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I went undercover in the incel community to try to understand men like Jake Davison
If we're going to tackle the incel ideology and its violent hatred of women, we must describe it as the unacceptable extremism it is
By Laura Bates
14 August 2021 • 6:30pm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/08/14/went-undercover-incel-community-try-understand-men-like-jake/
"I hope the women of Plymouth collectively take some responsibility for this.” This was the shocking response of one man online after the tragic events of Thursday evening, when Jake Davison, 22, massacred five victims in the city, before taking his own life.
"I hope the women of Plymouth collectively take some responsibility for this.” This was the shocking response of one man online after the tragic events of Thursday evening, when Jake Davison, 22, massacred five victims in the city, before taking his own life.
To understand this callous response, you need to know about so-called incel ideology. Incels are a sprawling online community of men who describe themselves as “involuntary celibates”.
They blame women for their lack of relationship success and share a starkly misogynistic worldview that portrays women as dehumanised sex objects whose sole purpose is to give men satisfaction.
In online postings and videos, Davison, who appeared obsessed with being a virgin, repeatedly described his affinity with incel ideology. “I’m socially isolated, have no social circle and don’t know any girls,” he said in one video.
In another deeply misogynistic post he said sexual assault was justified because “women don’t need men no more”. He uploaded hate-filled rants about single mothers and “liked” videos about “looking for a whore” and “why women always lie”.
Davison wrote that “incel virgins” were people “similar to me”, who had “nothing but themselves”. He described himself as a perpetual victim – “me against the world” – with life rigged against him.
He said he had been “consuming the blackpill overdose”, referring to a fatalistic sector of the incel community who describe themselves as “blackpilled” and believe there is no hope of life getting any better for them because their genetics rule out any woman ever being attracted to them.
Most incels start by, as they call it, “taking the red pill”, a metaphor borrowed from The Matrix science-fiction films, in which swallowing a coloured capsule allows the protagonist to see the world as it really is. They claim to have discovered that the whole world is a “feminist gynocracy” ruled by women, where men are helpless victims.
Some believe it is possible to improve their relationship prospects through strategies like “gymmaxxing” (working out), but those describing themselves as “blackpilled” have a nihilistic worldview and tend to see violence against women as a better solution than self-improvement.
Online incel forums are steeped in extremist misogyny, with members regularly suggesting women should be raped and murdered. They encourage each other to rise up in a “day of retribution” or “incel rebellion”, when they will punish society, and women in particular, for their suffering, by murdering as many “normies” (non-incels) as possible.
I know this because I spent two years undercover in incel forums to research these communities and the threat they pose, for my book Men Who Hate Women.
It started when I realised some of the boys I work with on gender inequality and sexual consent in UK schools were parroting extremist beliefs and fake statistics (didn’t you know 87 per cent of women lie about rape, one of them said). I soon realised that these teenagers had been radicalised online. But it wasn’t a kind of radicalisation anyone was talking about.
So I posed online as Alex, a disillusioned young white man who was tired of being called “privileged” when he felt deeply unsatisfied with life.
I had to pass tests to be allowed access to certain forums, explaining in detail what “kind” of incel I was – so I began the painstaking process of learning incel terminology and the bizarre pseudoscientific theories incels use to justify their worldview.
Women are referred to as “foids” (a derogatory abbreviation of “female humanoid”, used to emphasise that they are not seen as fully human).
I watched men earnestly debate whether women should be murdered or kept as “sex slaves” and argue over whether rape should be legalised. (It shouldn’t, one said, because that would take all the fun out of it.)
The men I met in these forums were almost exclusively white, usually well educated, and a lot of them (though not all) were young. Racism and sexism overlap in their ideology, with particular vitriol reserved for women who sleep with non-white men. The movement is transnational, but many of those I encountered referred to the UK specifically.
One day, they were discussing a massacre at a US school. There were rumours the shooter had been rejected by a female classmate. The forum members hoped that he had been able to rape her before she died. I switched off my computer and cried.
Views like this sound so extreme that incels are often written off as a small group of losers who should be pitied, not seen as a threat. But in the past 10 years, men who have been immersed in incel ideology have repeatedly committed real-life atrocities.
Elliot Rodger massacred six people and injured 14 in Santa Barbara in 2014. Alek Minassian killed 10 people and injured 16 in Toronto in 2018. In 2020, a 17-year old boy murdered a woman with a machete and injured another woman, also in Toronto.
And cases of violence motivated by extreme misogyny are by no means rare. Just last week, a man in Tokyo stabbed 10 people on a train, later saying he did it because he saw women looking happy and wanted to kill them. It has been just three weeks since US police arrested an Ohio man who was accused of plotting to “slaughter” young women out of “hatred, jealousy and revenge”.
Such ideas have spilled offline here in the UK, too. Incel ideology has been linked to two recent cases of men jailed for terror-related offences, though this was not proven to be their primary motivation.
In 2015, 18-year old Ben Moynihan attempted to murder three women in separate stabbings, writing in a diary: “I was planning to murder mainly women as an act of revenge… I’m still a virgin at 17. All women needs [sic] to die and hopefully next time I can gauge [sic] their eyeballs out.”
So, it was deeply frustrating, given the clear indications of Davison’s involvement with incel ideology, to hear the almost immediate dismissals of any potential terrorism link in the Plymouth shootings. “The incident is not terror related,” tweeted local MP Johnny Mercer, less than three hours after the shooting had taken place. Police have repeatedly said the same.
It is difficult to imagine the same response if the perpetrator had had a similar history of online posting relating to religious extremism or hatred of a different demographic group. But when the hatred in question is directed at women, and the killer is a young, white man, society seems to turn a blind eye.
Incel-related massacres are almost never described as terror attacks; the perpetrators are usually described as lone wolves and only in one case globally have terror charges ever been brought.
As the awful news from Plymouth rolled in on Friday, I returned to the online communities I had infiltrated to see how incels were responding.
Like the man who suggested the women of Plymouth should take responsibility, many blamed women for the atrocity. One wrote: “Women need to take accountability for leaving so many men sexless. It can lead to frustration and mass shootings.”
One post expressed the hope that the victims “suffered as they drew their last breaths”. Another described the killer as a “hero”. Of the hundreds of posts I read, just two spoke out against the attack.
Of course, some men drawn into incel groups are vulnerable, have real problems, or haven’t found healthy spaces to explore issues like sex and relationships elsewhere. It’s no coincidence that the incel community has swelled as government cuts have led to a significant reduction in youth-focused services.
But this would be true of any extremist group. This is an ideology dedicated expressly to incitement of violence and hatred against women. We should treat it as we would any other extremist group advocating for offline violence.
“He was in the same boat as most of us here,” one incel wrote about Davison. Another gushed about a potential “huge mass murder attack”. A third wrote: “They can’t do anything to stop the onslaught that is coming.”
This attack was not the first and it won’t be the last. But with one woman murdered by a man every three days in the UK, we are so desensitised to violence against women that we struggle to recognise it as something out of the ordinary.
To tackle this threat, we need to take male violence seriously, and we should start by describing it as the extremism it is
Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates (Simon & Schuster, RRP £9.99) is available for £8.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/08/14/went-undercover-incel-community-try-understand-men-like-jake/
INVESTIGATIONS The Capitol Siege: The Cases Behind The Biggest Criminal Investigation In U.S. History
Updated August 13, 202111:51 AM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/09/965472049/the-capitol-siege-the-arrested-and-their-stories
Editor's note: This story was first published on Feb. 9, 2021. It is regularly updated, and includes explicit language.
The riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 has led to what the Department of Justice calls the largest criminal investigation in American history. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has classified the attack as an act of domestic terrorism.
The violent breach forced the evacuation of the Capitol, and threatened the country's peaceful transfer of presidential power. Approximately 140 members of law enforcement suffered injuries in the attack, including brain damage and crushed spinal discs. More than 100 rioters have been accused of assaulting police, and many allegedly used weapons such as pepper spray, stun guns, bats, and American flags wielded as clubs.
Five people ultimately died. One rioter, 35-year-old Ashli Babbitt, was shot and killed by a police officer. And Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who investigators allege was attacked with a chemical spray, died the day after the riot. The medical examiner determined that death was the result of natural causes - two strokes - though stated that "all that transpired [on Jan. 6] played a role in his condition." Two other people died of natural causes, authorities concluded, and a third as the result of "acute amphetamine intoxication."
Since that day, the government has brought criminal charges against more than 600 individuals, and even now, more than seven months after the attack, the FBI continues to arrest new suspects. Meanwhile, some of these cases are reaching their conclusions. More than 35 defendants have pleaded guilty to one or more charges, and the charges against one defendant were dismissed. No defendants have gone to trial.
The stories of those charged provide clues to key questions surrounding the Capitol breach: Who exactly joined the mob? What did they do? And why? To try to answer those questions, NPR is examining the criminal cases related to the Capitol riot, drawing on court documents, public records, news accounts and social media.
Jump to our database of individuals charged
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/09/965472049/the-capitol-siege-the-arrested-and-their-stories#database
A group this large defies generalization. The defendants are predominantly white and male, though there were exceptions. Federal prosecutors say a former member of the Latin Kings gang joined the mob, as did two Virginia police officers. A man in a "Camp Auschwitz" sweatshirt allegedly took part, as did a Messianic Rabbi, and a Christian pastor. Far-right militia members decked out in tactical gear allegedly rioted next to a county commissioner, a New York City sanitation worker, and a two-time Olympic gold medalist.
Still, NPR's examination did identify certain commonalities.
...
MUCH MORE
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/09/965472049/the-capitol-siege-the-arrested-and-their-stories
MyPillow CEO says aggressive poke led to attack claim
yesterday
https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-joe-biden-sd-state-wire-a03bb141154ff14025eccdc9d48bd1f7
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell says he was aggressively poked by someone seeking a selfie in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, this week, which led him to say he was attacked.
Lindell, who hosted an election fraud symposium in the city this week, told the conservative talk show FlashPoint that he was approached by a man who wanted a photo on Wednesday night.
“He put his arm around and stuck his finger, it was so much pressure, I just knew if I did anything something more was coming,” Lindell said, gesturing to his side. “He jammed it in where it was just piercing pain.”
Lindell had told the crowd Thursday at the election fraud symposium that said he was still in pain and wanted everyone to know about the evil in the world, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader reported.
The Sioux Falls Police Department said it is investigating a report of an assault at a hotel near the symposium. Police spokesman Sam Clemens has declined to identify the victim, citing Marsy’s Law, a state constitutional amendment that protects crime victims.
Lindell announced the symposium in July, saying he hoped hundreds of “cyber-forensics experts” would attend and back up his claims that voting machines were hacked to flip votes for former President Donald Trump to President Joe Biden in 2020.
Almost all of the legal challenges casting doubt on the outcome of the election have been dismissed or withdrawn and many claims of fraud debunked. State and federal election officials have said there’s no evidence of widespread fraud.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said last month she suggested Lindell hold the event in her state.
She said that when she heard Lindell was looking for a place to hold the symposium, she told him: “Why don’t you do that in South Dakota? We would love to host guests.’”
Noem did not attend the event. She acknowledged last month that Biden is the “duly elected president,” but raised the possibility of election fraud by adding, “If there is fraud, we should know the facts.”
https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-joe-biden-sd-state-wire-a03bb141154ff14025eccdc9d48bd1f7
Afghan president in urgent talks as Taliban push closer to Kabul
Ashraf Ghani says focus is on preventing ‘further instability, violence and displacement’
Reuters in Kabul
Sat 14 Aug 2021 12.27 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/14/afghan-president-in-urgent-talks-as-taliban-push-closer-to-kabul
Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, said he was in urgent talks with local leaders and international partners as Taliban rebels pushed closer to Kabul, capturing a town south of the capital that is one of the gateways to the city.
“As your president, my focus is on preventing further instability, violence and displacement of my people,” Ghani said in a brief televised address, as the US and other countries rushed in troops to help evacuate their embassies.
Ghani gave no sign of responding to a Taliban demand that he resign for any talks on a ceasefire and a political settlement, saying “re-integration of the security and defence forces is our priority, and serious measures are being taken in this regard”.
He spoke soon after the insurgents took Pul-e-Alam, the capital of Logar province, 40 miles south of Kabul, according to a local provincial council member.
The Taliban did not face much resistance, the provincial council member said on condition of anonymity.
The gain of the city, a key staging post for a potential assault on Kabul, comes a day after the insurgents took the country’s second- and third-biggest cities.
US troops have begun flying in to Kabul to help in the evacuation of embassy personnel and other civilians, a US official said.
The Pentagon has said two battalions of Marines and one infantry battalion will arrive in Kabul by Sunday evening, involving about 3,000 troops.
“They have arrived, their arrival will continue till tomorrow,” the official said.
An infantry brigade combat team will also move out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to Kuwait to act as a quick reaction force for security in Kabul if needed, the Pentagon said.
Britain and several other western nations are also sending troops, as resistance from Afghan government forces crumbles and fears grow that an assault on Kabul could be just days away.
An Afghan government official confirmed on Friday that Kandahar, the economic hub of the south, was under Taliban control as US-led international forces complete their withdrawal after 20 years of war.
Herat in the west, near the border with Iran, also fell to the hardline Islamist group.
Kandahar’s loss was a heavy blow to the government. It is the heartland of the Taliban and is close to the town of Spin Boldak, one of the two main entry points into Pakistan and a major source of tax revenues.
A US defence official said before the fall of Pul-e-Alam that there was concern that the Taliban – ousted from power in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks on the US – could make a move on Kabul within days.
“Kabul is not right now in an imminent threat environment, but clearly … if you just look at what the Taliban has been doing, you can see that they are trying to isolate Kabul,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said.
Some embassies have begun to burn sensitive material ahead of evacuating, diplomats said.
The US embassy in the Afghan capital informed staff that burn bins and an incinerator were available to destroy material including papers and electronic devices to “reduce the amount of sensitive material on the property”, according to an advisory seen by Reuters.
UN secretary general Antonio Guterres warned that “Afghanistan is spinning out of control” and urged all parties to do more to protect civilians.
“This is the moment to halt the offensive. This is the moment to start serious negotiation. This is the moment to avoid a prolonged civil war, or the isolation of Afghanistan,” Guterres told reporters in New York.
Many people in the capital were stocking up on rice and other food as well as first aid, residents said. Visa applications at embassies were running in the tens of thousands, officials said.
The explosion in fighting has raised fears of a refugee crisis and a rollback of the country’s gains in human rights.
Some 400,000 civilians have been forced from their homes this year, 250,000 of them since May, a UN official said.
The speed of the Taliban’s gains has led to recriminations over the US withdrawal, which was negotiated last year under the administration of President Joe Biden’s Republican predecessor, Donald Trump.
Biden said this week he did not regret his decision to follow through with the withdrawal. He noted Washington has spent more than $1tn and lost thousands of troops over two decades, and called on Afghanistan’s army and leaders to step up.
Opinion polls showed most Americans back Biden’s decision, but Republicans criticised the Democratic president’s handling of the US withdrawal.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/14/afghan-president-in-urgent-talks-as-taliban-push-closer-to-kabul
A D.C. Cop At The Jan. 6 Riot Died By Suicide. Sleuths Identified 1 Of The Rioters He Battled.
Less than 24 hours after a Capitol rioter was identified by online sleuths as a Capitol Hill chiropractor, the family of the late Officer Jeff Smith filed a lawsuit.
By Ryan J. Reilly, HuffPost US
13/08/2021 22:15 BST | Updated 7 hours ago
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jeff-smith-capitol-police-assault-sedition-hunters_n_611687c0e4b07c1403147cbb?ri18n=true
For months, the widow of D.C. Metropolitan Police Department Officer Jeffrey Smith who died by suicide after protecting the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 has been trying to figure out exactly what happened to her husband the day that a mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed the seat of the U.S. legislative branch because they believed online conspiracy theories that the election was stolen.
Erin Smith, the widow of the 12-year MPD veteran, knew that her husband had been assaulted with a metal object of some kind. But she was stonewalled at every turn, even as she’s attended events at the White House where President Joe Biden honored Jeffrey Smith, who died on Jan. 15, and others who defended the Capitol. MPD refused to turn over footage from Jeffrey Smith’s body-worn camera, which would show what he went through that day. And she was battling with the Police and Firefighters Retirement and Relief Board in Washington, trying to convince them to find that her husband’s death by suicide was a line-of-duty death.
David P. Weber, an attorney and professor in forensics who teaches at the Perdue School of Business at Salisbury University in Maryland and is representing Erin Smith and her husband’s estate, was getting restless.
So when he read a HuffPost story about the “Sedition Hunters” who were working to identify violent Capitol rioters, he reached out and asked a reporter to make an introduction. Maybe, he thought, online sleuths would be able to figure out what happened to Jeffrey Smith that day, and perhaps light a bit of a fire under the government and secure benefits for an officer’s widow.
Soon, Weber was working with Deep State Dogs, an open-source intelligence group that has worked to identify several violent rioters, including the the MAGA-hatted California man who was charged with electroshocking Officer Mike Fanone in the neck when he was held hostage by the mob on Jan. 6. Because of the sensitive nature of the inquiry, Deep State Dogs worked quietly under the banner “Team Jeff (4626)” a reference to Jeffrey Smith’s badge number as they pored over hours of Capitol attack videos.
Given the astonishing amount of evidence of the events of Jan. 6, it took more than a month before they found him. But Thursday afternoon, a member of the group found what they were looking for: a helmet bearing the number 4626. There was Smith in the middle of a battle by the eastern entrance to the House side of the Capitol, not far from the Speaker’s Lobby. “Team Jeff” had found him. They celebrated in a group message with fire emojis:
Things moved quickly from there. They zeroed in on a man who came face-to-face with Jeffrey Smith just before the officer collapsed in the middle of a scrum. A facial recognition search turned up a hit for the man, who was wearing a padded motorcycle jacket. It was David Walls-Kaufman, who sleuths later discovered helpfully wore the same unique jacket in a video he posted to his own YouTube page.
“We felt we had to do something to honor the memory and family of Officer Smith. It’s terrible that the bereaved were left in that situation,” Forrest Rogers of Deep State Dogs told HuffPost. “So we turned to the thing we do best: finding bad guys.”
After the riot, Walls-Kaufman admitted to a reporter from NBC 6 in Miami that he was present on the Capitol stairs. He claimed not to be a Trump supporter, although his Facebook page and Twitter account suggest otherwise. No one answered the phone at a number listed.
Authorities won’t have to travel too far if they arrest Walls-Kaufman. He runs the Capitol Hill Chiropractic Center in D.C., only four blocks from the Capitol grounds. Back in 2008, he told Politico that about 40% of his clients worked in or around Capitol Hill and had issues because of the “unforgiving” surfaces in the building.
The FBI has already arrested more than 570 defendants in connection with the Jan. 6 attack. Walls-Kaufman may face several misdemeanor charges. Video footage discovered by Deep State Dogs shows Walls-Kaufman coming face to face with Jeffrey Smith as an angry crowd pushes to confront the officers. Whether Walls-Kaufman ends up with a felony charge might depend on what shows up on officers’ body-worn camera footage from that day.
Weber said he was astonished by how quickly online sleuths were able to solve a mystery that Jeffrey Smith’s family had been waiting on the feds to resolve for months.
“I thought the ‘I’ in FBI stood for ‘investigation,’” Weber said. “It’s pretty lame that a private lawyer for a dead police officer’s widow has to be the one conducting the investigation ... The fact that these volunteers have accomplished what the FBI has not is extraordinary.”
A FBI official declined to comment on Walls-Kaufman.
Walls-Kaufman’s potential criminal troubles are still on the horizon, but his legal troubles have already begun. Less than 24 hours after the ID, Weber filed a lawsuit against Walls-Kaufman on behalf of Smith’s estate. He spent Thursday evening going over the high-quality video frame by frame with the help of his YouTube-savvy 17-year-old son, and Friday morning he obtained an opinion from Jonathan L. Arden, D.C.’s former medical examiner, concluding that Jeffrey Smith had “post-concussion syndrome” because he lost consciousness after being struck.
In the meantime, Deep State Dogs have another target from the same video. The man in the “Make Space Great Again” hat. He’s holding a black object: maybe a cane, maybe a crowbar. And he’s within striking distance of Jeffrey Smith.
If you or someone you know needs help, call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. You can also text HOME to 741-741 for free, 24-hour support from the Crisis Text Line. Outside of the U.S., please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for a database of resources.
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jeff-smith-capitol-police-assault-sedition-hunters_n_611687c0e4b07c1403147cbb?ri18n=true
FBI Arrests 'Tunnel Commander,' An Anti-Abortion Extremist Who Fought Cops On Jan. 6
David Mehaffie was charged with attacking law enforcement during a January riot at the U.S. Capitol Building.
By Ryan J. Reilly Alanna Vagianos, HuffPost US
12/08/2021 16:46 BST
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/fbi-arrests-tunnel-commander-anti-abortion-capitol-riot_n_61152eb9e4b07c1403123f7e?ri18n=true&ncid=other_huffpostre_pqylmel2bk8
An Ohio man who was identified by online investigators in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack was arrested by the FBI on Thursday and charged with attacking law enforcement during a brutal siege on the western side of the U.S. Capitol Building.
Dave Mehaffie of Dayton, Ohio, was known to online investigators as #TunnelCommander because he was issuing orders to members of the mob who were attacking officers during a brutal battle at the lower western terrace entrance to the Capitol. Mehaffie was 86-AFO on the FBI’s Capitol wanted list, meaning he was wanted for assault on a federal officer.
A judge signed an arrest warrant for Mehaffie on Aug. 4 after he was indicted by a grand jury as part of an existing case.
Mehaffie was involved in one of the toughest battles of the Capitol siege. Members of the mob had stormed past police barriers and ascended the scaffolding set up for President Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, and were attempting to break into the building. During the “medieval” battle, members of the pro-Trump mob kidnapped D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone, who was repeatedly electroshocked. Rosanne Boyland, a pro-Trump member of the mob, was trampled during the brutal clash. The woman’s brother-in-law said that former President Donald Trump “incited a riot” that killed one of his “biggest fans.”
The arrest of #TunnelCommander is yet another boost for online “Sedition Hunters” who have used open-source information to identify the rioters who took part in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. The open-source work of the online community is a constant presence in court filings, and prosecutors have recently been more explicit about citing their work.
HuffPost referenced Mehaffie (though not by name) in a March 26 story on the role that public facial recognition websites were playing in the Capitol investigation. A search of #TunnelCommander’s image on a publicly available facial recognition website pulled up photos of Mehaffie, including one of him on Classmates.com. As HuffPost wrote at the time, Mehaffie had scrubbed his Facebook profile, though there were plenty of images of him available online in connection with the businesses he ran in Dayton as well as his anti-abortion activity.
Mehaffie’s display of violence on Jan. 6 wasn’t the only time he’s resorted to right-wing extremism. The Dayton, Ohio, native was at one time a vocal member of Operation Rescue, a conservative anti-abortion group known for doing sit-in demonstrations in front of abortion clinics. Mehaffie was one of six defendants in a 1998 federal lawsuit which alleged that, under the leadership of Operation Rescue, Mehaffie and five other protesters illegally blocked entrances to abortion clinics in three different cities in Ohio during the summer of 1997. The judge in the case declared a mistrial due to issues with the prosecution witnesses.
“I do believe it’s a victory,” Mehaffie told The Associated Press at the time. “God has given a victory over a federal government that has wholeheartedly endorsed, protected and even propagated infanticide.”
Mehaffie was even more irreverent in a statement he made a month before the mistrial, accusing the federal court of supporting murder.
“Better to hold on to my soul in prison than to lie in bed with my wife and my children nearby, having betrayed all that I have told them I stand for,” Mehaffie said in an Operation Rescue press statement. “The enemy wages this battle, not only for the lives of the innocent and the souls of women who give them up, but also for the very soul of the church in Dayton.”
Mehaffie wasn’t the only rioter who has a history of anti-abortion extremism. Several high-profile anti-abortion leaders were involved in promoting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and many took part in the violence.
Tayler Hansen, the founder of “Baby Lives Matter” and a well-known abortion clinic protester, filmed and shared a video to Twitter of fellow rioter Ashli Babbitt being shot and killed by Capitol police as rioters tried to push through a barricade. John Brockhoeft, infamous in anti-abortion circles for firebombing an Ohio abortion clinic in the 1980s, livestreamed himself in front of the Capitol on Jan. 6 “fighting” for Trump. Derrick Evans, a former member of West Virginia’s House of Delegates, participated in the Capitol riot and has a long history of harassing women outside of West Virginia’s Women’s Health Center, the only abortion clinic in the state.
The large presence of anti-abortion advocates at the Jan. 6 riot is no coincidence. The anti-abortion movement has long held deep ties to white supremacy, which was on full display in the mob of Trump supporters at the Capitol. Anti-abortion advocates were also the first to introduce conspiracy theories and disinformation to undermine facts and fan the flames of extremism, similar to the tactics of Trump and his base.
The fact that some people who truly believed Trump’s lies about a stolen election engaged in violence shouldn’t have come as a surprise, as HuffPost reported just a week after the 2020 election. If you actually believe that there was a massive criminal conspiracy across several states to steal the election on behalf of Joe Biden or if you deeply believe that abortion is equivalent to murder there’s a lot you can morally justify.
“It’s crucial we grapple with the deep and historic connections between the anti-choice movement, violence and white supremacy in this country,” NARAL Pro-Choice president Ilyse Hogue said after the Capitol riot. “We cannot move forward from these dark days and defend our democracy if we continue to gloss over how ideologically aligned these movements are.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/fbi-arrests-tunnel-commander-anti-abortion-capitol-riot_n_61152eb9e4b07c1403123f7e?ri18n=true&ncid=other_huffpostre_pqylmel2bk8
Deep State Dogs @1600PennPooch·12h “We felt we had to do something to honor the memory and family of Officer Smith. It’s terrible that the bereaved were left in that situation,” Forrest Rogers of Deep State Dogs told HuffPost. “So we turned to the thing we do best: finding bad guys.”
13/08/2021 22:15 BST | Updated 7 hours ago
A D.C. Cop At The Jan. 6 Riot Died By Suicide. Sleuths Identified 1 Of The Rioters He Battled.
Less than 24 hours after a Capitol rioter was identified by online sleuths as a Capitol Hill chiropractor, the family of the late Officer Jeff Smith filed a lawsuit.
By Ryan J. Reilly, HuffPost US
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jeff-smith-capitol-police-assault-sedition-hunters_n_611687c0e4b07c1403147cbb?ri18n=true
10:51 PM · Aug 13, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
“We felt we had to do something to honor the memory and family of Officer Smith. It’s terrible that the bereaved were left in that situation,” Forrest Rogers of Deep State Dogs told HuffPost. “So we turned to the thing we do best: finding bad guys.” https://t.co/swGzbI9qaS
— Deep State Dogs (@1600PennPooch) August 13, 2021
Family of D.C. officer who died by suicide after Capitol riot files lawsuit against alleged attacker
By Peter Hermann and Rachel Weiner
Today at 9:32 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/dc-officer-suicide-lawsuit-capitol-riot/2021/08/13/5601aedc-fc5b-11eb-943a-c5cf30d50e6a_story.html
The lawyer for a D.C. police officer who fatally shot himself nine days after he was injured confronting rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 says a group of cybersleuths has identified one of his attackers.
A blow to Officer Jeffrey Smith’s head captured on video shows the 12-year veteran being knocked to the ground, apparently unconscious, according to a lawsuit Smith’s family filed Friday against the alleged attacker. The lawsuit includes a report from a doctor who evaluated the case for Smith’s estate saying a traumatic brain injury led the officer to take his own life.
The family attorney, David Weber, said he turned the name of the potential attacker over to D.C. police, which a department spokesman confirmed.
That spokesman, Dustin Sternbeck, said the agency is “reviewing the information.” A spokeswoman for the FBI, which is leading the investigation into the assault on the Capitol, declined to comment.
The Washington Post is not identifying the man named in the lawsuit because The Post could not independently verify his identity and he has not been charged with a crime.
Reached Friday, the man declined to comment. He would not say if he had been to the Capitol on Jan. 6. Social media accounts that appear to be connected to him share conspiracy theories about the election and covid-19 vaccinations.
The HuffPost first reported the sleuthing group Deep State Dogs, whose members scour the Internet trying to identify people involved in the riot, had identified a person possibly involved in the attack on Smith with the help computer images.
“Officer Smith’s family has suffered terribly as they mourned amid uncertainty and doubt,” said Forrest Rogers, a spokesperson for Deep State Dogs.
Rogers said about a dozen people devoted themselves to identifying Smith’s attackers.
Most of that time went toward finding Smith in the crowd, he said, which they did for the first time on Thursday. After that, he said, they quickly identified the man with the help of open-sourced facial recognition software and reviews of photos and videos in which “he wore a distinctive jacket.”
Weber’s law firm filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington claiming wrongful death and assault and battery against one named person and one identified as John Doe. Weber, who is also a forensics professor at Salisbury University in Maryland, said investigators should have worked harder on Smith’s case.
“It shouldn’t take a forensics professor on summer break to do the government’s work,” he said.
The lawsuit contains an affidavit from Jonathan L. Arden, one of two doctors who examined the case on behalf of the estate, who concluded the injuries suffered at the Capitol was a “precipitating event that caused that caused the death of Officer Smith.”
Smith, 35, shot himself on Jan. 15 while driving his Ford Mustang along with George Washington Memorial Parkway near a scenic overlook on the Potomac River. It was the day after he had been ordered back to work by the Police and Fire Clinic, the first stop for most injured or sick officers seeking treatment.
Capitol Police Officer Howard Liebengood, 51, had taken his life three days after the riot. Two other D.C. officers also took their own lives in July. Their families have not spoken publicly.
Relatives of Smith and Liebengood have said they believe the riot led to the suicides and are pushing for their deaths to be recognized as having occurred in the line of duty.
Earlier this month, relatives of Smith and Liebengood were invited to the White House as Biden awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to officers on the Capitol and D.C. forces who responded to the insurrection. Their participation helped elevate their cause to be included among the list of law enforcement casualties.
Smith’s attorney has filed a petition with the D.C. Police and Firefighters Retirement and Relief Board, and he said the new details learned from the video bolster his argument. A line-of-duty death designation would allow his spouse to claim enhanced benefits. That petition is pending.
A therapist who counseled many of the D.C. officers who responded to the riot and led group sessions for hundreds has said she fears many suffered long-term head injuries that have gone undiagnosed.
In interviews with The Post, Erin Smith, the officer’s wife, has said her husband became isolated and distraught after returning from the Capitol, refused to walk his dog or go out. She said he couldn’t sleep and she would wake to find him crying.
On his police injury form the night of the riot, Smith wrote: “Hit with flying object in face shield and helmet.” He added that he “began feeling pain in my neck and face.”
Weber said the video found by Deep State Dogs for the first time shows how Smith was injured, and he said it is far more severe than the officer had recalled. He said Smith was not struck by a pole, as he thought, but with a much heavier object the lawyer described as either a crowbar or a heavy walking stick.
Weber said he believes Smith was singled out for attack because the face shield on his helmet was up, exposing his face. Weber said one person passed the stick or crowbar to the second person, who has not yet been identified, who struck Smith in the face. He said the man who hit Smith was wearing padded motorcycle clothing, which the attorney believes was makeshift protective armor.
“You can see Jeff go down,” Weber said, adding the officer disappears in the unruly crowd.
He said a Capitol Police officer dragged Smith to safety.
If you or someone you know needs help, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255). You can also text a crisis counselor by messaging the Crisis Text Line at 741741.
By Peter Hermann
Peter Hermann covers crime for The Washington Post. He previously worked for the Baltimore Sun for 22 years, covering a Baltimore suburb and then the Baltimore Police Department. Twitter
By Rachel Weiner
Rachel Weiner tries to cover Alexandria's federal court from a small windowless room with no cellphone access. She sometimes ventures outside to write about crime in Alexandria and Arlington. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/dc-officer-suicide-lawsuit-capitol-riot/2021/08/13/5601aedc-fc5b-11eb-943a-c5cf30d50e6a_story.html
Homeland Security @DHSgov DHS @SecMayorkas issued a new National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin regarding the heightened threat environment across the United States.
Read the full Bulletin here:
https://www.dhs.gov/ntas/advisory/national-terrorism-advisory-system-bulletin-august-13-2021?utm_source=hp_slideshow&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=dhsgov
7:44 PM · Aug 13, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
DHS @SecMayorkas issued a new National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin regarding the heightened threat environment across the United States.
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) August 13, 2021
Read the full Bulletin here: https://t.co/o9h8DoR1Yc pic.twitter.com/PWlm1uA7NY
Palmer Report @PalmerReport Snopes just retracted more than fifty articles and suspended its own co-founder.
Palmer Report has been blowing the whistle about Snopes since 2015.
We now DEMAND that Snopes also retract a series of dishonest and retaliatory “fact checks” it published about us from 2015-2018.
6:05 PM · Aug 13, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
Snopes just retracted more than fifty articles and suspended its own co-founder.
— Palmer Report (@PalmerReport) August 13, 2021
Palmer Report has been blowing the whistle about Snopes since 2015.
We now DEMAND that Snopes also retract a series of dishonest and retaliatory “fact checks” it published about us from 2015-2018.
The Co-Founder Of Snopes Wrote Dozens Of Plagiarized Articles For The Fact-Checking Site
“You can always take an existing article and rewrite it just enough to avoid copyright infringement."
Dean Sterling Jones
BuzzFeed Contributor
Posted on August 13, 2021, at 10:19 a.m. ET
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/deansterlingjones/snopes-cofounder-plagiarism-mikkelson
David Mikkelson, the co-founder of the fact-checking website Snopes, has long presented himself as the arbiter of truth online, a bulwark in the fight against rumors and fake news. But he has been lying to the site's tens of millions of readers: A BuzzFeed News investigation has found that between 2015 and 2019, Mikkelson wrote and published dozens of articles containing material plagiarized from news outlets such as the Guardian and the LA Times.
After inquiries from BuzzFeed News, Snopes conducted an internal review and confirmed that under a pseudonym, the Snopes byline, and his own name, Mikkelson wrote and published 54 articles with plagiarized material. The articles include such topics as same-sex marriage licenses and the death of musician David Bowie.
Snopes VP of Editorial and Managing Editor Doreen Marchionni suspended Mikkelson from editorial duties pending “a comprehensive internal investigation.” He remains an officer and a 50% shareholder of the company.
“Our internal research so far has found a total of 54 stories Mikkelson published that used appropriated material, including all of the stories Buzzfeed shared with us,” Marchionni and Snopes Chief Operating Officer Vinny Green said in a statement.
"Let us be clear: Plagiarism undermines our mission and values, full stop," Marchionni added. "It has no place in any context within this organization."
Snopes’ editorial staff disavowed Mikkelson’s behavior in a separate statement signed by eight current writers. “We strongly condemn these poor journalistic practices. … we work hard every day to uphold the highest possible journalistic and ethical standards.”
Snopes told BuzzFeed News it plans to retract all of the offending stories and disable advertising on them. It will also append an editor's note of explanation to each.
Said Mikkelson, “There is no excuse for my serious lapses in judgement. I’m sorry.”
“So I was browsing the news and came across an article on the CBS News web site about a horrific crime involving a Memphis woman charged with killing four of her children by slitting their throats with a butcher knife: Hmm, I wondered, as I pondered the headline ("Memphis mom charged with grizzly butchering of 4 of her kids"), did this woman murder her children in bear-like fashion? Or was the mother of extremely advanced age?”
—Snopes.com/July 3, 2016
Meet Jeff Zarronandia. During a brief but memorable career, his byline, which linked to a bio detailing his Pulitzer Prize and his skill at mule-skinning, appeared on at least 23 Snopes articles on topics like Donald Trump’s financial woes and false rumors about Hillary Clinton. His reporting made enemies of hoaxsters and fabulists across the political spectrum, including former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone and the late “fake-news kingpin” Paul Horner, both of whom were unaware of his true identity.
"It's just a David Mikkelson alt,” Snopes' former managing editor Brooke Binkowski explained when BuzzFeed News inquired. "He used to write about topics he knew would get him hate mail under that assumed name. Plus it made it appear he had more staff than he had."
Between 2015 and 2019, Mikkelson regularly plagiarized reporting from other news outlets in an effort, he said, to scoop up traffic.
...
MUCH MORE
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/deansterlingjones/snopes-cofounder-plagiarism-mikkelson
Forgotten anniversary: The birth of Western imperialism
David Keys 6 hrs ago
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/spotlight/forgotten-anniversary-the-birth-of-western-imperialism/ar-AANh1pw?li=AAnZ9Ug
Forgotten by most of the world, this month marks the 500th anniversary of one of human history’s most terrible and tragic events – the first large-scale European military conquest in mainland America.
Until then, major European (at that time, exclusively Spanish) military campaigns in the New World had been limited to the islands of the Caribbean.
But in August 1521, a small army of freelance Spanish soldiers, claiming to act in the name of the King of Spain, seized control of Mexico’s Aztec Empire in a vast sea of blood and suffering.
Only after recent research in Mexican, US, Canadian, British and other universities, have historians and archaeologists succeeded for the first time in getting a clearer picture of what actually happened – especially the crucial role of non-Aztec indigenous peoples in the conquest process.
In Spain itself, no major events are planned – and, indeed, the Spanish government has rebuffed Mexican suggestions that Spain should apologise for its destruction of ancient Mexican civilisation.
“The Spanish seizure of Mexico in 1521 was one of human history’s most violent acts,” says the Mexican archaeologist, Professor Elizabeth Baquedano of University College London.
The conquest led to centuries of suffering for tens of millions of people. In that sense, it was an event with few parallels.
Spanish soldiers, led by a minor Spanish nobleman called Hernán Cortés, had invaded Mexico, without pretext, in 1519. After two years of military and diplomatic activity, they finally seized control of the Aztec capital (Tenochtitlan, now modern Mexico City) on 13 August 1521 (23 August 1521 in modern ‘Gregorian’ calendar terms).
...
MUCH MORE
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/spotlight/forgotten-anniversary-the-birth-of-western-imperialism/ar-AANh1pw?li=AAnZ9Ug
Mike Lindell says he was attacked in Sioux Falls on Wednesday, police report has been filed
ALFONZO GALVAN | Sioux Falls Argus Leader
21 hours ago
https://eu.argusleader.com/story/news/crime/2021/08/12/mike-lindell-attacked-sioux-falls-police-report-cyber-symposium/8108425002/
MyPillow founder Mike Lindell told attendees at his “cyber symposium” Thursday morning in Sioux Falls that he was "attacked" Wednesday night at his hotel.
Now the Sioux Falls Police Department said they've received a report.
Lindell briefly told attendees he was "attacked," but did not go into detail about the incident while on stage at his three-day event at the South Dakota Military Heritage Alliance.
"I’m OK. It hurts a little bit,” Lindell said. “I just want everyone to know all the evil that’s out there.”
In the afternoon, Lindell again briefly brought up the incident saying he was "physically" attacked but provided no further details.
Earlier: MyPillow founder Mike Lindell wants 'cyber guys' to join him in Sioux Falls to vet election fraud claims
Sioux Falls police initially said Thursday morning they had not yet received a report, but an officer from the SFPD was supposed to visit Lindell on Thursday to ask about the incident, police spokesman Sam Clemens said.
The department later announced at about 2:45 p.m. that officers took a report at about 11 a.m. Thursday and an assault did occur at about 11:30 p.m. Wednesday in Sioux Falls at a hotel near Russell Street and West Avenue, in the area of the location of the symposium.
Because of both Marsy’s Law and police policy, Clemens said he was unable to release or confirm the name or names of any victims.
Clemens declined to answer follow up questions from the Argus Leader due to "investigative reasons" and said no further information would be released.
The Argus Leader requested the victim's age, gender, location of residence and injury status, which is commonly provided in other similar incidents while the investigation is taking place.
Ron Filipkowski
@RonFilipkowski
Mike Lindell was choked up opening the final day of his “symposium,” claiming that he was “attacked” at his hotel last night. He later claimed it was “Anifa,” but gave no details.
VIDEO -
Mike Lindell was choked up opening the final day of his “symposium,” claiming that he was “attacked” at his hotel last night. He later claimed it was “Anifa,” but gave no details. pic.twitter.com/OAdfBzngLU
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 12, 2021
Mike Lindell was choked up opening the final day of his “symposium,” claiming that he was “attacked” at his hotel last night. He later claimed it was “Anifa,” but gave no details. pic.twitter.com/OAdfBzngLU
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 12, 2021
Suspected U.K. Mass Shooter Said He Was American, Trump-Supporting Virgin
‘I’M THE TERMINATOR
Jake Davison raged on Facebook and YouTube for years before carrying out the worst shooting in Britain for over a decade.
Jamie Ross News Correspondent
Updated Aug. 13, 2021 7:48AM ET / Published Aug. 13, 2021 4:33AM ET
https://www.thedailybeast.com/jake-davison-suspected-mass-shooter-said-he-was-an-american-trump-supporting-virgin?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
The man suspected of killing five people before turning the gun on himself in a mass shooting in England on Thursday night was an incel Trump supporter who posted about “devil worshipers” in government.
The suspected shooter has been named by police as Jake Davison, a 22-year-old who is reported to have worked in construction. Davison allegedly killed two women, two men and one victim who officers described as a “very young girl,” during the rampage in Plymouth.
It was the worst mass shooting in Britain since 2010.
Before the shooting, Davison expressed his admiration for Donald Trump on Facebook and posted multiple self-pitying YouTube videos in which he identified himself as part of the incel community. On his Facebook page, Davison claimed to be from Arizona, but his distinctive accent is typical of people from the south-west of England.
In one post from 2018, Davison shared a Trump quote and, when his friends ridiculed him in the comments, the suspect hit back: “You may not agree with his political views (I do) but he is different from the scum like Hillary or the people running our country like the neo-con sellout that is [then-British Prime Minister] Theresa May.”
Elsewhere in the comments, Davison wrote about conspiracy theories that sound similar to those pushed by QAnon believers. He wrote: “Scepticism of government is key and everyone should be ready and prepared for anything bad that could happen. I am aware much of the government is deeply flawed there are many paedophiles and even reported devil worshipers people that sell us out to foreign countries.”
Davison’s Facebook likes suggest he was obsessed with conservative U.S. politics. He followed the pages of Trump, all of his children, and several Trump businesses, as well as pages for the NRA, Fox News, Breitbart, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and one called “Ted Nugent for President.” In one comment, he said it was his dream to move to the States.
In disturbing YouTube videos posted just weeks before the shooting, Davison appears to be deeply unhappy about his life. Under the username “Professor Waffle,” he refers to people like him as “blackpillers,” incels who believe unattractive men will never be romantically successful regardless of how much effort they put into how they look. In one comment under his video, he wrote that he’d been “consuming the blackpill overdose.”
In one video, he grabs his belly fat and bemoans his lack of motivation to get fit, complains about women being “simple-minded,” and justifies sexual assault by saying women ignore “average men and below average.”
“When you’ve worked so fucking hard... and you see other fuckers that work nowhere near as hard as you, then you wake up and look at the wall and think ‘Nothing’s changed,’” he whines in one clip. “I’m still in the same position, same period in life, still a fucking this, that, virgin, fat, ugly, whatever you want to call it. What’s changed? Nothing.”
Another video sees Davison spending 14 minutes complaining that he missed out on experiencing teenage love because of his weight, and saying that he has no desire to get a relationship with an adult woman.
“Let’s say I get with a woman my age,” he says. “She’s had a million relationships. Likely been destroyed and broken and torn apart by a fucking chad. She’s probably completely incapable of loving anyone like she did when she was 16, 17, 15, when she first got with that fucking chad.”
At the end of his final video posted before the shooting, Davison compares himself to The Terminator, telling viewers: “I know it’s a movie, but I like to think sometimes that I’m The Terminator. Despite reaching almost total system failure, he keeps trying to accomplish his mission.”
In a Friday morning press conference, police refused to comment on Davison’s social media posts, and said that they have not determined a motive for the shooting. Officers did confirm that Davison was a licensed gun-owner, and said witnesses saw him wielding a “pump-action shotgun.” The victims have not been named, but include a young girl.
Chief constable Shaun Sawyer told reporters that multiple witnesses saw the girl and her unidentified male relative being shot on the street, calling that specific part of the shooting spree a “truly shocking event.”
Britain has had some of the strictest gun laws in the world since the Dunblane massacre in 1996, when a gunman murdered 16 children and a teacher inside a Scottish primary school. Would-be gun owners must go through several stages of police checks before they can obtain a license, which then have to be renewed for approval every five years.
Britain hasn’t seen a mass shooting on the scale of what happened in Plymouth since 2010, when 52-year-old taxi driver Derrick Bird went on a rampage that saw him shoot 12 people dead in west Cumbria.
Safi Hilton, one of Davison’s Facebook friends, posted a tribute to the victims of the Plymouth shooting, writing: “In a world where you can be anything, be kind. Thoughts are with the families, friends and also witnesses of this incident tonight. Remember to reach out and talk.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/jake-davison-suspected-mass-shooter-said-he-was-an-american-trump-supporting-virgin?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
Julia Davis @JuliaDavisNews Rand Paul and his wife had not bought stock in an individual company in at least 10 years before Kelley Paul purchased shares of the drug company Gilead Sciences.
That purchase was made one day after the first clinical trial began for Gilead’s Remdesivir.
Rand Paul’s wife bought shares in Covid treatment maker Gilead in early days of virus, the couple’s only individual stock purchase in years
PUBLISHED THU, AUG 12 20217:36 PM EDTUPDATED THU, AUG 12 20219:54 PM EDT
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/12/rand-pauls-wife-bought-shares-in-covid-treatment-maker-gilead-as-virus-spread.html?__source=iosappshare%7Ccom.apple.UIKit.activity.PostToTwitter
2:16 AM · Aug 13, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
Rand Paul and his wife had not bought stock in an individual company in at least 10 years before Kelley Paul purchased shares of the drug company Gilead Sciences.
— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) August 13, 2021
That purchase was made one day after the first clinical trial began for Gilead’s Remdesivir.https://t.co/dq81XfkM2o
The number of White people in the U.S. fell for first time since 1790, according to new data from the 2020 Census
By Tara Bahrampour
Today at 2:09 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/08/12/census-data-race-ethnicity-neighborhoods/
The number of White people in the U.S. fell for first time since 1790, according to new data from the 2020 Census.
The first detailed race and ethnicity breakdown from the 2020 count shows a country that has become more multiracial and racially and ethnically diverse especially among those 18 and under.
This story will be updated.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/08/12/census-data-race-ethnicity-neighborhoods/
Census Bureau data out today will shape the redistricting fight of this decade
Of concern is a 2019 decision that gives lawmakers clearance to manipulate districts for political purposes
Sam Levine in New York
Thu 12 Aug 2021 15.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/12/census-bureau-data-redistricting-fight-to-vote
Happy Thursday,
It has arrived without much fanfare, but today is one of the most important days for the next decade of American politics.
Later this afternoon, the Census Bureau will release the data that all 50 states will use to redraw their political maps. That includes congressional districts as well as state legislative and other local districts. It’s a process that the constitution mandates just once every 10 years, and is therefore hugely consequential.
Almost every redistricting cycle is a nasty political battle over whose districts are preserved, cut and made more or less competitive. But observers are particularly concerned this time around.
One of the main reasons is a 2019 supreme court decision in a case called Common Cause v Rucho. In that case, the supreme court said for the first time that federal courts could not do anything to stop lawmakers from severely manipulating districts for political purposes. It’s a decision that could embolden lawmakers, who control the redistricting process, to tweak districts in a way that bakes in political wins for their respective parties. It will also be a boon to Republicans, who are poised to dominate the redistricting process this year.
Another concern is the absence of federal oversight. In every redistricting cycle since 1965, the Voting Rights Act has required places with a history of voting discrimination to get their districts pre-approved by the justice department or a three-judge court in Washington DC before they go into effect. But because of a 2013 supreme court ruling, states are no longer required to obtain that pre-clearance. States may now seek to draw districts that weaken the influence of voters of color. Civil rights and other groups can still challenge the districts, but probably only after they go into effect. This means that elections could occur in these discriminatory districts as litigation moves slowly through the courts.
One of the biggest issues is the data itself.
There are lingering worries that the Census Bureau’s 2020 count was inaccurate and undercounted minority communities. While the bureau has repeatedly assured the public of its confidence in the data, experts will be combing through it to spot any anomalies.
In a normal redistricting cycle, the data being released today would have been published much earlier in the year, giving states ample time to draw new maps before the midterm elections. But because of Covid-related delays with the 2020 census, the data is late. That’s another problem, because states face rapidly approaching deadlines to produce their maps for elections next year. Redistricting is a notoriously opaque process and the condensed timeline could allow lawmakers to rush plans through with little public input.
Beyond redistricting, the census data is also expected to show just how fast America’s non-white population is growing. The new numbers are likely to confirm estimates that non-white people account for almost all of the population growth in the US, while the white population is shrinking, according to the Washington Post.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/12/census-bureau-data-redistricting-fight-to-vote
The GOP strategy for retaking power is about to take an ugly new turn
Opinion by Greg Sargent
Columnist The Washington Post
Today at 10:42 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/12/gop-strategy-retake-power-gerrymandering/
It is a brutal reality about this political moment that Republicans can capture the House while dwelling almost exclusively in the safe confines of their alternate information environment.
In this hermetically sealed-off place, Republicans can continue deifying former president Donald Trump even as evidence mounts of his naked plot to steal the last election. They can oppose an accounting into the worst outbreak of political violence in recent U.S. history despite their deep implication in it.
They can dismiss broadly popular economic policies as “ socialism” while withdrawing from the conversation entirely about how they would address our deepest challenges. They can actively campaign against mask mandates despite their overwhelming public support, while boasting straight-facedly that this is good strategy.
A key reason for this state of affairs will become clearer on Thursday, when the gerrymandering wars kick off in earnest. The release of new census data will set off a scramble of state legislatures redrawing congressional and state legislative district lines, setting the political playing field for 2022.
It has been widely established that Republicans can recapture the House on the strength of extreme gerrymanders alone. They need to net five seats, and those could be added based solely on redrawn district lines.
Indeed, Samuel Wang, the director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, has concluded that if Republicans successfully gerrymander, they can win the House if the 2022 national popular vote rivals the 2020 Democratic edge of three points.
Meanwhile, a recent study by the Democratic data firm TargetSmart concluded that Republicans can add anywhere from six to 13 seats based on redrawn maps in just four states — Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. And the Brennan Center for Justice has also concluded that redrawn lines in those four states could determine House control.
A Brennan Center study highlights a perfect storm of factors. Republicans control all four of those state legislatures. Recent Supreme Court rulings — hobbling federal preclearance over voting changes and placing partisan gerrymanders beyond court supervision — removed key guardrails.
Meanwhile, as Ronald Brownstein notes, population growth, increasing diversification and growing minority vote share in Southern states is boosting GOP incentives to double down on anti-majoritarian tactics to hold back the demographic tide.
Even Republicans themselves gush that they can recapture the House via gerrymanders. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.) recently enthused that GOP control of “most” redistricting across the country “alone should get us the majority back.”
If Jackson understood this as an admission that Republicans must rig the playing field in glaringly anti-majoritarian ways to be competitive, it certainly didn’t seem to trouble him. He openly boasted about this as a sign of Republican strength.
The news is not all terrible for Democrats. As the New York Times summarizes:
- Political maps are already extremely gerrymandered, making it difficult to increase their partisan tilts. Some states that drew extensively gerrymandered maps, including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, now have divided government; others, like Michigan, have adopted independent redistricting commissions.-
Democratic governors in some states can veto bad GOP-drawn maps. Democrats are already vowing to contest GOP gerrymanders in state courts. And a few Democratic states can fight the tide by gerrymandering themselves.
But that will force a tough choice between honoring the party’s committed opposition to anti-majoritarian tactics and avoiding unilateral disarmament against the enthusiastic GOP embrace of such tactics in a fundamentally national war.
None of this relieves Democrats of responsibility for 2022. They lost a number of seats in 2020, and there are real questions about whether they are too complacent that big policy wins alone can hold the House. They must also effectively prosecute the case against GOP radicalization.
But, ultimately, all this isn’t just about partisan advantage. It’s also about the counter-majoritarian fate that Democrats will consign the country to if they refuse to end the filibuster to pass their package of democracy protections, including an end to extreme gerrymanders via independent redistricting commissions.
It may be too late for such protections to matter. But as Ari Berman details, that package contains provisions that could create new ways to challenge extreme maps — despite the Supreme Court’s rulings — and Democrats must reach for all tools available.
After all, the structural difficulties are bleak. Elections analyst Stephen Wolf calculates that Republicans will exercise total control over redrawing 4 or 5 out of 10 House districts nationally, while for Democrats it’s fewer than 2. (As my book argues, this strengthens the case for Democrats to do far better in winning ground in the states.)\
As for Republicans, it’s true that they’re not exclusively talking to their base. They hope attacks on critical race theory and fearmongering about the border, crime and inflation from Democratic spending will bring back suburban voters.
But it’s plainly obvious that their strategy mainly revolves around torquing up the base into the greatest frenzy possible, and letting extreme gerrymanders and other anti-majoritarian tactics do the rest.
We often talk about the biggest factors in our politics as separate stories. The political media covers the tendency of Republicans to speak mainly to their base, the GOP midterm strategy, and the GOP embrace of counter-majoritarian tactics as natural background conditions of our politics. The coverage rarely conveys faithfully just how deeply unbalanced a situation the interlocking of all these factors has created.
But they are deeply intermingled. The fact that Republicans can recapture the House via extreme gerrymanders alone, and the enthusiastic embrace of other anti-majoritarian tactics, help enable both the GOP’s toxic midterm strategy and the party’s near-total withdrawal from the mainstream conversation — and all the ugliness and destruction that come with them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/12/gop-strategy-retake-power-gerrymandering/
Brianna Keilar @brikeilarcnn Breaking overnight - Rand Paul's wife bought up to $15,000 worth of stock in the company that makes covid drug Remdesivir, as the pandemic was taking off here in the US.
By law, that should have been disclosed within 30-45 days.
Paul reported it 16 months late.
VIDEO
Breaking overnight -
— Brianna Keilar (@brikeilarcnn) August 12, 2021
Rand Paul's wife bought up to $15,000 worth of stock in the company that makes covid drug Remdesivir, as the pandemic was taking off here in the US.
By law, that should have been disclosed within 30-45 days.
Paul reported it 16 months late. pic.twitter.com/Zwg5xFceqY
Breaking overnight -
— Brianna Keilar (@brikeilarcnn) August 12, 2021
Rand Paul's wife bought up to $15,000 worth of stock in the company that makes covid drug Remdesivir, as the pandemic was taking off here in the US.
By law, that should have been disclosed within 30-45 days.
Paul reported it 16 months late. pic.twitter.com/Zwg5xFceqY
EXCLUSIVE: Cyber expert says his team can’t prove Mike Lindell’s claims that China hacked election
By Joseph Clark - The Washington Times - Wednesday, August 11, 2021
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/aug/11/mike-lindells-lead-cyber-expert-says-they-cant-pro/
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — The cyber expert on the “red team” hired by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell now says the key data underpinning the theory that China hacked the 2020 election unveiled at the Cyber Symposium is illegitimate.
Mr. Lindell said he had 37 terabytes of “irrefutable” evidence that hackers, who he said were backed by China, broke into election systems and switched votes in favor of President Biden. The proof, he said, is visible in intercepted network data or “packet captures” that were collected by hackers and could be unencrypted to reveal that a cyberattack occurred and that votes were switched.
But cyber expert Josh Merritt, who is on the team hired by Mr. Lindell to interrogate the data for the symposium, told The Washington Times that packet captures are unrecoverable in the data and that the data, as provided, cannot prove a cyber incursion by China.
“So our team said, we’re not going to say that this is legitimate if we don’t have confidence in the information,” Mr. Merritt said on Wednesday, the second day of the symposium.
Mr. Merritt’s break from Mr. Lindell accelerated the unraveling of the MyPillow millionaire’s months of spinning of a conspiracy theory that he said would reverse the outcome of the 2020 election and restore former President Donald Trump to the White House.
Mr. Lindell delayed a scheduled unveiling of his evidence on Wednesday at the symposium.
He had offered $5 million to any in-person attendee who can disprove his claims. The offer is no longer on the table, Mr. Merritt said.
Leading up to the seminar, Mr. Lindell had displayed a video of scrolling, incomprehensible text, which he claimed were the packet captures he had received — proof, he claimed, of his China hacking theory. The video was featured in his documentary “Absolute 9-0” and was played on loop on screens throughout the convention center during the symposium.
Cybersecurity expert J. Kirk Wiebe, a former senior National Security Agency analyst and whistleblower, also said Mr. Lindell did not have the actual data sets.
He said the scrolling text was likely meant to resemble what the packet captures would look like in the data set but were not actual packet captures, which are vital to prove the claims.
Several cyber experts at the symposium became frustrated late into the first day with not being provided with packet captures.
Mr. Merritt and Mr. Wiebe said the missing packet captures could be a result of either the format the data was sent in or they were withheld by the source of the information, Dennis L. Montgomery.
Mr. Montgomery is a former government contractor who developed cyber tools named HAMMER and SCORECARD, which were allegedly used by the U.S. to influence foreign elections. Mr. Montgomery came forward with the data after he said the tools were being used to influence U.S. elections, according to Mr. Wiebe.
Mr. Merritt confirmed that Mr. Montgomery was the source of the data.
But the data Mr. Montgomery sent contains no packet captures and cannot be used to validate Mr. Lindell’s marquee theory, which he planned to unveil at the symposium, said the two experts.
Mr. Montgomery reportedly suffered a stroke on the eve of the symposium and has not been in contact with Mr. Lindell’s team or any cyber experts at the symposium.
He has been behind several other high-profile conspiracy theories, including allegations that U.S. security agencies wiretapped Trump Tower while Mr. Trump was running for president in 2016.
Mr. Montgomery said he presented the wiretap evidence to then-FBI Director James B. Comey, who dismissed the information. Mr. Montgomery later sued Mr. Comey, alleging a cover-up. The lawsuit was dropped.
Mr. Montgomery has also publicly claimed that the 2020 election was manipulated, which former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Christopher Krebs said was a “hoax.”
Still, Mr. Merritt said, the data did contain important “forensic” evidence of manipulated voters.
“We were handed a turd,” he said. “And I had to take that turd and turn it into a diamond. And that’s what I think we did.”
The symposium organizers unveiled data Wednesday in front of the audience, which they said showed tampering in the 2020 presidential election in Mesa County, Colorado. The presentation was ad hoc and separate from Mr. Lindell’s original claim of a nationwide hack.
Mesa County’s clerk and recorder, Tina Peters, headlined Day One of the gathering. Ms. Peters is under investigation for a potential election security breach from within her office.
Mr. Lindell’s team would not confirm the source of the data used for Wednesday’s presentation.
Phil Waldron who is the leader of the red team, said only a small slice of the data was provided to the red team, just days before the symposium.
Mr. Waldron said the remaining data, not interrogated during the symposium, could contain the packet captures and other data needed to prove China hacked the election. He also said that ample evidence was contained in the data that points to other significant election anomalies, that were just as significant and worth unpacking during the symposium.
Kurt Olsen, a lawyer on Mr. Lindell’s team said there were multiple sources of the data that Mr. Lindell claims to have, and did not confirm that Mr. Mongtomery was the source of the data. He also clarified that the $5 million challenge has not been canceled and that Mr. Merritt would not be privy to that information.
Clarification: The article previously described Mr. Merritt as Lindell’s lead cyber expert. Mr. Merritt is a cyber expert on the red team hired by Mr. Lindell to interrogate the data for the symposium, and does not work directly for Mr. Lindell.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/aug/11/mike-lindells-lead-cyber-expert-says-they-cant-pro/
Brianna Keilar @brikeilarcnn "The CNNs of the world, you guys need to start reporting this and stop fact checking it,” says a speaker at MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s Big Lie-pushing “cyber symposium" in South Dakota.
@donie has this report.
VIDEO
"The CNNs of the world, you guys need to start reporting this and stop fact checking it,” says a speaker at MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s Big Lie-pushing “cyber symposium" in South Dakota.@donie has this report. pic.twitter.com/TVz0LiUElp
— Brianna Keilar (@brikeilarcnn) August 12, 2021
"The CNNs of the world, you guys need to start reporting this and stop fact checking it,” says a speaker at MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s Big Lie-pushing “cyber symposium" in South Dakota.@donie has this report. pic.twitter.com/TVz0LiUElp
— Brianna Keilar (@brikeilarcnn) August 12, 2021
Spooked by new laws, tech doubles down on kids' privacy
Axios
Margaret Harding McGill, Sara Fische
https://www.axios.com/tech-kids-privacy-united-kingdom-law-014f28ad-37d9-4134-90e8-84a3ca8a2f21.html
Tech giants are scrambling to update their privacy rules for young users in order to comply with new regulations from the United Kingdom focused on teens' online privacy and wellbeing.
Why it matters: Historically, when Europe passes new data laws, the U.S. and other Western countries have eventually followed suit. So it's likely that the U.K.'s pending Age Appropriate Design Code will set a new global standard for the treatment of children's data.
Driving the news: TikTok on Thursday announced a slew of changes to its children's privacy settings, including adding a pop-up for kids under the age of 16 asking them to choose who can watch their videos before they upload them, and adding another pop-up asking them to confirm whether others can download their videos.
TikTok last year said it would be disabling messaging for accounts under age 16 and has since beefed up its parental controls.
Instagram last month introduced a slew of new privacy features aimed at kids under 16, including making new accounts private by default for kids under 16.
Facebook and Instagram both said last month that they would begin limiting the way advertisers can target young users under age 18.
YouTube said it would adjust the default upload setting to the most private option for users between 13 and 17, and would remove "overly commercial" videos from YouTube Kids.
Snap's strict user privacy measures have allowed it to avoid a lot of the children's data privacy headaches that have plagued its rivals. A spokesperson notes that many of the measures within the U.K. code are already implemented in its product.
What's happening: The U.K. in September will begin enforcing 15 new standards for websites likely to be accessed by users under 18 that center around protecting young users' online privacy and wellbeing. The standards include:
Setting a high-privacy default.
Collecting and retaining the minimum amount of data necessary to provide services.
Switching off geolocation by default.
Not using "nudge techniques" — design features that encourage users to follow the company's preferred path — to lead children to turn off privacy protections or share more personal information than is necessary.
What they're saying: Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and Reps Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) and Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) have urged tech companies to extend their new U.K. privacy protections to cover U.S. teens as well.
"I’m glad that companies are taking steps in the right direction to increase privacy protections for children and teens online, but Big Tech keeps failing to live up to its promises.," Markey told Axios in a statement Wednesday.
"These voluntary policy changes are no substitute for legally enforceable rules that force websites and apps to stop putting corporate profits ahead of children’s privacy."
Yes, but: Online companies might determine they do not need to make changes to meet the new standards or target changes to apply only to U.K. users.
In its July response to lawmakers noting its current protections for U.S. kids, Amazon said, "we will carefully consider whether there are measures that we can roll out globally, beyond our services in the United Kingdom."
Twitter told lawmakers it believes its current practices already are "in alignment with AADC standards."
The big picture: Tech companies have been scrutinized in recent years for lax rules around data privacy for kids.
Both TikTok and YouTube faced major fines from the FTC for children's privacy violations in 2019.
Facebook has faced lots of criticism for testing an app for users under 13.
What's next: Markey and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) have introduced legislation that would update the existing U.S. children's online privacy law by applying protections to older teens and requiring companies to allow users to delete personal information, among other measures.
"Companies voluntarily doing some things in the U.S. that they are required to do in the U.K. is a good step, but we still need policymakers to act here," Ariel Fox Johnson, senior counsel for global policy at Common Sense Media, told Axios.
https://www.axios.com/tech-kids-privacy-united-kingdom-law-014f28ad-37d9-4134-90e8-84a3ca8a2f21.html
Trump Accountants Must Hand Over Some Tax Records to House Panel: Judge
FORK ’EM OVER
Corbin Bolies
Breaking News Intern
Updated Aug. 11, 2021 3:59PM ET / Published Aug. 11, 2021 2:18PM ET
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-accountants-must-hand-over-tax-records-to-house-panel-judge-says?via=newsletter&source=CSPMedition
It looks like former President Donald Trump will have to give up at least some of his taxes to Congress, no matter how many federal judges he begs otherwise. A U.S. District Court judge approved a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee subpoena Wednesday for Trump’s taxes and financial documents but limited what the accounting firm must turn over after finding the panel’s initial request too broad. “The more Congress can invade the personal sphere of a former President, the greater the leverage Congress would have on a sitting President,” the judge said. The committee has been investigating whether Trump’s businesses had profited from his time in the White House. It had sought records dating back to 2011, but the judge limited the transactions to those since 2018. The order could be appealed by Trump’s attorneys, according to Politico.
It follows Trump’s request last week to stop a different House committee from reviewing his taxes. Trump asked a federal judge to prevent the House Ways and Means Committee, which is reviewing the audit process for presidents, from obtaining his tax returns, arguing it was solely a political attempt to obtain his taxes.
Read it at Politico
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/11/trump-taxes-house-subpoeana-503800
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-accountants-must-hand-over-tax-records-to-house-panel-judge-says?via=newsletter&source=CSPMedition
A Judge Just Granted a Review of Decision Not to Seek So-Called ‘McMafia’ Order on Millions of Dollars Trump Poured into Scottish Golf Courses
ADAM KLASFELDAug 11th, 2021, 11:51 am
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/a-judge-just-granted-a-so-called-mcmafia-order-review-of-the-millions-of-dollars-trump-poured-into-scottish-golf-courses/
A judge agreed to review Scottish ministers’ refusal to investigate what a U.S. advocacy group describes as former President Donald Trump’s “highly suspicious” transactions on two golf courses in that country to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
In a ruling issued by Scottish Court of Session on Wednesday, Lord Craig Sandison cited the “general and continuing public importance of the legal questions” brought by the Delaware-based group Avaaz, which has been fighting for more than two years to push ministers in that country to pursue an “Unexplained Wealth Order” to illuminate how Trump paid for two golf courses. He reportedly spent more than $300 million in cash to buy and develop Turnberry in Ayrshire and Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeenshire.
Sometimes described as a “McMafia” order, an Unexplained Wealth Order forces disclosure over the source of finances, and Avaaz launched its petition after Scottish ministers refused to pursue one.
Nick Flynn, legal director at Avaaz, applauded the ruling in a press release focusing mainly on the $60 million purchase of Turnberry.
“Today’s win means Scottish Ministers will now be challenged in court over their ongoing failure to seek an Unexplained Wealth Order (‘UWO’) to investigate Trump’s suspicious Turnberry purchase,” Flynn wrote in a statement. “Armed with a proper understanding of the law, we hope that Ministers agree that Trump’s purchase demands the transparency that only a UWO can bring. Scotland’s reputation for upholding the rule of law and combating money laundering depends on it.”
An attorney for the Trump Organization did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.
In April 2019, Avaaz presented Scottish ministers with a 30-page briefing making their case for such a review.
“Scottish Ministers cannot afford to compromise the sanctity of the rule of law and allow Mr Trump and his associates to undermine Scottish institutions,” the briefing read. “The implications of overlooking the obvious gaps in the funding of the Turnberry purchase are not simply a matter of Scottish national interest, but of global proportions. Money laundering is an international threat leaving in its wake countless victims of robbery, embezzlement, fraud, drug-dealing, sex-trafficking and terrorism.”
Avaaz found allies in the country’s Green party, whose co-leader and Parliamentarian Patrick Harvie urged his fellow lawmakers to investigate exactly how the Trump Organization funded its multi-million dollar Scottish land acquisitions roughly a year later. Harvie argued at the time that there were “reasonable grounds” to suspect the U.S. president has been involved in illegal activity, a claim the then-president’s son Eric Trump called “libelous.”
This past February, the Scottish Green party brought forward a motion calling for the ministers to seek the “McMafia” order against Trump over his acquisition of Turnberry, but Avaaz says that the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Conservatives banded together to amend and water down the motion.
Avaaz’s legal director criticized the move.
“Scottish Ministers have been turning a blind eye to the cloud of suspicion hanging over Trump Turnberry for far too long,” Flynn added. “The vote in Parliament in February was the perfect chance for Scottish Ministers to bring an end to two years of dithering but the SNP and Tories refused to take it.”
The group says that the judicial review is expected to start later this year at the Court of Session in Edinburgh.
Read the Scottish order below:
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21040015/scottish-order-2021csoh81.pdf
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/a-judge-just-granted-a-so-called-mcmafia-order-review-of-the-millions-of-dollars-trump-poured-into-scottish-golf-courses/
Federal Judge Hands Dominion Procedural Win: Defamation Lawsuit to Move Forward Against Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and MyPillow
AARON KELLERAug 11th, 2021, 7:05 pm
https://lawandcrime.com/2020-election/federal-judge-hands-dominion-procedural-win-defamation-lawsuit-to-move-forward-against-giuliani-sidney-powell-and-my-pillow/
A federal judge on Wednesday refused to dismiss a cluster of three defamation lawsuits filed by U.S. Dominion, Inc., against attorney Sidney Powell, attorney Rudy Giuliani, My Pillow, Inc., and My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell alleging defamation in connection with Dominion’s activities during the 2020 election cycle. Other named defendants included Powell’s law firm and a “related entity.”
In the 44-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols, a Donald Trump appointee, dismissed attempts by the named defendants to jettison the litigation using a myriad of legal techniques and arguments.
The lawsuit spent nearly a dozen pages recounting precisely which supporter of then-President Trump said what, and when, with regards to election integrity and whether or not the election was “stolen” by “massive election fraud.”
“Powell also made public statements that Dominion had flipped, weighted, and ‘injected’ votes,” Nichols noted.
The judge rubbished Powell’s attempt to argue that her statements were merely opinions about the 2020 election and therefore were not actionable in a defamation lawsuit. (Defamation involves false statements of fact, not opinions.) And the judge said Powell could not cloak her commentary with immunity because it involved politics (citations omitted):
“As an initial matter, there is no blanket immunity for statements that are “political” in nature: as the Court of Appeals has put it, the fact that statements were made in a “political ‘context’ does not indiscriminately immunize every statement contained therein.” It is true that courts recognize the value in some level of “imaginative expression” or “rhetorical hyperbole” in our public debate. But it is simply not the law that provably false statements cannot be actionable if made in the context of an election.
“[I]t is simply not the law that provably false statements cannot be actionable if made in the context of an election,” Nichols wrote elsewhere.
The judge similarly swept aside claims by Powell that she was merely reporting details contained within her own lawsuits — thus affording her, in her mind, with some for of privilege or protection:
Powell similarly argues that her statements were protected commentary about other lawsuits. But Powell cannot shield herself from liability for her widely disseminated out-of-court statements by casting them as protected statements about in-court litigation; an attorney’s out-of- court statements to the public can be actionable, even if those statements concern contemplated or ongoing litigation.
Several pages of analysis are then devoted to the question of whether a reasonable juror could find Powell’s commentary “expressed or implied a verifiably false fact about Dominion.”
“This is not a close call,” the judge opined — then went through a list of specific reasons why (again, citations omitted):
To take one example, Powell has stated publicly that she has “evidence from [the] mouth of the guy who founded [Dominion] admit[ting that] he can change a million votes, no problem at all.” She told audiences that she would “tweet out the video.” These statements are either true or not; either Powell has a video depicting the founder of Dominion saying he can “change a million votes,” or she does not.
To take another example, Powell has stated that she could “hardly wait to put forth all the evidence . . . on Dominion, starting with the fact it was created to produce altered voting results in Venezuela for Hugo Chávez.” Again, this statement is either true or it is not; either Dominion was created to produce altered voting results in Venezuela for Hugo Chávez or (as Dominion alleges) it was not.
Take a few more examples. Powell has stated publicly that Dominion “flipped,” “weighted,” and “injected” votes during the 2020 election; either Dominion did so or (as Dominion alleges) it did not. Powell has claimed that state officials received kickbacks in exchange for using Dominion machines; either state officials received such kickbacks or (as Dominion alleges) they did not. All of these statements, and many others alleged in Dominion’s Complaint, “expressed or implied a verifiably false fact” about Dominion.
In part of his analysis, Nichols dinged Powell — and later Lindell — for their use of one so-called “expert” who spouted highly questionable histories of the world while disparaging the voting machine company.
“That expert has also publicly claimed that George Soros, President George H.W. Bush‘s father, the Muslim Brotherhood, and ‘leftists’ helped form the ‘Deep State’ in Nazi Germany in the 1930s—which would have been a remarkable feat for Soros, who was born in 1930,” Nichols noted in one parenthetical.
Powell had attempted to evade the entirety of the lawsuit by claiming that a D.C.-based district court lacked jurisdiction to hear the lawsuit against her. The court rejected that notion out of hand by noting that Powell represented Trump-era stalwart and retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn within the D.C. court system–which was more than enough to satisfy the federal district’s long-arm jurisdictional statute.
“[H]er representation of Michael Flynn occurred here, and she traveled to and rented hotel rooms here while filming interviews in which she repeated her allegedly defamatory statements,” Nichols noted–before citing language from relevant case law on civil procedure which would be well-known to any first year law student. “[I]t is enough that she has ‘purposefully engaged in some type of commercial or business-related activity directed at District residents,’ and that there is a ‘discernible relationship’ between her contacts and Dominion’s claims.”
Lindell similarly made a failed argument against jurisdictional heft.
The court noted the MyPillow CEO held and attended “three MyPillow-sponsored rallies” in the federal district “and touted his relationship with President Trump to market his products” there–including, as the judge pointed out in another parenthetical observation that Lindell made such endorsement-themed claimed “during the 2017 White House event in which Trump endorsed MyPillow and at an August 2020 speech in the Rose Garden.”
“As a preliminary matter, a reasonable juror could conclude that the existence of a vast international conspiracy that is ignored by the government but proven by a spreadsheet on an internet blog is so inherently improbable that only a reckless man would believe it,” the judge wrote re: Lindell. But other alleged facts buried within Lindell’s claims did suggest to the judge that Dominion’s lawsuit should remain alive:
[I]n addition to alleging that Lindell’s claims are inherently improbable, that his sources are unreliable, and that he has failed to acknowledge the validity of countervailing evidence, Dominion has alleged numerous instances in which Lindell told audiences to purchase MyPillow products after making his claims of election fraud and providing MyPillow promotional codes related to those theories. In totality, it has adequately alleged that Lindell made his claims knowing that they were false or with reckless disregard for the truth.
After wiping aside additional claims by Powell that the case against her should be moved to Texas and similar claims by Lindell that the case against him should be moved to Minnesota, the judge took aim at Rudy Giuliani’s attempt to dismiss the case against him.
Among Giuliani’s gripes was that Dominion had not properly pleaded that it suffered lost profits under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 9(g) as a result of his claims about the election. The judge said Giuliani was wrong on the law as it is applied in the District of Columbia.
“Under D.C. law, defamation may be actionable as a matter of law irrespective of actual harm (‘defamation per se’) or, if not, when the plaintiff pleads special harm,” the judge wrote. “There is no question that Giuliani’s statements accusing Dominion of election fraud constitute defamation per se; if Dominion were an individual, damages would be presumed.”
The judge said Giuliani’s reliance on three cases to support his technical analysis of the pleadings is sorely misplaced: according to the judge, the cases simply don’t say what Giuliani claims they say. “The Court is not aware of any case requiring a corporate plaintiff alleging defamation per se to plead damages specially, and by its terms Rule 9(g) does not include such a requirement,” the judge concluded.
Read the opinion below:
https://www.scribd.com/document/519812353/Dominion-v-Powell-Giuliani-And-My-Pillow-Aug-11-2021-Opinion?secret_password=6pzXPLY45h1FFSeN3p9h#download&from_embed
Colin Kalmbacher, Adam Klasfeld, and Matt Naham contributed to this report.
This report, which began as a breaking news piece, has been updated substantially.
https://lawandcrime.com/2020-election/federal-judge-hands-dominion-procedural-win-defamation-lawsuit-to-move-forward-against-giuliani-sidney-powell-and-my-pillow/
Trump election lawyers just got what was coming to them
Ministry of Trvth | 10:00 pm EDT August 10, 2021
https://www.palmerreport.com/community/trump-election-lawyers-just-got-what-was-coming-to-them/40731/
Colorado Federal Judge N. Reid Neureiter has issued a scathing decision ordering the lawyers who filed a frivolous “copy and paste” Big Lie lawsuit to pay all court costs and legal fees in the case. The suit was fatally flawed from the outset, and only became more self-contradictory as the hapless attorneys contorted their arguments under the judge’s questioning.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21034531/colorado-sanctions.pdf
The case relied on a stack of affidavits from voters saying they “believed” the election was compromised, but offering no actual evidence. Judge Neureiter correctly stated “the affidavits are notable only in demonstrating no firsthand knowledge by any Plaintiff of any election fraud, misconduct, or malfeasance.”
No effort was made to vet the deadly serious claims they were leveling as they copied and pasted entire pages from other failed Big Lie lawsuits without even consulting the attorneys in those cases. The judge skewered them for failing to ask critical questions before repeating such brash, debunked, and inflammatory claims in a court of law.
On the matter of jurisdiction, the Judge wrote “it should have been as obvious to Plaintiffs’ counsel as it would be to a first-year civil procedure student that there was no legal or factual basis to assert personal jurisdiction in Colorado for actions taken by sister states’ governors, secretaries of state, or other election officials, in those officials’ home states.”
The lawyers even cited a TIME Magazine article while saying “TIME Magazine doesn’t print conspiracy theories unless they’re true.” If they had bothered to read beyond the headline, they would have known that the article says: “Trump plotted to block a legitimate vote count” and “spent months following Nov. 3 trying to steal the election he’d lost – with lawsuits and conspiracy theories, pressure on state and local officials, and finally summoning his army of supporters to the Jan. 6 rally that ended in deadly violence at the Capitol.”
We knew they were crappy lawyers even before they copped to a deadly insurrection in federal court while simultaneously proving they have no evidence of voter fraud. We can only hope the bar association now does its job and ejects these idiots from the profession.
https://www.palmerreport.com/community/trump-election-lawyers-just-got-what-was-coming-to-them/40731/
Nader @Nader_SM It's out. Our long-read into Wagner's operations in Libya, based on two key bits of evidence we got hold of in Tripoli:
The lost tablet and the secret documents
Clues pointing to a shadowy Russian army
By Nader Ibrahim in London and Ilya Barabanov in Moscow
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/8iaz6xit26/the-lost-tablet-and-the-secret-documents
11:55 PM · Aug 10, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
It's out. Our long-read into Wagner's operations in Libya, based on two key bits of evidence we got hold of in Tripoli: https://t.co/6k5q8HYY19
— Nader Ibrahim (@Nader_SM) August 10, 2021
Man charged in Capitol riot also engaged in rightwing street brawl
Violence erupted between antifascist protesters and supporters of a far-right preacher
Jason Wilson
@jason_a_w
Wed 11 Aug 2021 11.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/11/man-charged-capitol-riot-portland-rightwing-street-brawl
A Washington state man who was involved in an armed brawl at a contentious protest in downtown Portland over the weekend was also charged, along with his son, over his presence during the attack on the Capitol in Washington DC on 6 January.
Jeffrey Grace’s ongoing participation in far-right street politics since January – which has included trips to the southern border – indicates that widespread charges against those involved in the Capitol attack have not deterred at least some militant pro-Trump supporters from further direct actions.
Grace, 62, of Battle Ground in south-west Washington, was captured by a photographer at the scene of the clash, which involved antifascists on one hand, and on the other armed rightwing demonstrators.
Some of the demonstrators appeared to be members of the Proud Boys, which is designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and is banned as a terrorist group in Canada.
The rightwingers, including Grace, had assembled in defense of a religious service led by Artur Pawlowski, a Polish-Canadian preacher whose events have long attracted antifascist counterprotests in Canada and abroad.
Saturday’s service was reportedly disrupted by antifascists, which led to street fighting involving pepper spray, paintball guns, batons and other weapons. One of the far- right group was captured by a reporter on camera brandishing a long gun in the setrets.
Grace was captured leaving the scene of the brawl in the back of a truck, holding a baton.
The next morning on his Instagram account, he admitted that “I went down in support of a pastor’s right to speak”, and that “we did perimeter security”.
At another point in the video, Grace said “people say you can’t fight Antifa with these”, held up his fists, and continued “well guess what, you can”.
Grace uses his social media channels to promote his web store, where he sells merchandise including T-shirts featuring images of the Capitol over the slogan “OUR HOUSE”.
Federal charging documents alleged that federal agents found in the trash folder of Grace’s cellphone “a “selfie-style” video that depicts him and an individual believed to be his son Jeremy outside the US Capitol building, both repeatedly saying: “Our house”.
In local media interviews, Grace has admitted to the central charge in the document: that he unlawfully entered the Capitol building. Grace did not respond to several Guardian attempts to contact him.
Pawlowski, the preacher, has attracted significant controversy in his home province of Alberta after adopting a range of far-right political positions. He once attributed Alberta floods to divine displeasure over homosexuality and he has participated in tiki torch anti-lockdown rallies in Calgary.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/11/man-charged-capitol-riot-portland-rightwing-street-brawl
Secret IRS Files Reveal How Much the Ultrawealthy Gained by Shaping Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Tax Cut”
by Justin Elliott and Robert Faturechi
Aug. 11, 5 a.m. EDT
https://www.propublica.org/article/secret-irs-files-reveal-how-much-the-ultrawealthy-gained-by-shaping-trumps-big-beautiful-tax-cut
Billionaire business owners deployed lobbyists to make sure Trump’s 2017 tax bill was tailored to their benefit. Confidential IRS records show the windfall that followed.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. The Secret IRS Files is an ongoing reporting project. Sign up to be notified when the next story publishes. Or text “IRS” to 917-746-1447 to get the next story texted to you (standard messaging rates apply).
In November 2017, with the administration of President Donald Trump rushing to get a massive tax overhaul through Congress, Sen. Ron Johnson stunned his colleagues by announcing he would vote “no.”
Making the rounds on cable TV, the Wisconsin Republican became the first GOP senator to declare his opposition, spooking Senate leaders who were pushing to quickly pass the tax bill with their thin majority. “If they can pass it without me, let them,” Johnson declared.
Johnson’s demand was simple: In exchange for his vote, the bill must sweeten the tax break for a class of companies that are known as pass-throughs, since profits pass through to their owners. Johnson praised such companies as “engines of innovation.” Behind the scenes, the senator pressed top Treasury Department officials on the issue, emails and the officials’ calendars show.
Within two weeks, Johnson’s ultimatum produced results. Trump personally called the senator to beg for his support, and the bill’s authors fattened the tax cut for these businesses. Johnson flipped to a “yes” and claimed credit for the change. The bill passed.
The Trump administration championed the pass-through provision as tax relief for “small businesses.”
Confidential tax records, however, reveal that Johnson’s last-minute maneuver benefited two families more than almost any others in the country — both worth billions and both among the senator’s biggest donors.
Dick and Liz Uihlein of packaging giant Uline, along with roofing magnate Diane Hendricks, together had contributed around $20 million to groups backing Johnson’s 2016 reelection campaign.
The expanded tax break Johnson muscled through netted them $215 million in deductions in 2018 alone, drastically reducing the income they owed taxes on. At that rate, the cut could deliver more than half a billion in tax savings for Hendricks and the Uihleins over its eight-year life.
But the tax break did more than just give a lucrative, and legal, perk to Johnson’s donors. In the first year after Trump signed the legislation, just 82 ultrawealthy households collectively walked away with more than $1 billion in total savings, an analysis of confidential tax records shows. Republican and Democratic tycoons alike saw their tax bills chopped by tens of millions, among them: media magnate and former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg; the Bechtel family, owners of the engineering firm that bears their name; and the heirs of the late Houston pipeline billionaire Dan Duncan.
Usually the scale of the riches doled out by opaque tax legislation — and the beneficiaries — remain shielded from the public. But ProPublica has obtained a trove of IRS records covering thousands of the wealthiest Americans. The records have enabled reporters this year to explore the diverse menu of options the tax code affords the ultrawealthy to avoid paying taxes.
The drafting of the Trump law offers a unique opportunity to examine how the billionaire class is able to shape the code to its advantage, building in new ways to sidestep taxes.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was the biggest rewrite of the code in decades and arguably the most consequential legislative achievement of the one-term president. Crafted largely in secret by a handful of Trump administration officials and members of Congress, the bill was rushed through the legislative process.
As draft language of the bill made its way through Congress, lawmakers friendly to billionaires and their lobbyists were able to nip and tuck and stretch the bill to accommodate a variety of special groups. The flurry of midnight deals and last-minute insertions of language resulted in a vast redistribution of wealth into the pockets of a select set of families, siphoning away billions in tax revenue from the nation’s coffers. This story is based on lobbying and campaign finance disclosures, Treasury Department emails and calendars obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, and confidential tax records.
For those who benefited from the bill’s modifications, the collective millions spent on campaign donations and lobbying were minuscule compared with locking in years of enormous tax savings.
A spokesperson for the Uihleins declined to comment. Representatives for Hendricks didn’t respond to questions. In response to emailed questions, Johnson did not address whether he had discussed the expanded tax break with Hendricks or the Uihleins. Instead, he wrote in a statement that his advocacy was driven by his belief that the tax code “needs to be simplified and rationalized.”
“My support for ‘pass-through’ entities — that represent over 90% of all businesses — was guided by the necessity to keep them competitive with C-corporations and had nothing to do with any donor or discussions with them,” he wrote.
...
MUCH MORE
https://www.propublica.org/article/secret-irs-files-reveal-how-much-the-ultrawealthy-gained-by-shaping-trumps-big-beautiful-tax-cut
https://www.propublica.org/article/secret-irs-files-reveal-how-much-the-ultrawealthy-gained-by-shaping-trumps-big-beautiful-tax-cut
Letting the ‘Vampire Kangaroo’ take control of Britain’s worst water company is a disaster for consumers – and the environment
Read this exclusive extract from our City Intelligence newsletter and sign up at the bottom of the article to get it every weekday lunchtime
BEN MARLOW
CHIEF CITY COMMENTATOR
10 August 2021 • 10:22pm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/08/10/letting-vampire-kangaroo-take-control-britains-worst-water-company/
Old pipes spilling hundreds of millions of litres of water every day; raw sewage pumped into the River Thames; more than £1bn in dividends funnelled to owners seemingly at the expense of investment; and a corporation tax bill reduced to nearly zero through offshore tax schemes.
The water industry has a woeful history of reward for failure but Macquarie’s decade-long ownership of Thames Water was so bad that rivals blamed the Australian investment giant for tarnishing the whole industry and fuelling Jeremy Corbyn’s nationalisation threat at the last election.
So with Southern Water, supplier to 4.7m customers in Kent, Sussex, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, requiring an emergency cash injection, you can see why the regulator turned to Thames’s former owners to spearhead a bail-out.
It’s bad enough that Macquarie would be allowed anywhere near the sector again but the idea it is best suited to turn around the industry’s current worst performer, and its most financially challenged operator, is almost beyond parody. It’s like asking an arsonist to put out a burning fire.
What was Ofwat thinking? True, Macquarie is pumping in £1bn and has pledged to ensure bills rise by no more than inflation over the next four years but anyone would have been better than an outfit dubbed “the Vampire Kangaroo” for its skill at maximising profits. One can only assume that there wasn’t exactly a queue of prospective investors willing to step in.
It wouldn’t be the first time that over-regulation has killed off investment. But it would be an unfortunate outcome to say the least if the very measures intended to clean up the sector killed off interest from more reliable, mainstream funds, leaving a field consisting only of those that the watchdog sought to weed out.
Crippled with £4.6bn of borrowings and racking up hundreds of millions of pounds in losses, the situation at Southern was so perilous that Ofwat was concerned that a £2bn investment programme in its pipes and sewers was in jeopardy.
So who better to resolve this financial black hole than a fund that practically invented the financial engineering playbook when it came to Britain’s water suppliers?
“Very profound changes are required, and much overdue, to improve company performance and to strengthen the financial position of Southern Water,” Ofwat chairman Jonson Cox declares in a letter to Leigh Harrison, Macquarie’s head of infrastructure.
But Cox could easily have been talking about the stewardship of Thames when it was owned by an international consortium that included Macquarie, the BT pension fund, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and China Investment Corporation. Over the course of a decade, Britain’s biggest water supplier was loaded up with £10.6bn of borrowings, while its investors extracted £1.6bn of shareholder dividends and paid corporation tax of just £100,000.
Ditto when Harrison decries Southern’s environmental performance as “one of the worst in the sector” after a record £90m Crown Court fine for deliberately dumping billions of litres of raw sewage into some of the UK’s most protected seas for financial gain.
The previous high watermark when it came to fines was the £20m Thames had to pay in 2017 for pumping 1.9bn litres of untreated sewage into the capital’s biggest river in 2013 and 2014. Judge Francis Sheridan said senior management must have known about the problem.
This was followed up by a £2.3m penalty for pollution in 2016. This time, Sheridan described it as “high negligence”.
This was followed up by a £2.3m penalty for pollution in 2016. This time, Sheridan described it as “high negligence”.
Yes, Southern “has failed its customers, its duties to the environment, and its stakeholders” but precisely the same could be said of Thames when it was in Macquarie’s hands, yet strangely Harrison’s correspondence with Cox fails to even mention its past association with the industry.
The regulator isn’t shy about trumpeting what a wonderful job it has supposedly done of shaking up the sector in recent years but the fact that Southern had to be rescued in the first place is hardly a ringing endorsement of its reforms, while it is impossible to see the return of Macquarie as anything other than a deeply retrograde step.
Uniting one of the world’s most rapacious banks with Britain’s worst water supplier, is a match made in hell for customers and the environment.
This article is from The Telegraph’s City Intelligence newsletter. Sign up here for incisive analysis of the day's biggest corporate story from our chief City commentator Ben Marlow.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/08/10/letting-vampire-kangaroo-take-control-britains-worst-water-company/
British embassy worker arrested in Germany for 'spying for Russia'
'On at least one occasion passed on documents he acquired as part of his professional activities to representative of Russian intelligence'
By Gareth Davies,
BREAKING NEWS EDITOR
11 August 2021 • 9:53am
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/08/11/british-embassy-worker-arrested-germany-spying-russia/
A British man suspected of spying for Russia in exchange for cash has been arrested in Germany, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.
The suspect identified only as David S worked as local staff at the British embassy in Berlin until the time of his arrest.
The federal prosecutor's office said in a statement: "On at least one occasion passed on documents he acquired as part of his professional activities to a representative of Russian intelligence.
"The accused received a cash payment in an unspecified amount in return."
Scotland Yard's counter-terror unit was also involved in the arrest, and the Met Police said the 57-year-old was detained as part of a joint operation.
In a statement, the force said: "A 57-year old British national was arrested by German authorities on Tuesday, 10 August, as part of a joint investigation between the Met's Counter Terrorism Command and German counterparts.
"The man was arrested in the Berlin area on suspicion of committing offences relating to being engaged in ‘Intelligence Agent activity’ (under German law).
"Primacy for the investigation remains with German authorities. Officers from the Counter Terrorism Command continue to liaise with German counterparts as the investigation continues."
The Met's Counter Terrorism Command is responsible for investigating alleged breaches of the Official Secrets Act.
It said David S, who was taken into custody Tuesday in the eastern city of Potsdam on an arrest warrant issued on Aug 4, was believed to have been spying since November 2020 "at the latest".
He is to appear later Wednesday before an investigating judge who will decide whether he will be remanded in custody.
Germany has arrested a number of people in recent years accused of spying for Russia, but the capture of a suspect from a close ally is highly unusual.
In June, German police arrested a Russian scientist working at a German university accused of working for Russian secret service since early October 2020 at the latest.
He is also suspected of accepting cash in exchange for his services.
Moscow is at loggerheads with a number of Western capitals after a Russian troop build-up on Ukraine's borders and a series of espionage scandals that have resulted in diplomatic expulsions.
In June, Italy said it had created a national cybersecurity agency following warnings by Prime Minister Mario Draghi that Europe needs to protect itself from Russian "interference".
The move came after an Italian navy captain was caught red-handed by police selling confidential military documents from his computer to a Russian embassy official.
The leaders of nine eastern European nations in May condemned what they termed Russian "aggressive acts", citing operations in Ukraine and "sabotage" allegedly targeted at the Czech Republic.
Several central and eastern European countries expelled Russian diplomats in solidarity with Prague, but Russia has branded accusations of its involvement as "absurd" and responded with tit-for-tat expulsions.
The latest espionage case also comes at a time of highly strained relations between Russia and Germany on a number of fronts, including the ongoing detention of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, who received treatment in Berlin after a near-fatal poisoning.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/08/11/british-embassy-worker-arrested-germany-spying-russia/
Senate OKs Dems’ $3.5T budget in latest win for Biden
By ALAN FRAM
an hour ago
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-health-coronavirus-pandemic-police-reform-da99a456faafc0a310eb48a2fbab9a67
WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats pushed a $3.5 trillion framework for bolstering family services, health, and environment programs through the Senate early Wednesday, advancing President Joe Biden’s expansive vision for reshaping federal priorities just hours after handing him a companion triumph on a hefty infrastructure package.
Lawmakers approved Democrats’ budget resolution on a party-line 50-49 vote, a crucial step for a president and party set on training the government’s fiscal might on assisting families, creating jobs and fighting climate change. Higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations would pay for much of it. Passage came despite an avalanche of Republican amendments intended to make their rivals pay a price in next year’s elections for control of Congress.
House leaders announced their chamber will return from summer recess in two weeks to vote on the fiscal blueprint, which contemplates disbursing the $3.5 trillion over the next decade. Final congressional approval, which seems certain, would protect a subsequent bill actually enacting the outline’s detailed spending and tax changes from a Republican filibuster in the 50-50 Senate, delays that would otherwise kill it.
Even so, passing that follow-up legislation will be dicey with party moderates wary of the massive $3.5 trillion price tag vying with progressives demanding aggressive action. The party controls the House with just three votes to spare, while the evenly divided Senate is theirs only due to Vice President Kamala Harris tie-breaking vote. Solid GOP opposition seems guaranteed.
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., once a progressive voice in Congress’ wilderness and now a national figure wielding legislative clout, said the measure would help children, families, the elderly and working people — and more.
“It will also, I hope, restore the faith of the American people in the belief that we can have a government that works for all of us, and not just the few,” he said.
Republicans argued that Democrats’ proposals would waste money, raise economy-wounding taxes, fuel inflation and codify far-left dictates that would harm Americans. They were happy to use Sanders, a self-avowed democratic socialist, to try tarring all Democrats backing the measure.
If Biden and Senate Democrats want to “outsource domestic policy to Chairman Sanders” with a “historically reckless taxing and spending spree,” Republicans lack the votes to stop them, conceded Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. “But we will debate. We will vote.”
The Senate turned to the budget hours after it approved the other big chunk of Biden’s objectives, a compromise $1 trillion bundle of transportation, water, broadband and other infrastructure projects. That measure, passed 69-30 with McConnell among the 19 Republicans backing it, also needs House approval.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., assured progressives that Congress will pursue sweeping initiatives going beyond that infrastructure package.
“To my colleagues who are concerned that this does not do enough on climate, for families, and making corporations and the rich pay their fair share: We are moving on to a second track, which will make a generational transformation in these areas,” Schumer said.
Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., missed the budget votes to be with his ailing wife.
In a budget ritual, senators plunged into a “vote-a-rama,” a nonstop parade of messaging amendments that often becomes a painful all-night ordeal. This time, the Senate held more than 40 roll calls by the time it approved the measure at around 4 a.m. EDT, more than 14 hours after the procedural wretchedness began.
With the budget resolution largely advisory, the goal of most amendments was not to win but to force the other party’s vulnerable senators to cast troublesome votes that can be used against them in next year’s elections for congressional control.
Republicans crowed after Democrats opposed GOP amendments calling for the full-time reopening of pandemic-shuttered schools and boosting the Pentagon’s budget and retaining limits on federal income tax deductions for state and local levies. They were also happy when Democrats showed support for Biden’s now suspended ban on oil and gas leasing on federal lands, which Republicans said would prompt gasoline price increases.
One amendment may have boomeranged after the Senate voted 99-0 for a proposal by freshman Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., to curb federal funds for any municipalities that defund the police. That idea has been rejected by all but the most progressive Democrats, but Republicans have persistently accused them anyway of backing it.
In an animated, sardonic rejoinder, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., called Tuberville’s amendment “a gift” that would let Democrats “put to bed this scurrilous accusation that somebody in this great esteemed body would want to defund the police.” He said he wanted to “walk over there and hug my colleague.”
Republicans claimed two narrow victories with potential implications for future votes, with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, one of the chamber’s more conservative Democrats, joining them on both nonbinding amendments.
One indicated support for health care providers who refuse to participate in abortions. The other voiced opposition to teaching critical race theory, which considers racism endemic to American institutions. There’s scant evidence that it’s part of public school curriculums.
The budget blueprint envisions creating new programs including tuition-free pre-kindergarten and community college, paid family leave and a Civilian Climate Corps whose workers would tackle environmental projects. Millions of immigrants in the U.S. illegally would have a new chance for citizenship, and there would be financial incentives for states to adopt more labor-friendly laws.
Medicare would add dental, hearing and vision benefits, and tax credits and grants would prod utilities and industries to embrace clean energy. Child tax credits beefed up for the pandemic would be extended, along with federal subsidies for health insurance.
Besides higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, Democrats envision savings by letting the government negotiate prices for pharmaceuticals it buys, slapping taxes on imported carbon fuels and strengthening IRS tax collections. Democrats have said their policies will be fully paid for, but they’ll make no final decisions until this fall’s follow-up bill.
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-health-coronavirus-pandemic-police-reform-da99a456faafc0a310eb48a2fbab9a67
Cryptocurrency platform loses estimated $600 million in cyberheist
Alun John, Tom Westbrook, Tom Wilson
August 11, 2021 10:51 AM BST
Last Updated 19 minutes ago
https://www.reuters.com/technology/defi-platform-poly-network-reports-hacking-loses-estimated-600-million-2021-08-11/
Summary
* Token-swapping network said it suffered hack attack
* Estimated $600mln in tokens affected
* Poly asks hacker to return funds
HONG KONG/SINGAPORE/LONDON, Aug 11 (Reuters) - A cryptocurrency platform has lost an estimated $600 million in digital tokens after one of the sector's biggest ever hacking attacks, according to details of the heist which emerged on Wednesday.
Poly Network, a decentralised finance platform (DeFi), announced the hack on Twitter and posted details of digital wallets to which it said the money was transferred, urging people to blacklist tokens from those addresses.
The value of the tokens in the wallets cited by Poly was just over $600 million at the time of the announcement, according to crypto trade publication The Block.
The heist appears to be one of the biggest ever in cryptocurrency markets, and compares with the $530 million in cryptocurrency stolen from Tokyo-based bitcoin exchange Coincheck in 2018.
Crypto exchange Mt. Gox, also based in Tokyo, collapsed in 2014 after losing half a billion dollars in bitcoin.
The latest attack comes as losses from theft, hacks and fraud related to decentralised finance hit an all-time high, raising the risk of both investing in the sector and of regulators looking to shake it down.
DeFi refers to peer-to-peer cryptocurrency platforms that allow transactions without traditional gatekeepers such as banks or exchanges. Poly Network allows users to swap tokens across different blockchains.
"It is a massive hack ... as large as Mt. Gox," said Bobby Ong, co-founder of crypto analytics website CoinGecko, although he noted the fallout had not yet hurt major crypto prices.
"This project is finished in my opinion. (It is) going to take a lot to regain confidence," Ong said.
Poly did not immediately respond to a request on Wednesday for more detail about the incident. It was not immediately clear where the platform is based, or whether any law enforcement agency was investigating the heist.
STOLEN TOKENS
Poly tweeted it planned to take legal action and urged the hackers to return the assets, a move analysts said underscored how hard it is to recover stolen tokens.
"It is not like an ordinary bank heist where the money is stolen from the bank who remains the victim," said Jake Moore, cybersecurity specialist at cybersecurity firm ESET and former head of digital forensics at Britain's Dorset Police.
"Money stolen which is stored in digital ledgers is taken from individual accounts and this is what worries those choosing to store their money in these locations," Moore added.
The stolen funds amount to more than the criminal losses registered by the entire DeFi sector from January to July of a record $474 million, according to a report from crypto intelligence company CipherTrace. read more
Proponents of DeFi say the technology will allow more people and businesses to access financial services. Yet it is mostly unregulated, with tech flaws and weaknesses in the code many platforms use leaving it vulnerable to hacks and heists.
Still, a message embedded in transactions from one of the wallets controlling the missing funds said: "I need a secured multisig wallet from you," possibly in an attempt to try and return the loot.
"It's already a legend to win so much fortune," read a subsequent message.
The chief technology officer of Tether, a stablecoin, also said on Twitter the company had frozen $33 million connected with the hack, and top management at large crypto exchanges responded to Poly on Twitter saying they would try to help.
Reporting by Alun John in Hong Kong, Tom Wilson in London and Tom Westbrook in Singapore Editing by Jane Wardell and David Holmes
https://www.reuters.com/technology/defi-platform-poly-network-reports-hacking-loses-estimated-600-million-2021-08-11/
YouTube suspends Rand Paul for a week over a video disputing the effectiveness of masks.
By Daniel Victor
Aug. 11, 2021, 3:41 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/11/business/youtube-rand-paul-covid-masks.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
YouTube on Tuesday removed a video by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky for the second time and suspended him from publishing for a week after he posted a video that disputed the effectiveness of wearing masks to limit the spread of the coronavirus.
A YouTube spokesperson said the Republican senator’s claims in the three-minute video had violated the company’s policy on Covid-19 medical misinformation. The company policy bans videos that spread a wide variety of misinformation, including “claims that masks do not play a role in preventing the contraction or transmission of Covid-19.”
“We apply our policies consistently across the platform, regardless of speaker or political views, and we make exceptions for videos that have additional context such as countervailing views from local health authorities,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
In the video, Mr. Paul says: “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work. They don’t prevent infection.” Later in the video, he adds, “Trying to shape human behavior isn’t the same as following the actual science, which tells us that cloth masks don’t work.”
In fact, masks do work, according to the near-unanimous recommendations of public health experts.
On Tuesday, Twitter suspended Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, for seven days after she posted that the Food and Drug Administration should not give the coronavirus vaccines full approval and that the vaccines were “failing.”
On Twitter, Mr. Paul called his suspension “a badge of honor” and blamed “left-wing cretins at YouTube,” while linking to an alternative site to watch the video.
In a statement, the senator said that private companies had the right to bar him, but that YouTube’s decision was “a continuation of their commitment to act in lock step with the government.”
“I think this kind of censorship is very dangerous, incredibly anti-free speech and truly anti-progress of science, which involves skepticism and argumentation to arrive at the truth,” he said.
Last week, YouTube removed from his channel an eight-minute Newsmax interview in which the senator said that “there’s no value” in wearing masks. According to YouTube policy, the company issues a warning for a first offense, then the weeklong suspension is part of its “first strike” response to a second offense.
The strike will be removed from his account after 90 days if there are no more violations. A second-strike in the 90 days would result in a two-week suspension, and the account would be permanently banned after a third strike.
Daniel Victor is a general assignment reporter based in London after stints in Hong Kong and New York. He joined The Times in 2012. @bydanielvictor
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/11/business/youtube-rand-paul-covid-masks.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
US ‘archbishop’ touts bleach as Covid ‘miracle cure’ from Colombia jail cell
Mark Grenon distributing bleach to at least 75 other prisoners
Grenon, facing US charges, getting product via secret channels
Ed Pilkington
@edpilkington
Wed 11 Aug 2021 09.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/11/coronavirus-miracle-cure-bleach-covid-mark-grenon
The head of a phoney church who is in jail in Colombia awaiting extradition to the US to face trial for selling bleach fluids as a “miracle cure” for Covid-19 is continuing to tout the potentially fatal products from his prison cell through social media and text messages.
The Guardian has learned that Mark Grenon, who calls himself the “archbishop” of the Genesis II “church”, is distributing bleach to at least 75 other prisoners in La Picota penitentiary in Bogotá, where he is being held captive. He has revealed that he is obtaining the product through secret channels and that the chemicals are in plentiful supply in the jail.
“You can’t get it on the outside, but we got it on the inside,” he said in a phone call, a recording of which has been heard by the Guardian. He added that more than 75 prisoners were taking the “cure” as a remedy for a range of ailments including diabetes and gastritis.
Grenon appears to have use of a clandestine phone, which allows him to remain in full contact with the outside world and on the internet despite the fact that he is facing serious criminal charges in the US relating to his bleach-peddling activities. He regularly advocates for bleach as a miracle cure from his prison cell using private pages on Facebook and the mobile messaging app Telegram.
Grenon and three of his sons were indicted by a grand jury in Miami in April. They face potentially long prison sentences for fraudulently marketing and selling a product they call MMS or “Miracle Mineral Solution”, which they say is a miracle cure for Covid, cancer, malaria and many other illnesses.
In fact, the chemicals are routinely used as bleach in textile and other industrial processes.
Grenon’s son Joseph is being held with him at La Picota. The two other sons, Jonathan and Jordan, are in jail in Miami awaiting trial scheduled for March.
The US Food and Drug Administration has been attempting over the past several months to clamp down on illegal sales of bleach products as miracle cures. The agency has issued stern warnings that the chemicals can be fatal when consumed.
The FDA describes MMS as a “powerful bleach typically used for industrial water treatment or bleaching textiles, pulp and paper”. The agency says imbibing it can cause diarrhea and severe vomiting that can in turn depress blood pressure with life-threatening consequences.
Fiona O’Leary, a campaigner against medical misinformation, said that Grenon’s on-going activities from prison were a cause for great concern. “The man is bleaching other prisoners and continuing to push bleach to parents with young children. He is endangering young lives.”
Among Grenon’s recent private posts on Facebook is one in which he complains about his treatment at the hands of the FDA. “What would you do if this happened to you?” he wrote. “Kidnapped by the justice system to silence you from helping people to be healthy.”
He also continues to encourage parents of children as young as six who have been infected with Covid to give their kids baths in bleach solution and to make them swallow bleach powder in capsule form as a purported remedy for the illness.
“Children do pretty good,” he said in one exchange with a parent of a six-year-old. “Give the child two or three drops [of bleach] every couple of hours.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/11/coronavirus-miracle-cure-bleach-covid-mark-grenon
Wisconsin governor vetoes Republican-backed voting restrictions
August 10, 2021 4:37 PM BST
Last Updated 5 hours ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/wisconsin-governor-vetoes-republican-backed-voting-restrictions-2021-08-10/
Aug 10 (Reuters) - Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Tuesday vetoed six voting restriction bills passed by Wisconsin's Republican-controlled legislature, blocking the latest Republican effort to limit access to the polls in a politically divided U.S. state.
"These bills add unnecessary and damaging hurdles for Wisconsinites to participate in our democracy," Evers, a Democrat, said at a news conference where he officially vetoed the bills, flanked by a group of voter advocates.
The Republican speaker of Wisconsin's State Assembly, Representative Robin Vos, said in a statement on Tuesday that he was "disappointed" by Evers' move because the bills would have "closed loopholes, standardized procedures, established uniformity, guaranteed only the voter can correct their own ballot and protected votes of seniors in long-term care."
The bills Evers vetoed would have limited how and by whom an absentee ballot could be returned, curtailed municipalities' ability to organize ballot collection events, and added voter identification requirements for voters confined to their homes due to age or disability.
Wisconsin's State Assembly is one of several Republican-controlled state legislatures that have pushed new voting restrictions in the name of enhancing election security, citing former President Donald Trump's false claims that his November election defeat was the result of widespread fraud.
Similar bills have failed in other states with Democratic governors, such as Pennsylvania, where Democratic Governor Tom Wolf vetoed a bill in June that would have imposed new voter identification requirements.
But laws limiting voting access have passed in several states whose governor's office and legislature are controlled by Republicans.
The biggest showdown is currently underway in Texas, where Democratic lawmakers fled the state in July to prevent a special session of the legislature from achieving the quorum needed to pass voting restrictions backed by Republican Governor Greg Abbott. read more
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/texas-democratic-lawmakers-flee-state-thwart-voting-restrictions-2021-07-12/
Reporting by Julia Harte; editing by Jonathan Oatis
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/wisconsin-governor-vetoes-republican-backed-voting-restrictions-2021-08-10/
As Senate Republicans Ignore Trump on Infrastructure, House GOP Falls in Line
Sam Brodey
Tue, August 10, 2021, 9:55 AM·7 min read
As Congress moves closer to passing a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, GOP senators appear more than willing to ignore Donald Trump’s pleas to block the bill. House Republicans, however, are listening dutifully.
Over the weekend, 18 GOP senators—more than a third of the conference—voted to advance legislation to fund roads, transit systems, broadband, and more, which they negotiated with President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats.
A fuming Trump, who’d criticized the bill previously, responded to the defections by blasting out a series of lengthy statements slamming the bill as a RINO-backed “disgrace,” insulting the intelligence of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and threatening to withhold endorsements for any lawmaker who voted for the package.
“Hopefully,” Trump said, “the House will be much stronger than the Senate.”
If Trump’s freeform post-presidency musings have tended to land like insignificant shouts into the void, that message seemingly did not. Since the Senate moved forward with the bill last week, House Republicans have increasingly leapt to the MAGA line on the package: that it’s a boondoggle that will pave the way to socialism.
Vociferous Trump backer Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), for example, tweeted before a key Senate vote on Sunday that his district is “sick and tired of these trillion-dollar socialist monstrosities.”
On Monday, Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO) said on Fox News that “the bipartisan infrastructure package is effectively a gateway drug,” implying that GOP support will hasten the passage of a far larger $3.5 trillion economic package that Democrats intend to pass along partisan lines.
And in a tweet, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) used scare-quotes when mentioning the “infrastructure” bill and called it a “trojan horse for another $3.5 trillion of toxic policy & debt” that “should be easily rejected.”
Largely unmentioned is that Trump spent four years talking up a free-spending, big-ticket infrastructure package that likely would have included many of the items in the bipartisan deal—had he ever actually gotten any proposal off the ground.
Instead, the ex-president’s opposition to this bill appears grounded in the petty and the political, denying Biden a win and leaning into his preferred 2022 midterm narratives. On top of that, the Republicans most closely associated with the bipartisan deal Trump couldn’t strike as president are the ones he hates most, like Sens. Mitt Romney (R-UT) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK).
“It probably strikes a chord with him because it’s a lot of the Senate Republicans he hates and it’s something he wanted to do and never got done,” said a senior GOP aide.
Even Trump supporters have openly acknowledged that reality. “He didn't give one reason why it’s a bad deal, other than it’s Joe Biden’s,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND), a supporter of the deal, during a Fox News Business segment on Sunday where he was grilled by a skeptical Maria Bartiromo.
A solid Senate majority consisting of Democratic and Republican senators believes that the policy in the bipartisan infrastructure deal is popular with the public, propelling them to clear the Senate’s 60-vote threshold and pass the legislation by Tuesday—a vote that would represent a rare bipartisan triumph in a riven Congress.
“The ??Democrats want to argue that the Senate's broken, and we can't do anything, and so I think this is pretty good evidence that we can on a bipartisan basis,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who voted to advance the legislation.
“Obviously, he still has some clout,” Cornyn said of Trump. “But to me, the most important thing in any vote is not who supports it or doesn’t support it in terms of non-constituents, but whether your constituents support it.”
But the response in the House Republican ranks reflects a far different political calculus.
But House members, who represent smaller, more ideologically polarized constituencies who decide their fates every two years, are more vulnerable than senators to those kinds of pressures. Liam Donovan, a GOP strategist, explained that dynamic magnifies the apparent disparity in Trump influence that’s on display between the House and Senate.
“The House is a majoritarian institution, and both sides play their role accordingly,” said Donovan. “And the politics are reinforced by its structure—you're always in cycle, answerable to a narrower constituency, and rarely have the opportunity to forge an independent brand you can fall back on.”
The House GOP might be far Trumpier and unfriendlier to the infrastructure deal, but that doesn’t mean the conference is a monolith.
The Problem Solvers Caucus, which consists of both Democrats and Republicans, has actively supported the package. Some in the GOP believe that House Republicans running in tough districts will eagerly embrace an opportunity to claim a win on funding roads, bridges, airports, and more, even if it risks angering Trump.
McCarthy has kept his cards close on the bipartisan deal, and insiders believe he will wait to see if Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) can produce 218 votes for it from a fractious group of brinksmanship-loving Democrats with a half-dozen votes to spare.
Still, some Republicans might relish a chance not only to accomplish some bread-and-butter policy goals but take a clear step away from a figure at least some of them believe is toxic to the party.
"If we’re ever gonna get off the Trump drug,” said a GOP aide, “he just needs to take a bunch of L’s."
Read more at The Daily Beast.
https://news.yahoo.com/senate-republicans-ignore-trump-infrastructure-085556441.html#:~:text=Since%20Jan.%206,mad%20as%20hell.%E2%80%9D
Twitter suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene for 7 days over vaccine misinformation.
Aug. 10, 2021, 10:04 a.m. ET 53 minutes ago
By Davey Alba
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/technology/twitter-suspends-marjorie-taylor-greene.html
Twitter on Tuesday suspended Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, from its service for seven days after she posted that the Food and Drug Administration should not approve the coronavirus vaccines and that the vaccines were “failing.”
The company said that this was Ms. Greene’s fourth “strike,” which means that under the company’s rules she could be permanently barred if she violated Twitter’s coronavirus misinformation policy again. The company issued Ms. Greene’s third strike less than a month ago.
On Monday evening, Ms. Greene said on Twitter, “The FDA should not approve the covid vaccines.” She said there were too many reports of infection and spread of the coronavirus among vaccinated people, and added that the vaccines were “failing” and “do not reduce the spread of the virus & neither do masks.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s current guidance states, “Covid-19 vaccines are effective at protecting you from getting sick.”
In late July, the agency also revised its indoor mask policy, advising that people wear a mask in public indoor spaces in parts of the country where the virus is surging to maximize protection from the Delta variant and prevent possibly spreading the coronavirus. A recent report by two Duke University researchers who reviewed data from March to June in 100 school districts and 14 charter schools in North Carolina concluded that wearing masks was an effective measure against preventing the transmission of the virus, even without six feet of physical distancing.
Ms. Greene’s tweet was “labeled in line with our Covid-19 misleading information policy,” Trenton Kennedy, a Twitter spokesman, said in an emailed statement. “The account will be in read-only mode for a week due to repeated violations of the Twitter Rules.”
A representative for Ms. Greene did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Twitter has picked up enforcement against accounts posting coronavirus misinformation as cases have risen across the United States because of the highly contagious Delta variant. In Ms. Greene’s home state, new cases have increased by 171 percent in the past two weeks, while 39 percent of the state’s population has been fully vaccinated against the virus.
Davey Alba is a technology reporter covering disinformation. In 2019, she won a Livingston Award for excellence in international reporting and a Mirror Award for best story on journalism in peril. @daveyalba
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/technology/twitter-suspends-marjorie-taylor-greene.html
Palmer Report @PalmerReport Twitter just suspended Marjorie Taylor Greene for a week for spreading false vaccine information. Good, now make it permanent.
2:02 PM · Aug 10, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
Twitter just suspended Marjorie Taylor Greene for a week for spreading false vaccine information. Good, now make it permanent.
— Palmer Report (@PalmerReport) August 10, 2021
US vows to isolate Taliban if they take power by force
By KATHY GANNON and TAMEEM AKHGAR
an hour ago
https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-taliban-e5288f8c0a5d48677f703dbc40c22d3a
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A U.S. peace envoy brought a warning to the Taliban on Tuesday that any government that comes to power through force in Afghanistan won’t be recognized internationally after a series of cities fell to the insurgent group in stunningly quick succession.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. envoy, traveled to Doha, Qatar, where the Taliban maintain a political office, to tell the group that there was no point in pursuing victory on the battlefield because a military takeover of the capital of Kabul would guarantee they will be global pariahs. He and others hope to persuade Taliban leaders to return to peace talks with the Afghan government as American and NATO forces finish their pullout from the country.
The insurgents have captured five out of 34 provincial capitals in the country in less than a week. They are now battling the Western-backed government for control of several others, including Lashkar Gah in Helmand, and Kandahar and Farah in provinces of the same names.
After a 20-year Western military mission and billions of dollars spent training and shoring up Afghan forces, many are at odds to explain why the regular forces have collapsed, fleeing the battle sometimes by the hundreds. The fighting has fallen largely to small groups of elite forces and the Afghan air force.
The success of the Taliban blitz has added urgency to the need to restart the long-stalled talks that could end the fighting and move Afghanistan toward an inclusive interim administration.
The new pressure from Khalilzad follows condemnations from the international community and a similar warning from the United Nations that a Taliban government that takes power by force would not be recognized. The insurgents have so far refused to return to the negotiating table.
Khalilzad’s mission in Qatar is to “help formulate a joint international response to the rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan,” according to the U.S. State Department.
He plans to “press the Taliban to stop their military offensive and to negotiate a political settlement, which is the only path to stability and development in Afghanistan,” the State Department said.
Meanwhile, the Taliban military chief released an audio message to his fighters on Tuesday, ordering them not to harm Afghan forces and government officials in territories they conquer. The recording was shared on Twitter by the Taliban spokesman in Doha, Mohammad Naim.
In the nearly five-minute audio, Mohammad Yaqoob, the son of late Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, also told the insurgents to stay out of abandoned homes of government and security officials who have fled, leave marketplaces open and protect places of business, including banks.
It was not immediately clear if Taliban fighters on the ground would heed Yaqoob’s instructions. Some civilians who have fled Taliban advances have reported that the insurgents imposed repressive restrictions on women and burned down schools.
There have also been reports of revenge killings in areas where the Taliban have gained control. The insurgents have claimed responsibility for killing a comedian in southern Kandahar, assassinating the government’s media chief Kabul and a bombing that targeted acting Defense Minister Bismillah Khan Mohammadi, killing eight and wounding more. The minister was not harmed in the attack.
The intensifying war has driven thousands of people to Kabul, and many are living in parks without adequate access to water and other necessities in the summer heat. The fighting has also increased the number of civilian casualties.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said that its staff has treated more than 4,000 Afghans this month in their 15 facilities across the country, including in Helmand and Kandahar, where Afghan and U.S. airstrikes are trying to rein in the Taliban onslaught.
“We are seeing homes destroyed, medical staff and patients put at tremendous risk, and hospitals, electricity and water infrastructure damaged,” Eloi Fillion, ICRC’s head of delegation in Afghanistan, said in a statement.
“The use of explosive weaponry in cities is having an indiscriminate impact on the population,” Fillion added. “Many families have no option but to flee in search of a safer place. This must stop.”
The surge in Taliban attacks began in April, when the U.S. and NATO announced they would end their military presence and bring the last of their troops home. The final date of the withdrawal is Aug. 31, but the U.S. Central Command has said the pullout is already 95% complete.
On Monday, the U.S. emphasized that the Biden administration now sees the fight as one for Afghan political and military leaders to win or lose — and showed no sign of stepping up airstrikes despite the accelerating Taliban gains.
“When we look back, it’s going to come down to leadership and what leadership was demonstrated, or not” by Afghans, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said at a Pentagon news conference. “It’s their country to defend now. It’s their struggle.”
Khalilzad, the architect of the peace deal the Trump administration brokered with the Taliban, was expected to hold talks with key regional players, as well as unspecified multilateral organizations to see how to restart talks and halt the Taliban onslaught.
The U.S. envoy will also likely seek a commitment from Afghanistan’s neighbors and other counties in the wider region not to recognize a Taliban government that comes to power by force. When the Taliban last ruled Afghanistan, three countries recognized their rule: Pakistan, Saudi Arabi and the United Arab Emirates.
Senior Afghan officials have also travelled to Doha, including Abdullah Abdullah, who heads the government’s reconciliation council. Pakistan’s national security adviser, Moeed Yusuf, on Monday called for “reinvigorated” efforts to get all sides in the conflict back to talks, describing a protracted war in Afghanistan as a “nightmare scenario” for Pakistan.
Yusuf, speaking to foreign journalists in Islamabad, refused to definitively say whether Pakistan, which holds considerable sway over the Taliban, would recognize a Taliban government installed by force, saying instead that Pakistan wants to see an “inclusive” government in Kabul.
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Gannon reported from Islamabad. Associated Press writer Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.
ttps://apnews.com/article/middle-east-taliban-e5288f8c0a5d48677f703dbc40c22d3a