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Launch a rocket from a spinning planet | NASA Space Place ...
Which direction do rockets launch?
eastward
Also, Earth rotates eastward on its axis, one complete turn each day. At the equator, Earth's surface is rotating at 1675 kilometers per hour (1041 miles per hour)! So if we launch the rocket toward the east, it will get another big boost from Earth's rotational motion. Now, we launch eastward.
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/launch-windows/en/
Brexit: What is the Northern Ireland Protocol and why does it affect sausages?
By Tom Edgington and Chris Morris
BBC News
Published 1 day ago
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-53724381
Rick Wilson @TheRickWilson Tragicomic or just tragic?
Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski · 16h
As he continues to lose his mind every day his indictment gets closer, Rudy gets more and more unhinged. Tonight, he goes on a rant claiming that Biden is behind his investigation, “You want to destroy me, but you’re not gonna do it, Joe!”
VIDEO
As he continues to lose his mind every day his indictment gets closer, Rudy gets more and more unhinged. Tonight, he goes on a rant claiming that Biden is behind his investigation, “You want to destroy me, but you’re not gonna do it, Joe!” pic.twitter.com/kls3usvuHO
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 9, 2021
Tragicomic or just tragic? https://t.co/KznlB5vXTg
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) June 9, 2021
George Conway @gtconway3d ·14m Is it really possible for an elected official to be this stupid?
Forbes @Forbes · 18h ORBITS: Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) asks whether the Forest Service or the BLM can alter the orbit of the moon or the Earth in order to fight climate change during a House Natural Resources hearing
VIDEO
ORBITS: Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) asks whether the Forest Service or the BLM can alter the orbit of the moon or the Earth in order to fight climate change during a House Natural Resources hearing pic.twitter.com/yYiOyi2cMZ
— Forbes (@Forbes) June 8, 2021
Is it really possible for an elected official to be this stupid? https://t.co/EHP8JDg9kC
— George Conway (@gtconway3d) June 9, 2021
The Brazilian doctor offering bogus Covid remedies for social media likes
By Juliana Gragnani
BBC Brasil
Published 1 hour ago
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-57276286
Thousands of fake online pharmacies shut down
Published 3 hours ago
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57358556
A record number of fake online pharmacies were shut down in May as part of a global crackdown.
More than 100,000 online marketplaces offering illicit drugs were removed as part of Interpol's Operation Pangea.
In the UK, fake medicines worth more than $13m (£9.17m) were seized as part of the efforts.
It marked the biggest week for the operation since 2008, as criminals cashed in on the demand for Covid-related products.
Police break up 'fake Covid-19 vaccine network'
'Fake prescription drugs left my son brain damaged'
Between 18 and 25 May, 277 arrests were made, involving 92 countries, and pharmaceuticals worth more than $20m seized.
Most of the illegal medical devices seized were fake or unauthorised Covid-19 testing kits.
UK authorities removed more than 3,100 advertising links for the illegal sale and supply of unlicensed medicines and 43 UK-based websites were closed down.
'Health scourge'
Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization, based in Lyon, France, facilitates international co-operation between police forces.
Secretary general Jurgen Stock said the sale of illicit medicines put thousands of lives at risk.
"The online sale of illicit medicines continues to pose a threat to public safety, which is why operations such as Pangea remain vital in combating this global health scourge," he said.
"As the pandemic forced more people to move their lives online, criminals were quick to target these new customers.
"As crimes continue to evolve amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, the authorities must remain vigilant in dismantling criminal networks involved in the proliferation of illicit pharmaceutical products especially in online platforms."
The global pharmaceutical industry is worth more than $1tn.
Vast supply chains stretch from key manufacturers in places such as China and India to packaging warehouses in Europe, South America or Asia and distributors sending medicines to every country in the world.
Last year, a BBC News investigation found fake drugs for sale in Africa, with counterfeiters exploiting growing gaps in the market.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57358556
State GOPs Can’t Explain Millions In ‘Trump Victory’ Cash
Roger Sollenberger
Political Reporter
Updated Jun. 09, 2021 6:21AM ET / Published Jun. 09, 2021 4:39AM ET
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/state-gops-t-explain-millions-083921197.html
Months after the Federal Election Commission notified several GOP state parties of major gaps in their 2020 fundraising and spending reports, the committees are correcting their numbers—but they still can’t explain why the discrepancies occurred.
The issue has raised new questions about possible abuse of a longstanding campaign finance loophole that allows wealthy megadonors to cut massive checks. Last year a number of Republican state parties failed to disclose transfers in the hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars, which violates reporting requirements.
“There are layers of problems here, but the basic question is whether the state parties complied with federal disclosure requirements,” Paul Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at election reform advocacy group Common Cause, told The Daily Beast.
It appears systemic. The FEC has so far sent notices to 10 of those 46 state parties that failed to report high-dollar same-day transfers from joint fundraising committees and to the RNC. So far, all but one have responded.
But their explanations have been incomplete or nonexistent. For example, the Rhode Island Republican Party seemed only to acknowledge the error occurred but did not address how or why. “The $251,771.78 for the Post General report was missed on the original 30 Day Post General report that was filed so an amended report was filed to include that.” The party later filed another amendment disclosing more than $455,500 in transfers from Trump Victory, but did not offer an explanation in that letter either.
Watch: Trump has raised $207 million since Election Day
VIDEO
The problem stems from joint fundraising agreements—teams of political committees that join together to increase their party’s fundraising power and reach. The arrangements are legal, but it appears the GOP has used them to secretly pass millions of dollars from Trump Victory to the RNC through apparently oblivious state committees.
And the corrected filings also show that some committees hadn’t told the FEC they joined Trump Victory, even though Trump Victory had included them. Their explanations have been unclear.
Hawaii didn’t announce its role in Trump Victory until this February. Four days later, the committee revealed nearly $1.7 million in transfers, claiming it missed the transactions “due to a misunderstanding regarding the reporting requirements.”
Last month, the Arkansas GOP disclosed a whopping $3.5 million in transfers with Trump Victory, a group it has never officially joined, according to FEC records. “The transfers were inadvertently not disclosed on the original reports due to clerical errors,” the state party explained.
The Oklahoma GOP passed hundreds of thousands of dollars from Trump Victory on to the RNC last year, but has still never officially joined the agreement. Last month, the treasurer wrote—twice—that he has been suffering from “serious health problems.”
However, while the state parties may have been unaware of the arrangement, the RNC wasn’t. The RNC reports include the transfers.
The FEC wanted to know how that was possible. In response to a question about the Colorado GOP’s unreported transfers, the RNC shifted all blame to the state, writing, “We have confirmed that we received funds from [the] Colorado Republican Committee. No further action is required.”
This doesn’t mean the FEC was baffled. In fact, the same month it asked the RNC to explain itself, the Wyoming GOP paid the FEC a major fine for the same types of omissions in 2016.
But now there’s a new dimension: A small D.C.-area bank may also be in the crosshairs.
In January 2020, Trump Victory told the feds it would use Chain Bridge Bank, a popular institution among Republican committees. The RNC also held an account there, but some state committees didn’t. Others recently told the FEC they had one, but initially failed to report it.
Two parties—Arkansas and Oklahoma—still haven’t reported an account with Chain Bridge. The Hawaii GOP only added the bank in February.
If the committees had established the accounts on their own, it’s unclear how they could have forgotten doing so. None of them have explained this to the FEC, and none responded to The Daily Beast’s inquiries. Chain Bridge would not comment publicly on its clients.
Joint fundraising arrangements are complicated, but carry major financial benefits. Here’s how it works.
Joint fundraising committees open a back door, allowing national parties to raise more money from megadonors than the law otherwise permits. Because Trump Victory has 48 members, one person can cut a single check equal to the combined contribution limits of all four dozen committees. Trump Victory then distributes that money to the other committees.
For example, two donors gave Trump Victory $817,800 in 2020: Pharma exec Richard Roberts, and Nicole Luckey, wife of billionaire tech pioneer Palmer Luckey, in September and October, respectively.
The arrangement has a second benefit. While a donor can only give $10,000 to a state party, state committees can transfer unlimited sums to the national party—the RNC. This means the RNC can effectively claw back all Trump Victory contributions from the states, including from donors who already gave the RNC the maximum amount.
The strategy traces back to 2016, when then-candidate Hillary Clinton became the first to take advantage of the 2014 Supreme Court decision that opened the joint fundraising floodgates. That helped the Democratic National Committee build a machine that pulled in $80 million for the DNC—about three times more than Trump’s own machine that year.
The system has been widely criticized by election reform advocates for skewing the playing field in favor of an elite group of megadonors.
“These joint fundraising practices amount to little more than legalized money laundering, and allow wealthy donors to sidestep contribution limits and write six-figure checks for the benefit of presidential candidates and the national parties,” Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at the Campaign Legal Center, a non-partisan watchdog group, told The Daily Beast.
“It’s bad policy, but it’s legally permissible,” said Ryan, who co-authored a 2013 Supreme Court amicus brief arguing that joint fundraising would unfairly empower wealthy donors.
Again, this is all usually legal. But last year many of those transfers appear to have gone unnoticed by a number of experienced state committee treasurers.
The FEC has previously issued fines for similar infringements. Given the amount of money involved, the penalties could be steep.
“A ‘knowing and willful’ violation of federal campaign finance law is punishable by a fine of up to 200 percent of any contribution or expenditure involved in such violation,” Ryan said.
There’s another twist: the bank accounts. Those omissions raise new questions about whether the party treasurers—who must sign off on those accounts—knew their committees had opened an account at Chain Bridge. That could expose them legally, Ryan said.
“Campaign finance law would be undermined if a state committee was using an account and not disclosing it, which treasurers must do under penalty of perjury.” Ryan said. “It would be even more severe if the RNC was setting up an account and not telling the state party about it.”
The FEC thinks the problems may be related.
In 2019, the agency slapped the Wyoming GOP with a major fine for its unreported 2016 transfers. The report cited allegations of suspicious banking activity, pointing to concerns that funds were transferred directly from Trump Victory to the RNC, “rendering all FEC reports concerning those transfers fraudulent.”
The General Counsel recommended a sweeping investigation. The Republican-appointed commissioners, however, voted it down.
The reason for the apparent shortcuts is hard to discern.
“I can’t think of many reasons why they would set this up,” said Ryan. “They may find it easier, or could be trying to save bank fees. But it could also be a way to increase the RNC’s haul. Suppose you had a state party that wouldn’t participate, but the RNC wanted to involve another state so it could pull in more money. This would allow them to do so.”
The Wyoming case may offer a hint that supports his hunch.
On Monday, WyoFile reported that the Wyoming GOP’s treasurer has accused the state party chair and RNC of striking a deal behind his back in 2016, calling it an “obvious ‘end run’ to by-pass individual state laws.”
Read more at The Daily Beast.
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/state-gops-t-explain-millions-083921197.html
Biden revokes Trump executive orders targeting TikTok and WeChat
BY REBECCA KLAR - 06/09/21 10:34 AM EDT
Biden revokes Trump executive orders targeting TikTok and WeChat
President Biden has revoked former President Trump’s executive orders that sought to ban downloads of the Chinese-owned apps TikTok and WeChat in the U.S., according to a fact sheet released by the White House Wednesday.
Trump had sought to block new users from downloading the apps, but the orders were blocked in courts and never took effect.
--Developing
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/557523-biden-revokes-trump-executive-orders-targeting-tiktok-and-wechat
Schumer plans to force key votes to win over Democratic holdouts on filibuster
Senate majority leader to embark on strategy demonstrating how Republicans have all but turned the filibuster into a weapon
Hugo Lowell
Wed 9 Jun 2021 05.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/09/filibuster-key-votes-us-congress-latest-chuck-schumer
Top Democrats are preparing to make the case to impose new limits on the filibuster, in a move that could bring to a head six months of smoldering tensions over an expected Republican blockade of President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda.
The Senate had its first filibuster of this Congress last week, when Republicans used the tactical rule to block a bipartisan House-passed measure to create a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Capitol attack perpetrated a pro-Trump mob.
Even as a majority of senators voted in favor of the commission, the bill’s defeat at the hands of Republicans deploying the filibuster underscored the ease with which legislation can be blocked under current Senate rules that require a 60-vote margin in the 100-strong chamber.
Republicans at the same time last week delayed a bipartisan measure aimed at improving American competitiveness with China, also proving to Democrats that the party was more interested in denying legislative wins to Biden than advancing bills that they helped write.
Now, in an attempt to demonstrate Republicans have all but turned the filibuster into a weapon to wage bad-faith politics, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is embarking on a strategy to force votes on some of Biden’s most high-profile measures.
The idea is to demonstrate to Democrats opposed to curbing the filibuster – most notably West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema – that Republicans will sink any Democratic policy, giving Schumer no choice but to defuse the procedural rule in order to pass Biden’s vision.
The problem, as Democrats see it, is that Republicans have effectively rewritten Senate rules to force supermajorities for bills that carry widespread public and congressional support. Filibustering bills, once extremely rare, has now become routine.
“Will our Republican colleagues let the Senate debate the bill, or will they engage in another partisan filibuster of urgent legislation? We will soon see,” Schumer said last week, previewing his intentions.
It is a replica of the playbook followed by then-Senate majority leader Harry Reid in 2013 to gather Democratic support to impose limits on the filibuster, after Republicans blocked former President Barack Obama’s picks for cabinet posts and the federal judiciary.
But it remains far from clear whether Schumer can find the same success in persuading the holdouts in the Senate Democratic caucus to move ahead with what is known on Capitol Hill as the “nuclear option” of limiting the filibuster.
The political moment confronting Schumer is far darker than the one experienced by Reid, who by virtue of having a larger Democratic majority in the 2013 Senate, did not need to convince all of his senators, such as Manchin, to support changing the rules.
In addition, Manchin has come out publicly against making any reforms to the filibuster so often to this Congress, that he may be unable to backtrack even if successfully convinced of the need for imposing new restrictions.
Writing in a recent op-ed published in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin warned that “partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy”, and reiterated he would not vote to remove or modify the filibuster.
The situation is similar with Sinema, who said during the Memorial Day recess that she would not budge on reforming the filibuster, having previously noted the perils of changing Senate rules that offer the minority party wide latitude to block action.
But with Biden’s ambitious political agenda imperiled by expected Republican filibusters, Schumer has reached the point where he believes the only way to pass bills offered by Democrats is to escalate the fight, according to a source familiar with his thinking.
The pressure is only likely to increase on Manchin and Sinema in the coming weeks, with Schumer pledging this month to hold a vote on S1, the sweeping voting rights measure expanding ballot access and controls on campaign contributions, known as the For the People Act.
In the struggle for voting rights, Democrats have rested their hopes on S1 for turning back a wave of new voting restrictions that grew out of former president Donald Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud enacted by Republican statehouses nationwide.
The political stakes, as well as the implications for the country at large, are huge: Democrats believe the bill’s passage could allow them to overrule such state-level mandates, while its failure could allow Republicans to marginalize Black, Asian and minority voters.
Against such a backdrop, Schumer’s plan has rattled Republicans. And on Monday, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell railed against the planned series of votes, slamming it as a partisan ploy that is “transparently designed to fail”.
“Senate Democrats intend to focus this month on the demands of their radical base,” McConnell said.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/09/filibuster-key-votes-us-congress-latest-chuck-schumer
Arizona ballot audit backed by secretive donors linked to Trump’s inner circle
Dark money groups pushing baseless election claims appear to be playing key role in unprecedented review of 2.1m ballots
This story was reported in collaboration with OpenSecrets
Sam Levine and Anna Massoglia
Wed 9 Jun 2021 06.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/09/arizona-election-audit-trump-2020-review
Dark money groups tied to Donald Trump’s inner circle and backed by people who have spread baseless claims about the 2020 presidential election appear to be playing a key role in funding an unprecedented review of 2.1m ballots in Arizona.
Republicans in the Arizona state senate, which authorized the inquiry, allocated $150,000 in state funds to pay for it – just a fraction of the projected overall cost, which is still unknown. The state senate had enough money in its operating budget to pay for the investigation, the Arizona Mirror reported in April, but chose not to pay the full price.
Instead, the effort is being paid for by private donors, who remain hidden from the public, according to a review by OpenSecrets and the Guardian. Arizona Republicans and Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based company overseeing the review, have refused to say who is providing the rest of the money.
“It is wholly inappropriate that the Arizona state senate is hiding the mechanisms by which their sanctioned activity is being funded,” said Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who served as the top election official in Maricopa county, the target of the ballot review, until he lost his re-election bid last year. “The lack of transparency there is just grotesque.”
*
Questions about funds come as the Arizona senate has faced scrutiny for why it hired Cyber Ninjas, a firm with little experience in auditing elections to oversee its massive review. Doug Logan, the firm’s chief executive, expressed support for the idea that the election was stolen from Trump.
Karen Fann, the president of the Arizona state senate, said last year she received a phone call from Trump thanking her for “pushing to prove any fraud,” according to emails obtained by American Oversight, a left-leaning watchdog group. Fann, a Republican, also said she had spoken with Rudy Giuliani, a Trump ally, multiple times last year.
At least $150,000 of the inquiry’s funding has purportedly come from Voices and Votes, a 501(c)(4) run by Christina Bobb, an anchor for the One America News Network (OANN), a rightwing media network that has given air to election conspiracy theories. The group is also run with White House correspondent Chanel Rion and Courtland Sykes, Rion’s fiancé. Bobb spoke with Trump about the review, according to the Washington Post, and emailed Fann affidavits on behalf of Giuliani last year, emails show.
Bobb frequently plugs the effort during shows, where she covers the Arizona review, and on social media, but told BuzzFeed that OANN is not “in any way” affiliated with her fundraising despite the dark money group being run by multiple OANN employees and being promoted on the network. Voices and Votes was incorporated in Wyoming in March, shortly before the inquiry was announced, by attorney Greg Roeberg, an Arizona attorney. A press release from the Trump campaign last year listed a Greg Roeberg as a “key member” of Jewish Voices for Trump. Roeberg said in an email he was not involved with the charity beyond helping it with the initial legal papers. The group declined an interview request.
L Lin Wood, the pro-Trump attorney behind a slew of lawsuits seeking to overturn election results last year, told Talking Points Memo that his non-profit, Fight Back, donated $50,000 to Voices and Votes for the review. But it is not clear what the money is actually going to since the groups are subject to few financial disclosure rules.
Wood, who has promoted fundraising efforts for the review on Telegram, also told TPM that Cyber Ninja chief Logan worked out of Wood’s home to investigate 2020 election voter fraud claims.
Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com and an ardent Trump supporter, is also leading a group funding the effort. Byrne was involved in what Axios described as the “craziest meeting of the Trump presidency” – a December 2020 summit in the Oval Office that included Michael Flynn, and Sidney Powell, who falsely claimed voting machines had flipped votes for Trump and suggested he use government resources to seize voting machines. Byrne also reportedly screamed at representatives from the White House counsel’s office, saying they were not sufficiently helping to overturn the election.
In April, Byrne’s nonprofit, the America Project, launched a Fund the Audit campaign aiming to raise $2.8m. Byrne says he contributed $1m to the effort, but at least another $900,000 has come from unknown sources. Byrne’s non-profit is also helping vet workers who participate in the review, according to the Arizona Republic.
Byrne also served as chief of another dark money group involved in the review, Defending the Republic, though he claims he resigned in April. Created by Powell, Defending the Republic published every Arizona lawmakers’ contact info on their website and promoted a misleading “Election Fraud Facts & Details“ document authored for the Arizona Senate by Cyber Ninja’s Logan prior to the probe. The document contains disproven claims about voting machine software switching votes from Trump to Biden.
Powell’s group also previously hired Wake Technology Services, Inc. (Wake TSI), a subcontractor to audit election equipment in Fulton County, Pennsylvania, at the request of Doug Mastriano, a state senator who aggressively suggested the election was stolen, according to county documents obtained by the Guardian.
Paula Shives, a Democrat on the three-member county commission, was stunned that the company was allowed to inspect election materials last year. “Who authorized this? When was this scheduled? Who was notified and present during the process?” Shives wrote in a text message to the country’s election director and two commissioners that was obtained by OpenSecrets and the Guardian through a public records request.
Randy Bunch, a Republican county commissioner, replied that the review did not show any problems: “On a good note, they didn’t find one thing wrong and praise our team meaning Patty and our staff on how organized everything was and we come [sic] out with no flaws it all matched up.”
Wake TSI submitted a draft report to county officials in February that appeared to back up that assessment, according to the Washington Post.
But the copy of the that Pennsylvania review uploaded on the county website contended Dominion Voting Systems did not meet the state’s certification requirements, documented “errors” in scanning ballots, and purportedly identified “non-certified” software installed in the county’s voting system. (Wake TSI did not respond to requests for an interview.)
Wake TSI abruptly withdrew from the Arizona review in May, and it’s unclear why. Mastriano was one of several Pennsylvania lawmakers who visited the audit site in early June, where he was interviewed by Bobb on OANN.
*
For weeks, observers have pointed out that the procedures in place for the unprecedented inquiry are shoddy and do not resemble a neutral audit. But Trump has also become increasingly focused on the Arizona review and possible similar efforts elsewhere. Trump has reportedly told people close to him he expects to be “reinstated” as president this summer – something that would be impossible under the current legal system.
The influx of private funds comes as Republicans themselves, including in Arizona, have pushed to outlaw the use of private grants for election processes after charities stepped up to fund under-resourced election officials during the pandemic. In particular, Republicans have targeted grants from organizations backed by hundreds of millions dollars of donations from Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.
In April, Arizona governor Doug Ducey, a Republican, signed a law prohibiting election officials from accepting private money to help run elections, saying it could weaken confidence in elections. Similar provisions have been enacted in Florida and Georgia this year.
And dark money raised for the review may be going to more than just paying the firms conducting it.
Arizona state representative Mark Finchem, a strong supporter of the review and the “Stop the Steal” movement, claimed that his 501(c)(4) Guardian Defense Fund is “paying money for additional security at the site” in an interview with Steve Bannon on America’s Voice News.
Finchem is currently campaigning to be Arizona’s next secretary of state, and claimed he has talked to Trump about the 2020 election in an appearance on the Twitch stream of Redpill78, which the New York Times reported promotes QAnon conspiracy theories. His attorney previously represented Cyber Ninjas.
“Ironically, after outlawing transparent philanthropic funding of election administration, used to assist all voters, regardless of party, during a global pandemic, the Arizona Senate now relies upon secret funding for their ‘audit,’” said David Becker, the executive director for the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a group that received funding from Zuckerberg and Chan last year.
*
Key individuals behind the dark money groups have also been using a network of Telegram channels to coordinate messaging and amplify each other’s content.
One of the main Telegram channels signal boosting the groups is Arizona Red Roots. Using Telegram and other messaging platforms, probe proponents have quietly coordinated efforts and distributed “AZ Ground Troops Updates” detailing strategies pushing for the ballot review.
An April “AZ Ground Troops Update” document downloaded from Telegram lists a number of key players in the Arizona review, including Power of the Meme, a site dedicated to making memes to promote the Arizona review and “Demand a Forensic Kinematic Audit”.
In messages throughout March and April, organizers in the channel pushed followers to pressure the Arizona legislature to hire Jovan Pulitzer, a treasure hunter best known for inventing a cat-shaped device that allowed people to scan barcodes in magazines to find the product online. PC World magazine ranked it as one of the 25 worst tech products of all time.
Pulitzer has become a kind of folk hero among those who believe the election was stolen (he has his own song) and Telegram messages in the channel told users Pulitzer was the only person who could do a necessary audit.
“If New Hampshire uses Jovan + other auditors, why not AZ? Jovan, since Nov 2020, was the first and only one to propose auditing paper ballots in an ingenious and novel way – never proposed & never before done! And it is what we need for the best chance to find ballots pre-printed from China. Or ballots filled out by the same fraudulent person,” reads one message.
The effort appears to have been successful. Pulitzer’s technology is reportedly being used by those running the Arizona review to inspect the quality of ballot paper and search for watermarks – a process election officials have said is unlikely to detect fraud. Officials are also reportedly using the technology to look for bamboo fibers in ballots, an echo of a conspiracy theory Pulitzer has endorsed suggesting ballots were flown into Arizona from Asia.
Even some people involved in advising the review are skeptical of Pulitzer’s involvement.
“This guy is nuts,” John Brakey, an activist who is helping with the Arizona process, told the Guardian in May. “He’s a fraudster.”
*
Even as experts have warned of the dangers of the Arizona review, it has fast emerged as a model for similar efforts elsewhere. Trump on Friday called for the Pennsylvania Senate to authorize a similar effort, just days after Mastriano and other lawmakers visited the Arizona count. Activists in New Hampshire unsuccessfully tried to get Pulitzer involved in a probe of a local election there. And there are bubbling efforts in Michigan to conduct a “forensic audit” – language that mirrors what is being used to describe the Arizona effort.
Some of the firms and individuals conducting the review also stand to potentially benefit from a proliferation of similar efforts across the country.
A recently dismissed Michigan case that was promoted and fundraised for in the Arizona Telegram channels featured Cyber Ninja’s Logan as an expert witness. Another expert witness in the case was Benjamin Cotton, the founder of CyFIR, a digital forensics firm that is helping conduct the Arizona audit.
The plaintiff’s attorney, Matthew DePerno, raised around $300,000 for an “Election Fraud Defense Fund“ to support the failed case in Michigan.
And while the amount of money raised through online fundraising platforms is publicly available, the total amount of money changing hands between each of the individuals and organizations involved in the efforts is subject to few disclosure requirements.
Fontes, the Arizona Democrat, said it was “wholly inappropriate” for the Arizona state senate not to disclose who was funding the effort.
“They have permitted this to happen, it happens under the authority of the Arizona state senate, this is senate president Karen Fann’s operation,” he said. “She can set whatever rules she wants to set. She has chosen secrecy. She has chosen to obfuscate. And she is trying to deflect responsibility for the lack of transparency.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/09/arizona-election-audit-trump-2020-review
Attack the Capitol, sure. But stay out of my garage!
Opinion by Dana Milbank
Columnist
June 9, 2021 at 12:27 a.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/08/attack-capitol-sure-stay-out-my-garage/
Rep. Mo Brooks is strictly an armchair insurrectionist.
On Jan. 6, the Alabama Republican incited Trump followers to sack the Capitol. “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass!” he told the crowd at a pre-riot rally. “Now, our ancestors sacrificed their blood, their sweat, their tears, their fortunes, and sometimes their lives…. So I have a question for you: Are you willing to do the same? My answer is yes. Louder! Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America? Louder!”
But when it came time to be held to account for inciting the deadly insurrection, Brooks chose flight, not fight.
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) sued Brooks, along with former president Donald Trump and others, for the damage caused by the insurrection. But Brooks, unlike the other defendants, refused to accept service of the court papers — prompting Swalwell to hire a private investigator to hunt him down. A weeks-long cat-and-mouse game ensued, and Brooks proved so elusive that the judge granted his pursuers a 60-day extension.
On Sunday, the process servers finally caught Brooks (or, rather, his wife, Martha). The aggrieved lawmaker fired off a tweet accusing Swalwell’s P.I. of “sneaking INTO MY HOUSE & accosting my wife!“ — and, attaching a photo of Alabama’s trespassing statute, declared that he would seek an “arrest warrant” for the “criminal trespass.”
Brooks tweeted the photo, of his computer screen, in such haste that he evidently didn’t notice it included what appeared to be a PIN and his Gmail password taped to his monitor. Apparently, taking a screenshot exceeded Brooks’s technical capabilities.
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) helpfully tweeted advice to his colleague: “Never tape PW to computer.”
Could it be any more embarrassing for Congressman Luddite? Well, consider that he is a member of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Innovative Technologies and Information Systems.
And consider Brooks’s absurdly selective outrage. He provoked hundreds of Trump supporters to invade the Capitol, injuring hundreds of police and leading to several deaths. But now he’s ALL-CAPS enraged because a nonviolent process server walked into his open garage.
Brooks is hoping Alabama voters will reward his stupidity by promoting him to the Senate next year. There is precedent for the state electing the dimwitted. Last year, Alabamians chose as their other senator former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville, a Republican who shortly after his election listed for an interviewer “all three branches of government…. You know, the House, the Senate and the executive.”
Maybe Mensa will let Tuberville and Brooks pool their IQ points for a membership?
Since his election to Congress a decade ago, Brooks has distinguished himself by:
* Saying that, to remove immigrants who are in the United States illegally, “I will do anything short of shooting them.”
* Declaring that Democrats, under President Barack Obama, had launched a “war on Whites.”
* Announcing that the top cause of rising sea levels isn’t climate change but rocks and sediment falling into the ocean.
In his latest gambit — championing Trump’s “big lie” about the 2020 election — Brooks is pretty much doing the same thing as his Republican colleagues in Congress. He’s just doing it more clumsily.
As early as Nov. 19, Brooks claimed members of Congress “control who the president of the United States is.” He later declared that “Joe Biden did not win” Georgia and that “Congress should reject any Georgia submission of 16 electoral college votes for Joe Biden.” He billed his appearance at the pre-insurrection Trump rally on Jan. 6 by saying he would “tell the American people about the election system weaknesses that the Socialist Democrats exploited to steal this election.”
After Trump’s marauders attacked the Capitol, Brooks proclaimed, “All may not be (and likely is not) what appears. Evidence growing that fascist ANTIFA orchestrated Capitol attack with clever mob control tactics.”
But when Swalwell sued Brooks, the combative Alabamian shied from the fight. He couldn’t be served at the Capitol complex (the insurrection aftermath left the complex off-limits to all but lawmakers and staff, who couldn’t act as process servers in their official capacities), forcing his pursuers to hunt for him in Huntsville, his hometown. Brooks taunted Swalwell on Twitter. Martha Brooks even performed an evasive maneuver in her car to give a process server the slip, Swalwell lawyer Philip Andonian told me.
As Mo Brooks was sharing his password and PIN with the world, Martha Brooks told a conservative talk radio station that she was startled by the process server and “screamed” at the man, who left the legal papers and “skedaddled.”
If only the domestic terrorists her husband incited had been so courteous.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/08/attack-capitol-sure-stay-out-my-garage/
How the GOP enables private ‘militias’ and the terrorist threat they pose
Opinion by Paul Waldman
Columnist
June 8, 2021 at 6:04 p.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/08/how-gop-enables-private-militias-terrorist-threat-they-pose/
What do you think of when I say the word “militia”?
It’s probably the kind of people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6: far-right anti-government extremists in the grip of paranoid conspiracy theories, paunchy White guys who fancy themselves defenders of liberty while running around the woods in military cosplay.
It’s the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the Boogaloo Bois. It’s the people who have allegedly killed cops and plotted to kidnap the governor of Michigan. That’s what “militia” means to most of us in 21st-century America.
But even as that is the reality on the ground, and even as most militia activity is actually illegal under state law, the dangerous ideology that drives those extremists is propped up not only by Republican politicians but by Republican-appointed judges.
That came through in a striking federal court decision handed down late last week, when U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez struck down California’s ban on assault-style weapons. The decision has gotten attention in part because it reads like a cross between an advertisement for the AR-15 (“Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment”) and the stylings of a pre-law freshman trying to turn what he heard on Fox News into something resembling legal prose.
But the most notable part may be this, when Benitez quite literally says that the reason AR-15s should be legal is because they’d be useful if you wanted to overthrow the U.S. government:
-Before the Court there is convincing and unrebutted testimony that the versatile AR-15 type of modern rifle is the perfect firearm for a citizen to bring for militia service. A law that bans the AR-15 type rifle from militia readiness is not a reasonable fit for protecting the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for the militia. It has been argued that citizens with nothing more than modern rifles will have no chance against an army with tanks and missiles. But someone forgot to tell Fidel Castro who with an initial force of 20 to 80 men armed with M-1 carbines, walked into power in Havana in spite of Cuba’s militarized forces armed with tanks, planes and a navy.
What exactly is the “militia service” the judge speaks of? In America today, it does not mean anything like the “well regulated Militia” that the Second Amendment describes as “necessary to the security of a free State.”
There are no private militias defending America from outside attack. The ones who call themselves that — which are widely understood to be the greatest terrorism threat America faces today — are those that use the threat of violence, and sometimes actual violence, to achieve political aims.
There’s an extensive debate about exactly what the Framers intended in the Second Amendment. But as Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and co-author of “Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea,” told me: “There’s no such thing as a militia that’s untethered to the state.”
While Antonin Scalia may have claimed in District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 Supreme Court decision that for the first time established an individual right to own guns, that the Framers conceived of every able-bodied man as part of a kind of militia-in-waiting, it’s only when organized and sanctioned by the government that they become a militia.
Which is why the only legitimate militias in America today are the 50 state National Guards. And in fact, every state has at least some laws forbidding paramilitary activity and training. But these laws are seldom enforced, either because law enforcement officials don’t take these groups seriously or are afraid to confront them.
While there are some such groups emerging on the left, they’re still primarily a creature of the extreme right. As Horwitz says, “The thing they do share is a fidelity to gun rights and to the idea that violence has a role in the political process.”
That’s the key — not just to the threat they pose, but to the way they’re supported by the Republican Party.
First, you have the insurrectionist groups themselves. Next, you have Republican politicians who validate their perspective, not just by promoting gun rights in general but by insisting that those rights exist so that private citizens can react to government policy they don’t like with violence.
When you see Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) wearing a mask that reads “Come and take it” when attending President Biden’s inauguration, what is the message of that phrase, said so often by gun advocates?
It’s a threat, that if gun regulations are made into law — not through a coup that overthrows the American government but through the legitimate process of legislation — then people like him will not only refuse to comply with the law but will meet any government official attempting to enforce that law with deadly violence.
Cruz might claim he wouldn’t go that far, or that he’s just showing how strongly he feels about his guns. But the message unequivocally validates the perspective of the insurrectionists.
And finally, you have conservative judges steadily dismantling the government’s ability to regulate guns. Gun advocates get to have it both ways: They can hand-wave about the “well regulated Militia” clause in the Second Amendment to make it all but meaningless, but also say that gun rights must be almost limitless so people can be ready to organize into private militias to overthrow the government.
So while we have no real militias in America apart from the National Guard, we do have people — including many people with power — who want to sustain the idea of private militias and the threat of insurrection. What does that mean for our politics?
“When push comes to shove, it looks like Jan. 6 and a bullet in Gabby Giffords’s head,” Horwitz says. “You can’t have a government where the private guys with guns make the rules.”
Opinion by Paul Waldman
Paul Waldman is an opinion writer for the Plum Line blog. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/08/how-gop-enables-private-militias-terrorist-threat-they-pose/
Air Force sergeant accused of killing two law enforcement officers trained with Calif. militia led by Army veteran, prosecutors say
BY ERIN TRACY• THE MODESTO BEE • JUNE 9, 2021
https://www.stripes.com/Branches/Air_Force/2021-06-08/air-force-sergeant-accused-of-killing-two-law-enforcement-officers-trained-with-calif-militia-led-by-army-veteran-prosec-1660863.html
MODESTO, Calif. (Tribune News Service) —A California man organized and led an armed anti-government militia that included one member, a U.S. Air Force airman, who allegedly killed two law enforcement officers last year, according to federal court filings.
Jessie Alexander Rush, 29, who organized the group known as the Grizzly Scouts, gave himself the title of major and held trainings near his residence in Turlock preceding the killings of Federal Protective Service Officer Dave Patrick Underwood in May 2020 and Santa Cruz Sheriff’s Sgt. Damon Gutzwiller the following month, according to the filings.
Air Force Sgt. Steven Carrillo has been charged with the murders, while Rush and three others were indicted in April on federal charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice by destroying evidence related to the murder investigations.
Recent court filings, first reported by The Santa Cruz Sentinel, detail conversations and activities among Rush and other Grizzly Scout’s members, who federal prosecutors allege continued to plot more deadly attacks on law enforcement.
Most members of the Grizzly Scouts are still at large, federal prosecutors said. The group identifies with a loosely-affiliated, nationwide militia movement that uses the name “Boogaloo” and favors Hawaiian shirts and violent rhetoric, but the Scouts’ activities appear to be more carefully plotted, the Sentinel reported.
Rush, along with Robert Jesus Blancas, 33, of Castro Valley; Simon Sage Ybarra, 23, of Los Gatos; and Kenny Matthew Miksch, 21, of San Lorenzo, are charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice.
The court filings were submitted in the case against Rush and his co-defendants as part of a failed attempt to keep all four defendants in jail pending trial, the Sentinel reported. A federal magistrate ultimately decided three of them, including Rush, were not a danger to the community and did not pose flight risks.
Rush was released to his residence in Turlock on a $50,000 bond co-signed by his wife, according to the filing. Attempts by The Bee to reach him by phone and email were not successful.
The Sentinel reported the filings not only confirm Carrillo as one of the militia’s roughly 25 members, but detail the group’s alleged activities in mid-2020: trainings near Rush’s home in Turlock, the creation of a “Quick Reaction Force” or QRF, and plans to send a member to scout disguised as a member of Antifa to a protest in Sacramento.
The filings allege that, in a document titled “Operations Order,” the militia described law enforcement officers as “enemy forces” and spoke of the possibility of taking prisoners at the protest.
The operations order named Rush and Miksch as part of a “Quick Reaction Force” that would be sent in if the man they sent into the protest ran into trouble. The QRF members were required to carry a rifle and pistol and extra magazines.
The orders said, “POWs will be searched for intel and gear, interrogated, stripped naked, blindfolded, driven away and released into the wilderness blindfolded with hands bound,” according to court documents.
Rush previously served in the U.S. military, making him the second known member of the militia, along with Carrillo, with military experience, according to the Sentinel. Rush’s Linkedin page says he served in the Army. The most recent job listed was a security position at a bar in Turlock that closed two years ago.
Rush allegedly messaged another group member, “the gov spent 100s of thousands of dollars on training me, im gonna use that sh—.”
“Towards the end of May and beginning June, the Grizzlies’ discussions of attacks on law enforcement matured,” according to the court filings.
In late May Carrillo allegedly messaged Ybarra that he wanted to commit a “cartel style” attack and the two met to discuss the plan. Ybarra admitted to FBI agents that he met with Carrillo in his van and they assembled an assault rifle together.
Two days later, Carrillo allegedly opened fire at a guard booth at a federal building in Oakland, killing Underwood and wounding his partner as they stood guard during a protest over the police killing of George Floyd.
Prosecutors said Carrillo used the protest as cover for the crime and for his escape.
The search for Carrillo ended eight days later when he allegedly ambushed and killed Gutzwiller and injured four other officers in Santa Cruz County as they surrounded his home.
Between the two killings, members of the Grizzly Scouts continued to discuss posing as members of “Antifa” and killing police officers as a way to kick off an all-out confrontation between the police and those groups, according to court documents.
On the day of the shooting in Santa Cruz County, Carrillo allegedly messaged Grizzly Scout members asking them to come to his aid.
Some replied that they were too far away. Rush advised him to delete the data on his phone and evade capture.
Prosecutors said the Grizzly Scouts erased group discussions on their phones about planned attacks on police and moved to a different platform to communicate.
According to the court documents, it was clear the group was mad at Carrillo for making it more difficult for them to operate.
“ ‘He removed our platform and robbed our message’ Rush moaned. ‘Unfortunately we would almost have to wait for the next one,’ he said, meaning the next opportunity to spark civil war,” the document says.
During a search of Rush’s Turlock residence in August, investigators seized three pistols, one with an extended magazine, a disassembled assault style rifle, numerous high-capacity magazines and ammunition, a bullet-proof vest, helmet, knife and a radio.
Rush and his co-defendants were scheduled to make their first court appearance in May but the hearing was continued to July 13 to give their attorneys time to review a “substantial amount of discovery” and discuss with their clients plea offers from federal prosecutors, according to a court filing.
___
(c)2021 The Modesto Bee (Modesto, Calif.)
Visit The Modesto Bee (Modesto, Calif.) at www.modbee.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
https://www.stripes.com/Branches/Air_Force/2021-06-08/air-force-sergeant-accused-of-killing-two-law-enforcement-officers-trained-with-calif-militia-led-by-army-veteran-prosec-1660863.html
The case for prosecuting Donald Trump
FUTURE-PROOFING THE PRESIDENCY
Donald Trump brought our democracy to the brink and exposed its weak spots. How to thwart the next American tyrant.
BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD
https://apps.bostonglobe.com/opinion/graphics/2021/06/future-proofing-the-presidency/part-6-the-case-for-prosecuting-donald-trump/?fbclid=IwAR24Y7Pu9qwErEVkXgY9prHaIO7tlmPDB78B-ETYE-_DyyKPuri5_fIZZvQ
Saving American democracy for the long run requires a clear condemnation of the Trump presidency. That means making clear that no one is above the law.
Norms in a democracy are only as good as our willingness to enforce them.
After the precedent-busting, lawbreaking presidency of Donald Trump, Congress needs to pass new laws to constrain future officeholders. That’s the case the Globe has made in this series: curbs on the pardon power, safeguards against nepotism, broadening the power of Congress to investigate the president, protections for whistle-blowers, requirements that presidents make financial disclosures to root out conflicts of interest.
All of that is crucial to protect Americans against a repeat of the last four years.
"Presidents also need a clear message, one that will echo through history, that breaking the law in the Oval Office will actually be punished."
But imposing stricter rules on future presidents, by itself, is clearly insufficient. Those presidents also need a clear message, one that will echo through history, that breaking the law in the Oval Office will actually be punished — that ethics policies and legal requirements, both the existing ones and those Congress will hopefully enact in the future, are more than just words on paper.
Trump’s presidency didn’t just expose glaring legal weaknesses: It also made clear that our institutions are incapable of holding presidents accountable for breaking even our existing laws. If Congress had played the role the Founders envisioned, by removing Trump from the presidency after his criminality became clear in the Ukraine affair, that might have been enough of a deterrent to scare future presidents straight. But lawmakers didn’t.
"Filing charges against former leaders is not a radical step."
So now there is only one way left to restore deterrence and convey to future presidents that the rule of law applies to them. The Justice Department must abandon two centuries of tradition by indicting and prosecuting Donald Trump for his conduct in office.
That’s not a recommendation made lightly. The longstanding reluctance to prosecute former leaders is based on legitimate concerns about the justice system being used to settle political scores. But filing charges against former leaders is not a radical step, either: Foreign democracies, including South Korea, Italy, and France, routinely manage to prosecute crooked former leaders without starting down a slippery slope to authoritarianism. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France was recently found guilty of bribery, a decade after his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, was convicted of corruption. France’s democracy and its image around the world remain intact.
In the case of Trump, prosecutors would have plenty of potential crimes from which to choose. While Trump may be prosecuted for financial crimes he potentially committed before he became president, what is most important to go after are his actions during his time in office, especially those after the 2020 election, which culminated in fomenting a full-on, violent assault on American democracy.
...
Congress’s failure to hold Trump accountable is one reason to break with precedent and prosecute him now. Another, perhaps more obvious reason, is that Trump’s misconduct ought to be handled differently because it was different. There’s a far stronger case that he committed serious crimes in office than could plausibly be made against even the country’s most unethical previous presidents. One of the reasons no president in history has been prosecuted for actions stemming from his presidency is that none of them before the 45th tried to instigate a coup.
"A commander in chief tried his very best to subvert democracy. He attacked his own country. Five people died."
The reluctance to prosecute presidents is deep-rooted, and extreme caution does make sense. (The last thing that the country needs is for Trump to be charged, tried, and then acquitted.) But it cannot be the case that there is no line — no hypothetical act of presidential criminality that would not rise to the level of seriousness that merits setting aside our qualms. And if one accepts that there is a line, it’s hard to imagine Donald Trump didn’t cross it. The events of Jan. 6, and those that led up to them, were an extreme abuse of power that few ever imagined a president would commit. A commander in chief tried his very best to subvert democracy. He attacked his own country. Five people died. Allowing him to go unpunished would set a far more dangerous precedent than having Trump stand trial. To reform the presidency so that the last four years are never repeated, the country must go beyond passing laws: It must make clear through its actions that no person, not even the president, is above them.
MUCH MORE
https://apps.bostonglobe.com/opinion/graphics/2021/06/future-proofing-the-presidency/part-6-the-case-for-prosecuting-donald-trump/?fbclid=IwAR24Y7Pu9qwErEVkXgY9prHaIO7tlmPDB78B-ETYE-_DyyKPuri5_fIZZvQ
IRS Is Investigating Release of Tax Information of Wealthy Americans
ProPublica published tax, income details of people including Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett
By Richard Rubin
June 8, 2021 3:11 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/irs-is-investigating-release-of-tax-information-of-wealthy-americans-11623179470?mod=e2tw
WASHINGTON— Federal authorities are investigating the release of wealthy Americans’ tax information, Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Charles Rettig said Tuesday.
ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization, published details about the reported income and tax payments of some of the richest Americans, including Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. CEO Warren Buffett.
Taxpayer information is confidential, and there are potential criminal penalties for IRS employees or others who release such information. Mr. Rettig told lawmakers that there were internal and external investigations beginning, with potential prosecutions to follow.
“I share the concerns of every American for the sensitive and private nature and confidential nature of the information the IRS receives,” he said during a Senate Finance Committee hearing that had been scheduled before the information was released. “Trust and confidence in the Internal Revenue Service is sort of the bedrock of asking people and requiring people to provide financial information.”
The ProPublica article said the news organization didn’t know the identity of its source and described the information it received as IRS data on thousands of people covering more than 15 years. It isn’t certain that the information—a highly unusual airing of private tax data—came directly from the IRS or whether the agency was hacked in some way. The article highlighted years in which Mr. Bezos and others paid little or no income tax.
“The unauthorized disclosure of confidential government information is illegal,” said Lily Adams, a Treasury Department spokeswoman. She said that the matter has been referred to the Treasury’s inspector general, the IRS inspector general, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and federal prosecutors in Washington.
Spokespeople for the IRS inspector general’s office, the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office didn’t immediately comment.
The IRS has systems that track employees’ access to taxpayer information, and the agency has fired workers in the past for unauthorized access. But an inspector general’s report last year said there were potential gaps in those systems.
The data in the ProPublica story attaches specific numbers and names to a controversial but well-known feature of the U.S. income tax system—that people can amass significant wealth as their companies grow but report relatively little income if they don’t sell shares or receive dividends. They can borrow against that wealth to finance their living expenses. Then, when they die, those appreciated assets aren’t taxed as capital gains.
The Biden administration has proposed changing that system by imposing capital-gains taxes on appreciated assets at death, and Democrats pointed to the disclosures on Tuesday as evidence for their case.
“The big picture is this data shows that the country’s wealthiest, who profited immensely during the pandemic, have not been paying their fair share,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.), the chairman of the Finance Committee.
But the disclosures could hurt support for a different piece of the Biden tax-enforcement plan, which would require banks and other financial institutions to provide the IRS with annual information about flows in and out of accounts. Republicans had already been balking at that idea even before Tuesday.
“This violation of individual privacy and confidentiality could easily happen to ordinary Americans and small businesses, and that is what concerns me,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R., Mont.)
Write to Richard Rubin at richard.rubin@wsj.com
https://www.wsj.com/articles/irs-is-investigating-release-of-tax-information-of-wealthy-americans-11623179470?mod=e2tw
George Conway @gtconway3d The cicadas in my backyard are almost old enough to remember when he said this:
THREAD
The cicadas in my backyard are almost old enough to remember when he said this: https://t.co/msCjXLQjmr pic.twitter.com/5aKNxIvHar
— George Conway (@gtconway3d) June 8, 2021
Pharmacist who 'intentionally' destroyed 500 Covid vaccine doses gets three years in prison
Steven Brandenburg told a federal judge on Tuesday that he was "desperately sorry and ashamed" about what he did.
June 8, 2021, 5:07 PM BST / Updated June 8, 2021, 5:17 PM BST
By David K. Li
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pharmacist-who-intentionally-destroyed-500-covid-vaccine-doses-gets-three-n1269944
A federal judge on Tuesday sentenced the Wisconsin pharmacist who destroyed 500 Covid-19 vaccine doses to three years in prison, according to NBC affiliate WTMJ of Milwaukee.
Back in January, Steven Brandenburg agreed to plead guilty to two counts of attempting to tamper with consumer products with reckless disregard.
Theoretically, he could have faced a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison for each count. But under federal sentencing guidelines, Brandenburg was looking at up to 51 months behind bars.
After completing his 36-month sentence, Brandenburg will face another three years of supervised release.
Brandenburg was fired from the Aurora Medical Center in Grafton, Wisconsin, in December after the hospital said he admitted he "intentionally removed the vaccine from refrigeration.”
Brandenburg told the court on Tuesday that he was "desperately sorry and ashamed" about what he did, WTMJ reported.
"I just want to finish by saying I am greatly ashamed and I thank you, your honor, for allowing me to say that," he said.
Brandenburg intentionally removed doses of the Moderna vaccine from its refrigeration during two successive overnight shifts in December, prosecutors said, possibly rendering them ineffective because the vaccine vials must be stored at specific temperatures.
Brandenburg then returned the vaccines to the refrigerator after knowing that they had been left out, leading to 57 people being injected with the potentially spoiled inoculations, according to the Department of Justice.
Grafton police said Brandenburg is an "admitted conspiracy theorist" who "told investigators that he believed that Covid-19 vaccine was not safe for people and could harm them and change their DNA."
The Wisconsin Pharmacy Examining Board suspended Brandenburg’s license earlier this year, which prohibits him from practicing at state pharmacies.
This is a developing story, please refresh here for updates
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pharmacist-who-intentionally-destroyed-500-covid-vaccine-doses-gets-three-n1269944
Guess what? The Trump coup against American democracy never stopped
If you think the coup attempt is over, or that Jan. 6 was a "defeat" for fascism, you're not paying attention
By CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
PUBLISHED JUNE 8, 2021 9:40AM (EDT)
https://www.salon.com/2021/06/08/guess-what-the-trump-coup-against-american-democracy-never-stopped/
I would like to share a public secret: Donald Trump and the Republican Party's coup attempt was not defeated on Jan. 6. The war against American democracy continues — and is gaining momentum.
All one has to do is take off one's blinders to see it. Unfortunately, too many Americans, including the Democratic Party's leadership, the professional smart people and other members of the country's mainstream media and chattering class, have waited for months to acknowledge what has been happening in plain sight.
Republicans have rejected any independent investigation into the events of Jan. 6. Why? Because they feel implicated, explicitly or otherwise, in supporting and collaborating with Trump's coup attempt and the assault on the U.S. Capitol.
By rejecting any efforts to properly investigate those events, Republicans are also giving permission and encouragement for similar acts of right-wing political violence and terrorism in the future.
Instead of being cowed by President Biden's victory and the events of Jan. 6, the Republican Party and Trump's larger neofascist movement have only been further empowered in their campaign to end America's multiracial democracy.
With attempts to pass voting restrictions in nearly all states, Republicans are trying to impose a new Jim Crow regime on Black and brown people. This strategy involves onerous ID requirements, gerrymandering, threats of intimidation and violence, severe limitations on polling places, absentee voting and early voting, and other selectively enforced laws and rules aimed at making it more difficult for nonwhite people — an indispensable part of the Democratic base — to exercise the right to vote.
Republicans are also trying to make their anti-democracy attacks "legal" by rigging America's electoral system so that only their approved candidates will win. In this near-future scenario, Democrats and others will still be permitted to vote — thus lending a veneer of legitimacy to Republican claims that they have won "free and fair elections" — but the outcome will be already have been determined.
This strategy, which political scientists describe as "managed democracy," is common to autocratic regimes such as Vladimir Putin's Russia, Viktor Orbán's Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Turkey.
In the Atlantic, Adam Serwer explores the Republican attack on democracy in further detail, explaining that Republicans did not block a Jan. 6 commission purely because they fear Trump or want to "move on":
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They are blocking a January 6 commission because they agree with the underlying ideological claim of the rioters, which is that Democratic electoral victories should not be recognized. Because they regard such victories as inherently illegitimate — the result of fraud, manipulation, or the votes of people who are not truly American — they believe that the law should be changed to ensure that elections more accurately reflect the will of Real Americans, who by definition vote Republican. They believe that there is nothing for them to investigate, because the actual problem is not the riot itself but the unjust usurpation of power that occurred when Democrats won. Absent that provocation, the rioters would have stayed home. …
For the Trumpist base, defined by the sense that a country that belongs to them is slipping away, a future full of elections contested by a right-wing party and a slightly less right-wing party would be an ideal outcome. Trump's election was, among other things, a gesture of outrage from his supporters at having to share the country with those unlike them. Successfully restricting democracy so as to minimize the political power of rival constituencies would mean, at least as far as governing the country is concerned, that they would not have to. Most elected Republicans have repudiated the violence of the Capitol riot, but they share the belief of the rank and file that the rioters' hearts were in the right place.
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What is the next step in this ongoing coup against American democracy? Trump and his acolytes have floated the premise that the Great Leader will somehow remove Biden from office and resume the presidency in August.
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who serves as a kind of oracle means for Donald Trump and his inner circle to communicate with the outer world, alleged in a tweet last week that Donald Trump "has been telling a number of people he's in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August."
Charles Cooke of the National Review, a venerable conservative publication, has confirmed that Trump really believes this:
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I can attest, from speaking to an array of different sources, that Donald Trump does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former senators David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be "reinstated" to office this summer after "audits" of the 2020 elections in Arizona, Georgia, and a handful of other states have been completed. I can attest, too, that Trump is trying hard to recruit journalists, politicians, and other influential figures to promulgate this belief — not as a fundraising tool or an infantile bit of trolling or a trial balloon, but as a fact.
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Trump is not merely emitting swamp gas here. He may no longer be president, but he remains de facto leader of the Republican Party and commands the loyalty of tens of millions of Americans, including a loyal core group of cult members who have shown themselves to be willing to kill or even die for him.
Trump's claims about a return to power this summer should not be rejected as harmless delusions. They are orders to his followers, who have been primed for violence against their "enemies" by the right-wing propaganda machine through the technique known as "stochastic terrorism".
Public opinion research has shown that at least half of Republicans actually believe that Trump is still the rightful president. A large proportion of Republicans either approve of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol or find various excuses for it. Earlier research has found that a significant percentage of Republicans (especially Trumpists) are willing to support political violence to overthrow the United States government if it is "necessary" to protect their so-called way of life.
A majority of Republicans also believe in the Big Lie (and the various other little lies which sustain it) about the 2020 election. Almost a third of Republicans endorse major portions of the antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory and its fictions about an apocalyptic battle that will destroy the Democrats and other "elites" and return Trump to power.
Many questions remain about the scale of the coup plot and the role of the military and other national security forces on Jan. 6. Michael Flynn, the retired and disgraced three-star general who briefly served as Trump's national security adviser, recently appeared to endorse a military coup similar to the one that recently took place in Myanmar. We should not forget that Flynn reportedly encouraged Trump last December to declare martial law in order to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
It is true that Donald Trump has no legal means of retaking power before the 2024 election. But coups and other acts of political terrorism and violence are almost by definition "illegal."
In an expression of glee at the anguish of an aspiring tyrant, some liberals are celebrating Trump's belief that he will be returned to power in August as evidence that he is mentally unwell. This is not a revelation: Based on his public and private behavior, Trump's unstable mental condition has been apparent for some time. Throughout history, many authoritarians and autocratic leaders have given evidence of poor mental health. But such an amateur diagnosis, by itself, tells us little about Trump and his and neofascist movement's threat to American democracy.
In an op-ed for CNN, Michael D'Antonio, the author of "Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success," issues a warning:
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It's important to stay on guard because the bar has now been lowered: we know that a pronouncement from Trump has the potential (whether intended or not) to elicit violence from his most rabid followers. …
Under our Constitution, Trump cannot be reinstated, which seems to leave the most rabid and ill-informed of his supporters with the coup option. I'm not saying that a coup is possible. However, January 6 showed that some in the Trump base can be spun up to the point where they turn violent. Add the sham audits, conspiracy theory grifters and a former President who has shown he's not inclined toward responsible behavior, and the prospect of trouble, come the hot days of August, is real.
This means that as we attend to real-life concerns, like infrastructure and holding certain people responsible for January 6, we should also keep our guard up. Trump and the crazies aren't done messing with us.
---
On Twitter, CNN analyst Asha Rangappa echoed D'Antonio's concerns: "Trump's claim that he will be 'reinstalled' this summer is a repeat of the same playbook that led to January 6. Give your followers false hope in a completely unattainable outcome, so that when it inevitably doesn't happen, you can channel their disappointment into rage."
It is tempting to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. Trump and his cult members have created an alternate reality in which his victorious return to power is imminent and their collective enemies will be vanquished and punished.
Many of the same people who are now laughing at Trump's fantasies also proclaimed in smug confidence that America would never elect a buffoon and fascist such as Donald Trump to the presidency. Many also said it was "hysterical" or "foolish" to worry that Trump would attempt a coup after his defeat in the 2020 election.
If these same events were happening in another country (an imaginary land that I have previously termed "Trumpistan"), America's news media and political leaders would be raising the alarm about an imminent coup or political crisis.
The news stories about Trumpistan might inform us of a number of alarming developments. Indeed, they might read something like this:
---
A recently deposed president, who attempted a coup only months ago, is publicly talking about another attempt. His forces include paramilitaries, street gangs and at least one former high-ranking general. The former president's propagandists and spokespeople continue to amplify him and depict him as the rightful leader. He retains a remarkably high level of support among his followers, who eagerly await his return to power. They number in the tens of millions, and include a core of potentially violent and heavily armed fanatics. Meanwhile, the opposition party and the majority of the public increasingly fear the loss of their already-weakened democracy. Minority groups, including Black people, immigrants, LGBTQ folks and leftists, fear reprisals and other attacks by the former president and his followers, who appear to be escalating their attacks in hopes of seizing full power.
---
Ultimately, the Trump-Republican coup attempt never really ended. (At most, it paused briefly to catch its breath.) The American people, along with many of the country's leaders and its mainstream news media, tried to convince themselves otherwise. Denying the reality of this escalating crisis will not save American democracy. The battle for America's future is now existential. Those who still believe in democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law are running out of time.
CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com. He also hosts a weekly podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show. Chauncey can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.
https://www.salon.com/2021/06/08/guess-what-the-trump-coup-against-american-democracy-never-stopped/
"Planned in plain sight": Why Donald Trump makes no attempt to hide his insurrectionist plots
Trump and his insurrectionists hid their plots in plain sight — and they may be doing it again
By AMANDA MARCOTTE
PUBLISHED JUNE 8, 2021 1:32PM (EDT)
https://www.salon.com/2021/06/08/planned-in-plain-sight-why-donald-trump-makes-no-attempt-to-hide-his-insurrectionist-plots/
On Tuesday morning, a new Senate report revealed even more of what is increasingly obvious: The January 6 Capitol insurrection was both surprisingly predictable and yet widely ignored by the people who had the power to stop it.
"The U.S. Capitol Police had specific intelligence that supporters of President Donald Trump planned to mount an armed invasion of the Capitol at least two weeks before the Jan. 6 riot," the Washington Post reports, "but a series of omissions and miscommunications kept that information from reaching front-line officers targeted by the violence."
The report itself is incredibly bureaucratic and, being bipartisan, overly delicate with the fragile feelings of Republicans who continue to support Trump despite his overt incitement of the insurrection. But the most important and remarkable aspect of the report is how it lays out that Capitol intelligence officials downplayed the threat of violence, even though, to quote the report author Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., "The attack was, quite frankly, planned in plain sight."
Intelligence officers had a huge amount of information about a planned attack because the insurrectionists were openly talking about it online and in great detail. But despite this, intelligence officials deemed the likelihood of an attack as "remote" and "improbable," choosing instead to ignore right-wing militia types openly sharing maps and strategies for storming the building. There are a lot of theories as to why Capitol intelligence simply didn't take the insurrectionists seriously, but it really may be as simple as this: Hiding in plain sight works — at least when it comes to white conservatives with terroristic inclinations.
Most of us, including intelligence officials, reasonably expect that people engaging in a criminal conspiracy prefer to do so in secret. (Cue the scene from "The Wire" of Stringer Bell dressing down an underling for "taking notes on a criminal f--king conspiracy!") But it appears that scheming right in the open was more effective for the Capitol insurrectionists precisely because it cut across the "common sense" expectation. All the guns and maps talk was easy for intelligence officials to write off as mere fantasy play-acting, instead of a serious plan.
And really, is it any surprise that the Capitol insurrectionists pulled off the "hiding in plain sight" strategy? They were only following the lead of the chief instigator of the insurrection, Trump himself. For years, Trump successfully demonstrated that the best way to get away with crimes is to commit them loudly. From the "grab 'em by the pussy" tape to the flagrant public bribe-taking to giving Russian conspiracists instructions on camera to witness tampering on Twitter, Trump realized that being bold about crimes and corruption keeps people from taking it seriously.
The reason it worked is simple: Trump didn't bother to hide his corruption. That lulled people into believing it couldn't really be that bad. It was easy for Trump apologists to write it off as "jokes" or otherwise no big deal, because if it was serious, then he would take pains to hide it, right? It was only when Trump did take measures to hide his behavior — in the attempt to blackmail the Ukrainian president into falsifying evidence for a smear of Joe Biden — that his malfeasance finally got the attention it deserved. And it was all because that particular scandal fit our pre-existing notion that if it's really a crime, the criminals try to hide what they're doing.
Trump used this "hiding in plain sight" strategy to organize and incite the January 6 insurrection.
In the days after the Capitol was stormed, the Just Security blog put together a comprehensive timeline of Trump's year of incitement and what was remarkable is how open Trump was about what he was doing. He repeatedly heaped praise on right-wing militias that used threats of violence against public officials and Biden campaign staff. He started in early on the Big Lie, insisting for months ahead of the election that the only way he could lose is if it were stolen. He even used a presidential debate stage to issue instructions to the Proud Boys, telling them to be on "stand by" before he gave them the time and place for the storming in an infamous tweet reading, "Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!"
The extremely public nature of Trump's incitement, however, perversely gave congressional Republicans the cover they needed to claim he didn't do the thing he obviously did. Repeatedly, Republicans insisted that Trump was merely speaking metaphorically and not literally with all his "fight" and "take back" language. That Trump didn't hide or show shame aided this nonsense excuse, because it really is just that hard to believe that someone would be so bold and public about a criminal conspiracy. And because Trump left the detailed work of the insurrection to the people who organized it online — basically, crowdsourcing an insurrection — it allows Republicans to pretend that he wasn't the ringleader.
Many Stringer Bell jokes were made about how Trump and his cronies do their crimes right out in the public view and how supposedly foolish this was. But really, was it?
Most of Trump's cronies are walking around free. Trump openly and flagrantly attempted a coup, and he's not only not in jail for it, but he's still the de facto head of the Republican Party. Whenever anyone points out that he's a literal seditionist, Republicans just shrug and pretend all of that violence and insurrection talk was just jokes and fantasies. Because of the politics of tip-toeing around Republican feelings, the Senate report focuses on "better planning, training and intelligence gathering," according to the Washington Post, and "its contents steer clear of offering any assessment or conclusion about Trump's responsibility for the riot." That is unfortunate because while intelligence failures were a problem, the real reason the Capitol riot happened is because Trump was empowered by the GOP and right-wing media to spread his lies and incite violence without consequence. And that problem hasn't been addressed in any meaningful way at all. If anything, it's just gotten worse. Trump has been using the media to disseminate yet another date for his followers to take action — sometime in August — just as he targeted January 6. And he used a platform offered to him by the Republican party, a big speech at a North Carolina event, to continue stoking insurrections by claiming that Joe Biden's electoral win was the "crime of the century."
Putting more cops around the Capitol Building doesn't address this larger issue. If there is more violence, it's unlikely to target the Capitol, in no small part because Trump's followers understand that it's likely to be more secure than it was January 6.
No, the real issue here is the "hiding in plain sight" problem.
Trump and his cronies have figured out how to use media and social media as a tool to crowdsource ideas for a fascistic takeover of the U.S. government. They throw out conspiracy theories and let the MAGAheads figure out the details for themselves about how to make it happen. It's inefficient, sure. Many of the schemes that the red hats tease out online fail to manifest in person. Still, it allows Trump to keep his hands relatively clean because he gets to pretend he's just spitballing instead of giving instructions. It's on other people to work out the details, from the Republicans passing state laws to make it easier to steal elections to the red hats who have now been given a new date to fixate on as a possible next target. As long as people's heads remain in the sand about what Trump is doing, the threat of more violence remains active.
AMANDA MARCOTTE
Amanda Marcotte is a senior politics writer at Salon and the author of "Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself." Follow her on Twitter @AmandaMarcotte and sign up for her biweekly politics newsletter, Standing Room Only.
https://www.salon.com/2021/06/08/planned-in-plain-sight-why-donald-trump-makes-no-attempt-to-hide-his-insurrectionist-plots/
Joe Manchin is opposing big parts of Biden’s agenda as the Koch network pressures him
PUBLISHED TUE, JUN 8 202110:11 AM EDTUPDATED 2 HOURS AGO
Brian Schwartz
@SCHWARTZBCNBC
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/joe-manchin-is-opposing-big-parts-of-bidens-agenda-as-the-koch-network-pressures-him.html
KEY POINTS
* The Koch network has been actively pressuring Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin to oppose key legislative items linked to Biden’s agenda, including filibuster reform and voting rights legislation.
* The lobbying effort appears to be paying off. Manchin, in a recent op-ed, wrote that he opposed eliminating the filibuster and that he would not vote for the For the People Act.
* The Koch network specifically calls on its grassroots supporters to push Manchin, a conservative Democrat, to be against some of his party’s legislative priorities.
The political advocacy group backed by billionaire Charles Koch has been pressuring Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., to oppose key parts of the Democratic agenda, including filibuster reform and voting rights legislation.
That lobbying effort appears to be paying off. Manchin, in a recent op-ed, wrote that he opposed eliminating the filibuster and that he would not vote for the For the People Act, which, advocates say, would limit the influence of big donors on elections.
President Joe Biden has called some of the voting restrictions proposed by Republican leaders in several states “sick” and “un-American.” The president has praised the For the People Act and has said the filibuster must be changed.
Sixty votes are needed to break the filibuster in the Senate in order to allow legislation to get a final vote. Democrats, who have 50 seats, have narrow control of the chamber because of Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote.
CNBC reviewed an episode of a Koch policy group Americans for Prosperity’s video series, along with ads crafted by the organization. The network specifically calls on its grassroots supporters to push Manchin, a conservative Democrat, to be against some of his party’s legislative priorities.
Americans for Prosperity launched a website titled West Virginia Values, which calls on people to email Manchin “to be The Voice West Virginia Needs In D.C. — Reject Washington’s Partisan Agenda.”
It then lists all of the items Manchin has promised to oppose, including the idea of eliminating the filibuster, the For the People Act and packing the Supreme Court. It then shows everything the group believes Manchin should oppose, including Biden’s infrastructure plan and the union-friendly PRO Act.
Americans for Prosperity leaders took part in one of their video series with their West Virginia state director in May where they praised Manchin for voicing his opposition to abolishing the filibuster. Both Americans for Prosperity and Manchin have said they believe eliminating the filibuster would exacerbate partisanship.
The video was reviewed by CNBC after it was posted to the group’s Facebook page.
“A wise man once said that it takes a lot of courage to stand up to your enemies but that it takes even more courage up to stand up to your friends,” Ted Ellis, director of coalitions for Americans for Prosperity’s government affairs team, told the audience. “And that’s what Joe Manchin is doing right now. He’s displaying, I think, a lot of courage and we should applaud that.”
“Our grassroots are critically important and it would be difficult to say that they are more important anywhere than West Virginia right now because of the dramatic impact that our grassroots have in West Virginia in encouraging Senator Manchin to stand strong on this point,” Casey Mattox, vice president of legal and judicial Strategy at Americans for Prosperity, said during the presentation.
Ellis is listed on a recent lobbying report as one of the Americans for Prosperity officials who in the first quarter of 2021 lobbied against the For the People Act and Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan. The lobbyists targeted House and Senate lawmakers.
In a statement to CNBC, a spokesman Americans for Prosperity did not deny whether its officials have spoken directly to Manchin or his staff about the For the People Act. The representative praised Manchin’s stance on the bill and likened the group’s stance to that of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Sen. Manchin has long blazed his own path, and on this issue, we agree: Extreme partisanship gets in the way of finding positive solutions,” Lo Isidro, a spokesman for AFP, told CNBC in an emailed statement on Tuesday. “Unfortunately, this bill and the tactics some are using to pass it would make it harder to work together – chilling debate, worsening partisanship, and setting up a false choice between voting rights and free speech. We’re for both. Like the ACLU, our concerns focus on the portion that targets the First Amendment. And we’ll continue to defend those rights.”
A spokesman for Manchin did not return a request for comment.
Americans for Prosperity also launched a radio ad in West Virginia that quotes Manchin himself saying Democrats aren’t for the Green New Deal or Medicare for All. “Encourage Senator Manchin to keep his promise. To reject a partisan agenda that will host West Virginia’s back from meeting their full potential,” the voiceover says in the ad.
The Koch political network is just one of many groups that have orchestrated outside efforts to oppose the Democratic-backed election bill.
The New Yorker reported on a meeting between Koch leaders and representatives from other conservative-leaning groups about how they have tried to stop the bill from passing but that some of their own polling shows the campaign finance elements of the legislation is widely supported.
Heritage Action and other groups organized a rally in March in West Virginia that was meant to pressure Manchin to oppose similar legislation to the For the People Act, , according to the watchdog group Documented.net.
Manchin has defended the Kochs from attacks by his own party.
“People want jobs. You don’t beat up people. I mean, I don’t agree with their politics or philosophically, but, you know, they’re Americans, they’re doing — paying their taxes,” he said in response to questions about party leaders blasting the Kochs.
“They’re not breaking the law. They’re providing jobs,” he said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/joe-manchin-is-opposing-big-parts-of-bidens-agenda-as-the-koch-network-pressures-him.html
US targets China rare earth magnets for possible tariffs
Biden considers probe of neodymium magnets in bid to reduce dependency on Beijing
Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington 8 HOURS AGO
https://www.ft.com/content/30dac928-e54a-4925-a1fa-e8bc6a7adae7
The Biden administration is considering an investigation into whether imports of rare earth magnets made largely in China pose a national security threat that could warrant the imposition of tariffs.
The White House said the commerce department would examine whether to probe neodymium magnets, which are used to manufacture everything from smartphones to electric vehicle motors.
President Joe Biden is considering the move as part of measures the White House unveiled on Tuesday to boost the resilience of US supply chains in areas including rare earths, food and pharmaceuticals amid concerns about over-reliance on China.
The administration will decide whether to investigate the national security implications of neodymium magnet imports under Section 232 of a 1962 trade law, which was rarely used until former president Donald Trump employed it to justify tariffs on steel and aluminium imports from US allies.
“In the case of neodymium magnets, those tariffs would be directed squarely at China, which dominates their manufacture,” said Martijn Rasser, a technology expert at the Center for a New American Security in Washington. “If the tariffs are high enough, that could provide financial incentives to build up a US domestic industry.”
Washington has grown increasingly concerned about China’s dominance in rare earths, 17 metallic elements that are used to manufacture commercial goods such as computer hard drives and military products such as radar, sonar and precision-guided missiles.
The Financial Times reported in February that China was considering limiting the export of rare earths used to produce F-35 fighter jets.
“We’re quite dependent on imports, particularly from China, of neodymium rare earth magnets. Section 232 is another tool we could take to help?.?.?.?reduce our dependency,” said a senior US official.
“We’re not looking to wage trade wars with our allies and partners,” the official added.
When Biden ordered the review of supply chains, he put the priority on semiconductors, rare earths, pharmaceuticals and electric vehicle batteries.
Officials said the administration would use the Defense Production Act — a 1950 Korean war-era law that allows the US to compel industry to prioritise government contracts to aid national security — to return the production of 50-100 critical drugs from overseas.
The energy department plans to release a 10-year plan to develop a domestic supply chain for lithium batteries, which are critical for electric vehicles, and will immediately use $17bn in lending facilities to support that effort. The agriculture department will separately commit $4bn to help strengthen and diversify US food supply chains.
Biden will also try to host a forum with allies to boost supply chain co-operation. He is also expected to discuss the issue at an EU-US summit next week in Brussels following the G7 meeting in Cornwall.
The official said the administration would also create a “trade strike force” led by Katherine Tai, the US trade representative, that would propose enforcement actions against countries engaged in unfair trade practices that erode the resilience of US supply chains.
VIDEO - RARE EARTHS - https://next-media-api.ft.com/renditions/16002458205540/1280x720.mp4
Follow Demetri Sevastopulo on Twitter
https://www.ft.com/content/30dac928-e54a-4925-a1fa-e8bc6a7adae7
A damning Senate report on Jan. 6 shows what Republicans want to keep buried
Opinion by Greg Sargent
Columnist
June 8, 2021 at 3:52 p.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/08/damning-senate-report-jan-6-shows-what-republicans-want-keep-buried/
It’s sometimes said that history is written by the victors, but if Republicans get their way, the history of the Jan. 6 insurrection will be written largely by the perpetrators and the enablers.
That’s the takeaway from a major new Senate report on security lapses at the Capitol that was released Tuesday. While the report is well executed on that topic, it’s also notable for what it does not cover: It does not officially describe the attack as an “insurrection,” instead opting for the word “attack,” and it avoids a frank discussion of the role played by one Donald J. Trump.
In short, the only history of the insurrection that Republicans will acknowledge is one that carefully sanitizes the role in inciting the mob played by the then-president — and by Republicans themselves.
What’s more, the only permissible history for them is one that buries another profoundly consequential truth: that Trump fully intended to disrupt the election’s conclusion by inciting a mob attack on duly elected lawmakers. Republicans refuse to reckon with this event as an act of mass political violence, one in which they are deeply implicated.
What the report avoided
The scope and descriptions in the report — which bears the names of Republican and Democratic leaders on the Senate Homeland Security and Rules committees — had to undergo extensive discussions to get GOP buy-in, a Democratic aide on one of the committees says.
“To get bipartisan agreement, the language had to be carefully negotiated,” the aide told me.
The result was that the report minimized the importance of key topics. Among these were the extent of Trump’s lies about the illegitimacy of the election in the run-up to the attack, and the degree to which Trump-supporting rioters were driven by the express goal of subverting the outcome, the aide tells me.
For instance, in the section entitled “Events of January 6,” the report carefully notes that after the networks called the outcome, Trump “continued to assert that the election was stolen from him,” without noting explicitly that this was false, or that he’d told this lie relentlessly in previous days to whip up supporters to descend on the Capitol.
The report also notes that in his remarks inciting the mob that day, Trump’s “statements focused on” the electoral count in Congress, and carefully recounts that he “encouraged his supporters to go to the Capitol.”
But the report doesn’t state outright that Trump repeatedly urged the mob to help subvert that count, or that he expressly directed the mob’s anger toward then-Vice President Mike Pence, while again calling on Pence to carry out that subversion. Instead, the report relegates Trump’s full remarks that day to the appendix, rather than rendering an official accounting of those matters.
Similarly, CNN reports that negotiators carefully avoided using the word “insurrection” for these same reasons.
To the degree the report does shed light on the depths of Trump’s lying and the rioters’ motives, it mostly transmits this via quotes and transcripts from key intelligence and law enforcement officials, rather than taking an official stand on them.
To be clear, there are understandable reasons for Democrats to undergo such negotiations to get Republican buy-in. The most important aspect of this report is its documentation of security failures and recommendations to law enforcement, which we want Republicans to endorse.
On that front, the report documents that the Capitol Police had more information indicating mobilization for a violent attack than previously known and that extensive communication breakdowns prevented that information from being acted upon. It documents numerous glaring failures of other kinds.
The report does offer new detail on the insurrectionary nature of the assault. It documents how intelligence officials collected information indicating that some attackers fully intended to terrorize lawmakers and saw themselves as a strike force overturning the election on Trump’s behalf.
But the report doesn’t meaningfully explore the deeper significance of the fact that this was not just a physical attack; it was an effort to subvert democracy through intimidation and violence, at the express behest of the president of the United States, who retains extensive GOP backing.
Nor does the report discuss the extent to which Republican lawmakers fed Trump’s lies about the election for many weeks, or the role of this in inciting the rioters, or the degree to which some GOP lawmakers themselves prompted the Jan. 6 event.
Obviously, this is in part due to the understandable decision to limit the scope of the report to security matters. But this is precisely the point: This limited scope is the only one that Republicans will allow.
Remember, when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) opposed a bipartisan Jan. 6 commission, he declared that existing investigations such as this one were sufficient. This narrow focus on security is what Republicans want.
To be fair, the Biden administration deserves some blame. Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the chair of the Homeland Security committee, says he’s “disappointed” with the failure of some agencies to fully cooperate with this probe.
We need a full accounting
In the end, though, this Senate report shows how powerful a fuller Jan. 6 accounting could be. It could document in similarly compelling detail the role of Trump’s lies in inciting the insurrection and the conversations Trump might have had with other lawmakers during the attack, demonstrating his true intentions.
More broadly, a full accounting would inevitably shed light on the growing number of Republicans who have openly renounced any obligation to accept election losses as legitimate, and the overlap of that with the ongoing right-wing extremist embrace of naked political violence.
All of which, of course, constitutes exactly the accounting Republicans don’t want to see happen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/08/damning-senate-report-jan-6-shows-what-republicans-want-keep-buried/
Sidney Powell Just ‘Eviscerated’ Her Own Legal Defense, Experts Say
Adam Rawnsley, Asawin Suebsaeng
Tue, June 8, 2021, 5:21 PM·4 min read
https://money.yahoo.com/sidney-powell-just-eviscerated-her-162126316.html
Sidney Powell lost the plot.
To protect herself from a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit, the Trumpist lawyer was supposed to stick to her wacky opinions that a voting technology company somehow stole the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and not try to present the conspiracy theory as a matter of fact.
But she couldn’t help herself. And now, legal experts tell The Daily Beast, she may be in even-more serious trouble.
Powell drew nationwide attention last month for her ’s bizarre claim at a Dallas MAGA rally that the twice-impeached former President Trump could be “reinstated” as commander-in-chief. But a little-noticed portion of that appearance on May 29 may prove to be more consequential. In it, she likely damaged one of the core arguments her lawyers are using to try to fend off the billion-dollar lawsuit over her baseless claims about the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic have filed multi-billion dollar suits against Powell and others for defamation over her public claims about the company and its products, including her wild assertion that its software was part of Venezuelan plot to steal elections and created masses of fake votes for Biden. In response, Powell’s attorneys have tried to argue that her statements were not meant to be factual—but rather legally protected statements of opinion.
Even for the Trumpist Conspiracy-Peddler Sidney Powell, This Was ‘Weird as Shit’
In a March 22 motion to dismiss in the Dominion suit, Powell’s attorneys argued that “no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact” and that they are simply “her opinions and legal theories on a matter of utmost public concern.” (In the United States, statements of opinion are protected from defamation claims if they cannot be “proven as fact” or if they use “loose, figurative, or hyperbolic language which would negate the impression that the writer was seriously maintaining” a position as fact.)
But a half-hour into the panel at the Dallas Patriot Roundup late last month, Powell appeared to veer away from the defense her attorneys had set out, according to multiple videos reviewed by The Daily Beast.
“I don’t think they realized that some of us litigators were going to catch on and hold their feet to the fire and expose what really happened or that they could shut us up by, say, suing me for 4.3 billion dollars in three different states,” Powell said at the panel discussion. “Threatening me is like waving a red flag in a bull’s face.”
Dominion’s suit against her should be dismissed, Powell continued, because “number one, they don't have jurisdiction over us and number two, we meant what we said and we have the evidence to back it up.”
At the very least, the statement was a tactical error, defamation law experts say—one could come back to haunt her in court.
“That seems like an extremely damaging admission from Ms. Powell that eviscerates her main defense, which is based on a distortion of the opinion doctrine to begin with,” Ted Boutrous Jr, an attorney at Gibson Dunn and an expert on defamation law, told The Daily Beast. “Dominion will have a field day with this statement in opposing her efforts to dismiss the case before trial, and before the jury if and when the case goes to trial.”
But Powell went further. In the event Dominion’s suits against her and her legal defense organization, Defending the Republic, aren’t tossed out, “then we will get discovery against Dominion and we will be on offense,” she added.
“Powell’s rather odd statement certainly won’t help her defense,” said Sam Terilli, a professor at the University of Miami’s School of Communication and the former general counsel for the Miami Herald. “It’s just hard to know in advance, but it clearly could be a problem.”
“Her stance ‘I can prove it’ is definitely inconsistent with her lawyers’ stance “nobody would take it as anything but opinion,’ added Ken White, a First Amendment lawyer and ex-federal prosecutor. “It’s tricky, though. Generally at this stage, a court wouldn’t be considering extrinsic evidence like her statements — they consider what’s in the complaint and what’s in public record (like court filings, etc.). The way it could play out is that the judge ignores it for now but revisits it at a later stage (like summary judgment) if the claims against her survive.”
Attorneys for Powell did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast.
Powell is one of a handful of pro-Trump figures whose post-election claims about Dominion and Smartmatic voting systems have prompted defamation suits. Smartmatic and Dominion have both filed suits against Powell, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, and Fox News. In addition, Dominion has also sued Trump ally and pillow magnate Mike Lindell for his dizzying array of claims about the company’s products.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
https://money.yahoo.com/sidney-powell-just-eviscerated-her-162126316.html
Russia builds its first stealth warship
Construction of the Mercury naval corvette, which will be hard for enemies to detect, has been on the radar for years but mired in delays
By Nataliya Vasilyeva,
RUSSIA CORRESPONDENT, MOSCOW
8 June 2021 • 4:00pm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/08/russia-building-first-full-stealth-warship-criticised-excessive/
Russia is close to completing its first naval ship fully equipped with stealth technology to make it hard to detect by enemy vessels, Russian media reported on Tuesday.
The Mercury naval corvette has been mired in delays but two sources in the shipbuilding industry told Russian-state-owned news agency RIA Novosti that the vessel, dubbed Project 20386, is expected to be delivered to the navy as soon as next year.
The hull of the corvette has already been built.
Russia has in the past decade invested heavily in a sweeping rearmament programme, designed to replace the army and navy’s Soviet-era weaponry.
But some efforts to revamp the military have been affected by Western sanctions imposed on Russia for annexing Crimea in 2014 and throwing its weight behind separatists in eastern Ukraine, as the US banned exports of dual-use technology to Russia.
The country’s shipbuilders previously used stealth technology, such as a radar-absorbing coating, in some of other naval ships but Mercury is expected to be Russia’s fully stealth vessel, having a special shape minimising protrusions and crevices on its surface, according to RIA Novosti.
The warship will be armed with cruise missiles, anti-aircraft missiles and artillery. It will also have equipment for hunting and destroying submarines.
Before the annexation of Crimea, the Russian navy was going to ditch the idea of building a full-stealth military ship altogether.
In 2013 the Izvestia daily newspaper quoted a high-placed military source as saying that the ship would be too expensive, at up to 18 billion rubles (£175 million), and equipped with “excessive” weaponry it did not need, such as the Kalibr cruise missiles.
Russia’s top military-focused publication, The Military Review, ran a scathingly critical article about Mercury in April, saying that the project was doomed to fail. The Military Review pointed to reported failures in design such as the lack of necessary equipment to support the cutting-edge weaponry that Mercury is supposed to carry.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/08/russia-building-first-full-stealth-warship-criticised-excessive/
Covid deaths at lowest level since before first lockdown
Data from ONS show that, in the week ending May 28, 106 people in the UK died of Covid – 0.97 per cent of all deaths
By Joe Pinkstone
8 June 2021 • 3:04pm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/08/covid-deaths-lowest-level-since-first-lockdown-ons-finds/
Covid now accounts for the lowest proportion of deaths in the UK since before lockdown began last March, official figures show.
Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that, in the week ending May 28, 106 people in the UK died of Covid. However, across England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, a total of 10,977 people died from all causes, with the virus accounting for just 0.97 per cent of all deaths.
The rate was largely consistent across the country but London was the worst affected, with 22 Covid deaths from 880 total registrations, a rate of 2.5 per cent.
The UK-wide figure is the lowest percentage since the week ending March 13 last year, when the proportion of Covid deaths was 0.04 per cent, with five Covid-related deaths against a backdrop of 12,539 all-cause deaths.
During this early phase of the pandemic in Britain, the UK had only registered a total of five deaths from coronavirus. Boris Johnson did not announce a full nationwide lockdown until March 23.
At the peak of the second wave in mid-January, 44 per cent of all deaths in the UK were linked to the virus.
The ONS gathers its own data for England and Wales, and the figures are based on when a death was registered, not when it occurred.
National Records of Scotland produces figures for Scotland, while the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency crunches the numbers for Northern Ireland.
Collation of these datasets reveals that since March 6 last year, 856,879 people have died in the UK. Some 152,289 of those deaths were related to Covid, a pandemic-long average of 17.8 per cent or around one in six.
Of the 106 Covid-related deaths in the UK for the week ending May 28 this year, the most recent available data, England had the highest number of deaths, numbering 92. Scotland registered eight, while Wales and Northern Ireland reported three each.
But of the 95 registered Covid deaths in England and Wales, more than a quarter were registered as "involving Covid-19" but not "due to Covid", indicating that the virus was not the underlying cause of death.
The ONS estimates that in the 460 days since March 6 last year, the number of excess deaths is 115,770 above the five-year average and England accounts for 93 per cent of these.
Among people aged 75 and over in England and Wales, there were 41 Covid-linked deaths in the week ending May 28 this year, down 99.3 per cent from the 6,145 fatalities in the week ending Jan 22.
Prof Kevin McConway, emeritus professor of applied statistics at The Open University, warned that the most recent ONS figures reflect a time before cases started rising due to the Delta variant, which was first identified in India and is thought to be 40 per cent more transmissible.
"The deaths registered as involving Covid-19 in the most recent week, ending May 28, would mostly have been of people who were infected in the first week of May or before," he said.
"The upturn in new cases didn't happen until after the first week in May. So if there is going to be a rise in deaths involving Covid because of that rise in cases, it wouldn't have shown up yet in this week's death registration data."
Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, told the House of Commons on Monday that only two per cent of people hospitalised in England with the Delta variant had received two doses of a vaccine.
"We should all be reassured by this, because it shows that those vaccinated groups who previously made up the vast majority of hospitalisations are in the minority," Mr Hancock said. "We know that the vaccine is breaking links between infections, hospitalisations and deaths."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/08/covid-deaths-lowest-level-since-first-lockdown-ons-finds/
China’s Wolf Warriors Are Turning the World Against Beijing
The country seems incapable of abandoning a disastrous diplomatic strategy.
Peter Martin
8 June 2021, 05:01 BST
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-08/china-s-wolf-warriors-are-turning-the-world-against-beijing
After China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, lectured his U.S. counterparts on America’s moral failings, including police killings of Black citizens, during bilateral talks in March, national security adviser Jake Sullivan didn’t exactly argue with him. But he reminded Yang of what he called the “secret sauce” of U.S. governance: the ability to acknowledge and fix mistakes. “A confident country,” Sullivan said, “is able to look hard at its shortcomings and constantly seek to improve.” His implication, of course, was that at least in international relations China can seem unable to do the same.
As the world’s most populous nation adopts a more aggressive posture, that view is becoming widely shared. China’s growing power has coincided with a drastic deterioration in public perceptions abroad. Surveys last year by the Pew Research Center found that, in 9 of 14 major economies, negative opinions of the country had reached their highest level since Pew began polling the question more than a decade ago. In the U.S., a full 73% of respondents reported a “very unfavorable” or “somewhat unfavorable” impression of China.
...
MORE
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-08/china-s-wolf-warriors-are-turning-the-world-against-beijing
Texas Democrats Begin Voter Registration Push as G.O.P. Eyes Limits
With Republicans moving to pass new voting restrictions in the state, Democrats are starting a major statewide registration program focused on racially diverse communities.
By Nick Corasaniti
June 8, 2021, 9:00 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/us/politics/texas-voter-registration-democrats.html
The Texas Democratic Party and a coalition of allied progressive groups are set to announce a major voter registration program on Tuesday, pledging to focus on registration in racially diverse communities at a time when the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature is vowing to pass a host of new voting restrictions, many of which would disproportionately affect communities of color.
The plan, which aims to register at least one million Democrats out of the state’s three million unregistered eligible voters, will be a combination of old-school field operations, mail outreach, digital ads and door-to-door canvassing.
It comes after Texas Democrats successfully blocked the state’s expansive voting bill, known as S.B. 7, in a dramatic late-night walkout. But Republicans in the state, led by Gov. Greg Abbott, have pledged to return in a special session and pass a similar voting bill.
Such Republican efforts have “increased the need for this work,” said Luke Warford, the chief strategy officer for the Texas Democratic Party. The voter registration effort, he continued, “is certainly a way to combat voter suppression, and we need to combat voter suppression in other ways too, like the federal government to pass the For the People Act, or our House members to stop whatever the next iteration of S.B. 7 is in a special session.”
The huge voter registration effort comes as Democrats across the country are struggling to stymie the Republican-led push to enact new voting restrictions through state legislatures that the G.O.P. controls. As of May 14, lawmakers had passed 22 new laws in 14 states to make the process of voting more difficult, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a research institute.
While Democrats nationwide are still hopeful that lawsuits against individual new voting laws will be successful, and that Congress will eventually pass one of the party’s big federal election bills — the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act — major voter registration campaigns could be another tool in Democrats’ arsenal to counteract voting restrictions.
Gilberto Hinojosa, the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, said that the program would most likely cost $13 million to $14 million this year, making it the single biggest investment in voter registration by the state party in its history. And the party is embarking on the effort in an off-year for national elections, an often sleepy time with a disengaged electorate and a recharging political base.
Texas Democrats were buoyed by their surge in turnout in the 2020 election despite losing at the presidential level and failing to flip either chamber of the State Legislature. But they face mounting questions about their strength among Latino voters, who backed former President Donald J. Trump in greater margins than in 2016, especially in southern counties in the state.
But despite those struggles, state Democrats see a potential path to victory through a pool of unregistered eligible voters that they say is overwhelmingly young and diverse.
“We have historically had turnout issues in Texas, particularly with the Latino community, which is a big part of our base,” Mr. Hinojosa said.
The program will take a targeted, nearly voter-by-voter approach to registration. If a voter lives in an apartment building and has no phone number on record, the first outreach will probably be an in-person visit or a flyer left by a volunteer with registration information. Younger voters will be targeted with online ads. And a new app called Register Texas (different from a 2020 web tool by the same name) will allow activists to sign in and find canvassing opportunities to register for.
The effort follows the blueprint laid out by Stacey Abrams in Georgia, with Texas Democrats aiming to cover every corner of the state to find voters to register.
“We got clobbered in the rural areas and in West Texas,” Mr. Hinojosa said. “So we’ve got a lot of work to do, but we think we can do it. Because the payoff for the Democratic Party nationally is great. If you’re able to take back the State Legislature, put yourself in the position of winning the next U.S. Senate race and also the governor’s mansion, then Texas is well on its way to becoming the battleground state that everybody wants it to be.”
Nick Corasaniti covers national politics. He was one of the lead reporters covering Donald Trump's campaign for president in 2016 and has been writing about presidential, congressional, gubernatorial and mayoral campaigns for The Times since 2011. @NYTnickc • Facebook
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/us/politics/texas-voter-registration-democrats.html
Judges uphold conviction of Serb military chief Ratko Mladic
By MIKE CORDER
19 minutes ago
https://apnews.com/article/united-nations-ratko-mladic-europe-government-and-politics-4d2b4bc207af6ad523fea76ca7a14b3b
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — U.N. appeals judges on Tuesday upheld the convictions of former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic for genocide and other offenses during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war and confirmed his life sentence.
The ruling means the 79-year-old former general who terrorized Bosnia throughout the war will spend the rest of his life in prison. He is the last major figure from the conflict that ended more than a quarter century ago to face justice.
Presiding Judge Prisca Matimba Nyambe of Zambia said the court dismissed Mladic’s appeal “in its entirety” and affirmed his life sentence.
It also rejected an appeal by prosecutors of Mladic’s acquittal on one other count of genocide linked to ethnic purges early in the war.
Mladic joins his former political master, ex-Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic, in serving a life sentence for masterminding ethnic bloodshed in the Bosnian war that left more than 100,000 dead and millions homeless.
Mladic, once a swaggering military strongman known as the “Butcher of Bosnia,” commanded troops responsible for atrocities ranging from “ethnic cleansing” campaigns to the siege of Sarajevo and the war’s bloody climax in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. Now, he is a frail elderly man whose ill health delayed this final judgment.
His toxic legacy continues to divide Bosnia and his dark shadow has spread far beyond the Balkans. To Serbs in Bosnia, he is a war hero who fought to protect his people. To Bosniaks, mostly Muslims, he will always be a villain responsible for their terrible wartime suffering and losses.
“I cannot accept any verdict,” Serb war veteran Milije Radovic from the eastern Bosnian town of Foca told The Associated Press. “For me, he is an icon. And for the Serb people, he is an icon.”
Mladic was first indicted in July 1995. After the war in Bosnia ended, he went into hiding and was finally arrested in 2011 and handed over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia by the then-ruling pro-Western government of Serbia.
The U.N. tribunal has since shut its doors. Mladic’s appeal and other legal issues left over from the tribunal are being dealt with by the U.N.’s International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, which is housed in the same building as the now-defunct court for the former Yugoslavia.
The shadow of Mladic and Karadzic spreads far beyond the Balkans. They have also been revered by foreign far-right supporters for their bloody wartime campaigns against Bosniaks.
The Australian who shot dead dozens of Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 was believed to be inspired by the wartime Bosnian Serb leaders, as well as Anders Breivik, the Norwegian white supremacist who shot dead 77 people in Norway in 2011.
___
Associated Press writer Dusan Stojanovic in Belgrade, Serbia, and videographer Aleksandar Furtula in The Hague contributed.
https://apnews.com/article/united-nations-ratko-mladic-europe-government-and-politics-4d2b4bc207af6ad523fea76ca7a14b3b
QAnon at a Crossroads: Leaders Try to Rein In the Crazy
Will Sommer
Tue, 8 June 2021, 9:53 am·7-min read
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/qanon-crossroads-leaders-try-rein-085310288.html
QAnon’s anonymous leader has been silent for more than six months. Now QAnon is in upheaval over what’s next.
When pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell took the stage at a QAnon convention in Dallas late last month, she was wearing a biker vest with a “Q” patch sewn on the back. And yet, when Powell began speaking, she did the unexpected: she trashed some of QAnon’s most cherished ideas.
According to the worldview held by many QAnon believers, Powell will actually lead the military tribunals at the heart of QAnon lore, imprisoning pedophile-cannibal Democrats in Guantanamo Bay and restoring Donald Trump to power. But at the conference, Powell broke some hard news to the QAnon faithful.
“There are no military tribunals that’s magically going to solve this problem for us,” Powell said, to scattered applause.
Powell even went against one of QAnon’s central pillars—the idea that believers should “trust the plan,” putting their faith in the idea that Trump and the military are carrying out a secret agenda to depose Democrats and bring back the Trump administration.
"I don't have any evidence that there's some grand underlying plan, pursuant to which all this is going to be made right,” Powell said. “I don't want to give anybody false hope that this is happening."
The crowd didn’t mind Powell’s off-message remark too much; that night, a picture of Powell riding a kraken sold at an auction at the conference for thousands of dollars. And Powell didn’t do much else to dissuade QAnon supporters of their bizarre beliefs. She claimed the election was stolen and raised the prospect that Trump would retake the presidency later this year.
But she did break it to the disappointed crowd that Trump wouldn’t get his second term extended to account for Joe Biden’s time in office. And Powell’s attempt to debunk the military tribunals and “plan” aspects of QAnon orthodoxy marks a new phase in QAnon’s tumultuous post-Trump era.
QAnon now finds itself without a central figure: Trump is out of office; And the anonymous “Q,” whose clues make up the conspiracy theory movement’s basis, has been silent since last December.
Followers of the nonsensical collection of conspiracy theories are now looking for guidance from a diffuse group of leaders in the QAnon movement. And the leaders—some pure hucksters and some pure screwballs—have very different visions for where the coalition should go.
For some leaders, it’s about reining in the most madcap beliefs. For others, it’s about using the momentum that QAnon has built in the GOP world to take over local offices and school boards.
A poll released in late May found that roughly 15 percent of people buy into the core QAnon idea that the world is controlled by a cabal of pedophilic elites. And QAnon has carved out ties with GOP officials. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and former Rep. Allen West (R-FL)—who resigned as the Texas GOP chairman just days ago to explore a statewide run—both appeared at the QAnon convention in Dallas.
QAnon has seen internal turmoil before, but in the past, “Q” was able to step in and settle disputes. One splinter group of followers, for example, believes that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death in a 1999 plane crash to team up with Trump and take on the Deep State. In a QAnon clue, though, “Q” claimed that JFK Jr. was dead. (That Q “drop” seemed aimed at putting down the breakoff faction that had begun to draw increasingly negative attention to QAnon.)
With Q gone, however, no one may have more power in the QAnon mythos than Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser. Flynn openly embraced QAnon in the final months of Trump’s presidency, selling QAnon merchandise and taking a “QAnon oath” with family members on the Fourth of July.
But in mid-May, Flynn pushed back on some QAnon beliefs in an interview with podcaster Doug Billings. He explicitly dismissed the idea that the military secretly controls the country or that Trump somehow invalidated the election through the Insurrection Act.
“I’m just going to ask you some questions, and I just want you to tell me whether it’s nonsense,” Billings said. “Did President Trump ever sign the Insurrection Act?”
“No, nonsense,” Flynn said.
“Is the United States military running the country, is that nonsense as well?” Billings said.
“More nonsense,” Flynn said. “There’s no plan.”
After the interview, Flynn spoke multiple times at the Dallas QAnon conference, and helped auction off a quilt bearing a giant “Q” image. On the conference’s second day, he called for a Myanmar-style military coup to take place in the United States—a popular notion in QAnon-world.
The fight over QAnon’s direction has spilled over into QAnon’s social media channels. In the wake of Twitter and Facebook crackdowns after the U.S. Capitol riot in January, tens of thousands of QAnon believers ended up on Telegram, a messaging app and social media platform popular with the far right.
On Telegram, a virulently antisemitic QAnon promoter impersonating former Trump intelligence official Ezra Cohen-Watnick has amassed more than 300,000 followers, coming from nowhere to challenge some of QAnon’s most established promoters. The account has attempted to push QAnon, which has always held antisemitic overtones, into a far more anti-Jewish direction, posting crude caricatures of Jewish people and pushing discredited antisemitic conspiracy theories.
At the same time, Telegram has become a haven for QAnon promoters posting outlandish financial promises, claiming, for example, that QAnon believers will become wealthy if they buy a specific cryptocurrency or near-valueless currency like the Iraqi dinar. Others have claimed that the world economy will soon be radically restructured in a “global financial reset” that will abolish debts, meaning QAnon believers should feel free to take on huge debts and not worry about paying them back.
As QAnon’s Telegram channels have become a haven for even more obvious hucksterism than usual, prominent QAnon booster Jordan Sather has slammed his QAnon rivals in an attempt to push QAnon away from both the antisemitic “Ezra” account and the predictions of a financial utopia. As often happens in internal QAnon wars, various sides have accused one another of being deep-state plants meant to sow discord within QAnon.
“What do we see now with the Q movement and the patriot truth movement that’s out there on social media?” Sather said in a speech at the Dallas convention. “Just a lot of dumb clickbait, ugh! I am sorry but there is just so much disinformation that is out there, it’s really targeting the platforms that we’ve all been funneled into.”
Sather’s feud with his QAnon rivals has hardly made him QAnon’s voice of reason. During his speech at the convention, Sather promoted the nonexistent medical benefits of chlorine dioxide—a substance the FDA says is equivalent to consuming bleach.
Other QAnon promoters at the convention urged supporters to fact-check their ideas before posting them online to QAnon channels—an odd idea for a movement based on amateur sleuths investigating the idea that, say, Hillary Clinton eats children in a Washington pizzeria and Tom Hanks drinks blood to keep his youthful appearance.
In the place of QAnon’s original wild-eyed visions, the Q promoters respectable enough to make it onstage at the QAnon convention promised more modest goals for QAnon. They urged audience members to build up local QAnon organizations and take precinct seats in local Republican groups—far from the vision of a world reborn through violence that sparked QAnon, but one that’s likely more achievable for the QAnon movement.
In the spirit of QAnon new localism, one promoter urged Q fans to get involved with their local school boards, a battlefield where QAnon has already seen some early success. As the QAnon convention began in Dallas, a school board in Michigan was convulsed by the news that a QAnon believer had won a seat in the body. At the conference, QAnon promoter Zak Paine urged audience members to follow suit.
"Go to your local school board meetings," Paine said. "Get on the school board."
Read more at The Daily Beast.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/qanon-crossroads-leaders-try-rein-085310288.html
He wore a QAnon shirt while chasing police on Jan. 6. Now he says he was deceived by 'a pack of lies.’
By Tim Elfrink
June 8, 2021 at 8:54 a.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/06/08/douglas-jensen-qanon-conspiracy/
As the first wave of rioters breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman wielded a baton as a bearded man in a QAnon shirt chased him up a stairway — a moment captured in a now famous video.
Now, Douglas Jensen, the man who prosecutors say chased Goodman, claims he was misled into joining the deadly insurrection by QAnon, an extremist ideology the FBI has deemed a domestic terrorism threat.
“Jensen became a victim of numerous conspiracy theories that were being fed to him over the internet by a number of very clever people,” his attorney, Christopher M. Davis, wrote in a court filing on Monday asking for the 41-year-old Iowan to be released until his trial. “Six months later, languishing in a DC Jail cell, locked down most of the time, he feels deceived, recognizing that he bought into a pack of lies.”
But Jensen also argued that prosecutors have misconstrued his role in the riot. Although he admits to carrying a pocketknife while pursuing Goodman, Jensen also claims in the new filings that he was simply there to “observe” the riot — and even argues that he was “threatened” by Goodman, who was honored with a Congressional Gold Medal for his heroism.
Jensen is just the latest Capitol riot suspect to express remorse and to blame QAnon or former president Donald Trump for inciting the deadly insurrection. So far, those lines of argument have failed to sway the federal judges overseeing the cases, as The Washington Post has reported.
Among the hundreds now charged in the Capitol riots, though, few had as visible a role as Jensen thanks to the viral video of Goodman’s standoff and the plaudits the Capitol Police officer later received for goading the mob away from the Senate chambers.
Jensen, a Des Moines native, traveled to D.C. for the rallies hosted by Trump supporters as Congress worked to certify President Biden’s victory. As the crowd coalesced into a violent mob, prosecutors said, he was “among the first … to push his way inside the United States Capitol.”
As captured in the video, prosecutors said, Jensen “led the crowd toward [Goodman] in a menacing manner” and repeatedly ignored his demands to stop. He later told police that he purposely jumped to the front of the crowd because he wanted his QAnon T-shirt to be prominently seen on TV, so that “Q” would “get the credit” for the insurrection.
Jensen turned himself in on Jan. 9 back in Des Moines. After holding him on a number of counts, including assaulting officers and civil disorder, prosecutors later added elevated charges including entering a restricted building with a dangerous weapon.
But in his new filings seeking to be released from custody, Jensen’s attorney casts his actions on Jan. 6 in a different light.
Describing him as a “blue-collar union laborer,” Jensen’s attorney said he became a “true believer” in QAnon “for reasons he does not even understand today.”
“In any event, he fell victim to this barrage of internet sourced info and came to the Capitol, at the direction of the President of the United States, to demonstrate that he was a ‘true patriot,’” the filing says.
Jensen’s attorney disputed claims that he played a significant role in the deadly violence inside the Capitol.
“Jensen was not an intended part of any group or mob at any time that day,” the filing claims. “He was at the front of the crowd, but in no way leading anyone.”
He also argues that the video shows Jensen never touched “anyone in an aggressive manner.”
“Even when threatened by Officer Goodman, armed with his baton hoovering over Jensen’s head, Jensen simply states, ‘I will take it for my country,’ ” his attorney wrote.
In the filing, Jensen asks to be released so his wife can pick him up and return him to Des Moines where he would remain on house arrest while working to support his family, which “is now suffering extreme financial hardship.”
There’s no indication in court records when a judge will rule on Jensen’s request.
By Tim Elfrink
Tim Elfrink joined The Washington Post in 2018. He's the editor of Morning Mix. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/06/08/douglas-jensen-qanon-conspiracy/
Plea discussions appear to be advanced in the case of at least one other accused rioter, court records showed. Douglas Jensen of Des Moines, Iowa, faces charges including violent entry of the Capitol and disrupting government business. Court records showed that a conference in early May was postponed until June while the parties decide if they want to proceed with a plea. Jensen’s lawyer declined to comment.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/few-plea-bargains-us-capitol-riot-cases-prosecutors-stand-firm-2021-05-21/
Websites begin to work again after major breakage
By Jane Wakefield
Technology reporter
Published 48 minutes ago
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57399628
MeidasTouch.com @MeidasTouch Thank you Brian Williams for sharing our ad that Fox “News” doesn’t want their viewers to see
VIDEO
Thank you Brian Williams for sharing our ad that Fox “News” doesn’t want their viewers to see pic.twitter.com/VIgDC0rdod
— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) June 8, 2021
Thank you Brian Williams for sharing our ad that Fox “News” doesn’t want their viewers to see pic.twitter.com/VIgDC0rdod
— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) June 8, 2021
In the coming months, ProPublica will use the IRS data we have obtained to explore in detail how the ultrawealthy avoid taxes, exploit loopholes and escape scrutiny from federal auditors.
Experts have long understood the broad outlines of how little the wealthy are taxed in the United States, and many lay people have long suspected the same thing.
But few specifics about individuals ever emerge in public. Tax information is among the most zealously guarded secrets in the federal government. ProPublica has decided to reveal individual tax information of some of the wealthiest Americans because it is only by seeing specifics that the public can understand the realities of the country’s tax system.
The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax
by Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen and Paul Kiel
June 8, 5 a.m. EDT
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax
Teddy Schleifer @teddyschleifer ·18m This is an amazing leak ... but also not terribly surprising?
1. Billionaires don’t make their money off of income.
2. Billionaires have access to the world’s savviest accountants and lawyers.
I primarily want to know how ProPublica got the data!
1:34 PM · Jun 8, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
This is an amazing leak ... but also not terribly surprising?
— Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer) June 8, 2021
1. Billionaires don’t make their money off of income.
2. Billionaires have access to the world’s savviest accountants and lawyers.
I primarily want to know how ProPublica got the data!
https://t.co/qtHU5qo1rY
The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax
by Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen and Paul Kiel
June 8, 5 a.m. EDT
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax
ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.
In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.
Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.
ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. The data provides an unprecedented look inside the financial lives of America’s titans, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. It shows not just their income and taxes, but also their investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits.
Taken together, it demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.
Many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, amassing little wealth and paying the federal government a percentage of their income that rises if they earn more. In recent years, the median American household earned about $70,000 annually and paid 14% in federal taxes. The highest income tax rate, 37%, kicked in this year, for couples, on earnings above $628,300.
The confidential tax records obtained by ProPublica show that the ultrarich effectively sidestep this system.
...
MUCH MORE
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax
Richard W. Painter @RWPUSA ·51m Replying to @RWPUSA This is the same thing that's going on in the Jean Carroll lawsuit. DOJ needs to stop fending for Trump.
@COFinkelstein and I discuss two "executive privilege" cases here.
12:45 PM · Jun 8, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
This is the same thing that's going on in the Jean Carroll lawsuit. DOJ needs to stop fending for Trump. @COFinkelstein and I discuss two "executive privilege" cases here.https://t.co/gnsM7yKqDU
— Richard W. Painter (@RWPUSA) June 8, 2021
Mastercard Foundation donates $1.3 billion to boost Africa’s coronavirus response
By Dan Diamond
June 8, 2021 at 1:15 p.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/06/08/mastercard-foundation-donation-africa-covid/
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The Mastercard Foundation on Tuesday announced a $1.3 billion donation to boost Africa’s response to the coronavirus, which public health experts hailed as a significant step to get vaccines to some of the world’s poorest people.
“Ensuring equitable access and delivery of vaccines across Africa is urgent,” Reeta Roy, the foundation’s CEO, said in a statement. “This initiative is about valuing all lives and accelerating the economic recovery of the continent.”
The funding, which will be distributed over three years in partnership with the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, is intended to help acquire vaccines for more than 50 million of the continent’s 1.3 billion people, improve its vaccine manufacturing and delivery system and strengthen public health institutions.
The foundation’s pledge — one of the largest private gifts made in the pandemic fight — comes amid a growing outcry over the lack of vaccine supply for poorer countries. While the United States and other high-income countries have provided at least one dose of a vaccine to most of their residents, many developing countries are not expected to have sufficient vaccine supply until at least 2022. President Biden this week is set to attend a Group of Seven meeting in Britain, where leaders are expected to debate how to address that vaccine inequality, which has sparked accusations from some advocates and public health officials that richer countries have fostered “vaccine apartheid” by hoarding doses.
The Mastercard Foundation, which says it has more than $39 billion in assets, has played a growing role in boosting Africa’s safety net during the pandemic, including a previous $40 million donation to boost the continent’s coronavirus testing. Mastercard spun off the independently operated foundation when the global financial services company went public in 2006.
Under the terms of the arrangement, the Africa CDC will help oversee the distribution of funds across the continent for an array of services, including workforce training and community engagement; drug safety efforts and genomic sequencing; and support for individual nations’ vaccination programs.
“Ensuring inclusivity in vaccine access, and building Africa’s capacity to manufacture its own vaccines, is not just good for the continent, it’s the only sustainable path out of the pandemic and into a health-secure future,” John Nkengasong, director of the Africa CDC, said in a statement.
The African Union and Africa CDC last year set a goal of vaccinating at least 60 percent of the continent’s population by the end of 2022, estimating that the effort would cost at least $16 billion. So far, fewer than 2 percent of people in Africa have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, significantly trailing the global average of 11.6 percent.
About 40 percent of people in North America and the European Union have received at least one dose of a vaccine.
Global public health experts hailed Tuesday's donation as a difference-maker.
“I think this is exactly the type of partnership that we had hoped to see — and that we need much more of,” said Krishna Udayakumar, who leads Duke University’s Global Health Innovation Center. “We need to be putting billions to tens of billions of dollars in play to acquire vaccines, but to also enhance the delivery capacity and capabilities and to generate demand.”
Udayakumar noted that Tuesday’s announcement calls for providing more doses to Africa “than have been shared across the continent to date.” Roughly 26 million people in Africa have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine thus far, according to vaccinations tracked by the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford.
Amanda Glassman, executive vice president at the D.C.-based Center for Global Development, praised the decision to route the funding through the Africa CDC, which she said had played a growing role in coordinating the continent’s response to the pandemic. The five-year-old organization, which is modeled on the United States’ CDC, has helped set standards and provide public health governance, she said.
“It’s good to see that [the funding] is going to a regional institution, especially because we see cases going up in sub-Saharan Africa,” Glassman said.
Mastercard has separately committed nearly $100 million in company donations to boost the global coronavirus response, including a partnership with Gavi, the vaccine alliance, to improve global access to the shots, and last year’s launch of the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator with the Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust, intended to expedite development of coronavirus treatments.
Mastercard executives also said the company will create incentives to help address vaccine hesitancy in the United States, using the company’s decades-old “Priceless” marketing campaign.
By Dan Diamond
Dan Diamond is a national health reporter for The Washington Post. He joined The Post in 2021 after five years at Politico, where he won a George Polk award for investigating the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/06/08/mastercard-foundation-donation-africa-covid/
Mining Companies Call Themselves Green in Push for Investor Cash
Many tout their production of materials that go into wind turbines, power lines and batteries
By Scott Patterson
June 8, 2021 5:33 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mining-companies-call-themselves-green-in-push-for-investor-cash-11623144781?mod=e2tw
Mining companies are trying to tap into the flood of cash targeting green investments by touting their production of materials that go into wind turbines, power lines and batteries.
They are playing down the environmental impact of their operations and, for many of them, their big businesses mining coal.
The International Energy Agency said in a May report that while coal mining will decrease dramatically in the coming years, “the mining of minerals needed for clean energy transitions increases very rapidly” in a global economy focused on bringing down carbon emissions.
Demand for lithium used in batteries, for instance, is expected to expand by a factor of 30 by 2030, according to the IEA. Cobalt and nickel also will be needed for batteries while copper will be used by transmission lines, electric vehicles and wind turbines. “Metals are at the heart of the new economy, they’re key to the transition to new technologies, EVs, energy storage,” said Mark Wade, head of sustainability research at Allianz Global Investors.
“For us as an industry, the transition to a decarbonized society and what that means to both demand and supply for our products becomes the defining issue of our time,” Anglo American PLC Chief Executive Mark Cutifani said at a recent Bank of America conference. London-based Anglo American “will be part of the solution” by providing the commodities required by the transition away from fossil fuels, he said.
Mining companies are trying to differentiate themselves from fossil-fuel producers. Major oil companies Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC in late May suffered defeats at the hands of environmental groups and investors pressing the companies to address concerns about global warming. The pressure shows how dramatically the landscape is shifting as oil-and-gas producers face scrutiny not only from environmentalists but also big investors who have increasingly been shifting capital into renewable energy.
The potential for a more stringent investor-driven climate and emissions actions may lead to higher capital costs and diminished access to capital for oil companies, according to Moody’s.
Mining faces similar risks. It is an energy-intensive business with a huge environmental footprint. Companies often use toxic chemicals to process materials, while waste is stored behind giant, potentially unstable dams. Coal used to generate electricity is one of the worst contributors to global warming. And the companies often operate in developing countries where corruption is commonplace.
That is causing some investors to back away from the sector, said Danielle Chigumira, a Bernstein Research analyst in London who tracks environmental, social and governance, or ESG, metrics in mining. She says some investors who a few years ago sought her advice have stopped investing in mining companies.
A number of clients of the firm “won’t speak to me because I cover mining,” she said.
It is a mounting problem for the industry as investors use ESG factors more than ever. Nearly $3 of every $10 of global equity inflows have been in ESG funds so far in 2021, according to Bank of America. Assets under management in the 1,900-plus global ESG funds tracked by the firm hit a record $1.4 trillion in April, more than double the amount from a year ago.
An unlikely mining giant seizing the clean-energy mantle is Glencore GLNCY -2.25% PLC, one of the world’s biggest producers of thermal coal used in power plants, but also the world’s biggest producer of cobalt used in rechargeable batteries. Glencore “is ready to support the transition to a low-carbon economy and realize its ambition of net-zero by 2050,” CEO Ivan Glasenberg said in February.
Glencore is also a big producer of copper in Chile and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Electric vehicles use three times as much copper than cars powered by internal combustion engines, according to RBC Capital Markets. Copper demand for electric vehicles is expected to grow to 6% of global demand in 2030, up from about 1% in 2020, RBC estimates.
Glencore, however, has some significant ESG hurdles, especially its large thermal coal operations. The company says it plans to phase out coal production over time, but the process could take decades.
Its Congo operations have been the source of scrutiny by investigators in the U.S. and elsewhere. In 2018, the company disclosed that it had received a subpoena from the U.S. Justice Department for records relating to its compliance with American antibribery and money-laundering laws in Congo, Venezuela and Nigeria. Glencore has said it is cooperating with investigators.
Bernstein’s Ms. Chigumira said such issues and Glencore’s outsize exposure to thermal coal mean the company isn’t a good fit for ESG-focused investors.
Among the major mining companies, she prefers Newmont Mining, a gold-mining company that she said has focused on ESG factors for years. She also likes BHP Group Ltd. , which has significant copper operations and limited thermal coal production.
But BHP also is a major player in iron ore and metallurgical coal used in steel production, both big emitters of greenhouse gases.
That could be a problem for BHP in the future, said Ms. Chigumira. While investors have mostly focused on thermal coal used for electricity, they are likely to start scrutinizing metallurgical coal producers as more companies factor in emissions throughout their supply chains.
As they do, metallurgical coal “will increasingly be a drag on the way that people think about BHP,” she said.
Write to Scott Patterson at scott.patterson@wsj.com
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mining-companies-call-themselves-green-in-push-for-investor-cash-11623144781?mod=e2tw
Richard W. Painter @RWPUSA Trump used his official position to commit a personal tort (defamation by calling Carroll a liar over her allegation of rape in 1996). That doesn't make it an official act. DOJ should stop defending Trump and get out of this lawsuit.
Biden Justice Department Seeks to Defend Trump in Suit Over Rape Denial
Donald Trump is facing a defamation lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll, who has accused Mr. Trump of raping her.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/nyregion/trump-jean-carroll-lawsuit.html?smid=tw-share
12:42 PM · Jun 8, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
Trump used his official position to commit a personal tort (defamation by calling Carroll a liar over her allegation of rape in 1996). That doesn't make it an official act. DOJ should stop defending Trump and get out of this lawsuit.https://t.co/Ddbib4JiVN
— Richard W. Painter (@RWPUSA) June 8, 2021
Global glitch: swaths of internet go down after cloud outage
13 minutes ago
https://apnews.com/article/europe-business-7c607c931faba19584975da74c8fa633
LONDON (AP) — Multiple major websites went offline briefly Tuesday after an apparent outage at the cloud service company Fastly, and there were still reports of sporadic disruptions after the company patched the problem about an hour later.
Dozens of sites including the New York Times, CNN, Twitch, Reddit, the Guardian, and the U.K. government’s home page, could not be reached.
San Francisco-based Fastly acknowledged a problem just before 1000 GMT. It said in repeated updates on its website that it was “continuing to investigate the issue.”
About an hour later, the company said: “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.”
A number of sites that were hit early appeared to be coming back online.
Some visitors trying to access CNN.com got a message that said: “Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com.” Attempts to access the Financial Times website turned up a similar message while visits to the New York Times and U.K. government’s gov.uk site returned an “Error 503 Service Unavailable” message, along with the line “Varnish cache server,” which is a technology that Fastly is built on.
Down Detector, which tracks internet outages, said: “Reports indicate there may be a widespread outage at Fastly, which may be impacting your service.”
Fastly describes itself as an “edge cloud platform.” It provides vital but obscure behind-the-scenes cloud computing services to many of the web’s high profile sites, by helping them to store, or “cache,” content in servers around the world, allowing users to fetch it more quickly and smoothly instead of having to access the site’s original server.
https://apnews.com/article/europe-business-7c607c931faba19584975da74c8fa633
Major websites experience outages, including the New York Times, CNN and Amazon Web Services
By Washington Post Staff
June 8, 2021 at 12:09 p.m. GMT+1
Large parts of the Internet went down early Tuesday, with the U.K. government, Reddit and others scrambling to get their websites back online.
This is a developing story. It will be updated.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/06/08/major-websites-experience-outages-including-new-york-times-cnn-amazon-web-services/