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President Trump Responds on Pennsylvania’s 2020 Election
Donald Trump writes a letter to the editor.
Oct. 27, 2021 2:15 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/president-donald-trump-2020-election-fraud-pennsylvania-ballots-11635280347
In your editorial “The Election for Pennsylvania’s High Court” (Oct. 25), you state the fact that a court wrongly said mail-in ballots could be counted after Election Day. “This didn’t matter,” you add, “because Mr. Biden won the state by 80,555, but the country is lucky the election wasn’t closer. If the election had hung on a few thousand Pennsylvanians, the next President might have been picked by the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Well actually, the election was rigged, which you, unfortunately, still haven’t figured out. Here are just a few examples of how determinative the voter fraud in Pennsylvania was:
• 71,893 mail-in ballots were returned after Nov. 3, 2020, at 8 p.m., according to Audit the Vote PA. None of these should have been counted according to the U.S. Constitution and the state Legislature, which didn’t approve this change.
• 10,515 mail-in votes from people who do not exist on the Pennsylvania voter rolls at all.
• 120,000 excess voters are not yet accounted for by the Pennsylvania Department of State—far more votes than voters!
• From 2016 to 2020, during my term as president, Republicans out-registered Democrats 21 to 1. This translated to a 659,145-vote lead at 12:38 a.m. on election night, with “Trump” up a full 15 points.
• Hundreds of thousands of votes were unlawfully counted in secret, in defiance of a court order, while Republican poll watchers were thrown out of buildings where voting took place.
• 39,771 people who registered to vote after the Oct. 19, 2020, deadline, still voted in the 2020 election—simply not allowed.
Highly respected Audit the Vote PA found numerous data integrity problems the Pennsylvania Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors (SURE) system, including:
• 305,874 voters were removed from the rolls after the election on Nov. 3rd.
• 51,792 voters with inactive voter registrations at the end of October 2020 nevertheless voted.
• 57,000 duplicate registrations.
• 55,823 voters who were backfilled into the SURE system.
• 58,261 first-time voters 70 years and older.
• 39,911 people who were added to voter rolls while under 17 years of age.
• 17,000 mail-in ballots sent to addresses outside of Pennsylvania.
• Another analysis of Montgomery County, Pa., found 98% of the eligible voting population in the county was already registered to vote—not possible.
• A canvass of Montgomery County has identified 78,000 phantom voters, with roughly 30% of respondents unaware that there are people registered and voting from their address.
• One nursing home in Lancaster County had 690 registrations and an extremely high turnout rate of 85% in 2020, while nursing homes were closed due to Covid. One of these residents said she had not voted in the past 3 years, but had a mail-in ballot cast in her name.
• 25,000 ballots were requested from nursing homes at the exact same time.
• Numerous reports and sworn affidavits attested to poll watcher intimidation and harassment, many by brute force.
• Attorney General Bill Barr ordered U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain to stand down and not investigate election irregularities.
• Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook poured over $17 million to interfere in the Pennsylvania election, including $5.5 million on “ballot processing equipment” in Philadelphia and $552,000 for drop boxes where the voting pattern was not possible.
And so much more! This is why Democrats and the Fake News Media do not want a full forensic audit in Pennsylvania. In reality, 80,555 ballots are nothing when there is this much corruption or voter irregularities.
Donald J. Trump
Palm Beach, Fla.
Copyright ©2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the October 28, 2021, print edition as 'President Trump Responds on Pennsylvania.'
https://www.wsj.com/articles/president-donald-trump-2020-election-fraud-pennsylvania-ballots-11635280347
EXPLAINER: Just what are ‘The Facebook Papers,’ anyway?
By The Associated Press
yesterday
https://apnews.com/article/what-are-the-facebook-papers-10e59530a699db5345ac3931509778b2
The Facebook Papers project represents a unique collaboration among 17 American news organizations, including The Associated Press. Journalists from a variety of newsrooms, large and small, worked together to gain access to thousands of pages of internal company documents obtained by Frances Haugen, the former Facebook product manager-turned-whistleblower.
A separate consortium of European news outlets had access to the same set of documents, and members of both groups began publishing content related to their analysis of the materials at 7 a.m. EDT on Monday, Oct. 25. That date and time was set by the partner news organizations to give everyone in the consortium an opportunity to fully analyze the documents, report out relevant details, and to give Facebook’s public relations staff ample time to respond to questions and inquiries raised by that reporting.
Each member of the consortium pursued its own independent reporting on the document contents and their significance. Every member also had the opportunity to attend group briefings to gain information and context about the documents.
The launch of The Facebook Papers project follows similar reporting by The Wall Street Journal, sourced from the same documents, as well as Haugen’s appearance on the CBS television show “60 Minutes” and her Oct. 5 Capitol Hill testimony before a U.S. Senate subcommittee.
The papers themselves are redacted versions of disclosures that Haugen has made over several months to the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging Facebook was prioritizing profits over safety and hiding its own research from investors and the public.
These complaints cover a range of topics, from its efforts to continue growing its audience, to how its platforms might harm children, to its alleged role in inciting political violence. The same redacted versions of those filings are being provided to members of Congress as part of its investigation. And that process continues as Haugen’s legal team goes through the process of redacting the SEC filings by removing the names of Facebook users and lower-level employees and turns them over to Congress.
The Facebook Papers consortium will continue to report on these documents as more become available in the coming days and weeks.
“AP regularly teams up with other news organizations to bring important journalism to the world,” said Julie Pace, senior vice president and executive editor. “The Facebook Papers project is in keeping with that mission. In all collaborations, AP maintains its editorial independence.”
___
See full coverage of “The Facebook Papers” here: https://apnews.com/hub/the-facebook-papers
https://apnews.com/article/what-are-the-facebook-papers-10e59530a699db5345ac3931509778b2
EXCLUSIVE: Jan. 6 Protest Organizers Say They Participated in ‘Dozens’ of Planning Meetings With Members of Congress and White House Staff
Two sources are communicating with House investigators and detailed a stunning series of allegations to Rolling Stone, including a promise of a “blanket pardon” from the Oval Office
By HUNTER WALKER
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/exclusive-jan-6-organizers-met-congress-white-house-1245289/
As the House investigation into the Jan. 6 attack heats up, some of the planners of the pro-Trump rallies that took place in Washington, D.C., have begun communicating with congressional investigators and sharing new information about what happened when the former president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Two of these people have spoken to Rolling Stone extensively in recent weeks and detailed explosive allegations that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and the Jan. 6 events that turned violent.
Rolling Stone separately confirmed a third person involved in the main Jan. 6 rally in D.C. has communicated with the committee. This is the first report that the committee is hearing major new allegations from potential cooperating witnesses. While there have been prior indications that members of Congress were involved, this is also the first account detailing their purported role and its scope. The two sources also claim they interacted with members of Trump’s team, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who they describe as having had an opportunity to prevent the violence.
...
MUCH MORE
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/exclusive-jan-6-organizers-met-congress-white-house-1245289/
Bombshell Report Says White House Staffers, GOP Members of Congress Met With Jan. 6 Organizers — Even Promised Pardons
Sarah Rumpf 10 hrs ago
Mediate
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/bombshell-report-says-white-house-staffers-gop-members-of-congress-met-with-jan-6-organizers-even-promised-pardons/ar-AAPUA39?ocid=msedgntp
A bombshell report published by Rolling Stone on Sunday said that several of the supporters of former President Donald Trump who helped plan the January rallies in D.C. and across the U.S. have been cooperating with the Jan. 6 House Select Committee, and they are alleging that not only did they participate in multiple planning sessions with senior White House staffers and Republican members of Congress, but that they were promised pardons by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ).
According to Rolling Stone’s Hunter Walker, two of these people spoke to him about these conversations, and the magazine had separately confirmed a third person who helped plan the rallies who was cooperating with the House Select Committee’s investigation.
In the article, Walker refers to his two sources as a rally “organizer” and a “planner” to keep clear the comments from separate people. Both of them were involved in helping plan and coordinate the “Stop the Steal” protests around the country in the aftermath of the 2020 election, which Trump baselessly claimed was stolen from him by election fraud, and the “Stop the Steal” and “March for Trump” rallies in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 5 and, most notably, Jan. 6, which immediately preceded the violent breaching of the Capitol as Vice President Mike Pence and Congress were meeting in a joint session to certify the electoral college votes from the states.
“I remember Marjorie Taylor Greene specifically,” the organizer said. “I remember talking to probably close to a dozen other members at one point or another or their staffs.”
In addition to the controversial conspiracy-mongering Georgia congresswoman, the sources said that they had conversations with other Republican members of Congress or their senior level staffers, including Gosar, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO.), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL.), Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX).
“We would talk to Boebert’s team, Cawthorn’s team, Gosar’s team like back to back to back to back,” the organizer said.
Gosar even went so far as to offer the possibility of a “blanket pardon” to both sources to show “how much we appreciate all the hard work you’ve been doing,” they said, telling them he had spoken to Trump about it and encouraging them to continuing planning the protest events:
“Our impression was that it was a done deal,” the organizer says, “that he’d spoken to the president about it in the Oval … in a meeting about pardons and that our names came up. They were working on submitting the paperwork and getting members of the House Freedom Caucus to sign on as a show of support.”
The organizer claims the pair received “several assurances” about the “blanket pardon” from Gosar.
Gosar’s chief of staff, Thomas van Flein, is among the people named in the House Select Committee’s requests for documents, and both sources identified him as participating in multiple conversations about the potential pardons and other issues related to planning the protests.
Trump, of course, did not give pardons to any of those charged in the Jan. 6 riot, or to any of the alleged organizers. Walker described his sources as “upset” that the promised pardons did not materialize, although that was not the sole reason they had gotten involved.
Gosar’s office did not respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment. Walker wrote that both sources provided additional documentary proof that they had communicated directly with Gosar and Boebert on Jan. 6.
As Walker noted, “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander, also known as Ali Akbar, had claimed in a now-deleted video that he had met with Gosar, Brooks, and Biggs, and that together they “came up with the Jan. 6 idea.” His sources confirmed that Alexander had met with those members of Congress, and that they had concerns about his involvement increasing the potential for violence.
The two sources both identified Katrina Pierson, an adviser on both of Trump’s presidential campaigns, as a direct liaison between them and the White House, describing her as “our go-to girl” and “our primary advocate.” Pierson was one of the speakers at the rally held at the Ellipse on Jan. 6.
Among those White House connections facilitated by Pierson was Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff — and furthermore, both sources said “concerns were raised to Meadows about Alexander’s protest at the Capitol and the potential that it could spark violence.”
At one point a deal was reportedly struck for Alexander to not hold his “Wild Protest” at the Capitol on Jan. 6, but Alexander backed out. Further alarms were raised about Alexander’s ties to paramilitary groups like the Oath Keepers and his messages encouraging agitated Trump supporters to travel to D.C. “We ended up escalating that to everybody we could, including Meadows,” said the organizer, but their worries fell on deaf ears.
Both Walker’s sources remain anonymous for now, but do expect to eventually come forward and testify publicly.
Read the full report at Rolling Stone.
Bombshell Report Says White House Staffers, GOP Members of Congress Met With Jan. 6 Organizers — Even Promised Pardons (msn.com)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/bombshell-report-says-white-house-staffers-gop-members-of-congress-met-with-jan-6-organizers-even-promised-pardons/ar-AAPUA39?ocid=msedgntp
UK phone companies to ban millions of calls from abroad in fraud crackdown
Emma Munbodh 4 hrs ago
https://www.mirror.co.uk/money/uk-phone-companies-ban-millions-25291278
Phone companies will automatically block almost all internet calls coming from abroad, under plans to combat foreign fraud, Ofcom has said.
All international calls found to be falsely using a UK number will be barred, the regulator said.
Criminals have been using internet-based calling technology to make it look like a phone call or text is coming from a real telephone number – often one based in the country they are targeting.
Almost 45 million consumers were targeted by phone scams between June and September this year.
"We've been working with telecoms companies to implement technical solutions, including blocking at source, suspicious international calls that are masked by a UK number," said Lindsey Fussell, Ofcom's networks and communications group director.
"We expect these measures to be introduced as a priority, and at pace, to ensure customers are better protected."
Fussell said that tackling the phone scams issue was a "complex problem" that requires a coordinated effort from the police, government, other regulators and industry.
Internet-based calling technology, also known as Voice Over Internet Protcol (VoIP), is used by millions of consumers globally to make phone calls free or cheaply every year.
Popular services that use this technology include WhatsApp, Skype, Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
Businesses also use the VoIP technology for internal corporate phone networks.
Whenever a corporate phone network makes a call, a VoIP provider hands over the call from the internet to the phone networks.
Gabriel Cirlig of US cyber-security firm Human, said criminal gangs are using this method to trick consumers into parting with their money.
"Because of this lower barrier of entry, it is very easy for scammers to build their own systems to spoof mobile numbers - the cybercriminals are essentially pretending to be legitimate corporate telephone networks in order to have access to legitimate telco infrastructure."
Experts agree that the only way to completely fix the problem is to implement new telephone identification protocols that enable phone networks to authenticate that all calls and text messages actually come a real telephone number.
At present, landline customers can request to have nuisance calls blocked by registering on the Telephone Preference Service.
The free opt out service allows you to record your preference on the official register and not receive unsolicited sales or marketing calls.
Companies (including charities) who choose not to screen but subsequently call a number on the register can be fined up to £6,500 for each registered number they call.
If you receive a call from an unsolicited number, Action Fraud’s advice is to not share any personal or financial information, hang up and contact the organisation yourself using a trusted source – such as the telephone number on the back of your bank card.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/money/uk-phone-companies-ban-millions-25291278
The case against Mark Zuckerberg: Insiders say Facebook’s CEO chose growth over safety
The SEC has been asked to probe whether his iron fisted management style, described in newly released documents and by insiders, led to disastrous outcomes.
By Elizabeth Dwoskin, Tory Newmyer and Shibani Mahtani
Today at 7:00 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/25/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-whistleblower/
Late last year, Mark Zuckerberg faced a choice: Comply with demands from Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party to censor anti-government dissidents or risk getting knocked offline in one of Facebook’s most lucrative Asian markets.
In America, the tech CEO is a champion of free speech, reluctant to remove even malicious and misleading content from the platform. But in Vietnam, upholding the free speech rights of people who question government leaders could have come with a significant cost in a country where the social network earns more than $1 billion in annual revenue, according to a 2018 estimate by Amnesty International.
So Zuckerberg personally decided that Facebook would comply with Hanoi’s demands, according to three people familiar with the decision, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal company discussions. Ahead of Vietnam’s party congress in January, Facebook significantly increased censorship of “anti-state” posts, giving the government near-total control over the platform, according to local activists and free speech advocates.
Zuckerberg’s role in the Vietnam decision, which has not been previously reported, exemplifies his relentless determination to ensure Facebook’s dominance, sometimes at the expense of his stated values, according to interviews with more than a dozen former employees. That ethos has come under fire in a series of whistleblower complaints filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen.
While it’s unclear whether the SEC will take the case or pursue action against the CEO personally, the allegations made by the whistleblower represent arguably the most profound challenge to Zuckerberg’s leadership of the most powerful social media company on Earth. Experts said the SEC — which has the power to seek depositions, fine him and even remove him as chairman — is likely to dig more deeply into what he knew and when. Though his direct perspective is rarely reflected in the documents, the people who worked with him say his fingerprints are everywhere in them.
In particular, Zuckerberg made countless decisions and remarks that demonstrated a hard-line devotion to free speech. Even in Vietnam, the company says that the choice to censor is justified “to ensure our services remain available for millions of people who rely on them every day,” according to a statement provided to The Post.
Haugen references Zuckerberg’s public statements at least 20 times in her SEC complaints, asserting that the CEO’s singular power and unique level of control over Facebook mean he bears ultimate responsibility for a litany of societal harms. Her documents appear to contradict the CEO on a host of issues, including the platform’s impact on children’s mental health, whether its algorithms contribute to polarization and how much hate speech it detects around the world.
For example, Zuckerberg testified last year before Congress that the company removes 94 percent of the hate speech it finds — but internal documents show that its researchers estimated that the company was removing less than 5 percent of hate speech on Facebook. In March, Zuckerberg told Congress that it was “not at all clear” that social networks polarize people, when Facebook’s own researchers had repeatedly found that they do.
The documents — disclosures made to the SEC and provided to Congress in redacted form by Haugen’s legal counsel — were obtained and reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including The Washington Post.
In her congressional testimony, Haugen repeatedly accused Zuckerberg of choosing growth over the public good, an allegation echoed in interviews with the former employees.
“The specter of Zuckerberg looms in everything the company does,” said Brian Boland, a former vice president of partnerships and marketing who left in 2020 after coming to believe that the platform was polarizing society. “It is entirely driven by him.”
A Facebook spokeswoman, Dani Lever, denied that decisions made by Zuckerberg “cause harm,” saying the claim was based on “selected documents that are mischaracterized and devoid of any context.”
“We have no commercial or moral incentive to do anything other than give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible,” she said. “Like every platform, we are constantly making difficult decisions between free expressions and harmful speech, security and other issues, and we don’t make these decisions inside a vacuum — we rely on the input of our teams, as well as external subject matter experts to navigate them. But drawing these societal lines is always better left to elected leaders which is why we’ve spent many years advocating for Congress to pass updated Internet regulations.”
Facebook has previously fought efforts to hold Zuckerberg personally accountable. In 2019, as the company was facing a record-breaking $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations related to Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that abused profile data from tens of millions of Facebook users, Facebook negotiated to protect Zuckerberg from direct liability. Internal Facebook briefing materials revealed the tech giant was willing to abandon settlement talks and duke it out in court if the agency insisted on pursuing the CEO.
The current chair of the SEC, Gary Gensler, has said he wants to go much harder on white-collar crime. Experts said Gensler is potentially likely to weigh the Haugen complaint as he looks toward a new era of corporate accountability.
Zuckerberg “has to be the driver of these decisions,” said Sean McKessy, the first chief of the SEC’s whistleblower office, now representing whistleblowers in private practice at Phillips & Cohen. “This is not a typical public company with checks and balances. This is not a democracy, it’s an authoritarian state. … And although the SEC doesn’t have the strongest track record of holding individuals accountable, I certainly could see this case as being a poster child for doing so.”
Zuckerberg, who is 37, founded Facebook 17 years ago in his college dorm room, envisioning a new way for classmates to connect with one another. Today, Facebook has become a conglomerate encompassing WhatsApp, Instagram and a hardware business. Zuckerberg is chairman of the board and controls 58 percent of the company’s voting shares, rendering his power virtually unchecked internally at the company and by the board.
An ownership structure that gives a single leader a lock on the board’s decision-making is “unprecedented at a company of this scale,” said Marc Goldstein, head of U.S. research for the proxy adviser Institutional Shareholder Services. “Facebook at this point is by far the largest company to have all this power concentrated in one person’s hands.”
Zuckerberg has long been obsessed with metrics, growth and neutralizing competitive threats, according to numerous people who have worked with him. The company’s use of “growth-hacking” tactics, such as tagging people in photos and buying lists of email addresses, was key to achieving its remarkable size — 3.51 billion monthly users, nearly half the planet. In Facebook’s early years, Zuckerberg set annual targets for the number of users the company wanted to gain. In 2014, he ordered teams at Facebook to grow “time spent,” or each user’s minutes spent on the service, by 10 percent a year, according to the documents and interviews.
In 2018, Zuckerberg defined a new metric that became his “north star,” according to a former executive. That metric was MSI — “meaningful social interactions” — named because the company wanted to emphasize the idea that engagement was more valuable than time spent passively scrolling through videos or other content. For example, the company’s algorithm would now weight posts that got a large number of comments as more “meaningful” than likes, and would use that information to inject the comment-filled posts into the news feeds of many more people who were not friends with the original poster, the documents said.
Even as the company has grown into a large conglomerate, Zuckerberg has maintained a reputation as a hands-on manager who goes deep on product and policy decisions, particularly when they involve critical trade-offs between preserving speech and protecting users from harm — or between safety and growth.
Politically, he has developed hard-line positions on free speech, announcing that he would allow politicians to lie in ads and at one time defending the rights of Holocaust denialists. He has publicly stated that he made the final call in the company’s most sensitive content decisions to date, including allowing President Donald Trump’s violence-inciting post during the George Floyd protests to stay up, despite objections from thousands of employees.
And his capacity for micromanagement is vast: He personally chose the colors and layout of the company’s “I got vaccinated” frames for user profile pictures, according to two of the people.
But the former employees who spoke with The Post said his influence goes far beyond what he has stated publicly, and is most felt in countless lesser-known decisions that shaped Facebook’s products to match Zuckerberg’s values — sometimes, critics say, at the expense of the personal safety of billions of users.
Ahead of the 2020 U.S. election, Facebook built a “voting information center” that promoted factual information about how to register to vote or sign up to be a poll worker. Teams at WhatsApp wanted to create a version of it in Spanish, pushing the information proactively through a chat bot or embedded link to millions of marginalized voters who communicate regularly through WhatsApp. But Zuckerberg raised objections to the idea, saying it was not “politically neutral,” or could make the company appear partisan, according to a person familiar with the project who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, as well as documents reviewed by The Post.
Ultimately, the company implemented a whittled-down version: a partnership with outside groups that allowed WhatsApp users to text a chat bot if they saw potential misinformation or to text a bot built by the organization Vote.org to get voting info.
When considering whether to permit increased censorship in Vietnam, one former employee said, Zuckerberg’s line in the free speech sand seemed to be constantly shifting. Warned that catering to a repressive regime could harm Facebook’s global reputation, according to one of the people, Zuckerberg argued that going offline entirely in Vietnam would cause even greater harm to free speech in the country.
After Zuckerberg agreed to increase censorship of anti-government posts, Facebook’s transparency report shows that more than 2,200 posts by Vietnamese users were blocked between July and December 2020, compared with 834 in the previous six months. Pro-democracy and environmental groups, meanwhile, have become a target of government-led mass reporting campaigns, the documents and interviews show, landing people in jail for even mildly critical posts.
In April 2020, Zuckerberg appeared to shoot down or express reservations about researchers’ proposals to cut down on hate speech, nudity, graphic violence and misinformation, according to one of the documents. The pandemic was in its early days and coronavirus-related misinformation was spreading. The researchers proposed a limit to boosting content the news-feed algorithm predicts will be reshared, because serial “reshares” tended to correlate with misinformation. Early tests showed limiting this could reduce coronavirus-related misinformation by up to 38 percent, according to the document.
“Mark doesn’t think we could go broad,” said Anna Stepanov, the director giving the readout from the Zuckerberg meeting, about the CEO’s response to the proposal to change the algorithm. “We wouldn’t launch if there was a material trade-off with MSI.”
Zuckerberg was a bit more open to a proposal to allow algorithms to be slightly less precise in what the software deemed to be hate speech, nudity and other banned categories — enabling it to delete a broader array of “probable violating content” and potentially reducing such harmful material by as much as 17 percent. But he only supported it as a “break the glass” measure, to be used in emergency situations such as the Jan. 6 insurrection, the documents said. Account demotions — which would have preemptively limited accounts that algorithms predicted were most likely to promote misinformation or hate — were off the table.
Facebook’s Lever says “probable violating” proposals were not break the glass measures and the company did implement them across categories such as graphic violence, nudity and porn, and hostile speech. Later, it also implemented the algorithm change fully for political and health categories that are in place today.
The Wall Street Journal first reported on the document’s existence.
The document that finally reached Zuckerberg was carefully tailored to address objections that researchers anticipated he would raise. For each of the nine suggestions that made their way up the chain, the data scientists added one row to list how the proposals would affect three areas he was known to care about: free speech, how Facebook is viewed publicly and how the algorithm change might affect MSI.
One former employee involved in that proposal process said those who worked on it were deflated by Zuckerberg’s response. The researchers had gone back and forth with leadership for months on it, changing it many times to address concerns about clamping down on free speech.
Zuckerberg, said a former executive, “is extremely inquisitive about anything that impacts how content gets ranked in the feed — because that’s the secret sauce, that’s the way this whole thing keeps spinning and working and making profits.”
“People felt, it was Mark’s thing, so he needs it to be successful. It needs to work,” the person added.
In 2019, those in the company’s civic integrity division, a roughly 200-person team that focused on how to mitigate harms caused by the platform, began to hear that Zuckerberg himself was becoming very worried about “false positives” — or legitimate speech being taken down by mistake. They were soon asked to justify their work by providing estimates of how many “false positives” any integrity-related project was producing, according to one of the people.
“Our very existence is fundamentally opposed to the goals of the company, the goals of Mark Zuckerberg,” said another person who quit. “And it made it so we had to justify our existence when other teams didn’t.”
“Founder-CEOs have superpowers that allow them to do courageous things. Mark has done that time and again,” Samidh Chakrabarti, the former head of the company’s civic integrity unit, who quit recently, tweeted this month. “But the trust deficit is real and the FB family may now better prosper under distributed leadership.”
Even as Facebook is facing perhaps its most existential crisis to date over the whistleblower documents, lately Zuckerberg’s attention has been elsewhere, focused on a push toward virtual-reality hardware in what former executives said was an attempt to distance himself from the problems of the core Facebook, known internally as the Big Blue app. The company is reportedly even considering changing its name to align better with his vision of a virtual-reality-driven “metaverse.” Facebook has said it doesn’t comment on rumors or speculation.
The former employees said it was also not surprising that the document trove contains so few references to Zuckerberg’s thoughts. He has become more isolated in recent years, in the face of mounting scandals and leaks (Facebook disputes his isolation). He primarily communicates decisions through a small inner circle, known as the Small Team, and a slightly bigger group of company leaders known as M-Team, or Mark’s team. Information that gets to him is also tightly controlled, as well as information about him.
Even criticizing Zuckerberg personally can come with costs. An engineer who spoke with The Post, and whose story was reflected in the documents, says he was fired in 2020 after penning an open letter to Zuckerberg on the company’s chat system, accusing the CEO of responsibility for protecting conservatives whose accounts had been escalated for misinformation.
One document, a 2020 proposal that indicates it was sent to Zuckerberg for review — over whether to hide like counts on Instagram and Facebook — strongly suggests that Zuckerberg was directly aware of some of the research into harmful effects of the service. It included internal research from 2018 that found that 37 percent of teenagers said one reason that they stopped posting content was because wanting to get enough like counts caused them “stress or anxiety.”
(The like-hiding study, named Project Daisy, was also reported by the Journal. In 2021, the company ultimately did offer an option to hide likes on Instagram, but not on Facebook. Facebook says it didn’t implement Project Daisy because a test showed mixed results for people’s well-being and that the 2018 study used in the presentation “cannot be used to show that Instagram causes harm because the survey wasn’t designed to test that, nor does the data show it.”)
Over the summer, executives in Facebook’s Washington office heard that Zuckerberg was angry about President Biden charge that coronavirus misinformation on Facebook was “killing people.” Zuckerberg felt Biden had unfairly targeted the company and wanted to fight back, according to people who heard a key Zuckerberg adviser, Facebook Vice President for Global Affairs Nick Clegg, express the CEO’s viewpoint.
Zuckerberg is married to a physician, runs a foundation focused on health issues and had hoped that Facebook’s ability to help people during the pandemic would be legacy-making. Instead, the plan was going south.
In July, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president for integrity, wrote a blog post noting that Facebook had missed its own vaccine goals, and asserting that Facebook wasn’t to blame for the large number of Americans who refused to get vaccinated.
Though Biden later backed off his comment, some former executives saw Facebook’s attack on the White House as unnecessary self-sabotage, an example of the company exercising poor judgment in an effort to please Zuckerberg.
But complaints about the brash action were met with a familiar response, three people said: It was meant to please the “audience of one.”
By Elizabeth Dwoskin
Lizza joined The Washington Post as Silicon Valley correspondent in 2016, becoming the paper's eyes and ears in the region. She focuses on social media and the power of the tech industry in a democratic society. Before that, she was the Wall Street Journal's first full-time beat reporter covering AI and the impact of algorithms on people's lives. Twitter
By Tory Newmyer
Tory Newmyer covers economic policy and the intersection of Wall Street and Washington as the anchor of PowerPost's daily tipsheet The Finance 202. He previously worked at Fortune, where he spent seven years as the magazine's Washington correspondent. Twitter
By Shibani Mahtani
Shibani Mahtani is the Southeast Asia bureau chief for The Washington Post, covering countries that include the Philippines, Myanmar, Thailand and Indonesia. She joined The Post's foreign desk in 2018 after seven years as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Southeast Asia and later in Chicago, where she covered the Midwest. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/25/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-whistleblower/
CNN Investigation: Tens of millions of filthy, used medical gloves imported into the US
By Scott McLean, Florence Davey-Attlee, Kocha Olarn and Tim Lister, CNN
Updated 1059 GMT (1859 HKT) October 24, 2021
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/24/health/medical-gloves-us-thailand-investigation-cmd-intl/index.html
Why Trump’s TRUTH Social Platform Will Probably Get Hacked Right Away
ANDREW HEINZMAN @andrew_andrew__
OCT 21, 2021, 12:04 PM EDT | 1 min read
https://www.reviewgeek.com/101126/why-trumps-truth-social-platform-will-probably-get-hacked-right-away/
Trump Media and Technology Group just announced TRUTH Social, a rival platform to Twitter, Facebook, and all of the other Big Tech giants. But like other specialized social media platforms, TRUTH will be a target for hackers, and it could leave your private info exposed. We’re not just speculating here—TRUTH Social has already been compromised, and it’s not even out yet!
Just two hours after Trump Media and Technology Group announced TRUTH Social, a group of Twitter users managed to access the beta website and make accounts with usernames like @donaldtrump and @mikepence. This beta website isn’t supposed to go live until November, but as reported by Insider, people simply guessed its URL to gain early access.
TRUTH Social’s beta page is now inaccessible to outsiders. But those who gained early access made some interesting discoveries. Most notably, TRUTH Social uses the open-source Mastodon 3.0 social media codebase, apparently without much customization (and without providing credit, which violates Mastodon’s terms).
That means TRUTH Media may be vulnerable to the same exploits as any other Mastodon-based site, including Gab, a niche social media platform that was recently hacked and hit with a $500,000 ransom demand. Evidently, hackers stole private user data from Gab using a simple SQL injection, something that should be impossible on a properly secured website.
Basic bugs and vulnerabilities are actually a very big problem in the world of specalized social media. Just look at Parler, a platform that lost 70TB of user data, including private posts and messages, all because it didn’t randomize its URLs.
And then there are sites like Gettr and Frank, which failed shortly after their debut due to … you guessed it, hackers. Are you noticing a trend here? These small websites are a huge target for hackers, but unlike Facebook or Twitter, they don’t have the resources or knowledge to deal with basic hacking attempts.
Even if TRUTH Social tries to take security seriously, which doesn’t seem to be the case (it’s a bare-bones uncredited Mastodon fork), the platform is a giant target for hackers. Those who sign up for TRUTH Social are almost certainly putting their private data at risk. Please keep that in mind when the platform launches this November.
Source: TMTG, Insider, @VValkyriePub
https://www.reviewgeek.com/101126/why-trumps-truth-social-platform-will-probably-get-hacked-right-away/
‘This stuff won’t go away’: PFAS chemicals contaminate Wisconsin’s waterways and soil
Water sources used by millions of humans as well as wildlife poisoned with ‘forever chemicals’
Tom Perkins
Fri 22 Oct 2021 10.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/oct/22/pfas-forever-chemicals-contaminate-waterways-soil-wisconsin
Last year, residents in Campbell, Wisconsin, a four-square-mile island city in the Mississippi River, learned disturbing news: toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” used in firefighting foam at a neighboring airport had probably been contaminating their private wells for decades.
As state and local leaders search for a solution, residents now use bottled water for drinking, cooking and brushing their teeth. Yet the situation represents more than an enormous inconvenience. Some strongly suspect that the seemingly high rate of cancer, Crohn’s disease and other serious ailments that have plagued the island’s residents stem from the dangerous chemicals.
“It’s emotionally draining,” said Campbell town supervisor Lee Donahue. “People are angry that it happened, they’re angry that they had no control over it, and they’re angry that their well is contaminated for no fault of their own.”
Campbell isn’t alone. Across the US similar stories of water contaminated with PFAS are emerging.
PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of chemicals used across dozens of industries to make products water, stain and heat resistant. They’re called “forever chemicals” because they don’t naturally break down, and they persist in the environment and accumulate in humans’ and animals’ bodies. The compounds are linked to cancer, decreased immunity, thyroid problems, birth defects, kidney disease, liver problems and a range of other serious diseases.
Between July and October, officials in nearby Eau Claire in Wisconsin shut down half its 16 municipal wells over PFAS contamination, and across the state PFAS have poisoned drinking water supplies, surface water in lakes and streams, air, soil and wildlife like deer and fish that are eaten by the state’s residents.
As municipalities and residents wrestle with the water crisis, the state’s Republican-controlled legislature has killed legislation and blocked funding meant to address the problem, which is likely much larger than currently known: only about 2% of the state’s utilities have tested for the chemicals, and those that have check for no more than 30 of the approximately 9,000 PFAS compounds that exist.
“We’ve had difficulty just testing water to get a handle on the scale and scope of PFAS contamination,” said Scott Laesar, water program director with the Clean Wisconsin advocacy group. “We are asking for some really basic information about what’s in people’s water, and if we can’t even get that, then we’re in a difficult spot.”
Wisconsin’s troubles aren’t unique. States around the US are contending with similar difficulties, as increased testing has revealed that drinking water supplies for more than 100 million people are contaminated with PFAS, and the Environmental Protection Agency recently revealed 120,000 sites across the country that may expose people to the chemicals.
The compounds’ ubiquity makes it difficult to determine sources of contamination, but Wisconsin airports and military bases that use PFAS-laden firefighting foam have often been identified as the culprit, including in Eau Claire, Madison, Milwaukee and Campbell.
The state’s combined groundwater standard for six types of PFAS is 20 parts per trillion (ppt), and the chemicals were detected at levels up to 70 ppt Eau Claire. Madison, a city of more than 250,000 and Wisconsin’s capital, found PFAS in all of its 16 drinking water wells in May 2020, but only at levels that exceeded health standards in one of them, which had been shut down months before.
Meanwhile, the lakes and streams around Madison are contaminated at startling levels. Officials have recorded counts for multiple compounds as high as 102,000 ppt, and levels in fish from nearby Lake Monona reached 180,000 ppt. Wisconsin department of natural resources signs posted along the region’s riverbanks warn residents against eating fish.
The pollution isn’t only in the water. A military base about 30 miles north-west of Madison open burns ammunition and flares that are composed of as much as 45% PFAS, and local residents are calling on the state and EPA to intervene.
Burning PFAS doesn’t destroy the chemicals, but does release them into the air, where they can be breathed in or contaminate water and soil. “Right now, [the base] can legally – not morally, but legally – burn PFAS,” said Laura Olah, director of Citizens for Safe Water Around Badger, which coordinates with affected communities around the state.
Cities like Milwaukee that draw drinking water from Lake Michigan on the state’s east side face less of a threat because the chemicals are diluted by the large body of water, but many private well owners who aren’t connected to municipal systems have recorded dangerous levels.
In Marinette, just north of Green Bay along Lake Michigan, a massive 10-sq-mile PFAS plume grew from a firefighting foam testing ground owned by manufacturer Tyco Fire Products. The plume hasn’t contaminated the municipal system at high levels, but levels in nearby private wells have reached 254,000 ppt, and alderman Doug Oitzinger said rates of thyroid disease and testicular cancer in young men in the region are “off the charts”. The plume has contaminated the city’s sewage sludge, which now has to be shipped to a specialized facility in Oregon.
“This stuff is in the groundwater and won’t go away,” Oitzinger said.
Polluting the lake still has wider consequences. PFAS have been found in a range of Great Lakes fish, and the DNR issued an advisory to limit the consumption of rainbow smelt.
Though residents across the political spectrum are being exposed and PFAS legislation has had at least some bipartisan support, Wisconsin’s Republican leadership last session killed the Clear Act, which would have established drinking water standards and funded cleanup, among other measures. The bill is once again stalled in the Republican-controlled legislature. Democratic governor Tony Evers’ last budget proposed $22m for statewide PFAS testing and cleanup, but that money was stripped away. The state legislature is expected to kill new limits on PFAS being developed by the DNR.
In Campbell, town officials are demanding that the Federal Aviation Administration stop using firefighting foam with PFAS, as is now required by law, but the airport continues using it, town supervisor Donahue said. The city of La Crosse, which owns the airport, has sued PFAS manufacturers for allegedly hiding the foam’s danger.
The cleanup effort is also meeting resistance from an unlikely source – water utilities, which say they don’t have money to filter the chemicals. Meanwhile, one of the few actions taken by the DNR that would require testing and cleanup faces a legal challenge from the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce trade group, which represents some of the state’s PFAS polluters. Should the case go to the state’s supreme court, it will be heard by a pro-business, Republican-controlled judge panel.
“We have an industry that would rather not know what’s out there and is engaged in a pretty cynical effort to maintain the status quo,” Laeser said. “This legislature has had numerous opportunities to invest in addressing PFAS and they have elected not to do so.”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/oct/22/pfas-forever-chemicals-contaminate-waterways-soil-wisconsin
A Judge Said It Was "Offensive" That A Man Who Threatened Democrats And "Tech Execs" On Jan. 6 Claimed To Be A Victim Of Racism
Troy Smocks was sentenced to 14 months in prison.
Zoe Tillman BuzzFeed News Reporter
Map of Washington, DC
Reporting From Washington, DC
Posted on October 21, 2021, at 5:57 p.m. ET
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zoetillman/january-6-threaten-democrats-sentence?bftwnews&utm_term=4ldqpgc#4ldqpgc
WASHINGTON — Troy Smocks, a Texas man who posted on the social network Parler on Jan. 6 urging supporters of former president Donald Trump to “go hunting” for Democrats, tech executives, and others, was sentenced on Thursday to 14 months in prison.
The sentence from US District Judge Tanya Chutkan was higher than what both Smocks and the prosecutor had asked for. Smocks has been in custody since his arrest in mid-January and argued for a sentence that was equivalent to the roughly nine months he’d already served. The government didn’t back a specific amount of prison time but backed a sentence on the low end of the 8- to 14-month recommended range.
Smocks traveled to Washington on Jan. 6 but wasn’t charged with participating in the riots. Instead, he was charged with — and ultimately pleaded guilty to — posting messages online throughout the day that promoted violence against anyone who didn’t back Trump. He wrote that Trump’s supporters should “prepare our weapons” and “go hunting” for Democrats, tech company executives, and “RINOS,” a term that refers to “Republicans in Name Only.”
Chutkan, who has imposed stiffer sentences than what the government argued for in several other Jan. 6 cases, said that Smocks had failed to show “genuine remorse” for his actions. He will receive credit for the time he’s already spent in jail.
A last-ditch effort by Smocks, who is Black, to argue that his prosecution was rooted in racism backfired. Smocks told Chutkan that he believed he had been treated more harshly than white Trump supporters who were charged with misdemeanor crimes for going into the Capitol. He claimed to be the only Black person charged in connection with Jan. 6 to face pretrial detention, but Chutkan noted that wasn’t true. Although the vast majority of people who attacked the Capitol were white, just Wednesday she presided over a hearing for Mark Ponder, a Black man charged with assaulting police at the Capitol who was also ordered to stay behind bars.
In his defense, Smocks had also compared himself to people who protested for racial justice in the 20th century, and he invoked civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. Chutkan, who is also Black, said she found the comparison “offensive.”
“People died fighting for civil rights, people were gassed, they were beaten, they were tortured mentally and physically,” Chutkan said. “For you to hold yourself up as a soldier in that fight is really quite audacious.”
Smocks is the 19th person sentenced in the Jan. 6 prosecutions. Chutkan’s decision represented the highest amount of prison time that a judge has handed down so far in connection with the cases.
The morning of Jan. 6, Smocks had posted a lengthy message on Parler in support of Trump, including a pledge to come back to Washington on the eve of President Joe Biden’s inauguration: “Many of us will return on January 19, 2021, carrying Our weapons, in support of Our nation’s resolve, towhich [sic] the world will never forget!!!”
That evening after the riots, he posted another message invoking Trump’s statement at a rally earlier in the day that his supporters should “fight like hell”: “So over the next 24 hours, I would say, lets get our personal affairs in order. Prepare Our Weapons, and then go hunting. Lets hunt these cowards down like the Traitors that each of them are. This includes, RINOS, Dems, and Tech Execs. We now have the green light. [All] who resist Us, are enemies of Our Constitution, and must be treated as such.”
Smocks pleaded guilty in September to one count of making threats, a felony crime that carried a maximum sentence of five years in prison. His estimated sentencing range reflected an extensive criminal record — he had approximately 18 prior convictions, many of which involved fraud, according to the government, although the prosecutor noted on Thursday that most of those incidents took place two decades ago. The government also claimed Smocks falsely claimed to be a veteran; the Department of Defense had no record of him serving in any branch of the military.
Smocks’s lawyer, John Machado, suggested there might be evidence of his client’s military service in a document related to one of Smocks’s earlier criminal cases, but he didn’t have a copy to show the judge. The judge said she couldn’t accept that representation without seeing the document itself.
Machado told Chutkan that Smocks had acknowledged that his threatening messages were “inappropriate,” but argued it wasn’t as serious as if he’d directed those threats at specific people by name. Chutkan pointed out that he’d referenced members of Congress and tech executives. When Machado pressed the point, saying it’d be different if the posts named individuals, Chutkan jumped in and replied that he might want to ask the members of Congress who hid under desks during the riots.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zoetillman/january-6-threaten-democrats-sentence?bftwnews&utm_term=4ldqpgc#4ldqpgc
The Recount @therecount·21h Is Ron DeSantis copying Trump?
VIDEO
Is Ron DeSantis copying Trump? pic.twitter.com/FGGFlLmQpH
— The Recount (@therecount) October 21, 2021
Is Ron DeSantis copying Trump? pic.twitter.com/FGGFlLmQpH
— The Recount (@therecount) October 21, 2021
A ‘non-cancellable’ community: the ‘truth’ about Trump’s social media platform
The presentation outlining the ex-president’s new company, Trump Media & Technology Group, is rich with hyperbole, but low on detail. Here’s the gist
Arwa Mahdawi
Thu 21 Oct 2021 21.28 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/21/trump-truth-social-media-platform-tmtg-presentation
Trump's Truth Social Hacked Within Hours of Announcement
BY KHALEDA RAHMAN ON 10/21/21 AT 5:59 AM EDT
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-truth-social-hacked-within-hours-announcement-1641137
Former President Donald Trump's new social media platform was reportedly hacked within hours of its announcement.
Trump announced he was launching a new media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, and its "Truth Social" app on Wednesday. The "Truth Social" app will begin a beta launch for "invited guests" in November, with a nationwide rollout planned for early 2022, according to a press release.
But people were able to sign up to create accounts using a publicly available link, Drew Harwell, a technology reporter for The Washington Post, said on Twitter late on Wednesday.
"I literally just registered 'mikepence.' The site hasn't even launched yet and it's already this vulnerable," Harwell added. In a subsequent tweet, he revealed that account had been suspended.
In another tweet, Harwell said it appeared the "donaldjtrump" account on Truth Social had been hacked. A screenshot Harwell shared showed the pinned post on the account was of a defecating animal.
However, it's not clear if that account belongs to the former president.
Meanwhile, Mikael Thalen, a reporter for The Daily Dot, tweeted that he was able to create an account using the handle @donaldtrump before the public domain for the site was taken down.
"Was just able to setup an account using the handle @donaldtrump on 'Truth Social,' former President Donald Trump's new social media website," Thalen tweeted. "Although the site is not officially open, a URL was discovered allowing users to sign up anyway."
In a follow-up tweet, Thalen added: "For those asking, the public domain for what appeared to be the mobile beta of Trump's new social media platform 'Truth Social' has been taken offline. I did manage to grab a screenshot of the Account Settings menu before access was blocked."
In a statement, Trump said his goal in launching Trump Media & Technology Group and the "Truth Social" app is to create a rival to the Big Tech companies that expelled him after the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
"I created TRUTH Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech," he said. "We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced. This is unacceptable."
Trump had spoken about launching his own social media site since he was banned from Twitter, previously his favorite megaphone, over the risk of inciting violence. He also remains indefinitely suspended from other sites, including Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
In May, he unveiled a new section on his existing website called "From the Desk of Donald J. Trump." The blog was soon abandoned after a reported decline in visitors.
A spokesperson for Trump Media & Technology Group has been contacted for comment.
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-truth-social-hacked-within-hours-announcement-1641137
TRUTH Social TERMS OF SERVICE
Last updated: September 20, 2021
Welcome to the T MEDIA TECH website. This Site has been created for your entertainment as well as educational and personal use.
...
CONTACT US
In order to resolve a complaint regarding the Site or to receive further information regarding use of the Site, please contact us at:
1100 South Ocean Blvd.
Palm Beach, FL 33480
support@truthsocial.com
(866)878-8442
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https://truthsocial.com/terms-of-service/
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https://www.maralagoclub.com/
Trump’s New Free Speech Network Has Already Banned Any Criticism of Itself
GREAT START
Jamie Ross News Correspondent
Updated Oct. 21, 2021 5:34AM ET / Published Oct. 21, 2021 4:57AM ET
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-new-free-speech-network-has-already-banned-any-criticism-of-itself?via=twitter_page
Donald Trump hailed his own creation of a new free speech social media network, Truth Social, on Wednesday night—but a scan of its terms and conditions shows that users will not be allowed to criticize the site. The former president, who was thrown off Facebook and Twitter earlier this year for inciting the Capitol riot, announced the launch of his new network in a press release, writing: “I created Truth Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech.” The site’s landing page claims that the site, which is set to go live next year, will be a place for “open, free, and honest global conversation.” However, despite those promises, Truth Social has already published a long list of prohibited activities—including a clause that states that users must not “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site.” Users are also told they must not “annoy” any of the site’s employees. It’s not clear if that includes Trump himself.
Read it at Deadline https://deadline.com/2021/10/donald-trump-social-media-network-1234859462/
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-new-free-speech-network-has-already-banned-any-criticism-of-itself?via=twitter_page
Pig kidney successfully connected to human body in world first
The 'huge breakthrough' could lead to a vast new supply of organs for patients in critical need, experts hope
By Jamie Johnson, US CORRESPONDENT
20 October 2021 • 6:05pm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/10/20/pig-kidney-successfully-connected-human-body-inworld-first/
Scientists have hailed a “huge breakthrough” for organ transplants after a pig’s kidney was successfully connected to a human body for the first time.
The scientific advance could one day lead to availability of a vast supply of organs for patients in critical need, experts hope.
The procedure, carried out at NYU Langone Health in New York, involved use of a pig whose genes had been altered so that its tissues no longer contained a molecule known to trigger almost immediate rejection.
The recipient was a brain-dead patient with signs of kidney dysfunction whose family consented to the experiment before she was due to be taken off of life support.
For three days, the new kidney was attached to her blood vessels and maintained outside her body, giving researchers access to it.
Test results of the transplanted kidney's function "looked pretty normal," said surgeon Dr Robert Montgomery, who led the study.
“It was better than I think we even expected.
“It just looked like any transplant I’ve ever done from a living donor. A lot of kidneys from deceased people don’t work right away, and take days or weeks to start. This worked immediately.”
The kidney made "the amount of urine that you would expect" from a transplanted human kidney, he added, and there was no evidence of the vigorous, early rejection seen when unmodified pig kidneys are transplanted into non-human primates.
The recipient's abnormal creatinine level - an indicator of poor kidney function - returned to normal after the transplant, Dr Montgomery, a heart transplant recipient himself, added.
Genetically engineered pigs “could potentially be a sustainable, renewable source of organs — the solar and wind of organ availability,” Dr Montgomery said.
“This is a huge breakthrough. It’s a big, big deal,” said Dr Dorry Segev, professor of transplant surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and was not involved in the project.
But, he told the New York Times: “We need to know more about the longevity of the organ.”
In the United States, nearly 107,000 people are presently waiting for organ transplants, including more than 90,000 awaiting a kidney, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. Wait times for a kidney average three-to-five years.
Researchers have been working for decades on the possibility of using animal organs for transplants, but have been stymied over how to prevent immediate rejection by the human body.
Dr Montgomery's team theorised that knocking out the pig gene for a carbohydrate that triggers rejection - a sugar molecule, or glycan, called alpha-gal - would prevent the problem.
The genetically altered pig, dubbed GalSafe, was developed by United Therapeutics Corp's Revivicor unit. It was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in December 2020 for use as food for people with a meat allergy and as a potential source of human therapeutics.
Medical products developed from the pigs would still require specific FDA approval before being used in humans, the agency said.
The NYU kidney transplant experiment should pave the way for trials in patients with end-stage kidney failure, possibly in the next year or two, said Dr Montgomery.
Those trials might test the approach as a short-term solution for critically ill patients until a human kidney becomes available, or as a permanent graft.
As the science advances, questions are likely to be raised about the ethics of altering the DNA of pigs for medical purposes. However, 100 million pigs are killed each year for food in the United States.
The current experiment involved a single transplant, and the kidney was left in place for only three days, so any future trials are likely to uncover new barriers that will need to be overcome, Dr Montgomery said. Participants would probably be patients with low odds of receiving a human kidney and a poor prognosis on dialysis.
"For a lot of those people, the mortality rate is as high as it is for some cancers, and we don't think twice about using new drugs and doing new trials (in cancer patients) when it might give them a couple of months more of life," Dr Montgomery said.
The researchers worked with medical ethicists, legal and religious experts to vet the concept before asking a family for temporary access to a brain-dead patient, he added.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/10/20/pig-kidney-successfully-connected-human-body-inworld-first/
Melissa W Replying to @TheTruthSocial
THREAD
https://twitter.com/ILOVERAFA1/status/1451093343543328768
TheTRUTHSocial @TheTruthSocial ·6h Success. It’s in our DNA.
THREAD
Success. It’s in our DNA. pic.twitter.com/pHPYtolfFf
— TheTruthSocial (parody) (@TheTruthSocial) October 21, 2021
https://twitter.com/thetruthsocial
TheTRUTHSocial
@TheTruthSocial
Twitter, but for racists and domestic terrorists.
Wuhan, China / Palm Beach, FL Joined October 2021
Pinned Tweet
TheTRUTHSocial
@TheTruthSocial
·
6h
Read this before we go bankrupt.
The chairman/CEO of Digital World Acquisition Group that is merging with Trump’s new media company, is also CEO of Yunhong International, a Cayman Islands incorporated blank check company with headquarters in Wuhan, China.
Yunhong International SEC CIK #0001773086
https://sec.report/CIK/0001773086
Yunhong International is incorporated in the state of Cayman Islands. Yunhong International is primarely in the business of blank checks. For financial reporting, their fiscal year ends on June 30th. This page includes all SEC registration details as well as a list of all documents (S-1, Prospectus, Current Reports, 8-K, 10K, Annual Reports) filed by Yunhong International.
Yunhong International is a blank check company.
Company Details
Reporting File Number 001-39226
State of Incorporation CAYMAN ISLANDS
Fiscal Year End 06-30
Date of Edgar Filing Update 2020-07-17
SIC 6770 [BLANK CHECKS]
Business Address
19/F DECHENG CENTER 124 ZHONGBEI ROAD
WUHAN-HUBEI F4 430000
Business Phone 86 180 8643 3333
Mailing Address
19/F DECHENG CENTER 124 ZHONGBEI ROAD
WUHAN-HUBEI
F4
430000
10-Q Quarterly Report [latest filing - 2021-07-30 17:27:31]
Annual Report [latest filing - 2021-07-23 00:00:00]
Kara Swisher @karaswisher Ouroboros in action: The chairman/CEO of Digital World Acquisition Group that is merging with Trump’s new media company, is also CEO of Yunhong International, a Cayman Islands incorporated blank check company with headquarters in Wuhan, China.
THREAD
Ouroboros in action: The chairman/CEO of Digital World Acquisition Group that is merging with Trump’s new media company, is also CEO of Yunhong International, a Cayman Islands incorporated blank check company with headquarters in Wuhan, China. pic.twitter.com/a4ljUETFg9
— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) October 21, 2021
New York Prosecutor Opens Criminal Inquiry Into Trump Golf Course: Reports
Officials are reportedly examining Trump National Golf Club Westchester for possible tax fraud.
By Sara Boboltz, HuffPost US
20/10/2021 17:20 BST
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/trump-national-golf-course-criminal-investigation_n_617019ebe4b079111a518546
A New York prosecutor has opened a criminal investigation into one of Donald Trump’s golf courses, according to multiple outlets, further dialing up the heat on the former president and his business practices.
Westchester County District Attorney Miriam Rocah has reportedly set her sights on the Trump National Golf Club, situated in a wealthy suburb north of New York City. Rocah’s office has subpoenaed records from the golf club “in recent months” along with property records from the town of Ossining, where the club is located, The New York Times reported Wednesday, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.
ABC News later confirmed the Times’ report. A spokeswoman for Rocah’s office declined to comment Wednesday morning.
The Trump Organization is already the subject of a long-running criminal investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which joined forces with the New York state attorney general’s office earlier this year. The two offices are seeking to determine whether people at the Trump Organization knowingly engaged in tax fraud.
Rocah is reportedly investigating similar accusations, including whether the Trump Organization deflated its property values in order to pay a lower tax rate, according to the Times.
It is not clear whether Rocah’s office suspects the former president of wrongdoing.
Trump purchased the Westchester golf club in 1996, rebranding it with his own name in line with his other properties.
What, exactly, Trump knew about his company’s alleged tax evasion is the big question surrounding the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation. In July, New York state prosecutors charged Allen Weisselberg who had served as financial chief of the Trump Organization for decades with evading taxes on employee perks, such as apartments and school tuition.
Since leaving office, Trump has faced an abundance of legal challenges covering both his business practices and his conduct while serving as president ? including his actions the day of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which are the subject of a House select committee investigation.
NBC News reported this week that at least 10 civil lawsuits are currently pending against Trump in the U.S.
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/trump-national-golf-course-criminal-investigation_n_617019ebe4b079111a518546
Donald Trump launching new social media platform, TRUTH Social
The former president has been banned from several platforms.
By Mark Osborne,John Santucci, andWill Steakin
21 October 2021, 02:58
• 4 min read
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-launching-social-media-platform-truth-social/story?id=80697031
Silenced by many major platforms, former President Donald Trump is launching his own social media app.
Trump Media and Technology Group and Digital World Acquisition Group, which is already listed on the Nasdaq, have entered into a merger to form a new company, chaired by the former president, according to a press release.
Trump says the group will form "a rival to the liberal media consortium."
Its first step will be launching a new social media platform called TRUTH Social. A beta version will be available to invited guests in November, according to the release.
"We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced," Trump said in the statement.
According to the release, the company was formed using a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, which the Securities and Exchange Commission's website says is a "popular vehicle for various transactions, including transitioning a company from a private company to a publicly traded company." The SEC says these companies are often referred to as "blank check companies."
Patrick F. Orlando, who according to the release is the chairman and CEO of the Digital World Acquisition Group that is merging with the former president's new media company, is also CEO of Yunhong International, which itself is an international blank check company incorporated in the Cayman Islands with headquarters in Wuhan, China, according to Bloomberg.
It's currently unclear who else is behind the SPAC that is launching Trump's new platform.
The former president and his advisers have hinted since he left office that he was considering creating a rival platform to Facebook and Twitter, after the social media giants suspended his accounts following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Trump, who throughout his presidency used Twitter to attack his enemies and often break his own news, has been emailing out statements almost has frequently as he previously tweeted.
"We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced," Trump said in the statement.
According to the release, the company was formed using a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, which the Securities and Exchange Commission's website says is a "popular vehicle for various transactions, including transitioning a company from a private company to a publicly traded company." The SEC says these companies are often referred to as "blank check companies."
Patrick F. Orlando, who according to the release is the chairman and CEO of the Digital World Acquisition Group that is merging with the former president's new media company, is also CEO of Yunhong International, which itself is an international blank check company incorporated in the Cayman Islands with headquarters in Wuhan, China, according to Bloomberg.
It's currently unclear who else is behind the SPAC that is launching Trump's new platform.
The former president and his advisers have hinted since he left office that he was considering creating a rival platform to Facebook and Twitter, after the social media giants suspended his accounts following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Trump, who throughout his presidency used Twitter to attack his enemies and often break his own news, has been emailing out statements almost has frequently as he previously tweeted.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-launching-social-media-platform-truth-social/story?id=80697031
The Digital World Acquisition SPAC has about $290 million on hand. Mr. Trump’s firm could use the money held by the SPAC to fund its growth, but that cash pile could shrink. That is because SPAC investors have a right to pull their money out of the deal before it is completed. Such withdrawals have skyrocketed in recent months, with shares of many SPACs falling after some companies that went public this way struggled to meet their growth targets.
Asked whether the deal would include private investment in public equity, or PIPE, financing, which often accompanies such deals, a spokesman for the SPAC said it couldn’t provide more details but would reveal more publicly soon.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-new-social-media-company-plans-to-go-public-via-spac-11634786531
Trump to launch social media platform to compete with Twitter and Facebook
Former US president to go public with TRUTH Social via merger with blank cheque company
James Fontanella-Khan in Los Angeles, Lauren Fedor in Washington and Ortenca Aliaj and Antoine Gara in New York 3 HOURS AGO
https://www.ft.com/content/0c989fd1-2e1a-4509-a478-02bb494f40de
DIGITAL WORLD ACQUISITION CORP.
https://www.iposcoop.com/ipo/digital-world-acquisition-corp/
Digital World Acquis (DWAC)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/Digital-World-Acquisition-DWAC-40248/
Trump’s New Social-Media Company Plans to Go Public via SPAC
Former president says Trump Media & Technology Group will create Truth Social to combat large social-media platforms
By Amrith Ramkumar
Updated Oct. 20, 2021 11:32 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-new-social-media-company-plans-to-go-public-via-spac-11634786531
Former President Donald Trump unveiled a new digital-media venture Wednesday and said it would go public by merging with a special-purpose acquisition company.
Trump Media & Technology Group will create a social network called Truth Social to fight such companies as Facebook Inc. FB 0.23% and Twitter Inc., TWTR -0.47% the Trump company said in a press release late Wednesday. Mr. Trump’s access to several social-media platforms was restricted following the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
He has held discussions with a number of different platforms throughout the year to find a new online megaphone. Mr. Trump had nearly 89 million followers on Twitter.
SPAC deals, such as the one Mr. Trump is doing, have become popular alternatives to traditional initial public offerings in the past year. Trump Media & Technology Group will combine with a SPAC called Digital World Acquisition Corp., valuing the Trump venture at $875 million, including debt, the press release said.
The firm’s Truth Social network will initially launch for invited users next month and is expected to be available nationwide in early 2022, the company said. It also hopes to create a subscription video-on-demand service.
Trump Media & Technology Group “was founded with a mission to give a voice to all,” Mr. Trump said in the release.
Also called a blank-check firm, a SPAC is a shell company that lists on a stock exchange with the sole intent of merging with a private firm to take it public. The private company then gets the SPAC’s place in the stock market. SPAC mergers have exploded in popularity in the past year for many startups because they are allowed to make projections about their business. Those aren’t allowed in normal IPOs.
The Digital World Acquisition SPAC has about $290 million on hand. Mr. Trump’s firm could use the money held by the SPAC to fund its growth, but that cash pile could shrink. That is because SPAC investors have a right to pull their money out of the deal before it is completed. Such withdrawals have skyrocketed in recent months, with shares of many SPACs falling after some companies that went public this way struggled to meet their growth targets.
Asked whether the deal would include private investment in public equity, or PIPE, financing, which often accompanies such deals, a spokesman for the SPAC said it couldn’t provide more details but would reveal more publicly soon.
Several former Trump administration officials are involved with their own SPACs, including Wilbur Ross, Larry Kudlow and Gary Cohn.
SPAC deals have become a hot fundraising tool for digital-media startups. BuzzFeed Inc. announced a roughly $1.5 billion SPAC merger in June.
Write to Amrith Ramkumar at amrith.ramkumar@wsj.com
Copyright ©2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the October 21, 2021, print edition as 'Trump Venture To List Via SPAC.'
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-new-social-media-company-plans-to-go-public-via-spac-11634786531
Trump to launch social media platform to compete with Twitter and Facebook
Former US president to go public with TRUTH Social via merger with blank cheque company
James Fontanella-Khan in Los Angeles, Lauren Fedor in Washington and Ortenca Aliaj and Antoine Gara in New York 3 HOURS AGO
https://www.ft.com/content/0c989fd1-2e1a-4509-a478-02bb494f40de
Donald Trump is launching a social media platform called TRUTH Social, which will go public via a merger with a blank cheque company, as the former US president seeks to capitalise on his popularity among a large chunk of Republicans.
The move comes after months of speculation about whether Trump would launch a media company to compete with Twitter and Facebook and set the stage for another presidential run in 2024.
Trump, who used Twitter extensively during his 2016 campaign and four years in office, was banned from the platform, along with Facebook, YouTube and other big social media networks in the wake of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
The former president said in a statement on Wednesday that the new app would be controlled by Trump Media & Technology Group.
“I created TRUTH Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech,” he said in a press release obtained by the Financial Times. “We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American president has been silenced. This is unacceptable”.
Digital World Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company launched by Patrick Orlando, will merge with TMTG in a deal that values the business at $875m, with a potential to rise to $1.7bn based on the performance of the stock.
In September, Digital World raised $293m of cash in an initial public offering. Eleven hedge funds, including DE Shaw and Saba Capital, which are headed by prominent Democratic party donors, participated in the offering, according to filings.
Assuming no investors redeem their shares, an option they have, that cash will be used to capitalise on Trump’s media business.
TRUTH Social is already available for pre-order on Apple’s App Store, where it is scheduled for release next year. The app is described as “America’s ‘Big Tent’ social media platform that encourages an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating against political ideology”.
The former president has kept a relatively low profile since being stripped of his social media accounts and skipping Joe Biden’s inauguration in January. But he has continued to issue press releases through his “Save America” political action committee and publicly toyed with another bid for the White House in 2024.
He held a rally this month in Iowa, an important state in the presidential nominating process, and has endorsed a number of candidates ahead of next year’s midterm elections, when control of both houses of Congress will be in contention.
Trump and other Republican lawmakers have accused Big Tech companies of censorship and bias against conservatives, and have called for an overhaul of the laws that govern a platform’s liability for the speech they host. A number of smaller “free speech” platforms have sprung up, with some vying recently to partner with the former president to give him a platform.
Jason Miller, a former senior adviser to Trump who this year set up his own social media platform intended to appeal to conservatives called Gettr, issued a statement congratulating his former boss.
“Now Facebook and Twitter will lose even more market share,” Miller said. “President Trump has always been a great dealmaker, but we just couldn’t come to terms on a deal.”
Miller did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.
Additional reporting by Hannah Murphy in San Francisco
https://www.ft.com/content/0c989fd1-2e1a-4509-a478-02bb494f40de
Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla Oh my god. WHAT???
Deripaska is directly implicated in Russian interference in US election. Read the goddamn Senate Intelligence Report, Britain. An utter utter disgrace
@George_Osborne
Quote Tweet
The Kleptocracy Initiative
@KleptocracyIntv
· Sep 23
George Osborne, former UK chancellor, will become an advisor to Deripaska-backed Russian energy firm EN+. https://ft.com/content/cf936f46-a6c8-4ca2-b0db-95fc1155a42f
7:11 PM · Sep 23, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
Oh my god. WHAT???
— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) September 23, 2021
Deripaska is directly implicated in Russian interference in US election. Read the goddamn Senate Intelligence Report, Britain. An utter utter disgrace@George_Osborne https://t.co/GtM1eZJU0J
Why is McConnell Getting Away with the Deripaska Scandal?
Yosef 52 Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)
Thursday December 31, 2020 · 5:10 AM GM
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/12/30/2004140/-Why-is-McConnell-Getting-Away-with-the-Deripaska-Scandal
Not since the days of Joseph McCarthy has a member of the Senate been as recklessly irresponsible as Mitch McConnell. Not since the Gilded Age in the late 19th century has anyone in Congress been as corrupt as Mitch McConnell. Not since the dark days of John C. Calhoun has there been a member of the Senate more harmful to the well-being of America than Mitch McConnell. These facts alone would justify politically destroying the vile malignancy that is McConnell.
But McConnell is also deeply involved with Russian organized crime. An utterly shocking instance of corrupt dealing has gone under-reported: the deal Mitch McConnell made with Putin Buddy and Mob boss Oleg Deripaska. If the United States is to survive, McConnell will have to be politically destroyed and driven out of the Senate. In trying to renew interest in this issue, I propose to do exactly that.
...
MUCH MORE
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/12/30/2004140/-Why-is-McConnell-Getting-Away-with-the-Deripaska-Scandal
Surely It's a Coincidence That a Firm Tied to a Russian Oligarch Is Pouring Millions Into Kentucky
Surely.
By Charles P. Pierce
Apr 24, 2019
The Louisville Courier-Journal is chasing a story that further illustrates what a wonderful environment for coincidence the current political moment happens to be.
Kentucky might be going into business with the Russian mafia. Not the rough-and-tumble “Godfather” crowd with the bent noses and such names like Tessio, Barzini and Luca Brasi. If all goes according to plan, by the middle of the year, we’ll be in business with Oleg Deripaska, a buddy of Vladimir Putin.
He could be sending $200 million — if you believe media reports — in what could very well be mobbed-up money to northeastern Kentucky to build a $1.7 billion aluminum plant on an old strip mine there. The 51-year-old billionaire emerged as a powerful businessman following the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union after a bloody fight for control of Russia's aluminum industry. Last November, the New York Times quoted Mikhail Khodorkovsky, another Russian billionaire, saying he stayed out of that battle and urged those he worked with to do the same because of the ruthlessness of the fight. “There were so many murders, I refused to go into this business,” Khodorkovsky said. According to the Times, many have claimed that Deripaska “engaged in theft, intimidation, bribery and even murder, notably of a Russian banker in 1995,” but that none of those claims has been substantiated.
It seems that Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin was hot to build a new aluminum milling plant, but that the proposed location was not suitable for such a large operation. The cost of finding a new location drained the project's funds. And along came the Volga Bagmen to the rescue.
Enter Rusal, a Russian aluminum company that until just three months ago was barred from doing business in the United States in part because of its ties to Deripaska. The Trump administration lifted the sanctions in January after Deripaska agreed to reduce his ownership stake in the Moscow-based company, the world’s second-largest aluminum manufacturer, from 70% to less than 45%.
But there was Kentucky-specific help needed, too.
And that came only after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell backed that decision despite large numbers of Republicans and Democrats who objected to allowing Rusal and its parent company En+ Group into the United States. The House voted to keep the sanctions 362-53, but the Senate fell three votes short of the 60 votes needed to end a filibuster. McConnell, along with Sen. Rand Paul, voted against the resolution.
Two of the three votes needed to maintain the sanctions against goons like Deripaska came from senators representing a state into which his company was pumping money he'd obtained god knows where or how, and one of whom is the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate into whose PAC Deripaska's partner dumped $3.5 million between 2015 and 2017. Oddly, one of the stories that has sunk like a stone over the past few years is the story of how much Russian ratfcking money went into Republican campaigns generally over the past few cycles.
Again, nobody knows what the ultimate sources of this money may be, but since Russia is a thoroughgoing thieves' paradise, anybody's guess is as good as anybody else's. But only a fool believes in accidents any more.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a27259438/oleg-deripaska-kentucky-aluminum-mitch-mcconnell-rand-paul/
Is Oleg Deripaska the missing link in the Trump-Russia investigation?
This article is more than 2 years old
The Russian oligarch could face greater scrutiny after disclosure that Paul Manafort discussed Ukraine peace plan with associate
Peter Stone
Tue 29 Jan 2019 07.00 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/29/oleg-deripaska-paul-manafort-trump-russia-investigation
Laura Strickler @strickdc·2h Breaking: FBI raiding home of Oleg Deripaska as per law enforcement
.
@NBCNews
THREAD
Breaking: FBI raiding home of Oleg Deripaska as per law enforcement. @NBCNews pic.twitter.com/nbKdhaFKh3
— Laura Strickler (@strickdc) October 19, 2021
Coronavirus breakthrough: Stunned scientists discover uncommon antibody in 45-year old man that halts most Covid variants
Michiel Willems
Wednesday 13 October 2021 4:58 pm
https://www.cityam.com/coronavirus-breakthrough-stunned-scientists-discover-uncommon-antibody-in-45-year-old-man-that-halts-multiple-covid-variants/
Scientists were left stunned after they discovered a natural Covid antibody that seems to neutralise multiple Coronavirus variants.
The ‘potent’ antibody was reportedly found in a 45-year old man who recovered from Covid-19 more than three months ago.
One of the antibodies, labelled as ‘54042-4’, seemed to be able to halt multiple mutations, including the Delta and Alpha variants.
The researchers wrote in Cell Reports that the antibodies have ‘uncommon genetic and structural characteristics’ thereby setting themselves apart from others.
They are now looking into developing the antibody with the aim of protecting more people against a range of viruses.
https://www.cityam.com/coronavirus-breakthrough-stunned-scientists-discover-uncommon-antibody-in-45-year-old-man-that-halts-multiple-covid-variants/
Justice Department will ask Supreme Court to block Texas abortion law while legal fights play out
By Ann E. Marimow and Robert Barnes
Today at 12:05 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/doj-texas-abortion-ban-supreme-court/2021/10/15/bd5762e6-2dcc-11ec-8ef6-3ca8fe943a92_story.html
The Department of Justice said Friday that it will go back to the Supreme Court to request that it put on hold Texas’s restrictive abortion law while legal battles continue.
In a different case, the Supreme Court last month allowed the law to go into effect on a divisive 5 to 4 vote.
The DOJ has filed a separate challenge to halt the law, which bars abortion as early as six weeks into the pregnancy and makes no exceptions for rape or incest, with mixed results.
Last week, a federal judge in Austin temporarily suspended enforcement of the abortion ban, saying he would “not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right.”
“A person’s right under the Constitution to choose to obtain an abortion before fetal viability is well established,” U.S. District Judge Robert L. Pitman, a nominee of President Barack Obama, wrote in a 113-page ruling. “Fully aware that depriving its citizens of this right by direct state action would be flagrantly unconstitutional, the State contrived an unprecedented and transparent statutory scheme to do just that.”
But the U.S. Court of Appeals of the 5th Circuit quickly put Pitman’s order on hold, and on Thursday said the law would remain in effect, setting a hearing the week of Dec. 6. and reinstated the law pending further review.
In a 2-to-1 order, the judges did not give detailed reasoning for their action. Judges James C. Ho, a nominee of President Donald Trump, and Catharina Haynes, a nominee of President George W. Bush. were in the majority. Judge Carl E. Stewart, a nominee of President Bill Clinton, dissented.
The majority cited a previous rulings in a separate challenge, which said that because the ban is enforced by private individuals and not government officials, it is not clear when and how the law can be challenged in federal court.
“The Justice Department intends to ask the Supreme Court to vacate the Fifth Circuit’s stay of the preliminary injunction against Texas Senate Bill 8,” Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley said in a brief statement Friday.
The battle over the law’s enforcement mechanism has effectively halted almost all abortions in Texas, even though no court has addressed whether the ban violates past Supreme Court decisions guaranteeing the right to an abortion until viability, usually about 22 to 24 weeks of pregnancy.
Since Sept. 1, patients seeking to terminate their pregnancies have been driving hours to other states, including Oklahoma and Kansas, according to providers and advocates. Those who lack the money to make such trips, or cannot leave work or child-care commitments, are forced to continue with unwanted pregnancies.
A dozen other states have passed laws that are as restrictive as the one in Texas, which bans abortion after a physician detects cardiac activity in the womb. But federal judges have prevented those laws from taking effect, finding them at odds with Roe v. Wade and other rulings.
But the Texas law was specifically designed to avoid judicial review by making it difficult for abortion providers and individuals seeking access to abortion to challenge it.
By Ann Marimow
Ann Marimow covers legal affairs for The Washington Post. She joined The Post in 2005 and has covered state government and politics in California, New Hampshire and Maryland. Twitter
By Robert Barnes
Robert Barnes has been a Washington Post reporter and editor since 1987. He joined The Post to cover Maryland politics, and he has served in various editing positions, including metropolitan editor and national political editor. He has covered the Supreme Court since November 2006. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/doj-texas-abortion-ban-supreme-court/2021/10/15/bd5762e6-2dcc-11ec-8ef6-3ca8fe943a92_story.html
Trump hid over $70 million in losses on his DC hotel, House committee report alleges
PUBLISHED FRI, OCT 8 202111:39 AM EDTUPDATED FRI, OCT 8 20215:06 PM EDT
Christina Wilkie @CHRISTINAWILKIE
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/08/trump-hid-over-70-million-in-losses-on-dc-hotel-house-panel-alleges.html?__source=sharebar|twitter&par=sharebar
- Former President Donald Trump’s luxury hotel in Washington, D.C., lost more than $70 million from 2016 to 2020, according to newly released filings that his accountants submitted to the hotel’s landlord, the General Services Administration.
- While the hotel was losing money, Trump’s annual financial disclosures reported only its revenue, which amounted to $156 million over five years.
- The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee alleges in a new report that Trump hid more than $20 million in loans to the struggling hotel.
WASHINGTON – Former President Donald Trump’s luxury hotel in Washington, D.C., lost more than $70 million from 2016 to 2020, according to newly released confidential filings that his accountants submitted to the hotel’s landlord, the General Services Administration.
While the hotel was losing money, Trump’s annual financial disclosures filed with the Office of Government Ethics reported publicly only the hotel’s revenue, which added up to nearly $156.6 million.
Yet over that same period, Trump’s accounting firm, WeiserMazars LLP, disclosed in confidential reports to the GSA that the hotel lost nearly $73.9 million. The firm later changed its name to Mazars USA LLP.
According to a new report issued Friday by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the effect of the discrepancy between what Trump publicly reported and what he privately disclosed was to mislead the public about the president’s financial situation.
A spokeswoman for the Trump Organization rejected the committee’s findings and denied that there was anything misleading in the former president’s disclosures, noting that Trump had reported the hotel’s gross revenue, not its net profit.
The committee also alleges that Trump hid more than $20 million in loans that his real estate holding company made to the struggling hotel, another attempt to conceal the true state of the president’s finances.
“Far from being a successful investment, the Trump Hotel was a failing business saddled by debt that required bailouts from President Trump’s other businesses,” the committee wrote in a letter Friday to Robin Carnahan, administrator of the General Services Administration, the federal agency that holds the lease to the underlying property of Trump’s D.C. hotel, the historic Old Post Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue.
“In deciding to conceal the Trump Hotel’s true financial condition from federal ethics officials and the American public, President Trump hid conflicts of interest,” wrote Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., the committee chair and the chairman of the Subcommittee on Government Operations, respectively.
It’s not clear whether Trump violated any federal rules regarding the disclosure of assets and income. By reporting the revenue, and omitting the losses, Trump appears to have abided by the letter of the law, if not the spirit.
The committee also alleged that Trump received an unreported and surprising loan modification from Deutsche Bank halfway into his presidency, one that potentially saved the then president and his struggling company tens of millions of dollars.
Deutsche Bank’s U.S. subsidiary loaned Trump $170 million in 2015 to finance the renovation and operation of the hotel. Under the terms of that loan, Trump was supposed to begin paying down the principal in 2018.
But according to the committee’s findings, in 2018, “the terms of the loan were changed to allow the Trump Hotel to defer any principal payments on the loan by six years.”
It is unclear, the committee says, how the loan modification was negotiated, or by whom. The change to the loan terms was never publicly disclosed, according to Trump’s annual financial disclosures.
A Deutsche Bank spokesman pushed back.
“The Committee’s letter makes several inaccurate statements regarding Deutsche Bank and its loan agreement,” he said.
The Trump Organization spokeswoman likewise denied that the company had ever received “any preferential treatment from any lender.”
The new findings are in keeping with Trump’s decadeslong pattern of allegedly inflating his income, assets and net worth, while hiding his losses and liabilities.
That pattern is currently the subject of a probe by New York state authorities, who are investigating whether Trump’s company inflated the value of his properties on insurance forms, and undervalued them on tax returns. This could amount to insurance fraud.
The company is also facing a tax evasion case in New York that has already ensnared its top accountant, longtime Trump family employee Allen Weisselberg. In July, Weisselberg pleaded not guilty to a bevy of charges stemming from an alleged decadeslong plot to hide compensation he received from the company.
Trump has denied any allegations of wrongdoing, instead accusing authorities of subjecting him to a partisan “witch hunt.”
Trump was recently removed from the Forbes magazine list of the 400 richest Americans, a list he had been named on for the past 25 years. The Covid-19 pandemic hurt the commercial real estate and hotel industries especially hard, costing Trump approximately $600 million in estimated net worth, Forbes determined.
Correction: Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., is chairman of the Subcommittee on Government Operations. An earlier version misspelled his name.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/08/trump-hid-over-70-million-in-losses-on-dc-hotel-house-panel-alleges.html?__source=sharebar|twitter&par=sharebar
U.S. Jan. 6 panel to advance contempt charges if subpoenas not followed -Cheney
Reuters 2 minute read
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-jan-6-panel-advance-contempt-charges-if-subpoenas-not-followed-cheney-2021-10-13/
WASHINGTON, Oct 12 (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol will move criminal contempt charges against those who do not comply with its subpoenas, Representative Liz Cheney, the panel's vice chair, said on Tuesday.
The committee late last month subpoenaed four members of former President Donald Trump's administration. They were Trump's former chief of staff Mark Meadows, former White House adviser Steve Bannon, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino and former Defense Department official Kash Patel.
The committee has already threatened criminal contempt charges against Bannon for refusing to cooperate with the inquiry into the attack, in which a mob of Trump's supporters stormed the seat of the U.S. government.
Those subpoenaed will have the opportunity to cooperate, but if they do not, the committee will enforce its subpoenas, Cheney, a Republican, told reporters at the U.S. Capitol. She leads the committee along with its chairman, Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson.
"In general, people are going to have to appear, or, you know, we will move contempt charges against them," Cheney said. She said the entire committee was in agreement on that point.
Cheney said the committee expected to have depositions from Meadows and Patel later this week. "We'll see if they show up. If they show up, we'll be prepared," she said.
The riot took place as Congress was meeting to certify Democrat Joe Biden's election victory, delaying that process for several hours as then-Vice President Mike Pence, members of Congress, staff and journalists fled. More than 600 people now face criminal charges stemming from the event.
House Democrats formed the committee over objections from Trump's fellow Republicans in the House. Cheney is one of two Republicans on the committee.
Reporting by Susan Cornwell; Editing by Peter Cooney
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-jan-6-panel-advance-contempt-charges-if-subpoenas-not-followed-cheney-2021-10-13/
We Are Republicans. There’s Only One Way to Save Our Party From Pro-Trump Extremists.
Oct. 11, 2021
By Miles Taylor and Christine Todd Whitman
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/opinion/2022-house-senate-trump.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes
Mr. Taylor served at the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff, and was the anonymous author of a 2018 guest essay for The Times criticizing President Donald Trump’s leadership. Ms. Whitman was the Republican governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001.
After Donald Trump’s defeat, there was a measure of hope among Republicans who opposed him that control of the party would be up for grabs, and that conservative pragmatists could take it back. But it’s become obvious that political extremists maintain a viselike grip on the national and state parties and the process for fielding and championing House and Senate candidates in next year’s elections.
Rational Republicans are losing the party civil war. And the only near-term way to battle pro-Trump extremists is for all of us to team up on key races and overarching political goals with our longtime political opponents: the Democrats.
This year we joined more than 150 conservatives — including former governors, senators, congressmen, cabinet secretaries, and party leaders — in calling for the Republican Party to divorce itself from Trumpism or else lose our support, perhaps with us forming a new political party. Rather than return to founding ideals, Republican leaders in the House and in many states have now turned belief in conspiracy theories and lies about stolen elections into a litmus test for membership and running for office.
Starting a new center-right party may prove to be the last resort if Trump-backed candidates continue to win Republican primaries. We and our allies have debated the option of starting a new party for months and will continue to explore its viability in the long run. Unfortunately, history is littered with examples of failed attempts at breaking the two-party system, and in most states today the laws do not lend themselves easily to the creation and success of third parties.
So for now, the best hope for the rational remnants of the Republican Party is for us to form an alliance with Democrats to defend American institutions, defeat far-right candidates, and elect honorable representatives next year — including a strong contingent of moderate Democrats.
It’s a strategy that has worked. Mr. Trump lost re-election in large part because Republicans nationwide defected, with 7 percent who voted for him in 2016 flipping to support Joe Biden, a margin big enough to have made some difference in key swing states.
Even still, we don’t take this position lightly. Many of us have spent years battling the left over government’s role in society, and we will continue to have disagreements on fundamental issues like infrastructure spending, taxes and national security. Similarly, some Democrats will be wary of any pact with the political right.
But we agree on something more foundational — democracy. We cannot tolerate the continued hijacking of a major U.S. political party by those who seek to tear down our Republic’s guardrails or who are willing to put one man’s interests ahead of the country. We cannot tolerate Republican leaders — in 2022 or in the presidential election in 2024 — refusing to accept the results of elections or undermining the certification of those results should they lose.
To that end, concerned conservatives must join forces with Democrats on the most essential near-term imperative: blocking Republican leaders from regaining control of the House of Representatives. Some of us have worked in the past with the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, but as long as he embraces Mr. Trump’s lies, he cannot be trusted to lead the chamber, especially in the run-up to the next presidential election.
And while many of us support and respect the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, it is far from clear that he can keep Mr. Trump’s allies at bay, which is why the Senate may be safer remaining as a divided body rather than under Republican control.
For these reasons, we will endorse and support bipartisan-oriented moderate Democrats in difficult races, like Representatives Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, where they will undoubtedly be challenged by Trump-backed candidates. And we will defend a small nucleus of courageous Republicans, such as Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Peter Meijer and others who are unafraid to speak the truth.
In addition to these leaders, this week we are coming together around a political idea — the Renew America Movement — and will release a slate of nearly two dozen Democratic, independent and Republican candidates we will support in 2022.
These “renewers” must be protected and elected if we want to restore a common-sense coalition in Washington. But merely holding the line will be insufficient. To defeat the extremist insurgency in our political system and pressure the Republican Party to reform, voters and candidates must be willing to form nontraditional alliances.
For disaffected Republicans, this means an openness to backing centrist Democrats. It will be difficult for lifelong Republicans to do this — akin to rooting for the other team out of fear that your own is ruining the sport entirely — but democracy is not a game, which is why when push comes to shove, patriotic conservatives should put country over party.
One of those races is in Pennsylvania, where a bevy of pro-Trump candidates are vying to replace the departing Republican senator, Pat Toomey. The only prominent moderate in the primary, Craig Snyder, recently bowed out, and if no one takes his place, it will increase the urgency for Republican voters to stand behind a Democrat, such as Representative Conor Lamb, a centrist who is running for the seat.
For Democrats, this similarly means being open to conceding that there are certain races where progressives simply cannot win and acknowledging that it makes more sense to throw their lot in with a center-right candidate who can take out a more radical conservative.
Utah is a prime example, where the best hope of defeating Senator Mike Lee, a Republican who defended Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede the election, is not a Democrat but an independent and former Republican, Evan McMullin, a member of our group, who announced last week that he was entering the race.
We need more candidates like him prepared to challenge politicians who have sought to subvert our Constitution from the comfort of their “safe” seats in Congress, and we are encouraged to note that additional independent-minded leaders are considering entering the fray in places like Texas, Arizona and North Carolina, targeting seats that Trumpist Republicans think are secure.
More broadly, this experiment in “coalition campaigning” — uniting concerned conservatives and patriotic progressives — could remake American politics and serve as an antidote to hyper-partisanship and federal gridlock.
To work, it will require trust building between both camps, especially while they are fighting side by side in the toughest races around the country by learning to collaborate on voter outreach, sharing sensitive polling data, and synchronizing campaign messaging.
A compact between the center-right and the left may seem like an unnatural fit, but in the battle for the soul of America’s political system, we cannot retreat to our ideological corners.
A great deal depends on our willingness to consider new paths of political reform. From the halls of Congress to our own communities, the fate of our Republic might well rest on forming alliances with those we least expected to.
Miles Taylor (@MilesTaylorUSA) served at the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff, and was the anonymous author of a 2018 guest essay for The Times criticizing President Donald Trump’s leadership. Christine Todd Whitman (@GovCTW) was the Republican governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001 and served as E.P.A. administrator under President George W. Bush.
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A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2021, Section A, Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: We Are Republicans With a Plea: Elect Democrats. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/opinion/2022-house-senate-trump.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes
Failure to challenge poor scientific advice during pandemic cost thousands of lives
First major report into Government’s Covid-19 response says the error led to ‘one of most important public health failures in UK history’
By Sarah Knapton, SCIENCE EDITOR
12 October 2021 • 6:00am
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/12/failure-challenge-poor-scientific-advice-pandemic-cost-thousands/
Britain did not lock down sooner because ministers failed to challenge poor scientific advice, the first major report into the Government’s pandemic response has concluded.
The error led to "one of the most important public health failures the UK has ever experienced" and resulted in a higher death toll, MPs said.
A joint report by the Government's health and science select committees found that many mistakes were made in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, which had only been redeemed by Britain’s successful vaccination programme.
The MPs said a lack of testing early in the pandemic left the country "facing the biggest health crisis in a hundred years with virtually no data to analyse", while a failure to shut borders allowed an influx of new cases.
'Fatalistic' approach
Unaware of the true scale of spread, ministers and scientists adopted a "fatalistic" approach of trying to manage Covid-19, rather than stop it, which "amounted in practice" to accepting herd immunity through infection, the report concluded.
It was only when it became apparent that the NHS would be overwhelmed that the Government imposed a lockdown on March 23.
In an interview with BBC Radio Four, Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, said his advice now for winter would be to go "sooner" and "harder" with restrictions to get on top of the spread.
His comments are in contrast to Spring 2020, when scientists advising the Government warned that coming down too hard would push cases back to the winter when the NHS would be less able to cope, and argued the public would not accept a lockdown.
Poor pandemic planning
The report also concluded that Britain’s pandemic planning was too heavily based on influenza, and had failed to incorporate lessons from outbreaks of Sars, Mers and Ebola.
And MPs criticised the "slow, uncertain and chaotic" performance of the test, trace and isolate system, which "severely hampered" the UK's response to the pandemic.
However, the report did praise Britain’s vaccine programme, labelling it "one of the most stunning achievements in history", which prevented a fourth lockdown this summer.
In a joint statement, Jeremy Hunt MP, the chairman of the Health and Social Care Committee, and Greg Clark MP, the chairman of the Science and Technology Committee,?said: "The UK response has combined some big achievements with some big mistakes.
"Our vaccine programme?was boldly planned and effectively executed.?Our test and trace programme?took too long to become effective.
"The Government took seriously scientific advice but there should have been more challenge from all to the early UK consensus that delayed?a?more comprehensive lockdown."
Analysis: The terrible mistakes, and how vaccine programme turned things around
The first major report into the Government’s pandemic response has highlighted a series of errors which are likely to have cost thousands of lives.
The Science and Technology Committee?and?Health and Social Care Committee has published an initial report following months of evidence from witnesses including Matt Hancock, Prof Chris Whitty, Sir Patrick Vallance and Dominic Cummings.
MPs concluded that while Britain’s Covid-19 vaccine programme was one of the most effective in history, a series of early mistakes left the UK struggling to keep the virus under control.
Here is what they found:
The mistakes
Pandemic preparedness
When Johns Hopkins University undertook a global survey of which countries were the best prepared for a pandemic in October 2019, it was Britain and the US that came out top. Yet, when it came to coronavirus, the UK found itself seriously on the back foot.
The problem was Britain had planned for an influenza epidemic, which is not driven by asymptomatic transmission and where community testing and tracing of cases was less important.
Exercises to test national response capacity – Cygnus and Winter Willow – had not addressed a disease with Covid-19's characteristics, and the Government had seriously underestimated how bad things could get.
The 2019 National Risk Register concluded an emerging virus would lead to a maximum of 100 deaths.
In the report, MPs said: "An over-reliance on pandemic influenza as the most important disease threat clearly had consequences. It means that the emphasis of detailed preparations was for what turned out to be the wrong type of disease."
A lack of preparedness meant that the NHS was forced to divert resources to Covid-19 from across the health service, leading to a substantial increase in missed, delayed and cancelled appointments.
Lockdowns and social distancing
The large number of deaths in the first wave were largely driven by decisions made in the early weeks of the pandemic, when the Government was operating in a "fog of uncertainty".
Despite the UK developing a test for Covid in January 2020, testing was not rolled out widely and it was abandoned completely in the community in March due to a lack of capacity.
Unaware of how widespread the virus was, ministers and scientists agreed the best option was to try to manage Covid-19 rather than stop it.
Boris Johnson described this policy as "squashing the sombrero" and asked people with symptoms to stay at home, while advising the over-70s to avoid cruises and schools to stop foreign trips.
Scientists had warned the Government that coming down too hard would push cases back to the winter when the NHS would be less able to cope, and argued the public would not accept a lockdown.
But MPs described it as "fatalistic" approach which in practice amounted to herd immunity and said it should have been challenged by ministers.
It was only when it became apparent that the NHS would be overwhelmed that the Government finally imposed a lockdown on March 23.
Experts have estimated that half the number of people would have died had the country locked down a week earlier.
Test and trace
Early on in the pandemic it was clear that Britain’s testing capacity was not sufficient to keep the virus under control.
By the end of January, Public Health England (PHE) could only manage up to 500 tests a day and in the crucial period between January 25 and March 11, 2020, just 27,476 tests were carried out: the equivalent of one test a day for each parliamentary constituency.
In contrast, by mid-March, Germany was testing 50,000 people per day. Without adequate testing it was impossible to monitor the virus.
The MPs said that the lack of testing left the country "facing the biggest health crisis in a hundred years with virtually no data to analyse".
"The UK was reduced to understanding the spread of Covid-19 by waiting for people to be so sick that they needed to be admitted to hospital," the report added.
The NHS Test and Trace system was also singled out for criticism for failing to meet even the most predictable demands of Autumn 2020.
NHS Test and Trace had also asked for £37 billion on the grounds it could prevent the need for a second national lockdown. Yet, despite the promises, and the eye-watering costs, England underwent a second national lockdown in November and again in January.
"Vast sums of taxpayers money were directed to Test and Trace," MPs wrote. "Were it not for the success of the vaccines task force it is likely that further lockdown restrictions would have been needed in Summer 2021."
Profits of ping: the eight NHS Test and Trace directors earning more than the PM
Gareth Williams, formerly chief people officer and now chief operating officer: £240,000 - £245,000
Ben Stimson, chief customer officer until he left in May: £240,000 - £245,000
Mark Hewlett, testing chief operating officer: £220,000 to £225,000
Adam Wheelwright, chief information officer: £200,000 to £205,000
Simon Bolton, then chief technology and information officer: £200,000 to £205,000. Left in June to become NHS Digital interim chief executive, earning the same salary
Robert Howes, director of the “megalab” in Royal Leamington Spa: £180,000 to £185,000
Philip Huggins, Test and Trace chief information security officer: £180,000 to £185,000
Faran Johnson, Test and Trace chief people officer: £160,000 to £165,000
Source: Senior civil servant data on roles and salaries (DHSC), quarter 1 2021/2022
Social care
The lack of testing was particularly damaging for care homes. It was not until mid-April that testing was made a requirement for people discharged from hospital to social care.
This was particularly dangerous because Covid-19 was known to impact the elderly far more than younger people, and many cases were seeded from hospitals.
"This, combined with untested staff bringing infection into homes from the community, led to many thousands of deaths which could have been avoided," said MPs.
Between March 2020 and April 30 2021, more than 41,000 care home residents died of Covid, nearly a quarter of all deaths.
MPs also warned that Do Not Resuscitate orders had been issued inappropriately for some people, including those with learning disabilities, which they branded "completely unacceptable".
"The lack of priority attached to social care during the initial phase of the pandemic was illustrative of a longstanding failure to afford social care the same attention as the NHS."
Social care
The lack of testing was particularly damaging for care homes. It was not until mid-April that testing was made a requirement for people discharged from hospital to social care.
This was particularly dangerous because Covid-19 was known to impact the elderly far more than younger people, and many cases were seeded from hospitals.
"This, combined with untested staff bringing infection into homes from the community, led to many thousands of deaths which could have been avoided," said MPs.
Between March 2020 and April 30 2021, more than 41,000 care home residents died of Covid, nearly a quarter of all deaths.
MPs also warned that Do Not Resuscitate orders had been issued inappropriately for some people, including those with learning disabilities, which they branded "completely unacceptable".
"The lack of priority attached to social care during the initial phase of the pandemic was illustrative of a longstanding failure to afford social care the same attention as the NHS."
The Government identified early that vaccination was the route out of the pandemic and poured funding into research and development of a number of jabs both in Britain and abroad.
The vaccine taskforce, led by Dame Kate Bingham, correctly predicted which vaccines would be ready first, ensuring Britain had early access and could begin its roll-out ahead of most other countries.
"Globally it is one of the most stunning achievements in history," said MPs. "Millions of lives will ultimately be saved as a result of the global vaccine effort, of which the UK has played a leading part."
"The success of the vaccine programme has redeemed many of the persistent failings of other parts of the national response such as the test and trace system."
Britain was also at the forefront of developing new treatments for Covid-19, harnessing the power of the NHS to recruit in-hospital trials which were quickly able to show the effectiveness of drugs like dexamethasone.
Hancock’s 100,000 test target
On April 2, Matt Hancock the former health secretary, set an arbitrary target of 100,000 tests a day by the end of the month, a decision criticised by Dominic Cummings as a "stupid thing to do".
The target was achieved on April 30, and MPs concluded that the intervention had actually spurred on production and helped to improve testing capacity.
"Given the painfully slow increase in the availability of testing before April 2020, we consider that the impact of the Secretary of State’s target to have been an appropriate one to galvanise the rapid change the system needed," they said.
"It is concerning to contemplate what would have happened without this unorthodox initiative."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/12/failure-challenge-poor-scientific-advice-pandemic-cost-thousands/
Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla My God. This lede.
‘Britain’s early handling of the Coronavirus pandemic was one of the worst public health failures in UK history’
11:11 PM · Oct 11, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
My God. This lede.
— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) October 11, 2021
‘Britain’s early handling of the Coronavirus pandemic was one of the worst public health failures in UK history’ pic.twitter.com/uYJtdcPGbN
First Thing: Trump aides could be prosecuted over Capitol attack
House select committee ready to urge action, says Schiff. Plus, Succession’s Alan Ruck on bouncing back
Nicola Slawson
Mon 11 Oct 2021 11.06 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/11/first-thing-trump-aides-could-be-prosecuted-capitol-attack
‘The rich don’t always fight fair’: Guardian lawyers, libel and lawsuits
Gill Phillips 41 mins ago
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/the-rich-dont-always-fight-fair-guardian-lawyers-libel-and-lawsuits/ar-AAPmscf
It was 9pm on a Friday and I had finally sat down with a gin and tonic to watch a bit of catch-up television when the phone rang. It was an American lawyer fuming about a piece the Guardian had just published. As I scrambled to read into the story and figure out how I would raise the journalist involved, an urgent sport story landed in my inbox following a punch-up at a football match, quickly followed by a 2,000-word Observer story that needed to be 100% legally watertight.
Such is the lot of the media lawyer, often the last line of defence between a publisher and a hefty lawsuit. Freedom of speech is a fundamental part of any democracy, but exercising and defending it can be a difficult and expensive thing.
The rich, the famous and the powerful don’t like criticism and don’t like having their dirty laundry aired in public. They can be well-resourced, and will spend heavily on expensive lawyers. They don’t always tell the truth, or fight fair. In April 1995, Jonathan Aitken, then a Treasury minister, denounced the “wicked lies” told by the Guardian and Granada TV’s World in Action about his business activities.
But the Guardian held its nerve and two years later his legal action collapsed and he was jailed for perjury and perverting the course of justice.
That story set the tone: never again would the Guardian be considered a soft touch when it came to defending itself. But the implication was that it would have to be sure of itself on every contentious story it published.
The Guardian operates with a team of in-house editorial lawyers who are available to work closely with its journalists to get legally difficult stories successfully over the line.
Our small team look after all publishing related legal issues for the Guardian and the Observer – from whether it is OK to publish a particular story or picture, to advising on leaked documents and court reporting. We also pick up and respond to legal complaints after publication.
Our primary aim is to ensure that what is published has been legally and editorially risk-assessed. Of course, not every article needs legalling. We could get sent up to 50 articles a day for pre-publication legal review or checking, and we won’t know in advance, in most cases, what an article is about, so we need to be nimble and ready to move quickly from, say, a sport story to a science one, to a long read on sexual abuse, to a foreign investigation about corruption. Ultimately, the decision on what to publish lies with the editors. There’s an old adage – lawyers advise, but editors decide.
Making a serious legal mistake can be time-consuming, costly and reputationally damaging. The prevailing global media landscape is pretty hostile. It’s not just about facing down legal threats. Donald Trump referred to reporters as “enemies of the people”. Attacks such as this have been a gift to strongmen dictators who wish to silence the press, and have increased the risk and likelihood of physical attacks on journalists.
The UK is not so friendly either. It is very expensive to fight a case all the way to a trial here. It can easily mean costs running into the hundreds of thousands of pounds. Even if you win you may still be well out of pocket, because of the way the legal costs regime works.
And if you lose, you may have to pay damages as well as the other side’s costs. As Voltaire said: “I was never ruined but twice – once when I lost a lawsuit, once when I won one.”
London is considered by some as the libel capital of the world, and many use English lawyers to silence their critics. Because we publish via a website, where anyone can access and read our stories, we face the possibility of being sued anywhere in the world.
Big investigative series generally present the biggest legal challenges, as they often publish material that powerful interests do not want aired – and involve many stories by a number of journalists, based in the UK and abroad. Here, editorial lawyers tend to get involved early on, so we can advise on what is being planned, and facilitate discussions around the public interest or what the editorial code is saying.
Later, the journalists will put together any “right to reply” letters that will be sent out seeking comment from those who may be criticised. Once those letters go out, we can usually expect to get a barrage of responses, often from expensive claimant-friendly lawyers, some of whom are hired to try to put journalists off publishing, usually by whatever means they can – threats, bluster, as well as, where appropriate, pointing out that we have misunderstood something or missed a key bit of evidence.
These letters are often headed “private and confidential and “not for publication” and can be tricky and time-consuming to respond to, particular as things near the publishing deadline. We have to take on board what these letters say, consider how they might affect what the journalists want to write, and discuss any next steps.
Publishing 24 hours a day, 365 days a year around the world is a legally fraught business. The law can change very rapidly and we have to try to make sure we are up to date with how the courts at looking at things.
For example, over the past five to 10 years, the courts have got very hot on what they call audit trails – they like to see evidence of journalists and editors’ workings and thought processes before something contentious gets published. This is a relatively new court-created development. It’s not something the government or a regulator have put in place. And it can be tricky when there’s a deadline looming.
A free press stands for the kind of liberties and tolerances that are vital and precious to all of us. As the philosopher JS Mill and the poet John Milton recognised, we need to believe and have faith that in a free and equal encounter with falsehood truth will emerge, that differences of opinion encourage debate and help truth emerge, and that by this process we have a better chance to get the whole picture and not a partial one fed to us by those in power or who are able to influence it.
My team are very privileged to be working for a news organisation that does its best to espouse these high standards and contribute in our own small way to trying to get the story, and hopefully the truth, over the finishing line.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/the-rich-dont-always-fight-fair-guardian-lawyers-libel-and-lawsuits/ar-AAPmscf