couldn’t make enough of them,” he said. He tapped a MyPillow partner in Haiti (Lindell claims on his personal website that MyPillow products are “100% American Made”) and outsourced sewing work to domestic companies and, he says, churches.
Amanda Gray, vice president of sales at Georgia Expo—a company that makes tradeshow and event equipment—told The Daily Beast they had reached out to Lindell.
“Our owner is a big fan of Fox News, and he saw the news that Mike was going to sell masks,” Gray said. “Our model had to change quickly with the pandemic, and we’ve got a full sewing department. I went down a rabbit hole and called over and over again. Guess it was right place, right time, and they said ‘Yes, we do need help.’”
But the partnership ended up costing Lindell hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“As soon as imports hit the market, we were done,” Gray said, echoing Lindell on that issue. “We were selling for a dollar at one point and couldn’t compete. At some point they said demand was falling off, and we had already staffed up and ordered equipment. So he paid for the full order anyway.”
Lindell, who said shady middlemen had sandbagged him to the tune of millions, paid Georgia Expo $800,000 to make good on the contract. The money, Gray said, helped carry the company over as it scrambled to adapt to the novel needs of pandemic life.
By the fall, Lindell said, he had given up. In October, he contacted the office of Democratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz—who at the time Lindell was threatening to challenge in 2022—to see if the state wanted his masks. But according to Lindell, the office said the donation would have to wait until after the election, citing the CEO’s close affiliation with Trump.
“I told him I was going to go to the press, so he did finally take them,” Lindell said.
Walz’s office pushed back on that claim in a statement: “We worked with Mr. Lindell, just as we worked with companies, nonprofits, and individuals across the state who generously offered to help,” adding, “The state did not take politics into consideration when accepting donations.”
Lindell may be able to use these donations as tax write-offs. But it’s unclear exactly who would get those benefits, because the lines between his business and charity activities are difficult to decipher.
Although Lindell said he personally outsourced KN95-style masks to donate, MyPillow also sold similar masks alongside its own line of cloth coverings, making it difficult to say whether his personal efforts overlapped with his company—and if so, to what degree.
Some of what Lindell calls the “un-given-away” face coverings in his warehouse are surgical masks, some are disposable, and some are cloth. And while Lindell told The Daily Beast he didn’t deal with foreign entities for his outsourcing, an order form url on his site indicates the disposable masks were imported. They’re still featured on the MyPillow site, though the order form has been deleted.
Lindell says he stopped selling his masks after coming to the conclusion that they don’t work.
“After all that and then we find out masks never worked in the first place,” said Lindell, who at one point tried to donate oleander, a toxic plant he has pitched as a COVID miracle cure. “They’ve proven they didn’t help one iota. I got calls into other countries but don’t know if I even want to give them now, because they don’t work.”
Science, of course, does not support those claims. But they could have something to do with MyPillow’s anemic sales, which the company draws almost exclusively from a conservative market.
By the summer, mask sales had proved a boon for struggling small businesses and retailers alike, and the market was swelling. Burberry introduced a line of designer antimicrobial cloth face coverings in August, the month Lindell paid Georgia Expo $800,000 for masks he no longer wanted.
A Pew Research study from late June 2020 found that Democrats were more than twice as likely to wear masks as Republicans. And anti-mask theories were pushed by mainstream conservative voices throughout the summer, including by Lindell allies on Fox News, when his operation was struggling.
Lindell currently faces two billion-dollar defamation lawsuits for promoting reckless and false allegations of election fraud. His interview with The Daily Beast was riddled with complaints about the recent damage his business has sustained from politically motivated boycotts.
But he isn’t exactly out of money. He may be able to write losses off as business costs, according to Phil Hackney, a tax law expert at the University of Pittsburgh who served in the Chief Counsel’s Office at the Internal Revenue Service. Asked whether Lindell may have crossed any legal lines between charity and business, Hackney said it was unlikely.
“Sounds to me like it’s just a bad business decision,” he said, noting that Lindell may also be able to deduct some donations, such as to religious groups, the state of Minnesota, and to Navajo Nation.
As for his Lindell’s original pillow business, he says he’s only been able to shift a fraction of his mask operations back to normal business use.
“That building sits about the same way it was when I converted it last May. That’s all the same now,” he said. “I don’t know how to convert it back—you can’t just cut wires and stuff. Will we need it again? Probably not. We’ll probably eventually have to sell the sewing machines. We bought hundreds.”
As for the millions of masks sitting in that warehouse, they’re free for the taking.
“We gave away five million masks to the public, free across this country, and it cost about $4.8 million to make them,” he said. “Anyone can have them now. I don’t care.”
Read more at The Daily Beast.
https://news.yahoo.com/spectacular-failure-mypillow-guy-mask-043244823.html
Ukraine sanctions tycoon Firtash for business links to Russian defense firms
Reuters Pavel Polityuk
Publishing date:Jun 18, 2021 • 18 hours ago • 2 minute read •
https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/ukraine-sanctions-tycoon-firtash-for-business-links-to-russian-defense-firms
KYIV — Ukraine imposed sanctions on tycoon Dmytro Firtash on Friday for selling titanium products that allegedly end up being used by Russian military enterprises.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s security and defense council said the exact nature of the sanctions would be announced separately in a presidential decree.
A spokesman for Firtash was not immediately available for comment.
Firtash rose to become a wealthy and influential businessman in Ukraine but has been indicted in the United States on bribery and racketeering charges. He denies wrongdoing and has fought extradition from Vienna.
Relations between Ukraine and Russia collapsed after Russia’s annexation of the Crimea peninsula in 2014 and support for separatist forces in the eastern Donbass region in a conflict that Kyiv says has killed 14,000 people.
Firtash was being sanctioned for “his involvement in the titanium business,” the security council secretary Oleksiy Danilov told a briefing.
“There is a supply of raw materials and then … it goes to the military enterprises of the Russian Federation and we cannot allow this to continue,” he said, without providing specifics.
Zelenskiy has promised action to reduce the influence of oligarchs on Ukraine.
In February he imposed sanctions on Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian businessman and politician with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, a move that the Kremlin called “alarming.”
The production of titanium products is a core business in Firtash’s Group DF and it includes titanium mining and enrichment, the production of titanium dioxide, titanium slag, sponge ingots and slabs.
Austria’s Supreme Court ruled in June 2019 that Firtash could be extradited to the United States but he remains in the country as his lawyers have filed a request for a retrial that has not yet been ruled on.
A final decision to extradite Firtash can only be taken by the justice minister once the case has run its course.
Firtash is a former supporter of Ukraine’s ousted pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovich and made a fortune selling Russian gas to the Kyiv government.
Firtash has also been represented by Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, who are associates of Rudy Giuliani.
The council also announced sanctions against businessman Pavel Fuks, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Fuks told the Ukraine 24 channel that the sanctions against him were groundless and he would take legal action.
(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk in Kyiv; additional reporting by Ilya Zhegulev in Kyiv and Francois Murphy in Vienna; writing by Matthias Williams; Editing by Catherine Evans, Raissa Kasolowsky and Philippa Fletcher)
https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/ukraine-sanctions-tycoon-firtash-for-business-links-to-russian-defense-firms
Anna Massoglia @annalecta Wow. Ukraine is imposing sanctions on:
Dmytro Firtash—a Ukrainian oligarch with alleged Russian mob ties who helped Rudy Giuliani push Biden conspiracies
Pavel Fuks—who helped Giuliani get Ukrainian work in 2017 & was behind a failed Trump Moscow deal http://crp.org/giufr
Mike Eckel @Mike_Eckel · 19h Ukraine's national security council is imposing sanctions (assets seizure?) on Dmytro Firtash, the oligarch who's still fighting extradition to the US on bribery charges. Also sanctioned is developer Pavel Fuks. Both have worked closely w/ Rudy Giuliani. https://rnbo.gov.ua/ua/Diialnist/4915.html
5:50 PM · Jun 18, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
Wow. Ukraine is imposing sanctions on:
— Anna Massoglia (@annalecta) June 18, 2021
➟Dmytro Firtash—a Ukrainian oligarch with alleged Russian mob ties who helped Rudy Giuliani push Biden conspiracies
➟Pavel Fuks—who helped Giuliani get Ukrainian work in 2017 & was behind a failed Trump Moscow deal https://t.co/2e8WMf9jpY https://t.co/rCBPthdL8f
Judge Orders Employees at Devin Nunes Family’s Dairy Farm to Produce Citizenship Documents Following Attorney’s ‘Puzzling and Troubling’ Explanation About Deposition ‘Behavior’
JERRY LAMBE Jun 18th, 2021, 2:35 pm
https://lawandcrime.com/awkward/judge-orders-employees-at-devin-nunes-familys-dairy-farm-to-produce-citizenship-documents-following-attorneys-puzzling-and-troubling-explanation-about-deposition-behavior/
A federal magistrate judge in Iowa on Thursday ordered the employees at a dairy farm owned by the father and brother of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Cal.) to produce documentation concerning their immigration status in the family’s protracted defamation lawsuit filed against Esquire magazine and journalist Ryan Lizza. The court also singled out attorney Steven Biss—known for representing the Republican lawmaker in a series of failed defamation suits against news organizations—for his “puzzling and troubling” explanation about a deposition of a dairy farm employee.
The lawsuit centers on the 2018 article entitled “Devin Nunes’s Family Farm Is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret,” which alleged that the Nunes family’s dairy farm—NuStar Farms, LLC—knowingly employed undocumented workers.
The eight-page order from U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark Roberts of the Northern District of Iowa came in response to a motion filed by attorneys representing Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. (Hearst owns and publishes Esquire) concerning their first attempt to depose one of the dairy farm employees, who is referred to as F.S.D. in court documents.
Esquire’s filing complained that during the deposition of F.S.D., Biss “asserted argumentative objections that were disruptive and intended to intimidate or coach the witness” when counsel tried to question F.S.D. about legal documents that bore his signature. Biss denied the accusation, saying he only “intended to call out the Defendants’ overt harassment of the NuStar employee.” But Judge Roberts called Biss’s explanation “puzzling and troubling.”
“Mr. Biss made a lengthy speaking objection claiming this was harassment,” Roberts wrote. “Here, where the identity and immigration status of the employees is a central issue, it is not harassing or irrelevant to ask questions about such documents. In the context of this case, it is not conducive to obtaining truthful answers from an employee such as F.S.D. to have his employer’s lawyer making lengthy, animated objections to those questions.”
Judge Roberts further stated that “the most puzzling and troubling aspect” of Biss’s “behavior” concerned his decision to seek a sidebar with F.S.D.’s attorney to determine “whether the witness wanted to take the Fifth Amendment.”
The sidebar, which the judge noted lasted approximately two hours, occurred immediately after F.S.D.’s attorney Justin Allen said that he’d advised F.S.D. to invoke the Fifth Amendment regarding questions about the legal documents that bore his signature. When the attorneys returned to the deposition room, F.S.D.’s attorney informed Esquire’s counsel that he was no longer representing F.S.D. and Biss said the deposition was over pending rescheduling.
“Normally, one would expect the lawyer for a deponent to be in the best position to ascertain whether the deponent desires to assert a privilege,” Judge Roberts wrote. “Mr. Biss makes bald assurances that the employees want to answer all questions and not assert their Fifth Amendment rights. Nevertheless, Mr. Biss’s behavior—coupled with the facts that (a) the privilege was raised, (b) the privilege was perhaps withdrawn after a lengthy sidebar, and (c) Mr. Allen was fired—gives me little confidence that F.S.D. could make a knowing waiver of his Fifth Amendment rights under these circumstances.”
Roberts ordered Biss and all the NuStar attorneys to read a court case to provide “instruction on appropriate behavior” regarding attorneys pressuring witnesses not to assert their rights, though the judge was clear that he made no finding on whether such pressure did occur.
Additionally, Roberts ordered Biss and all other NuStar attorneys to “inform the [NuStar] employees of their obligation to search for the requested [citizenship] documents and bring the documents to the deposition, if they still possess them,” adding that the employees “may be asked about their efforts to comply at the deposition.”
Read the order below.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/20964539/nunes-farm-ruling.pdf
https://lawandcrime.com/awkward/judge-orders-employees-at-devin-nunes-familys-dairy-farm-to-produce-citizenship-documents-following-attorneys-puzzling-and-troubling-explanation-about-deposition-behavior/
Donald Trump can’t pay his bills
Bill Palmer | 9:09 am EDT June 18, 2021
Palmer Report » Analysis
https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/donald-trump-cant-pay-his-bills/39614/
Since it became clear that he was no longer going to be President, and in particular since he incited a deadly insurrection, Donald Trump has taken one financial blow after another. Some of his few remaining banks have dropped him. He’s tried and failed to sell off properties. It’s clear he’s in a financial downward spiral. But just how broke is he?
It looks like Trump is now in a place where he can’t even pay off a mere half a million dollar debt. Sure, that’s a lot of money to most people. But for a self proclaimed billionaire, that should be no problem right? Yet now that Trump is hitting the road to try to reignite some kind of political relevance for himself, he’s in trouble with a Texas judge because he still owes $560,000 to the city of El Paso for a rally he held there awhile back.
Trump has never been one to pay his bills, even back in the old days when he was in a better cashflow situation. But at this point the city of El Paso is bringing legal action against him, and a judge is cracking down on him, so now would be the time to pay off this one debt in order to make it go away. Yet Trump can’t seem to afford to do that, can he? Just how short on cash is he?
https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/donald-trump-cant-pay-his-bills/39614/
Trump Should Pay $560K For Border Visit Debt: Texas Judge
BY JON JACKSON ON 6/17/21 AT 10:36 AM EDT
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-should-pay-560k-border-visit-debt-texas-judge-1601574
When former President Donald Trump visits the U.S.-Mexico border later this month, he should bring along $560,000 to pay off an outstanding debt, according to El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego.
Samaniego said Trump owes the city of El Paso that amount for his last trip there during his re-election campaign—a debt the judge claims the ex-president has yet to settle.
Trump said on Tuesday that he will travel to the border at the invitation of Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Trump has endorsed the fellow Republican for re-election in 2022, and he recently joined Abbott in criticizing President Joe Biden for his handling of the influx of migrants crossing over into the country from the southern border.
"The Biden administration inherited from me the strongest, safest, and most secure border in U.S. history, and in mere weeks they turned it into the single worst border crisis in U.S. history," Trump said in a statement released on Tuesday. "It's an unmitigated disaster zone."
As Abbott assists the former leader in finding a location along the border to visit, Samaniego told local NBC affiliate KTSM-TV he thinks the governor should also help the city of El Paso "collect the $560,000 that Trump owes from when he was here on his campaign."
"That would be really nice if that's one of the things that we get," Samaniego said, noting "we have been trying to reach out to get the $560,000 from when he had his campaign here."
Trump visited the city on February 11, 2019, during a campaign stop. The rally came less than a week after his State of the Union address, during which he claimed El Paso was one of the country's most dangerous cities until the Secure Fence Act of 2006 was passed and several miles of barriers were constructed in the border city.
However, FBI statistics showed crime had consistently fallen every year there before the act passed, and the city was generally regarded as one of the safest communities along the border.
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-should-pay-560k-border-visit-debt-texas-judge-1601574
Fact Checker Analysis - Republican governors’ misleading spin on new voting restrictions
By Salvador Rizzo
Reporter
June 17, 2021 at 8:00 a.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/17/republican-governors-misleading-spin-new-voting-restrictions/
VIDEO
Several prominent Republican governors have continued to spread 2020 election falsehoods, echoing former president Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated fraud claims. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)
Courts across the country rejected President Donald Trump’s claims of massive election fraud in 2020, but his falsehoods have taken on a life of their own, as new voting restrictions pile up in Republican-controlled states.
At least 14 states have enacted laws this year that tighten the rules around casting ballots. Hundreds of bills pending in statehouses would institute new voting restrictions, as this Washington Post tracker shows, and many of the Republican lawmakers sponsoring those proposals are echoing Trump’s false claims that loose election laws allowed the 2020 White House race to be tainted by fraud.
The Fact Checker dug into statements from three of the Republican governors who have signed voting restrictions into law this year: Ron DeSantis of Florida, Brian Kemp of Georgia and Doug Ducey of Arizona.
As the video above shows, all three governors obfuscated to varying degrees, either by mischaracterizing the contents of the new law they signed, or by repeating one of Trump’s faulty arguments for needing the law.
Florida
“We’re making sure we’re enforcing voter ID. ... We’re also prohibiting mass-mailing of ballots. … In Florida, we track the votes coming in in real time — not the results — but we know who’s voting, what your registration is. And we follow the turnout, so that when the election’s over, we know the universe of votes that have been cast, and it makes [it] so that someone can’t dump 100,000 votes two or three days later.”
— Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), in remarks about Senate Bill 90 on Fox News, May 6, 2021
A law signed by DeSantis on May 6 requires Floridians to renew their mail voting application every two years, limits access to ballot drop boxes and limits the practice of third-party groups collecting ballots for others, among other provisions.
DeSantis claimed without evidence that thousands of votes had been “dumped” two or three days after an election (echoing a false claim Trump often makes about the 2020 race) but that the new Florida law would solve this fictitious problem.
Representatives for DeSantis did not say what election he was referring to, or what he meant to reference when he mentioned a 100,000-vote dump.
Perhaps he was echoing Trump, who claimed that 100,000 votes were mysteriously “dumped” in an Atlanta precinct during the November election, tilting that race in favor of Joe Biden. “This act coincided with a mysterious vote dump of up to 100,000 votes for Joe Biden, almost none for Trump,” Trump said at a rally outside the White House on Jan. 6, shortly before a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol.
Perhaps DeSantis was echoing Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who previously earned Four Pinocchios for claiming without evidence that Florida election officials “completely violated the law” in his 2018 race. “They found 95,000 votes after election night,” Scott claimed.
In any case, no evidence of a 100,000-vote dump has surfaced anywhere.
On Fox News, DeSantis said the new law strengthens voter ID requirements and prohibits mass mailing of ballots. But he seems to be overselling its merits. Although the new law adds some legal heft, the state already required voter ID and already banned mass mailing of ballots.
Georgia
“People are saying we are taking something away with drop boxes. There’s counties that did not have a drop box last election. … Now every county will be required to have one drop box.”
— Gov. Brian Kemp (R-Ga.), speaking about Senate Bill 202 at a news conference, April 3, 2021
Kemp certified Biden’s unexpected win in Georgia. Then, he and the GOP-controlled state legislature rewrote much of the state’s voting rules covering absentee ballots and drop boxes.
The new rules ban proactively sending mail ballot applications to voters, require voters to submit identification with their application to be approved, and shorten the time frame for the application process to take place.
Like several other states, Georgia added new restrictions on the use of mail ballot drop boxes. Kemp indicated it was really an expansion, but his comments are misleading.
The law he signed does require that each county in the state have at least one drop box available to voters, which may increase voting options in some smaller counties.
What Kemp failed to mention is that the same law caps the number of drop boxes per county, based on the number of registered voters or early voting sites. (The law says, on Page 47, that county officials “shall establish at least one drop box” and “may only establish additional drop boxes totaling the lesser of either one drop box for every 100,000 active registered voters in the county or the number of advance voting locations in the county. Any additional drop boxes shall be evenly geographically distributed by population in the county.”)
In larger counties, namely the predominantly Black metro area in Atlanta, this new restriction effectively curtails the number of drop boxes. An analysis by the New York Times found it would limit Atlanta’s four main counties to 23 or fewer drop boxes, down from 94 in the 2020 election.
The Georgia law also requires that drop boxes be located inside and be available only during early voting hours, which limits their practicality.
“I would point out that prior to the 2020 election drop boxes were not allowed under state law and were only made available to counties by temporary emergency rule by the State Elections Board due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Cody Hall, a spokesman for Kemp. “That emergency rule would have expired this summer once the governor’s public health state of emergency for COVID-19 expires. … The change in state law via SB 202 to codify drop boxes in every county for the first time is clearly an expansion of voting access.”
When we asked whether Kemp had concerns about election fraud in Georgia (remember: he certified Biden’s victory), Hall said: “The governor has been very clear in his public comments since the 2020 election. There were significant issues at the state and local level, which the governor raised concerns over at the time. However, the secretary of state and local elections officials are the entities tasked with running and overseeing elections — and investigating allegations of fraud — in the state of Georgia, per state laws and our constitution.” (Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has forcefully rejected Trump’s claims of election fraud.)
Arizona
“Despite all the deceptive and heated rhetoric being used by some partisan activists to lobby against this reform, not a single Arizona voter will lose their right to vote as a result of this new law.”
— Gov. Doug Ducey (R-Ariz.), speaking about Senate Bill 1485 in a video message, May 11, 2021
A law signed by Ducey on May 11 will purge some Arizonans from the state’s early voter list, which determines who receives mail ballots each election cycle.
Ducey’s comments, batting down concerns that Arizona citizens would lose their right to vote, represent a straw-man argument. The substance of the complaint from Democrats and some voting-rights experts is that the new rules will reduce access to the ballot, especially in tribal areas, to solve a nonexistent problem.
Ducey certified Biden’s unexpected victory in Arizona and vouched for the state’s election integrity in 2020, but he described the new rules as sound policy.
“Others have suggested that ‘now is not the time’ for election reform,” Ducey wrote in a letter explaining his decision. “I could not disagree more. The politics of the moment should not impede good policy, and SB1485 is a measure that ensures our voting lists remain verifiable and accurate, will free up resources for local election officials, and strengthen trust among citizens in our election system.” (Ducey’s representatives did not respond to our questions.)
The new rules mean voters who do not cast a ballot at least once every two years will have to respond to a government notice to avoid being removed from the list and to continue getting a ballot in the mail. Some experts say this automatic removal could deter some people from voting. Those removed from the list would remain registered voters, but they would no longer receive ballots automatically by mail and would have to request them ahead of time or vote in person.
“Removing voters from the permanent early voting list makes it more likely that those people will not participate in elections,” according to an analysis of the Arizona proposal from the Brennan Center for Justice. “Increasing opportunities for mail-in voting brings marginal voters into elections and retains voters who might otherwise choose not to participate.”
An estimated 125,000 to 150,000 voters could be removed from the Arizona early voting list under the new law, according to the Brennan Center.
“If it had been enacted in 2019, approximately 126,000 Arizonans who voted in 2020 would have been removed,” the Brennan Center says, adding that it’s a bigger number than Biden’s margin of victory in the state in 2020.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/17/republican-governors-misleading-spin-new-voting-restrictions/
Scott MacFarlane @MacFarlaneNews !! ALERT: A new type of charge just filed in a January 6th prosecution
Guy Reffitt is now charged w/ *TRANSPORTING FIREARM... IN FURTHERANCE OF CIVIL DISORDER"
This allegation is..... a tough break for "not an armed insurrection crowd
6:04 PM · Jun 17, 2021·TweetDeck
THREAD
!! ALERT: A new type of charge just filed in a January 6th prosecution
— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) June 17, 2021
Guy Reffitt is now charged w/ *TRANSPORTING FIREARM... IN FURTHERANCE OF CIVIL DISORDER"
This allegation is..... a tough break for "not an armed insurrection crowd pic.twitter.com/WyZVXFSdtN
THREAD: This might be the most striking of the thousands of court filings submitted in US Capitol Insurrection cases. Filed this weekend against Guy Reffit of Texas pic.twitter.com/Sd2QioHArK
— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) March 14, 2021
Capitol riot suspect accused of threatening to shoot family if they turned him in faces firearms charge over 6 January
The man claimed it was his constitutional right to try to take over Congress
Graig Graziosi
1 hour ago
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/capitol-riot-suspect-firearms-riot-law-b1868663.html
A suspected Capitol insurrectionist will face firearms charges under a law outlawing the use of guns during a riot.
Guy Wesley Reffitt, of Texas, an alleged participant in the Capitol riot, was arrested in January.
In addition to his alleged involvement on 6 January, his wife reported him to the FBI after she said he threatened to shoot her and their family if any of them turned him in for going to the Capitol on the day Congress was certifying Joe Biden’s presidential victory.
Mr Reffitt was charged with obstructing an official proceeding, entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds and obstruction of justice by hindering communication through physical force or threat of physical force.
He pleaded not guilty to the charges.
In addition to those charges, he was also given a firearm charge for bringing a gun to the Capitol.
According to the indictment, Mr Reffitt "without lawful authority to do so, and during and in relation to the offense, did use and carry a deadly and dangerous weapon and firearm, that is, a semi-automatic handgun”.
Prosecutors noted video footage capturing Mr Reffitt at the Capitol, and further argued in a court document that Mr Reffitt allegedly admitted to having his gun. He defended bringing it to the Capitol, stating it was his constitutional right to do so and "take over the Congress”.
More than 450 people have been arrested in connection with the Capitol riot, and more arrests are likely.
Prosecutors are also working to bring conspiracy charges against extremist right-wing groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and potentially the Three Percenter Militia, whose members have been accused of coordinating their attacks before the riot.
At least three other rioters are facing gun charges, but rather than being charged under riot laws, like Mr Reffitt, they are being charged for illegally owning weapons or owning illegal weapons. Mr Reffitt's gun was a legal weapon, but he carried it to a riot in a protected federal building.
One of the other rioters facing gun charges is Lonnie Coffman from Alabama, who brought a truck full of guns, Molotov cocktails and hundreds of rounds of ammunition to Washington DC. He also had a list full of "good guys" and "bad guys”, as well as contact information for one of Senator Ted Cruz's offices.
GOP lawmakers have been gradually offering fewer condemnations of the insurrectionists, with some – like Republican Senator Ron Johnson – calling them "peaceful protesters”.
Senate Republicans also managed to block an investigative commission into the riot, and 21 GOP members of the House of Representatives voted not to award medals to the Capitol police officers who were attacked by Donald Trump's supporters that day.
The list of Republicans who voted against giving the medals is essentially the same as the list of Republicans who have been accused of helping foment the insurrection in the first place.
Trump imitators like Reps Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz were among the group, as well as Reps Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs, who the organizer of the "Stop the Steal" rally claims helped facilitate the event that immediately preceded the riot.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/capitol-riot-suspect-firearms-riot-law-b1868663.html
INSIGHT - Methane menace: Aerial survey spots 'super-emitter' landfills
By Nichola Groom
JUNE 18, 202112:01 PM UPDATED 2 HOURS AGO
9 MIN READ
https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-climate-landfills-idUSL5N2NW6UJ
LOS ANGELES, June 18 (Reuters) - The U.S. waste-management industry has become a darling of environmentally minded investors for its work in recycling trash and harvesting gases from landfills as an alternative fuel.
Leading firms Waste Management Inc and Republic Services Inc are included in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index, a benchmark for socially conscious investing. The firms’ major investors include funds controlled by billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates and wealth-management icon Larry Fink, founder of BlackRock Inc, who are both leading advocates for corporate climate action.
But the waste industry may be doing far more harm to the planet than investors think, according to a years-long aerial survey commissioned by California air-quality regulators. The survey found “super-emitter” landfills accounted for 43% the measured emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane - outpacing the fossil-fuel and agricultural sectors.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and leak-detection firm Scientific Aviation have been conducting the flyovers since 2016. They found that some trash dumps operated by top U.S. landfill companies including Republic Services and Waste Management have been leaking methane at rates as much as six times the facility-level estimates from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). (See graphic tmsnrt.rs/3vuZrAV on California's "super-emitter" landfills).
The ten biggest methane-emitting landfills pumped out the gas at rates averaging 2.27 times the federal estimates, which are produced by waste firms using EPA methodology.
The California research may have wide-ranging global implications by showing the waste-management industry is playing a bigger role in accelerating climate change than regulators had believed. The surveys could also reveal flaws with United Nations guidelines for estimating methane emissions that are followed by the major governments including the United States, according to scientists involved in the surveys and regulators interviewed by Reuters.
The research could also bring scrutiny on the waste management industry from both policy-makers and green investors - who until now have been focused mainly on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil fuels, said Eliot Caroom, a researcher at TruValue Labs, which provides investors with environmental and social-governance data and analysis.
“One of the largest emitting industries, waste management, deserves more attention,” he said.
Gates - who earlier this year published a book titled, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster - owns more than a third of Republic Services. He owns about 8% of Waste Management through stakes held by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust and his personal investment vehicle Cascade Investment LLC, according to fund disclosures. BlackRock owns a 4.6% share of Republic Services and 5% of Waste Management, mainly through funds that track third-party indexes.
Officials representing Gates and BlackRock did not comment for this story.
Inclusion in the Dow Jones sustainability indices is based on S&P Global scores for a number of environmental, social and governance criteria. Waste Management has the highest environmental score in the broader commercial services sector and a near-perfect score for climate change strategy. Republic Services also earned high marks for climate strategy.
Officials for Republic Services and Waste Management said they were cooperating with the California flyover surveys.
Waste Management said it was expanding efforts to reduce methane leaks, including better monitoring, adding more soil to cover landfills and capturing the gas for reuse.
Republic Services said in a statement that the aerial survey data represents snapshot data that may not accurately capture routine emissions at its facility. It called itself a leader in responsible landfill management.
FLAWED ASSUMPTIONS
Methane traps much more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, although for a shorter period of time. All told, one tonne of methane does about 25 times more damage to the climate over a 100-year period than one tonne of carbon dioxide, according to the EPA.
Methane concentrations in the atmosphere have been rising rapidly in recent years, alarming world governments seeking to cap global warming under the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. Measuring those concentrations in the atmosphere is relatively easy, but tracking the sources of the emissions is hard. That difficulty has become a major stumbling block for global policy-makers hoping to curb the problem.
The United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued guidelines for governments in 2006 on how to estimate methane emissions from landfills without direct measurements such as aerial surveys. Instead, the U.N. has said, methane at landfills can be estimated using factors such as the amount and content of waste stored on site and assumed rates of waste decay. Such methods “really don’t do the job anymore,” said Jean Bogner, a University of Illinois researcher who has studied methane emissions in landfills since the 1970s.
The IPCC said it would revisit its guidelines if U.N. member nations asked it to do so.
The U.N. estimates that landfills and wastewater produce about a fifth of the world’s human-caused methane emissions, behind only agriculture and the oil-and-gas industry.
Landfills produce methane when organic materials like food and vegetation are buried within them, rotting in low-oxygen conditions. The gas can leak out if the soil covering the dump is too thin, for instance, or if pipes intended to capture methane are broken.
About one-fifth of trash in the United States is food, according to the EPA, a major driver of the problem. Methane emissions from landfills are less of a problem in many developing nations, which tend to waste less food and use open-air dumps rather than covering trash with soil, according to the IPCC.
UNDER THE RADAR
On February 26, an airplane flown by Scientific Aviation buzzed about 1,500 feet above the Republic Services’ Forward landfill in Manteca in the Central Valley and snapped a series of pictures using an infrared spectrometer.
Scientists said the image showed the trash dump was emitting more than a quarter tonne of methane into the atmosphere each hour, the climate equivalent of nearly 12,000 cars idling on the nearby freeways. That rate is about six-times higher than the EPA had estimated for the facility.
Previous fly-overs of the facility since 2017 had shown similar readings.
The California Air Resources Board (CARB), which commissioned the survey, hopes the effort to find leaks will eventually help to curb emissions. A month after the February flyover, state inspectors accompanied officials from the San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District on a trip to examine the Forward landfill. The group discovered methane leaks that exceeded allowed limits in various locations, issuing two notices of violation to the landfill’s operator, according to an inspection report seen by Reuters.
In the most recent series of overflights which began last fall, regulators asked landfill operators to use information relayed to them in real-time from the aerial surveyors to find and fix leaks on the ground. The state is planning to issue a report on the effort later this year.
Many of the leaks are easily fixed by adding more soil or fixing broken pipes meant to capture methane for use as a fuel, said Jorn Herner, head of CARB’s research planning, administration and emissions mitigation.
The Biden administration last month announced it would require more U.S. landfills to install gas-capture systems to help limit methane emissions. A White House official did not comment for this story.
The state hopes to eventually replace the planes with space satellites. California in April announced a $100 million project, backed by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, to launch satellites in 2023 that will pinpoint large emissions of greenhouse gases from landfills and other sources, such as refineries, pipelines and farms.
Reporting by Nichola Groom; editing by Richard Valdmanis and Brian Thevenot
https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-climate-landfills-idUSL5N2NW6UJ
The Daily Show @TheDailyShow ·10h Jordan Klepper meets the My Pillow Guy Mike Lindell. This is good TV.
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Jordan Klepper meets the My Pillow Guy Mike Lindell. This is good TV. pic.twitter.com/W58cq2YeHM
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) June 18, 2021
Jordan Klepper meets the My Pillow Guy Mike Lindell. This is good TV. pic.twitter.com/W58cq2YeHM
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) June 18, 2021