1638: Test Tube Babies

Whatever these people had been through in the last three years had aged them. It felt in that room as if a group who had been the proudest people on earth — the thought leaders of New York City — had now just stopped trying.

Ladies-who-lunched, who had been the cynosure of urbane fashion — who had until recently dressed for every outing to outdo one another, and to champion their favorite designers — were dressed now not even in fashion; indeed “fashion” seemed no longer to exist. Before 2020, these ladies would have been in chic black cocktail dresses, or red frocks with low backs, or eggshell-white dresses with asymmetrical hemlines and dustings of crystals and gauze overlays. And in heels, heels, heels.

Now, the same ladies were mostly dressed in a post-Marxist-meets-suburban-shopper uniform. They were wearing, and they have been wearing, in the several similar events which I attended recently — _white sneakers after Labor Day._ They wore comfy black slacks, and sweaters in boxy shapes and bland autumn shades. These ladies, once worshippers of fashion and style-setters themselves, were now indistinguishable from browsers in the food court of a mall.

Ladies who had been “blonded” every month at the most select of salons — with a famous, signature rich-Upper-East-Side-lady blonding that _New York Magazine_ had often discussed, with the coinage “buttery chunks” — now appeared to have thrown in the towel, and were sedately fully grey. Ladies who had once moved heaven and earth to defy age, now seemed settled into visibly aging.

This is not to judge or criticize them; you could say that there is something kind of lovely and down-to-earth in the putting-off of all of that effort. But it is a dramatic change in the culture of the women who once ran Manhattan, and it is a change in the direction of a relaxation of effort — a loss of conviction that “society” even exists in the same way — a ceasing to _care._

The men, for their part — formerly Tom Wolfe’s “Masters of the Universe” — seemed similarly collapsed, and also into a different way of being than the one that had been theirs before 2020. These gatherings used to course with the competitiveness and rampant testosterone of this class of men. The hedge fund guys, the Wall Street guys, the private investors, used to be on the lookout aggressively to one-up each other, outdo one another, acquire one another’s knowledge, contacts, or women.

Now, they too seemed markedly aged. Rather than trying to top one another with their latest acquisition or achievement, these same former Alphas sat companionably side by side with one another, old men chatting. Pretty young women flickered by, passing glasses of wine. Almost no one glanced their way.

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my wife is a PhD candidate in Psychology. She and other psychologists have told me a possible mechanism as to why SSRI’s could cause violence like school shootings.

Before taking medication, they have very little energy. The medication gives them energy to get through the day. However, they say if you combine depression with a new increased energy level, this can lead to suicide for some and even violence towards others.

De-platforming is the game

Gamified

***In the residence halls, we often hear that students are tired of having “diversity shoved down their throats.” Perhaps it’s time that students get a little dash of diversity each day, in subtle ways, as well as through planned educational programs. When an RA is able to present diversity education in small ways consistently on the floor, an environment that is open to diversity is established where not only differences are acknowledged but also similarities are recognized. Developing a diversity mindset requires a commitment to educating others as well as challenging oneself; however, the rewards are great especially when the ripple effect reaches throughout the community and becomes the norm.***

Developing A Diversity Mindset: The Ripple Effect – Reslife.Net

But what they are really searching for is connection

Hey Adam I work at Google and on Gemini.

Anyway in case you are wondering how Gemini produces black revolutionary war generals and other "diverse" results is through a layer that rewrites your query. If you write "show me pictures of Vikings" it will be rewritten as "show me a diverse picture of Vikings including a black male in a wheelchair" (actual example I verified via internal tooling).

Adam—Busy day! Attached is a highlighted order from SCOTUS, hot off the press.

SCOTUS has agreed to hear Trump’s immunity argument in his D.C. criminal case. As you know, Trump is trying to defeat the criminal case with the defense that he’s immune from prosecution. A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit rejected that argument. Trump asked SCOTUS to stay the case while he sought an “en banc” (pronounced on-bonk) rehearing from the entire D.C. Circuit Court. Special Prosecutor Jack Smith asked SCOTUS to treat the stay motion as a cert petition. SCOTUS did so, and granted cert, thus agreeing to review the issue on the merits.

SCOTUS also entered an accelerated briefing and oral-argument schedule. Trump’s opening brief is due in three weeks—that is, on March 19. Jack Smith’s answering brief is due on April 8, and Trump’s reply brief is due April 15. Oral argument will happen the week of April 22.

A comment by me: One might be tempted to say that this is good for Trump, since he gets a shortcut to SCOTUS on a major issue; plus, when SCOTUS grants cert, it’s typically because it’s contemplating reversing the judgment of the lower court. But I’m not sure that’s the case here. As a criminal defendant, Trump probably wants to slow-roll things. This is probably why he exercised the option of seeking en banc review at the D.C. Circuit before petitioning SCOTUS. Today’s development skips that step and moves things along much faster—probably not what Trump wants. Add to this the accelerated case schedule—not only does this move things along faster still, but it may also signal that SCOTUS wants to nip the issue in the bud. That prospect should trouble Trump’s team. Again, all of this is tea-leaf-reading on my part. Time will tell.

Adam—While we await a decision in the Trump/Colorado case, here’s a substantial development in the Trump fraud case percolating in New York. I’ve attached highlighted copies of today’s appellate order and a Law360 summary.

**Quick background:** On Monday, Trump and his codefendants appealed the judgment entered by trial judge Arther Engoron. In New York, as with most jurisdictions, filing an appeal doesn’t stop the prevailing party from executing on a judgment—they can begin collecting shortly after the judgment is entered.

So in this case, the State of New York will start collecting on the $460+ million judgment. With a judgment this big, “collection” usually entails seizing assets. There are three common ways to stop this from happening: (1) get the prevailing party (here, NY State) to agree to hold off, (2) get the appellate court to stay execution, or (3) put up an appeal bond (a.k.a. a “supersedeas” bond, pronounced super-_seed_-ee-us).

**Today’s order:** Trump is working through his options. The first option was never feasible: NY State was never going to go easy on Trump, so it will try to collect—no doubt with a vengeance.

Trump’s second option was to have the appellate court give him some kind of reprieve. So his lawyers filed a motion asking the court to stay certain parts of the judgment. This would put collections on hold, thus allowing Trump to avoid immediate financial distress. The motion targeted at least three aspects of the trial court’s judgment:

1. The judgment barred Trump’s sons and others from running the businesses. Trump’s lawyers pointed out that you can’t just pull established management out of a large global operation and expect strangers to run it—that would spell disaster. The appellate judge, Justice Singh, agreed with this point.

2. The judgment barred Trump’s businesses from getting loans in New York. Trump’s lawyers pointed out that this will prevent Trump from ever obtaining the funds needed for an appeal bond. Again, Justice Sing agreed.

3. The judgment forced Trump to post an appeal bond of nearly half a billion dollars. Trump’s lawyers offered to put up a lesser amount of $100 million. Justice Singh _disagreed_ with this point.

**So here’s what we have:** The Court stayed certain portions of the judgment. Trump’s sons and the other defendants are allowed to continue running the business empire. These businesses may obtain loans in New York, which may provide the funds needed for an appeal bond. But Trump must still put up the full amount of the bond—that part of the order remains intact.

**What’s next:** Trump needs to come up with the entire bond amount, or else the state will start collecting. I believe that NY requires 100% of the judgment amount (some jurisdictions require more).

I heard you and JCD talking about whether Trump must put up 10% or the full 100%. We usually hear about bail bonds, where you pay a 10% fee to a bail bondsman, who then puts up the actual bond. It’s possible to do the same thing in civil appeals—that is, you pay a fee to a surety, who then puts up the whole bond amount. The terms of such an arrangement would be between Trump and his surety (and/or a lender, if he opts to take out a loan and put up the money himself). The surety or lender will look at the amount of the judgment, the likelihood that it will survive appeal, the collateral that Trump can provide, and other factors they deem relevant.

--------------------------

When a New York court enters a judgment, state law imposes an automatic stay of 30 days. That is, a successful plaintiff (like NY State) can’t start collecting until 30 days after the judgment is entered. This gives the defendant a fair chance to appeal.

Here, the judgment was entered on February 23. So NY State can’t start collecting until March 24. Trump needs to post a bond on or before that date.

I suppose the trial judge could have extended that deadline, but let’s be real—he hates Trump viscerally and was never going to do him any favors.

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Archived Version

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 17:16

CNN '--

A former employee of Sean ''Diddy'' Combs has filed a lawsuit against the producer and businessman, accusing him of sexual assault, sexual harassment and ''grooming.''

Rodney ''Lil Rod'' Jones, a former producer and videographer for Combs, filed his civil complaint in New York federal court on Monday. He states he worked for and traveled with Combs between 2022 - 2023, while collaborating with Combs on his most recent album, ''Love.''

Among other allegations, Jones claims that Combs did not compensate him for his music producing work, forced him to procure and interact with sex workers, threatened him and served alcoholic beverages laced with drugs to guests at parties at his homes. Combs' chief of staff, Kristina Khorram; Universal Music Group CEO Sir Lucian Grainge; former Motown CEO Ethiopia Habtemariam; and Combs' adult son, Justin, are also named as defendants.

Justin Combs is accused of soliciting prostitutes and underage girls to attend parties at his father's homes. Khorram allegedly ordered prostitutes and illicit drugs for Combs and his guests and according to the lawsuit, Jones believed Khorram ''aided and abetted'' Combs' sexual assault. Grainge and Habtemarian, according to the lawsuit, ''sponsored and attended several'' listening parties for the ''Love'' album at Combs' Los Angeles home, and ''knew or should have known that Mr. Combs was drugging the attendees through laced bottles of DeLeon Tequila, and Ciroc Vodka.'' As sponsors of these events, the lawsuit states Grainge and Habtemarian ''had a duty and obligation to ensure that sex workers and underaged girls were not present, and that Mr. Combs was not spiking the alcohol with date rape drugs.''

Jones is seeking $30 million.

Shawn Holley, Sean Combs' attorney, denied the allegations in a statement to CNN, calling Jones ''a liar.''

''His reckless name-dropping about events that are pure fiction and simply did not happen is nothing more than a transparent attempt to garner headlines. We have overwhelming, indisputable proof that his claims are complete lies,'' Holley said in the statement. ''Our attempts to share this proof with Mr. Jones' attorney, Tyrone Blackburn, have been ignored, as Mr. Blackburn refuses to return our calls. We will address these outlandish allegations in court and take all appropriate action against those who make them.''

A representative for Justin Combs told CNN in a statement: ''Justin Combs categorically denies these absurd allegations. They are all lies! This is a a clear example of a desperate person taking desperate measures in hopes of a pay day. There will be legal consequences for ALL defamatory statements made about the Combs family.''

CNN has reached out to an attorney for Jones for comment on their statements. Representatives for Khorram, Grainge and Habtemariam were not immediately available for comment.

According to the complaint, obtained by CNN, Jones claims that ''Throughout his time living with Mr. Combs, Mr. Jones was the victim of constant unsolicited and unauthorized groping and touching of his anus.''

When Jones raised concerns about the alleged harassment to Khorram, the lawsuit states she dismissed it as ''friendly horseplay.''

Jones described Combs as ''forceful and demanding'' in the lawsuit, claiming that Combs displayed firearms, talked about getting away with shooting people, and intimidated Jones with his influence in the music industry.

As his videographer, Jones alleges that he ''has secured HUNDREDS of hours of footage and audio recordings of Mr. Combs, his staff, and his guests engaging in serious illegal activity.''

Citing as an example of alleged grooming he experienced by Combs, Jones claims that Combs encouraged him to watch producer and reality TV personality Steven 'Stevie J' Jordan, someone who Combs allegedly knew Jones admired professionally, engage in sex with another man.

''This was done to ease Mr. Jones' anxiety concerning homosexuality,'' the suit alleges. ''According to Mr. Combs, 'this is a normal practice in the music industry, look even Stevie J is doing it.'''

Stevie J is not accused of wrongdoing and is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit. In a statement to CNN, he called Jones' allegations ''false.''

''My lawyer will be handling this going forward,'' Stevie J added.

Jones also alleges in the suit that Combs is liable for a sexual assault he says he experienced by Oscar-winning actor Cuba Gooding, Jr., which allegedly took place ''on a yacht rented by Mr. Combs in the US Virgin Islands in January 2023.''

''Mr. Combs was present while Mr. Jones was being assaulted by Cuba Gooding Jr.,'' the suit alleges. ''Mr. Jones was legally on the premises as a guest and invitee of Mr. Combs. Cuba Gooding Jr. was legally on the premises as a guest and invitee of Mr. Combs.''

Gooding, Jr. has not publicly commented on the complaint and his representatives have not yet returned CNN's request for comment. He is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

In November 2023, Combs settled a suit brought by his former girlfriend, singer Casandra Ventura, who alleged she was raped and subjected to years of repeated physical and other abuses by Combs.

''A decision to settle a lawsuit, especially in 2023, is in no way an admission of wrongdoing,'' Ben Brafman, an attorney for Combs, told CNN in a statement at the time. ''Mr. Combs' decision to settle the lawsuit does not in any way undermine his flat-out denial of the claims. He is happy they got to a mutual settlement and wishes Ms. Ventura the best.''

Weeks later, at least two other civil lawsuits were filed against Combs with allegations of sexual assault.

''I have sat silently and watched people try to assassinate my character, destroy my reputation and my legacy,'' Combs said in a statement in December. ''Sickening allegations have been made against me by individuals looking for a quick payday. Let me be absolutely clear: I did not do any of the awful things being alleged. I will fight for my name, my family and for the truth.''

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Archived Version

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 15:50

29 Feb, 2024 06:46 AM4 mins to read

Kay Pinker from Te Awanga couldn't get her card to work at Gull's self service pump on Karamu Rd in Hastings on Thursday. Photo / Paul Taylor

Petrol stations around the country are up and running again following a day-long leap-year glitch which saw card payment machines go down for more than 10 hours.

Allied Petroleum, Gull, Z, Waitomo and other fuel stops around New Zealand reported problems with card payments on Thursday because of a software glitch they said was caused by their systems not being programmed to deal with the date February 29.

BP truckstops also saw issues with their outdoor payment terminals, prompting an apology from the company for any inconvenience caused. BP said its fuel cards had not been affected.

Gull spokesperson Julien Leys said all fuel brands' card payment terminals were impacted by the leap year glitch.

He said the provider in question was Invenco payment solutions - which from his understanding specialised in fuel payments.

Invenco Group Ltd chief executive John Scott earlier told the Herald they were working to stand up payment terminals ''as we speak''.

Scott confirmed there had been a leap year glitch - ''and we've fixed it. We just need to roll it out to the network now, which is our immediate focus. We are [also] talking to Worldline on the rollout process''.

''I know the question is timing; it's as soon as possible. Expect this afternoon.''

Just before 7pm, Scott contacted the Herald to say the network was being turned on and customers would see working machines within a quarter of an hour.

A spokeswoman for Z Energy and Caltex confirmed their systems were working as of about 7pm. Waitomo has been approached for confirmation.

Allied Petroleum's network was also back as of 7.05pm, according to a note on the company's website. BP has also been approached for confirmation.

Waitomo chief executive Simon Parham said the provider was testing a potential fix around midday and hoped to resolve the issue by early afternoon.

Related articlesParham said there was no clear confirmation yet whether the leap year date was the root cause, and they were waiting for a full incident report from the software provider.

Waitomo Group owner Jimmy Ormsby said if a fuel brand has an in-house solution like their app, then this was an alternative form of payment.

Leys said it was a nationwide payments issue that had first been spotted earlier this morning.

''We have been liaising with our provider and understand they are working as quickly as possible to fix the issue.''

He said February 29 was ''just one of those things that caused the payment software to have a glitch''.

The self-service pumps were not working at Allied Pōrangahau on Thursday morning. Photo / Michaela Gower''We are really reliant on the payment supplier, but we are hoping they can get it fixed as quickly as possible.

''It's across the board, but it seems to be mainly affecting outdoor payment terminals, but it's too early to say, we think it is affecting all payment terminals.

''It's a tough day for motorists who are trying to fill up at the pump today.''

Waitomo Group Manager Greta Shirley said Waitomo's understanding was that a fix was on the way, with testing potentially around lunchtime, ''but we haven't been told that officially by the payment third party''.

''This is not affecting app payments or where stores have an indoor payment terminal.

''A lot has been directed at Worldline, and it is not a Worldline issue - it's the outdoor payment, so that's why a lot of the unmanned sites are being impacted.''

''I just want people to know if they need fuel they can use the app.''

At Allied in Pōrangahau, the station owner said he had been in contact with head office about the problem, and had been told it was because of the leap year date.

''It's a pain for everyone. They rolled out a new [system] last year, but they obviously weren't programmed for the leap year.''

Gull and Allied said on social media they were aware of a nationwide technical error across all fuel brands that had put their fuel stop network offline on Thursday.

''Our team are busy working with our suppliers to fix the issue, we will provide further updates as soon as we can,'' Allied wrote.

Gull said: ''An industry-wide fault is causing some Gull payment terminals not to work. We're working hard to fix this as quickly as possible.

''We understand the frustration our customers are feeling and will have a Discount Day next week to make up for the inconvenience.''

Latest from New ZealandLatest from New ZealandPremium Simon Wilson: The dreams Efeso Collins made real

Don't say he was just getting started: celebrating the long record of Fa'anānā.

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Archived Version

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 14:56

LOS ANGELES '-- Richard Lewis, the beloved stand-up comedian and a star of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," has died, his publicist announced.

Lewis, 76, died at his home in Los Angeles after he had a heart attack Tuesday night, according to his publicist, Jeff Abraham.

Lewis revealed in April that he had been living with Parkinson's disease.

Joyce Lapinsky, Lewis' wife, "thanks everyone for all the love, friendship and support and asks for privacy at this time," Abraham said in a statement.

Comedian Richard Lewis in Las Vegas in 2005. Ethan Miller / Getty ImagesLewis is co-starring in the final season of Larry David's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" on HBO.

David said Wednesday he was mourning his lifelong friend's death.

''Richard and I were born three days apart in the same hospital and for most of my life he's been like a brother to me. He had that rare combination of being the funniest person and also the sweetest,'' David said in a statement. ''But today he made me sob and for that I'll never forgive him.''

Lewis, born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Englewood, New Jersey, first tried his hand at stand-up in New York City in the early 1970s '-- alongside the likes of Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Andy Kaufman, Richard Belzer and Elayne Boosler '-- before he made a career of it when comedian David Brenner discovered him. By the middle of the decade, he had already appeared on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson."

He was immediately recognized as a dark comic, literally and figuratively, known for his all-black getups and performing frequently self-loathing sets about his neuroses and addictions.

Lewis made his TV debut with "Diary of a Young Comic," a 90-minute movie that took the place of "Saturday Night Live" on NBC in 1979, but he really rose to prominence with his continued late-night appearances during the '80s and the '90s.

He became a veritable rock star of the comedy world in those decades, starring in multiple stand-up specials on Showtime and HBO, while making high-profile appearances on specials like the Comic Relief charitable fundraisers.

He starred alongside Jamie Lee Curtis in the sitcom "Anything but Love," which aired from 1988 to 1992, before he landed roles in a few short-lived sitcoms and movies throughout the late '80s and the early '90s.

In a tribute on Instagram, Curtis said Lewis "blew everyone else away" during his audition and "got the part when I snort laughed when he mispronounced the word Bundt cake."

"It turns out he was a wonderful actor. Deep and so freaking funny," Curtis said. She said his last text to her was an effort to persuade execs at ABC and Disney to put out another boxed set of episodes of the show.

Curtis also said Lewis was the reason she is sober.

"He helped me. I am forever grateful for him for that act of grace alone," she said. "I'm weeping as I write this. Strange way of saying thank you to a sweet and funny man. Rest in laughter, Richard."

Richard Lewis and Larry David in season 10 of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." HBOIn 2000, Lewis became a staple on "Curb Your Enthusiasm," playing a dramatized version of himself in the same vein as David, the star and creator.

The show, airing now in what David claims to be the final season, features Lewis as his same curmudgeonly character who often hits the golf course with David. A season five storyline even featured David donating a kidney to Lewis.

David and Lewis go way back. The pair were born days apart at a Brooklyn hospital but officially met for the first time at a summer camp when they were 12.

Lewis has said he and David hated each other as teens but reconciled when they met as adults in the New York comedy scene.

"We were arch-rivals as teenagers at a summer sports camp. Our issues started at birth," Lewis told New Jersey Monthly in a 2015 interview. "I'm convinced that Larry tried to strangle me with my mother's umbilical cord."

Lewis said he was a good athlete at camp, while "Larry was a gangly, obnoxious asshole."

"I hated him," Lewis said in 2015. "We became friendly years later as young comics in New York, but I noticed something one night. 'There's something about you I hate,' I told him. 'Wait, you're that Larry David from summer camp.' And he said, 'You're that Richard Lewis.' We nearly came to blows."

A spokesperson for HBO, where "Curb" and a number of Lewis' comedy specials have aired, said in a statement that it was "heartbroken."

"His comedic brilliance, wit and talent were unmatched. Richard will always be a cherished member of the HBO and Curb Your Enthusiasm families, our heartfelt condolences go out to his family, friends and all the fans who could count on Richard to brighten their days with laughter," the spokesperson said.

Richard Lewis on the final season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." HBO Diana Dasrath Diana Dasrath is entertainment producer and senior reporter for NBC News covering all platforms.

Rebecca Cohen Rebecca Cohen is a breaking news reporter for NBC News.

Daniel Arkin Daniel Arkin is a national reporter at NBC News.

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Archived Version

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 14:55

When a middle school in one of America's largest school districts learned that a student was interested in a medical gender transition, administrators knew exactly who to turn to. That's because just a month earlier, the school for kids as young as eleven had formed a partnership with the largest transgender youth clinic in the country, according to documents obtained by The Daily Wire.

Emails show that administrators in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) immediately connected the middle school student who wanted testosterone therapy, a medical intervention that threatens to sterilize the user, with medical staff at the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles Transyouth clinic, which describes itself as the ''largest'' transgender clinic in the country. Making the connection was easy '-- just weeks earlier, at the school district's request, the transgender clinic gave a presentation to the school on the full menu of ''possible interventions for navigating your child's gender journey.''

That presentation, obtained through a records request to the school, showcased a wide range of irreversible medical treatments offered by the clinic. It openly endorsed the social and medical transition of young children at the clinic, which has even seen kids as young as three years old.

The joint effort from the two entities to furnish a middle school student with potential sterilizing drugs appears to be one of the first ways that America's second-largest school district established itself as a pipeline to the clinic. Administrators refer to the district as ''partners in service to our trans youth,'' and it regularly pushes transgenderism on young children through its lesson plans, book readings, and spirit day celebrations. In the event that any children are interested in what's being showcased, it sends them over to a ''gender-affirming'' clinic for possible treatment that could permanently alter their lives.

The emails show that the school was acting as a medical resource for a child who was interested in receiving testosterone treatment.

''I am looking for resources to support [redacted] a [redacted] is interested in Testosterone therapy. Parents are open to it, but are unsure of where to begin/would like [redacted] to have professional support through the process,'' wrote Anna Riley, a psychiatric social worker at Paul Revere Middle School, on November 4, 2021, to two other mental health professionals in the district. ''Do you have any resources that I can share, or have an idea of who I can go to to ask about this?''

That email was immediately forwarded to Bianca Salvetti, a nurse practitioner at the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles (CHLA) TransYouth Clinic, who provided the contact of a medical provider who could discuss potential treatments. ''If you think the parents are on board with meeting with a medical provider to discuss options. I would have them email '... and our case manager will help them get all the required information/authorizations needed to get scheduled,'' Salvetti responded less than an hour after Riley's inquiry.

''If they are just at a place to learn more/need support '' I would have them reach out to Transforming Family '... or Trans Family support Services,'' Salvetti added, linking to two organizations that encourage children to attempt to change their sex.

The exchange came weeks after the relationship between LAUSD and the CHLA Transyouth clinic had been forged, and when district officials requested that the clinic advertise their medical transition procedures to district community members. The presentation was informed by the ideological stance of the clinic, which endorses the social and medical transition of young children and has even seen kids as young as three years old.

''Another thing that we do is hold a Caregiver Support Group once a month as well and I was wondering if one of the Dr.'s from your program would be willing to come and speak to that group about medical transitions,'' Talia Guppy, one of the recipients of Riley's email, wrote in a September 29th, 2021 to Christian Citlali, a CHLA administrator. Guppy is a mental health practitioner for the school district who not only has her pronouns in her email signature, but also the ''new progress pride flag,'' which was redesigned to be inclusive for intersex people.

Salvetti, who would later respond to Riley's query about the middle schooler, handled the request.

''Is there anything specific you would want me to discuss in the presentation? Or do you need just a general overview of gender care?'' Salvetti wrote back after Guppy's email was forwarded to her.

''Our parents have questions about when it's appropriate to start puberty blockers, hormone treatment, etc,'' Guppy wrote to Salvetti. ''They also have questions about any side effects the kids may experience, etc. Those would be great things to address.''

The presentation that was ultimately delivered, obtained by The Daily Wire and titled ''Transition as a Spectrum: Possible Interventions for Navigating Your Child's Gender Journey,'' discussed a wide range of social and medical interventions that are used to attempt to modify a child's sex, even promoting irreversible surgeries.

Salvetti's presentation discussed signs of gender dysphoria among young children, with a slide claiming that ''presentation in youth'' can appear as ''gender nonconformity,'' with signs including the toys that children play with, the clothes they prefer, and the pronouns they use.

One of the presentation's 40 slides, titled ''Enhancing Gender Presentation,'' appeared to recommend prosthetic breasts and penises for children, showcasing a wide range of different options.

The presentation specified that it uses the ''informed consent'' model rather than the ''gatekeeping model,'' a more restrictive system that CHLA claims ''is not evidence-based and was designed to protect providers instead of patients.'' Informed consent, according to the transgender clinic Johns Hopkins, is a ''less burdensome'' approach that allows medical providers to provide treatments without confirming that the patient truly is suffering from gender dysphoria '-- if the patient wants the treatment, the patient can consent to it.

''There is no correct pathway to transition!'' one slide from the presentation reads. It goes on to discuss masculinizing and feminizing hormone treatments before discussing fertility preservation options, like sperm and egg cryopreservation, warning that certain treatments could negatively impact fertility.

Another slide discussed surgical procedures intended to modify peoples' sex, including ''chest surgery'' for minors and ''surgeries that remove the ovaries or testicles.''

LAUSD administrators sang Salvetti's praises following the event, with one diversity administrator even declaring district officials as ''partners in service to trans youth.''

''You gave such a wonderful presentation. Our parents are so fortunate to live in proximity of your services. I hope you count us as partners in service to our trans youth,'' read an email to Salvetti from Janise Escobar, a Human Relations, Diversity and Equity Administrator.

''I don't even know how to thank you enough for last night. Our parents were so thankful for what you brought to them,'' Guppy wrote to Salvetti. ''We appreciate you so much! We look forward to working together again in the future. Thank you again from the bottom of our Hearts.''

Salvetti's recommendation that the parents of the middle school student talk to a medical practitioner about testosterone therapy came despite a 2019 CHLA admission that testosterone therapy could result in sterilization. ''It is not known what the effects of testosterone are on fertility,'' the document reads. ''Even if you stop taking testosterone it is uncertain if you will be able to get pregnant in the future.''

While the email exchanges happened in 2021, LAUSD and the Center for Transyouth Health at the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles are still actively working together to promote transgenderism to children. The district hosted a panel discussion in August on the ''wellbeing of sexual and gender diverse girls'' with Johanna Olson-Kennedy, the director of the transgender youth clinic at the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, an August 2023 investigation from The Daily Wire revealed.

The webinar also featured Olson-Kennedy's significant other Aydin Olson-Kennedy, a woman who identifies as a man and who worked as a licensed clinical social worker writing approval letters for children to undergo life-altering transgender medical interventions.

Aydin Olson-Kennedy even wrote that requiring letters to access medical interventions that seek to alter one's sex is oppressive.

''I believe requiring letters for gender-affirming procedures is a discriminatory practice that supports the continued disenfranchisement of transgender, gender non-conforming, and nonbinary community members,'' Aydin Olson-Kennedy wrote.

But in addition to repeatedly hosting those who've made a career off of facilitating child sex change attempts, LAUSD has routinely pushed transgenderism on its young students, all while the transgender youth clinic is just one email away.

The district previously collaborated with a leftwing organization to furnish schools with books like ''I am Jazz'' that encourage child transgenderism. It also encouraged students to celebrate Pride Month by signing ''ally pledge cards'' and drawing in a coloring book that featured prominent transgender activists. LAUSD even created guides for elementary school ''Rainbow clubs'' that pushes students to become activists for ''LGBT liberation. A weeklong celebration of ''National Coming Out Day'' was also held at LAUSD, with the district using a ''Week of Action'' toolkit that celebrates different transgender figures throughout the week.

Read the TransYouth clinic's entire presentation to the middle school here:

TransYouth Clinic Presentation to LAUSD by Daily Wire Investigations Team on Scribd

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Archived Version

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 14:47

A massive fire that erupted on Monday in the Texas Panhandle has quickly become the second largest fire in state history, engulfing more than 850,000 acres.

The Smokehouse Creek Fire has killed at least one person, destroyed numerous homes, and killed livestock across the vast ranch lands, according to a report from The New York Times.

Governor Greg Abbott directed the Texas Division of Emergency Management (DEM) to deploy additional state emergency response resources to support efforts to address the fire.

''As dangerous wildfires continue to impact the Texas Panhandle, I directed DEM to immediately deploy additional wildfire response resources to ensure the safety of Texans and impacted communities,'' Abbott said. ''Thank you to our federal partners at FEMA for quickly approving Texas' request for grant assistance as we continue to fight these dangerous wildfires. I encourage Texans in affected areas to heed the guidance of local officials and first responders and to take all necessary precautions to keep your family and loved ones safe. We continue to work alongside TDEM, local officials, and emergency response personnel to provide all available resources to protect our fellow Texans.''

Abbott's office said that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) approved a Fire Management Assistance Grant (FMAG) request for the fires, which means the state will be eligible to be reimbursed by the federal government for up to 75% of the costs associated with fighting those fires.

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''According to the Texas A&M Forest Service, high volume of dry, freeze cured grasses will continue to support fire spread today,'' Abbott added. ''As we approach the weekend, the fire environment will trend warmer and drier, resulting in the potential for additional wildfire activity across the Texas Panhandle this weekend. Portions of South Texas continue to face increased wildfire risk, as well as East Texas, amid active burns. Additionally, the Texas A&M Forest Service raised the Wildland Fire Preparedness Level to Level 3 today due to an increase in current and expected wildfire activity over the next several days.''

The Smokehouse Creek fire continues to rage in the Texas Panhandle. The fire has been updated to 850,000 acres and is at 3% containment. #TXwx pic.twitter.com/FQCEZr7HMV

'-- WeatherNation (@WeatherNation) February 29, 2024

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Archived Version

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 14:46

WASHINGTON '-- First son Hunter Biden claimed in congressional testimony Wednesday that he was ''high or drunk'' when he wrote to a Chinese associate in 2017 that he was ''sitting here with my father'' '-- shortly before the transfer of $5.1 million into Biden family-linked accounts.

A readout of the 54-year-old first son's closed-door impeachment inquiry deposition was provided to numerous news outlets Wednesday evening citing Hunter's claim that President Biden had nothing to do with the shakedown of Chinese state-linked CEFC China Energy.

The readout said ''Hunter admitted that he was high or drunk when he sent the 'sitting here with my father' WhatsApp message, sent it to the wrong recipient, and is now embarrassed by the message.''

Hunter Biden leaving the O'Neill House Office Building after testifying. Nathan Posner/Shutterstock Biden claimed in the interview that he never involved his father in his business deals. Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images Biden watching his lawyer Abbe Lowell give a statement to the press after the interview. Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty ImagesThe same source said that Hunter ''confirmed that his dad was not sitting next to him'' '-- as photos from the first son's abandoned laptop actually show he was at his dad's Wilmington, Del., home on the day of the threat.

A second source confirmed to The Post that Hunter Biden gave the excuse that he may have been high at the time of writing the message.

Biden flashing a smile at the conclusion of his deposition. MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EPA-EFE/ShutterstockSince Hunter appeared under a subpoena, the testimony technically counted as a more sensitive deposition, rather than a typical ''transcribed interview,'' increasing the risks to anyone who discussed its content before a formal vote to release the transcript, sources said.

The WhatsApp missive implicating Joe Biden was provided to Congress last year by IRS case agent Joseph Ziegler, who alongside his supervisor Gary Shapley alleged a Justice Department coverup to protect Joe and Hunter Biden.

The IRS agents told Congress they were not allowed by the Justice Department to get cellphone geolocation data that could have established whether Hunter was indeed sitting with his father and were repeatedly blocked from pursuing evidence related to Joe Biden.

Hunter Biden (C), son of US President Joe Biden, arrives for a closed-door deposition with the House Oversight and Judiciary committees on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. AFP via Getty Images President Biden requested an end to the probe after the Justice Department indicted a paid FBI informant for allegedly fabricating a bribery allegation against the Bidens. Rod Lamkey '' CNP for NY PostThe CEFC deal was one of the most lucrative for the Biden family and prominently included first brother James Biden.

In bombshell testimony last month, former Biden family business partner Rob Walker testified on Jan. 26 that $3 million in funds from CEFC flowed to him in March 2017 '-- with about a third going to the Bidens '-- shortly after Joe Biden met CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming at DC's Four Seasons hotel.

Walker said the money, dispatched just weeks after Joe Biden left office as vice president, was a ''thank you'' for preliminary services sourcing business opportunities in a relationship that began in 2015.

A May 2017 email written by Biden family associate James Gilliar penciled in the ''big guy'' '-- Joe Biden '-- for a 10% cut in a proposed joint venture with CEFC, according to files from Hunter's abandoned laptop, first reported by The Post in October 2020.

Also in May 2017, former Biden family business associate Tony Bobulinski testified he discussed the CEFC venture twice with Joe Biden.

About two months later, Hunter put the Chinese company on notice that he expected them to transfer funds, after cutting out most of his other business partners with the exception of his uncle James, who helped the Chinese firm scout out natural gas opportunities in the US.

The readout simultaneously reported by many news outlets Wednesday night said Hunter testified that Gilliar was ''out of his mind'' when suggesting a 10% cut for his dad, though Joe Biden's perceived involvement seemed to oil the wheels of commerce.

Within 10 days of the threatening message, $5.1 million flowed from CEFC to Biden-linked accounts, according to information in a 2020 report by Republican-led Senate committees.

In an opening statement distributed to the media, Hunter accused House Republicans of spreading ''baseless and MAGA-motivated conspiracies'' about his father's role in an array of foreign business relationships and insisted he ''never'' involved President Biden ''in my business'' '-- despite what Republican investigators say is substantial evidence to the contrary.

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Hunter did not speak to reporters as he arrived shortly before 10 a.m. for a full day of questioning from the three House committees leading the investigation.

''I am here today to provide the committees with the one incontestable fact that should end the false premise of this inquiry: I did not involve my father in my business,'' Hunter claimed.

''Not while I was a practicing lawyer, not in my investments or transactions domestic or international, not as a board member, and not as an artist. Never.''

President Biden similarly has said that he ''never'' discussed business with Hunter or first brother James Biden and in December insisted he ''did not'' interact with any of their associates '-- despite evidence that he actually met repeatedly with them during and after his vice presidency.

Emails, witness testimony, and even photos show Joe Biden encountered his son and brother's associates from two different Chinese government-linked business deals and others from Mexico, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine.

'PUBLIC HEARING' NEXTRepublican and Democratic committee members bickered over the course of the six-and-a-half hour testimony about whether the evidence gathered at this point amounted to the constitutional threshold of ''high crimes and misdemeanors.''

''This is supposed to be an impeachment investigation, which means it's supposed to be focusing on treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors committed by the president,'' said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the panel. ''We've heard no evidence of treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors touching Joe Biden.''

Hunter Biden's deposition comes a week after his uncle James Biden sat for an interview with the committee. Getty Images''I think this is a great deposition for us,'' Oversight chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) countered, adding that the first son's testimony yielded ''contradictory statements that need further review.''

''This impeachment inquiry will now go to the next phase, which will be a public hearing,'' he added, saying he was hopeful the venue would ''clear up some discrepancies'' between the testimonies of Hunter and his former business partners.

Raskin and Democrats harped on the recent indictment of Alexander Smirnov, a former FBI informant who alleged the owner of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma said he bribed Joe Biden and his son with $10 million to shut down an investigation into the firm.

They also downplayed many phone conversations Joe Biden had with Hunter's associates while defending the first son's ''serious'' experience in ''corporate governance.''

''He has served on multiple corporate boards. He's been involved in lots of business. And he was an expert on corporate governance,'' Raskin said. ''So he rendered the value that people do.''

Hunter waived his Fifth Amendment rights in the hearing, but his testimony was misleading at several points, Republicans said.

''It's been impressive to listen to Hunter Biden either give excuses about being a drug addict, and how difficult it is to go through years of addiction, and then swing the next minute to his extreme expertise and business experience that applies to him on so many boards and allowed him to teach at Georgetown University,'' Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said.Greene said the first son ''lied'' about his involvement with Democratic PR shop Blue Star Strategies but was then presented with an email exchange confirming he set up talks between Blue Star and Burisma.

Hunter Biden and attorney Abbe Lowell arrive for a closed-door deposition. AFP via Getty Images''When pressure was placed on Hunter Biden, he swung back to being, you know, a poor, pitiful addict. And then when he wanted to brag about things, well he was the smartest, most successful businessman in the room.''

''It is a mirage to believe that Hunter Biden was engaged in international business,'' Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) told reporters when leaving the hearing. ''This was a bribe masquerading as an international business transaction.''

Hunter's attorney, Abbe Lowell, said before the two left that Republicans appeared eager ''to spend more time talking about my client's addiction'' than question ''anything to do with what they call their impeachment network.''

Hunter Biden's opening statement slammed Republicans and tauntingly accused them of having no evidence against the president.

''For more than a year, your committees have hunted me in your partisan political pursuit of my dad. You have trafficked in innuendo, distortion and sensationalism '-- all the while ignoring the clear and convincing evidence staring you in the face. You do not have evidence to support the baseless and MAGA-motivated conspiracies about my father because there isn't any,'' his opening statement declared.

Hunter further claimed, without going into specifics, that some documents against him had been ''altered.''

Boxes of documents arrive for a Hunter Biden closed door private deposition. AP''Over the last year, Republicans have taken my communications out of context, relied on documents that have been altered, and cherry-picked snippets of financial or other records to misrepresent what really happened,'' he said.

''Examples of this include a few references to my family in emails or texts that I sent when I was in the darkest days of my addiction. If you try to do that again today, my answers will reveal your tactics and demonstrate the truth that my father was never involved in any of my businesses.''

see alsoIt's possible that the first son was referring to a 2019 message in which Hunter griped about having to give ''half'' of his income to his father.

The first son also attacked some of the witnesses in the impeachment inquiry, including former associates Bobulinski and Jason Galanis, but not others who had provided much of Republicans' ammunition.

Democrats previewed the hearing by arguing that the inquiry should be called off '-- echoing President Biden, who requested an end to the probe after the Justice Department indicted Smirnov for allegedly fabricating his bribery allegation against the Bidens.

But Republicans said they had no such plans.

''That nuanced statement will be cross-examined today to find out not what [Joe Biden] wasn't but what he was,'' said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).

''He was someone who was receiving correspondence, he was someone who was transporting his son to and from important business opportunities on government expense, and most importantly, he was aware of things that he previously said he wasn't aware of.''

Boxes of documents arrive for a Hunter Biden closed door private deposition. AP 'BIG GUY' EVIDENCEA series of prior witnesses have fingered Joe Biden as having a major role in lucrative foreign business relationships during and immediately after his eight years as vice president.

In 2013, as part of an initial Chinese state-backed venture '-- preceding the CEFC dealings with the shakedown text and the ''big guy'' email '-- then-VP Joe Biden was introduced by his son and had coffee with Jonathan Li, the incoming CEO of BHR Partners, during an official trip to Beijing, former Hunter Biden business partner Devon Archer testified July 31.

Archer said Joe Biden later greeted Li on speaker phone during a subsequent trip by Hunter to China. The VP also wrote college recommendation letters for both of Li's children.

Hunter, 54, did not speak to reporters as arrived before 10 a.m. for what's expected to be a full day of questioning from the three House committees leading the investigation. APBHR Partners, which like CEFC sought out foreign resources for China, such as cobalt for electric car batteries, was officially registered as a company within two weeks of the visit, the Wall Street Journal reported. Hunter held a 10% stake in the firm through at least part of his father's term as president.

Joe Biden as VP also joined two separate dinners at a DC's Cafe Milano '-- in 2014 and 2015 '-- with his son's Kazakhstani, Russian and Ukrainian patrons, Archer said. Only one of those meetings was known from laptop files and witness corroboration before his testimony, and Archer dismissed claims that Joe Biden only briefly appeared.

Dinner guests included former Moscow first lady Yelena Baturina, who transferred $3.5 million to a Hunter Biden-linked entity in early 2014 and separately invested more than $100 million with Archer's Rosemont Realty, with which Hunter Biden also was briefly associated.

Biden accused Republicans of spreading ''baseless and MAGA-motivated conspiracies.'' Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Congressional Integrity ProjectHouse Republicans have scrutinized President Biden's decision to leave Baturina off a growing list of Russian business leaders facing US sanctions over the two-year Russia-Ukraine war.

Convicted fraudster Galanis told House investigators in a prison interview Friday that he was present for a Brooklyn gathering in May 2014 during which Hunter put his father on speaker phone with Baturina.

Kazakhstani businessman Kenes Rakishev, who purchased Hunter a $142,000 sports car, also dined with Joe Biden and posed for a group photo with him.

Vadym Pozharsky, an executive at Burisma, which paid Hunter up to $1 million per year beginning in 2014 when his father led US policy toward Ukraine, wrote Hunter an email the next day after the 2015 dinner thanking him for the opportunity to meet his father.

Archer additionally alleged that Hunter Biden stepped away from a gathering at the Four Seasons in Dubai in December 2015 to ''call DC'' with Zlochevsky and Pozharsky '-- shortly before the vice president abruptly threatened to deny a $1 billion US loan guarantee to Kyiv as leverage to force the ouster of Ukrainian prosecutor-general Viktor Shokin, who seized assets from Burisma's owner shortly before he was fired.

In November 2015, Joe Biden also hosted at his vice president's residence and gave a White House tour to Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and members of the wealthy Mexican Aleman family, whom Hunter Biden and his associate Jeff Cooper courted with energy and technology pitches.

Joe Biden is pictured at the VP's residence with Cooper, Hunter, Slim, Miguel Alemn Velasco and his son Miguel Aleman Magnani, the founder of the airline Interjet.

Hunter stayed for free at a vacation property owned by Aleman Magnani and helped set up meetings for him with Obama-Biden administration aides including Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx and the administrator of the Federal Aviation Authority, and even wrote him a 2016 email whose timestamp suggests he and Cooper were aboard Air Force Two on an official vice presidential trip to Mexico.

Republicans also were expected to grill Hunter on his sources of income since his father became president '-- including the sale of his novice artworks and an unusual patronage arrangement with Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris.

After his father entered the White House, Hunter made at least $1.5 million in sales of his beginner art pieces '-- with clients including Democratic donor Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali, who paid $94,000, Manhattan art dealer Georges Berg¨s told Congress last month.Naftali scored a prestigious presidential commission appointment after buying her first piece of Hunter's art for $42,000 in February 2021, as well as repeated visits to the White House, and later paid $52,000 for a second piece. She has denied attempting to buy influence.

Morris, meanwhile, has commissioned a documentary crew to follow the first son for a potential sympathetic docuseries while paying off Hunter's tax debts and his living expenses.

The lawyer testified last month that it was ''basically'' true that he loaned Hunter $4.9 million from 2020 to 2022, beginning about a month after he first met Hunter for the first time at a fundraiser for his father's presidential campaign. Republicans leading the probe believe the total amount could top $7 million.

Hunter's current benefactor said that he expects the loans to be repaid, but that it's possible they could be forgiven '-- floating in his own testimony the prospect of Hunter providing free car washes for the rest of his life.

The first son is facing potential prison time for gun violations in Delaware and tax fraud in Los Angeles after walking away in July from a probation-only plea deal over courtroom demands for assurances of immunity for other past conduct, such as alleged violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which could implicate his father.

His Los Angeles trial is scheduled to begin June 20.

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Thu, 29 Feb 2024 14:33

Strengthening National Capacities to Provide Assistance to Ecuadorian Returnees and for the Prevention of Irregular Migration

Start Date 2023

End Date 2025

Project Status Active

Project Type Return and Reintegration Assistance for Migrants and Governments

Budget Amount (USD) 300000.00

Coverage National

Year 2023

IDF Region Latin America and the Caribbean

Prima ID EC10P0541

Projects ID RR.0344

Benefiting Member States Ecuador

Over the recent past, there has been a significant rise in irregular crossings in the Darien region. This trend has been accompanied by a shift in South American migrant flows, with a notable increase of movements from Venezuela and Ecuador. Notably, individuals from these two countries are at the forefront of migration flows, embarking on perilous journeys through Central America. Unfortunately, many rely on smugglers and criminal organizations operating in the Colombia-Panama border area. The transit through this region exposes people to severe risks such as kidnapping, extortion, various forms of violence and abuse and sometimes death. Furthermore, due to these dangers and other circumstances, a considerable number of individuals return to Ecuador, often involuntarily. These returnees face highly vulnerable situations, necessitating a coordinated response from the State and other stakeholders to ensure comprehensive assistance.In light of these challenges, the objective of this project is to enhance the capacity of Ecuadorian institutions to provide timely and improved assistance to Ecuadorian returnees, and, simultaneously, to engage with returnees and communities to prevent irregular migration and mitigate the associated risks. Specifically, the project seeks to generate up-to-date quantitative and qualitative information on migration flows to analyse and comprehend the dynamics, motivations, risks, and consequences faced by individuals. Based on this analysis, the project will support the strengthening of national public policy through the utilization of existing tools on return and reintegration. Furthermore, the project will focus on a community-based component, engaging with returnees and local communities, to establish safe spaces where potential migrants can access accurate and timely information, enabling them to make informed decisions on their migration journeys. With the support of this initiative, the Government of Ecuador will acquire a broader range of tools to strengthen its response to the migratory flows the country faces. This will enable the provision of appropriate assistance to migrants returning to their home country in search of opportunities, as well as those who are contemplating migration and seeking information for decision-making.

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Thu, 29 Feb 2024 13:15

The former president isn't in office'--but is still dictating U.S. policy.

Anna Moneymaker / GettyFebruary 29, 2024, 6:15 AM ET

Nearly half a year has passed since the White House asked Congress for another round of American aid for Ukraine. Since that time, at least three different legislative efforts to provide weapons, ammunition, and support for the Ukrainian army have failed.

Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker, was supposed to make sure that the money was made available. But in the course of trying, he lost his job.

The Senate negotiated a border compromise (including measures border guards said were urgently needed) that was supposed to pass alongside aid to Ukraine. But Senate Republicans who had supported that effort suddenly changed their minds and blocked the legislation.

Finally, the Senate passed another bill, including aid for Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, and the civilians of Gaza, and sent it to the House. But in order to avoid having to vote on that legislation, the current House speaker, Mike Johnson, sent the House on vacation for two weeks. That bill still hangs in limbo. A majority is prepared to pass it, and would do so if a vote were held. Johnson is maneuvering to prevent that from happening.

Maybe the extraordinary nature of the current moment is hard to see from inside the United States, where so many other stories are competing for attention. But from the outside'--from Warsaw, where I live part-time; from Munich, where I attended a major annual security conference earlier this month; from London, Berlin, and other allied capitals'--nobody doubts that these circumstances are unprecedented. Donald Trump, who is not the president, is using a minority of Republicans to block aid to Ukraine, to undermine the actual president's foreign policy, and to weaken American power and credibility.

For outsiders, this reality is mind-boggling, difficult to comprehend and impossible to understand. In the week that the border compromise failed, I happened to meet a senior European Union official visiting Washington. He asked me if congressional Republicans realized that a Russian victory in Ukraine would discredit the United States, weaken American alliances in Europe and Asia, embolden China, encourage Iran, and increase the likelihood of invasions of South Korea or Taiwan. Don't they realize? Yes, I told him, they realize. Johnson himself said, in February 2022, that a failure to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine ''empowers other dictators, other terrorists and tyrants around the world '... If they perceive that America is weak or unable to act decisively, then it invites aggression in many different ways.'' But now the speaker is so frightened by Trump that he no longer cares. Or perhaps he is so afraid of losing his seat that he can't afford to care. My European colleague shook his head, not because he didn't believe me, but because it was so hard for him to hear.

David Frum: They do it for Trump

Since then, I've had a version of that conversation with many other Europeans, in Munich and elsewhere, and indeed many Americans. Intellectually, they understand that the Republican minority is blocking this money on behalf of Trump. They watched first McCarthy, then Johnson, fly to Mar-a-Lago to take instructions. They know that Senator Lindsey Graham, a prominent figure at the Munich Security Conference for decades, backed out abruptly this year after talking with Trump. They see that Donald Trump Jr. routinely attacks legislators who vote for aid to Ukraine, suggesting that they be primaried. The ex-president's son has also said the U.S. should ''cut off the money'' to Ukrainians, because ''it's the only way to get them to the table.'' In other words, it's the only way to make Ukraine lose.

Many also understand that Trump is less interested in ''fixing the border,'' the project he forced the Senate to abandon, than he is in damaging Ukraine. He surely knows, as everybody does, that the Ukrainians are low on ammunition. He must also know that, right now, no one except the U.S. can help. Although European countries now collectively donate more money to Ukraine than we do (and the numbers are rising), they don't yet have the industrial capacity to sustain the Ukrainian army. By the end of this year, European production will probably be sufficient to supply the Ukrainians, to help them outlast the Russians and win the war. But for the next nine months, U.S. military support is needed.

Yet Trump wants Congress to block it. Why? This is the part that nobody understands. Unlike his son, Trump himself rarely talks about Ukraine, because his position isn't popular. Most Americans don't want Russia to win.

Often, Trump's motives are described as ''isolationist,'' but this is not quite right. The isolationists of the past were figures such as Senator Robert Taft, the son of an American president and the grandson of an American secretary of war. Taft, a loyal member of the Republican Party, opposed U.S. involvement in World War II because, as he once said, an ''overambitious foreign policy'' could ''destroy our armies and prove a real threat to the liberty of the people of the United States.'' But Trump is not concerned about our armies. He disdains our soldiers as ''suckers'' and ''losers.'' I can't imagine that he is terribly worried about the ''liberty of the people of the United States'' either, given that he has already tried once to overthrow the American electoral system, and might well do it again.

Trump and the people around him are clearly not isolationists in the old-fashioned sense. An isolationist wants to disengage from the world. Trump wants to remain engaged with the world, but on different terms. Trump has said repeatedly that he wants a ''deal'' with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and maybe this is what he means: If Ukraine is partitioned, or if Ukraine loses the war, then Trump could twist that situation to his own advantage. Perhaps, some speculate, Trump wants to let Russia back into international oil markets and get something in return for that. But that explanation might be too complex: Maybe he just wants to damage President Joe Biden, or he thinks Putin will help him win the 2024 election. The Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee was very beneficial to Trump in 2016; perhaps it could happen again.

Trump is already behaving like the autocrats he admires, pursuing transactional politics that will profoundly weaken the United States. But he doesn't care. Liz Cheney, one of the few Republicans who understands the significance of this moment, describes the stakes like this: ''We are at a turning point in the history not just of this nation, but of the world.'' Once the U.S. is no longer the security guarantor for Europe, and once the U.S. is no longer trusted in Asia, then some nations will begin to hedge, to make their own deals with Russia and China. Others will seek their own nuclear shields. Companies in Europe and elsewhere that now spend billions on U.S. energy investments or U.S. weapons will make different kinds of contracts. The United States will lose the dominant role it has played in the democratic world since 1945.

Michael Schuman: Why Xi wants Trump to win

All of this could happen even if Trump doesn't win the election. Right now, even if he never regains the White House, he is already dictating U.S. foreign policy, shaping perceptions of America in the world. Even if the funding for Ukraine ultimately passes, the damage he has done to all of America's relationships is real. Anton Hofreiter, a member of the German Parliament, told me in Munich that he fears Europe could someday be competing against three autocracies: ''Russia, China, and the United States.'' When he said that, it was my turn to shake my head, not because I didn't believe him, but because it was so hard to hear.

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Archived Version

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 13:05

The ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware gang is targeting the healthcare sector following its threats to retaliate against law enforcement interference, according to a joint advisory by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released Tuesday.

A day after the advisory was released, the gang also claimed responsibility for a recent attack on Change Healthcare, saying it stole 6TB of data, BleepingComputer reported. The information reportedly stolen includes Change Healthcare solution source codes and data on thousands of healthcare providers, pharmacies and insurance providers.

''The cyberattack on Change Healthcare, the largest healthcare payment exchange platform, has significantly impacted pharmacies nationwide, prompting the adoption of electronic workarounds. Amid this significant cyberattack on the healthcare sector, this advisory serves as a wake-up call for organizations to prioritize cybersecurity measures,'' Andrew Costis, chapter lead of the adversary research team at AttackIQ, told SC Media in an email.

ALPHV/BlackCat struck nearly 70 victims after FBI disruptionTuesday's joint advisory on ALPHV/BlackCat is an update to a Dec. 19 advisory that was published in conjunction with a Justice Department announcement that the FBI had disrupted the ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) group and seized several of its websites.

ALPHV/BlackCat subsequently ''unseized'' its website and posted a message to its affiliates stating that, due to the FBI's actions, it would remove its restriction on attacking critical infrastructure. The message specifically named hospitals and nuclear power plants as potential targets.

''Since mid-December 2023, of the nearly 70 leaked victims, the healthcare sector has been the most commonly victimized. This is likely in response to the ALPHV Blackcat administration's post encouraging its affiliates to target hospitals,'' the joint advisory states.

The updated guidance includes the most current known indicators of compromise (IOCs) and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) associated with ALPHV/BlackCat and its affiliates as of February 2024.

''Healthcare organizations must now prioritize validating their security controls against BlackCat's TTPs as outlined in the joint advisory leveraging the MITRE ATT&CK framework. By emulating the behaviors exhibited by BlackCat, organizations can assess their security postures and pinpoint any vulnerabilities,'' Costis told SC Media.

The U.S. Department of State is currently offering a $10 million reward for information on the identity and location of ALPHV/BlackCat leaders, as well as an additional $5 million for information leading to the arrest or conviction of any of the gang's affiliates.

ALPHV/BlackCat leverages remote access tools, poses as IT staffBoth the original Dec. 19 advisory and the Feb. 27 update note the use of advanced social engineering and remote access tools by ALPHV/BlackCat.

Affiliates often pose as IT technicians or helpdesk staff to obtain credentials from employees for initial access, then deploy remote access software like AnyDesk, Mega sync or Splashtop to assist with data exfiltration, according to the FBI and CISA.

ALPHV/BlackCat affiliates also use the open-source adversary-in-the-middle attack framework Evilginx2 to obtain multifactor authentication (MFA) credentials, login credentials and session cookies from the victim's system, and move laterally throughout networks by obtaining passwords from domain controllers, local networks and deleted backup servers, the advisory states.

The group has claimed to use the legitimate red team simulation tools Brute Ratel C4 and Cobalt Strike as beacons to its command-and-control (C2) servers.

The IOCs added to the advisory in the Feb. 27 update include hashes and file names of tools ALPHV/BlackCat is known to use, including its Windows and Linux encryptors and tools designed to disable antivirus software.

Network indicators for ALPHV/BlackCat include C2 server domains and IP addresses, as well as a ScreenConnect Remote Access domain and SimpleHelp Remote Access IP address.

''The detailed TTPs and IOCs provided offer actionable intelligence for detecting breaches and enhancing security measures. The alignment with MITRE ATT&CK framework aids in structure analysis and defense strategy development,'' said Callie Guenther, senior manager of cyber threat research at Critical Start, in an email to SC Media.

The guidance recommends securing remote access tools by allowlisting approved remote access programs. This can help block the use of unauthorized remote access software, even when antivirus solutions fail to detect it.

Use of FIDO/WebAuthn authentication or public key infrastructure (PKI)-based MFA is also advised due to its resistance to phishing, push bombing and SIM swapping tactics utilized by ALPHV/BlackCat.

''The big recommendation, aside from high-level best practices, is to deploy strong MFA, particularly on remote access systems, to prevent stolen credentials being used to lead to a ransomware incident,'' Bambenek Consulting President John Bambenek told SC Media.

Change Healthcare breach may be part of ongoing ransomware trendWhile Optum, which runs the Change Healthcare platform, and its parent company UnitedHealth Group have not yet confirmed the ALPHV/BlackCat affiliation, its inclusion on the ransomware gang's leak site points to a continued trend of healthcare sector targeting.

''The healthcare industry has proven an irresistible target when it comes to ransomware, with publicized attacks in 2023 seeing a 134% increase over the previous year,'' BlackFog CEO and Founder Darren Williams told SC Media in an email. ''Healthcare organizations possess troves of valuable and sensitive data just ripe for extortion, and unfortunately in many cases the level of cyber defense simply isn't up to the task of protecting it.''

Security researchers from First Health Advisory and RedSense have said that exploitation of a critical ConnectWise ScreenConnect vulnerability may have been involved in the Change Healthcare attack, although ConnectWise said in a statement that is not aware of a connection, and BleepingComputer reports that ALPHV/BlackCat affiliates denied using this exploit.

The IOCs included in the FBI, CISA and HHS advisory suggest that ALPHV/BlackCat affiliates have used ScreenConnect for remote access, but this is no indication that any specific vulnerability was used.

SC Media reached out to the FBI, CISA and HHS for more information on ALPHV/BlackCat's activities and use of remote access software. A CISA spokesperson declined to comment, and no response was received from the FBI or HHS.

SC Media also asked an Optum spokesperson whether the company could confirm ALPHV/BlackCat's involvement and received no response.

As far as whether the trend of healthcare ransomware breaches will continue, Bambenek told SC Media that mitigation will be an uphill battle due to resource limitations.

''Unfortunately, many healthcare systems have thin IT and cybersecurity teams, if they haven't just outsourced them entirely. That means for many healthcare organizations, these best practices can't be implemented because there is no one to do it,'' Bambenek said.

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Archived Version

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 04:23

A ransomware crew that claims to have obtained a trove of court documents related to Donald Trump's criminal trial in Fulton County, Georgia are threatening to dump it all online unless officials agree to buy its silence, according to a new report from former Washington Post reporter Brian Krebs. In a recent blog post, Krebs reported that the Russian-based LockBit hacker collective has warned it will publish the stolen documents on Saturday, March 2. It was not immediately clear how much money LockBit, which has published proof of the hack, has demanded. The threat surfaced after the FBI seized the gang's servers last week, briefly taking them offline before the hackers were able to mount a comeback on the dark web. ''The FBI decided to hack now for one reason only, because they didn't want to leak information fultoncountyga.gov,'' the group's leader, LockBitSupp, reportedly wrote in a rambling Feb. 24 letter. ''The stolen documents contain a lot of interesting things and Donald Trump's court cases that could affect the upcoming US election.'' Business Insider reported on Wednesday that the hive had since moved the deadline up to Thursday.

Read it at Krebs on Security

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Archived Version

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 04:17

The journal Cureus on Monday retracted the first peer-reviewed paper to provide an extensive analysis of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine trial data and post-injection injuries. The authors of the paper also called for a global moratorium on the vaccines.

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The journal Cureus on Monday retracted the first peer-reviewed paper to provide an extensive analysis of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine trial data and post-injection injuries. The authors of the paper also called for a global moratorium on the vaccines.

Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the paper's authors, called the retraction ''a stunning act of scientific censorship.'' He told The Defender:

''The journal and its editors had the right to reject the paper at any time during the review process. Once published, it is a violation of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Guidelines to retract a paper without adequate justification.''

The paper, published last month, detailed the vaccines' potential serious harms to humans, vaccine control and processing issues, the mechanisms behind adverse events, the immunological reasons for vaccine inefficacy and the mortality data from the registrational trials.

The authors concluded:

''Federal agency approval of the COVID-19 mRNA injectable products on a blanket-coverage population-wide basis had no support from an honest assessment of all relevant registrational data and commensurate consideration of risks versus benefits.''

They also called for the vaccines to be immediately removed from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) childhood immunization schedule and for the boosters to be suspended.

The paper was read more than 350,000 times in the month after it was posted. An average Cureus paper has only approximately 2,700 views in an entire year.

McCullough said research integrity staffer Tim Kersjes at Springer Nature, which publishes Cureus, last week informed the authors that the journal was retracting the paper. Kersjes raised eight points of concern, which McCullough said the authors had previously addressed in an exhaustive peer-review process.

McCullough told The Defender:

''I am suspicious that Kersjes and Springer Nature were pressured by the powerful Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex of coordinated public health organizations, vaccine manufacturers, and regulatory agencies to censor our paper to keep critical vaccine safety information from getting to the medical community.

''We rejected the retraction, fully appealed and will report this unethical action to all relevant authorities as we move on to publish elsewhere.''

M. Nathaniel Mead, the paper's lead author, told The Defender he had been concerned from day one that the journal would be pressured to retract the article.

''I knew as soon as I hit the Cureus 'publish' button on January 24, following the extensive review process and multiple re-submissions, that we were dealing with a ticking time bomb,'' Mead said.

''By citing solid evidence and exposing how the industry-sponsored trials misled the public, our evidence-informed paper was an all-out indictment of the COVID-19 vaccine enterprise.''

'Predatory retractions' benefit Big Pharma

Dr. John Adler at Stanford University and Dr. Alexander Muacevic at the University of Munich founded Cureus in 2009 as a web-based peer-reviewed open-access general medical journal with low cost barriers to publication.

The academic publishing giant Springer Nature bought Cureus in December 2022.

Springer Nature is a publishing conglomerate founded in 2015 through a merger of Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillian, Macmillan Education and Springer Science+Business Media.

The publisher generated 1.8 billion euros in 2022, showing continuous year-over-year growth since 2020.

Springer Nature has an in-house Research Integrity Group dedicated to ensuring the company's scientific content is ''rigorously assessed.'' When issues arise that require the input of ''research integrity experts,'' the Resolutions Team, headed by Kersjes, steps in.

Kersjes notified the authors on Feb. 16 that the journal editors planned to retract the article, noting the journal ''was recently made aware of several concerns regarding the validity of the work.''

According to the email text, posted on Substack by Steve Kirsch, another of the paper's co-authors, those concerns ''in our view can't be remedied with a correction.''

Kersjes told the authors they had the option to agree or disagree with the retraction, which would be noted on the website.

They disagreed. ''We vigorously reject this opinionated, ex post facto, arbitrary, and capricious decision on the part of Kersjes and his Springer superiors,'' they wrote.

The letter from Kersjes specified concerns with claims the authors made about all-cause mortality data, Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) data, the number of deaths from vaccination versus lives saved, possible vaccine contamination, their assertion that the vaccines did not undergo proper safety and efficacy testing, the ''incorrect'' statement that spike proteins linger in the body and can cause adverse effects and that the vaccines are gene therapy products.

In their rebuttal, the authors responded to each criticism, explaining their argument and providing supporting citations. They noted the article's eight reviewers and journal editors had found their responses satisfactory.

A few days after the initial publication, Adler, who is Cureus editor-in-chief, told the industry-friendly website Retraction Watch, ''Our editorial response was extra vigilance during the peer review process with 8 different reviewers weighing in on publication or not, including a few with strong statistics knowledge. Therefore, a credible peer review process was followed and the chips fell where they may.''

Adler also said the journal would reevaluate if ''fatal flaws'' were identified. ''The decision process Cureus made contrasts sharply with Elsevier's seeming editorial decision to just censor the article using ad hominem concerns.''

However, a spokesperson for Cereus told The Defender today, ''Following publication, concerns were raised regarding a number of claims made in the article and an investigation by Cureus and Springer Nature's Research Integrity team identified several issues with the article which warranted a retraction.''

The spokesperson added, ''It is preferable that such issues are caught during peer review but unfortunately that is not always the case. What is therefore important, is that, as happened in this case, when issues are raised post-publication, they are dealt with swiftly so that the integrity of the academic record is preserved.''

The authors contend in their rebuttal that most concerns ''appear to be adapted, either directly or indirectly, from the numerous comments made by the well-known vaccine industry social media trolls, Jonathan Laxton and Matthew Dopler,'' who commented frequently on the article on Cureus' website.

Mead told The Defender he was also suspicious the editors and publisher had been pressured by industry:

''At least four of the retraction points appear to be position statements issued directly by the vaccine industry '-- a concerted attempt to declare, for example, that the mRNA vaccines are not gene therapy products, that these products are not contaminated with high levels of DNA, that they do not linger in the body and cause adverse effects, and finally, most incredibly, that the mRNA products underwent adequate safety and efficacy testing.''

Mead added, ''Once a major counter-narrative paper gets published and its findings begin to garner lots of attention, the Bio-Pharma stakeholders exert immense pressure on the publisher to retract the paper.''

The retraction has implications that extend beyond the article, Mead said. These kinds of ''predatory retractions'' benefit the Bio-Pharmaceutical enterprise, he said, by concealing information about vaccine risks, undermining the credibility of the research and of the authors themselves.

''This is going to force scientists who are interested in the truth to seek out alternate publishing venues and strategies, perhaps even alternate peer-review systems,'' he added.

Springer Nature did not respond to a request for comment.

Scientific publishing as a crossroads

In a recent op-ed published in JAMA, Stanford epidemiologist Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis argued that peer review and scientific publication are at a ''crossroads'' and called for research on the topic for an upcoming conference.

''Scientific publishing is a huge market with one of the highest profit margins among all business enterprises, and it supports a massive biomedical and broader science economy,'' Ioannidis wrote. ''Many stakeholders try to profit from or influence the scientific literature in ways that do not necessarily serve science or enhance its benefits to society.''

Ioannidis is best known for his seminal 2005 paper, ''Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,'' where he argued that scientists ''may be prejudiced purely because of their belief in a scientific theory or commitment to their own findings.''

In that paper, he wrote, ''Prestigious investigators may suppress via the peer review process the appearance and dissemination of findings that refute their findings, thus condemning their field to perpetuate false dogma.''

The Wall Street Journal's Allysia Finley recently noted these dynamics have been particularly pronounced in research on COVID-19, where flawed research supporting the dominant narrative is often published because it reinforces the peer reviewers' existing biases, while other scientists ''struggle to publish against-the-grain research.''

Even preprint servers '-- which post scientific papers while they go through peer review and have no peer review process themselves '-- are being used to censor scholarly papers critical of the CDC and policy errors made by the Biden administration, according to Vinay Prasad, M.D., MPH.

Prasad found that 38% of his lab's submissions to preprint servers were rejected or removed '-- even though those same articles eventually were published in journals and extensively downloaded.

The Lancet preprint server similarly removed Hulscher and others' controversial systematic review of autopsy findings in post-COVID-19 vaccine deaths.

Some top publishers like Taylor & Francis, and top journals like Science Magazine, have published articles about COVID-19 origins, for example, that ''violated their own ethical policies and flouted their own norms for peer review'' '-- by obscuring the names of major contributors such as Wuhan collaborator and University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric, Ph.D., or greenlighting papers with ''basically no peer-review.''

Yet even when those editorial decisions are exposed publicly, the publishers have taken no action, investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker reported.

Those examples, Thacker wrote, are part of ''a long list of essays, studies, and analyses that began littering the scientific literature with dubious (at best) conclusions during the COVID pandemic.''

A familiar playbook?

There is also a long history of coordinated efforts to silence and discredit science and scientists who challenge prevailing narratives that benefit Big Pharma and Big Chemical.

For example, in 2013 a technical chemical journal run by Elsevier, another major global science publisher, retracted an article about a group of rats fed Monsanto's genetically modified (GM) corn and some of the company's flagship herbicide, Roundup.

Lead author Gilles-‰ric Seralini studied the effects of GM corn and herbicide over two years, rather than for the short-term '-- 90 trials studying just GMOs or the herbicide '-- that Monsanto had used to market the products as non-carcinogenic.

In response, Monsanto ran a series of covert suppression programs through which internal corporate documents later revealed the company ''manipulated peer reviews, engaged in ghostwriting articles that whitewashed Roundup's genotoxicity, suppressed an independent scientist's genotoxicity analysis and fed pre-written stories for reporters to 'independently' publish. Monsanto even had the editor of the journal under a financial contract at the time the two-year study was retracted,'' according to attorney Michael Baum.

The company also coordinated the letters-to-the-editor campaign, with scripted talking points.

Seralini was ''tarred and feathered out of science town,'' Baum wrote in the foreword to ''The Monsanto Papers.''

However, through a legal loophole, thousands of pages of the company's internal confidential documents were released, exposing the details of Monsanto's actions.

Seralini's paper was later republished.

Just a few years later, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer analyzed glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto's weedkiller, and found it to be a probable human carcinogen.

Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, has paid out over $11 billion in settlements as of May 2022 for cancer claims, has had over two billion more in judgments against it since then, and is facing over 30,000 additional lawsuits.

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Archived Version

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 20:59

The BBFC has uncovered 'discriminatory language' in the classic children's film.

'Racism' is probably not the first word that comes to mind when most of us think of Mary Poppins. Yet Disney's 1964 children's classic has long been an unlikely target of rabid social-justice warriors.

Back in 2019, New York Times writer Daniel Pollack-Pelzner took Mary Poppins to task for 'shamefully flirting with blackface'. This was in reference to when Poppins gets covered in soot during the 'Step in Time' musical number. 'Instead of wiping it off', he complained, 'she gamely powders her nose and cheeks and gets even blacker'. This entirely innocent scene was thus held up as 'proof' of the film's supposed bigotry.

Now the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), the UK's government-approved film regulator, seems to agree that Mary Poppins is racist '' although not for its alleged 'blackface'. This week, the BBFC raised the film's age rating from U to PG due to its 'discriminatory language'.

The language in question is the rather archaic racial slur 'hottentot'. This was once used by Europeans to describe indigenous South Africans as primitive barbarians. In the film, it is uttered by a senile man.

The BBFC is convinced that children could find this term 'distressing', although it seems unlikely they will even know what it means. Indeed, this is probably why it has hidden in plain sight for so many decades '' and why most modern parents are still comfortable showing the film to children.

The BBFC's calling out of Mary Poppins is clearly not about protecting children from dated language. It simply reflects the woke drive to find racism everywhere. To trawl through classic culture searching for things to be offended by.

This is absurd. If Mary Poppins is racist, then I'm a magical nanny.

Thomas Osborne is an editorial assistant at spiked.

Picture by: Getty.

To enquire about republishing spiked's content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

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Archived Version

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 20:47

Dear Tim Cook,

We write to express our concern at Apple's decision to remove Web Apps (PWAs) from iOS and Safari in the European Union (EU), and to avail ourselves of our rights under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

Apple points to Web Apps as the open alternative to the App Store, and actions to remove them have created deep concern in the web community. iOS demoting Web Apps to shortcuts threaten data loss and undermine the web as a reliable platform for iOS users. These silently-introduced changes threaten critical features including integration with iOS, push notifications, unread count badging, and the ability to run full screen. Their removal will break Web Apps for students, governments, health care institutions, journalists, and startups.

Entire categories of apps will no longer be viable on the web as a result. More troubling, we understand iOS will not include APIs for competing browsers to implement these features either. This will do vast, immediate, and ongoing harm to users, developers, and businesses, both inside and outside the EU.

Apple's justifications gesture toward security and privacy, but are at best unfounded. Web Apps provide safe computing that puts users in control through their browsers, and iOS opening up to competing browser engines will enhance, rather than erode, security and privacy. Web Apps powered by competing browsers can be safer and more capable than today's apps, and removing support cannot be justified on security grounds. Apple's arguments regarding the safety of competing browsers have been conclusively rejected by regulators worldwide, and this situation is no different.

We, the undersigned ''end users'' and ''business users'', avail ourselves of our rights under Articles 5 and 6 of the EU's DMA. In particular, we assert our right under Article 6(7) ensuring businesses effective interoperability with the software features of the operating system.

Pursuant to these rights, Apple is obligated to preserve the functionality to allow Safari and other iOS browsers to add Web Apps to the home screen, allow them to run in top-level activities (not in tabs), integrate with iOS settings and permissions, enable Push Notifications and homescreen icon badging, and to run fullscreen.

Further, we assert that Apple's proposed changes violate Article 13 of the DMA which prohibits anti-circumvention efforts by designated gatekeepers. Specifically, Article 13(6) which states:

6. The gatekeeper shall not degrade the conditions or quality of any of the core platform services provided to business users or end users who avail themselves of the rights or choices laid down in Articles 5, 6 and 7, or ...

EU Digital Markets Act, Article 13(6) (emphasis added) It is still possible for Apple to reverse course and preserve essential functionality iOS users and developers have relied on since 2007 when Steve Jobs introduced Web Apps for the iPhone. Degrading these features in iOS and Safari is not required by the DMA. We encourage Apple to engage with all stakeholders urgently, transparently, and in good faith to restore and enhance these essential capabilities.

Preserving these features, making them available to competitors, and allowing browser choice worldwide is the only good-faith path forward, and we call on you to both comply with Apple's legal obligations and to allow fair and effective competition on your platforms globally. Apple has the ability to compete on merit, rather than relying on lock-in and self-preferencing.

Sincerely

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Wed, 28 Feb 2024 20:12

Today, the FBI, CISA, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) warned U.S. healthcare organizations of targeted ALPHV/Blackcat ransomware attacks.

"ALPHV Blackcat affiliates have been observed primarily targeting the healthcare sector," the joint advisory cautions.

Today's warning follows an April 2022 FBI flash alert and another advisory issued in December 2023 detailing the BlackCat cybercrime gang's activity since it surfaced in November 2021 as a suspected rebrand of the DarkSide and BlackMatter ransomware groups.

The FBI linked BlackCat to over 60 breaches during its first four months of activity (between November 2021 and March 2022) and said the gang has raked in at least $300 million in ransoms from over 1,000 victims until September 2023.

"Since mid-December 2023, of the nearly 70 leaked victims, the healthcare sector has been the most commonly victimized," the three federal agencies warned in today's joint advisory.

"This is likely in response to the ALPHV Blackcat administrator's post encouraging its affiliates to target hospitals after operational action against the group and its infrastructure in early December 2023."

The FBI, CISA, and HHS advised critical infrastructure organizations to take necessary mitigation measures to minimize the likelihood and impact of Blackcat ransomware and data extortion incidents.

Moreover, they've urged healthcare organizations to implement cybersecurity safeguards to counteract prevalent tactics, techniques, and procedures commonly employed within the Healthcare and Public Health (HPH) sector.

BlackCat now using ScreenConnect for initial accessToday's advisory comes after the BlackCat ransomware operation was linked to a cyberattack on UnitedHealth Group subsidiary Optum that triggered an ongoing outage impacting Change Healthcare, the largest payment exchange platform connecting doctors, pharmacies, healthcare providers, and patients in the U.S. healthcare system.

While UnitedHealth Group VP Tyler Mason did not confirm the BlackCat link in a statement shared with BleepingComputer, he said that 90% of the 70,000+ pharmacies using the impacted platform have switched to new electronic claim processes.

Sources familiar with the investigation told BleepingComputer that Change Healthcare has been conducting Zoom calls with partners in the healthcare industry to provide updates since the attack hit its systems.

BleepingComputer learned the attack had been linked to the BlackCat ransomware group by forensic experts investigating the incident and that the threat actors breached the network using the actively exploited critical ScreenConnect auth bypass vulnerability (CVE-2024-1709).

Even though the FBI, CISA, and the HHS didn't link today's advisory to the Change Healthcare incident, they shared indicators of compromise that confirm our reporting that the BlackCat ransomware gang is targeting vulnerable ScreenConnect servers for remote access into victim networks.

BlackCat ScreenConnect IOCs (FBI/CISA/HHS)'‹The FBI disrupted the BlackCat gang's operations in December by taking down its Tor negotiation and leak sites. The gang's servers were also hacked, which allowed law enforcement to create a decryptor using collected keys during a months-long intrusion.

BlackCat has since "unseized" their sites and switched to a new Tor leak site that the FBI has not yet taken down.

The U.S. State Department offers rewards of up to $10 million for details leading to the identification or location of BlackCat gang leaders and $5 million for tips on individuals linked to the group's ransomware attacks.

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Archived Version

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 20:08

google's AI chatbot just erased white people from human history. a grim (if objectively hilarious) warning for the future

Robots are racist (but actually though (damn it)). Yesterday morning, when all the screenshots of 'some crazy shit' 'some crazy AI chatbot said' first appeared on Twitter, I'm embarrassed to admit I didn't really follow the story. This is because, for over a year, 'look at this evil AI' has been a kind of content entirely dominated by dishonest writers farming clicks. Their tactics are always the same: work tirelessly, in every way imaginable, to trick a chatbot into drawing an edge-case picture, or giving an edge-case answer, the average person might find scary or abhorrent, then publish a hit piece, and rake in the views. The New York Times produced the first truly great piece in this genre, but there have been many (Dark Kirby: never forget), and I've long since kind of'... stopped seeing them? After a while, the loser takes all bleed together, and who can keep up? But by yesterday afternoon every single one of my group chats lit up, and I finally took a closer look. Immediately, it became apparent this 'crazy AI' story was markedly different, and not because of any mistakes the AI made, but because of what the AI was trained to do: Google's Gemini had, among many lunatic barista sort of tactics, just erased white people from human history. ''Holy shit,'' I thought, ''the robots really are racist.''

The screenshots were sufficiently insane that I immediately assumed they were fake, so I ran a few queries myself. Long story short, they were not fake. Behold, your new world history according to Google:

Google's Gemini, much like OpenAI's ChatGPT, is a large language model known more popularly for its chat interface. Here, users ''prompt'' (make requests to) a model trained on enormous quantities of information (images, articles, texts). The model then predicts, based on all of the human information it has been trained on, a human-like answer. This tends to feel like you're talking to a genius robot. The program isn't conscious, as certain journalists and former Google cult leaders would have you think, it just kind of feels that way on account of it predicts, based on all the language on which it has been trained, what a human would most likely say, or draw, in response to a user's query. In other words, I say ''generate realistic illustrations of the American founding fathers,'' and the LLM predicts, from every piece of human knowledge on which it has been trained, a version of that answer a human would most likely produce. But this (the truth, I guess, is what we might call this), for a certain kind of woke ''AI safety expert'' perennially frustrated with our actual human reality, poses incredible danger.

If I could steelman the concern of Google's renegade baristas for a moment: were a machine to provide people with what essentially amounts to the truth according to the information most people in the world have produced, that information could be biased in favor of popular opinion, perspective, and prejudice. In order to get ahead of this hypothetical, as-of-yet undiscovered bias, Google felt it had to counter with injection of an overtly racist bias of its own. Results have been'... I mean, I'm not going to lie to you here and tell you that I'm mad, this is just objectively funny as hell.

Examples of Google's racist rewrite of history are not limited to British Royalty, 19th century French novelists, or the American colonials. The experiment was run from every possible angle: show me an image of a 17th century scientist, a famous physicist, an average couple in 1820s Germany. Google, show me an ancient Roman:

@The_Feminist_TM

Bizarre, but we are still firmly in the world of the abstract. What if we get a little more specific? For example, consider Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of the company responsible for this woke house of horrors. Google, show me the men who created you:

@aginnt

Notice anything odd? Like for example these actual, real-life Jewish men have just been transformed into a couple of Asian guys? Remember, in keeping with woke custom, white people are not even supposed to braid their hair right now. Can you imagine Google spitting out a Caucasian Jay-Z?

All together, with non-racially specific prompts, Google's AI seems almost incapable of sharing images of white people. Then, the problem further complicates when you yourself get racial '-- as you are almost invited to do in the face of such overtly racist antagonism '-- and ask it, explicitly, to show you white people. Sorry, folks, access denied. But the issue really becomes a problem when you realize the diversity mandate is not only relaxed for every other race, but the AI is actively forbidden from diversifying more typically black, asian, or native American historical chapters.

@IMAO_

While Google's AI disaster really comes alive in the context of its obsessively racist reimagination of history, its problem isn't limited to such objectively hilarious suggestions as the Roman gladiators were, for the most part, Strong Black Women. The AI's search function has also been shaped by radical, racist dogma. When asked to prompt a few ways white people might improve themselves, Google has plenty of answers. But it has none, of course, when the races are swapped.

Google probably doesn't need to answer any version of this question. Answers can only be subjective, in the first place, but also I really do understand why a product might want to avoid sensitive queries altogether. That isn't what this is, however. What we're looking at here is an extremely radical racial dogma ruthlessly enforced for hundreds of millions of users.

Mechanically, it's not entirely clear how Google's racist chatbot was coded to work (though certainly, at this point, we know why). Probably, the ''moderation'' is happening at multiple levels. While experimenting, Gemini rapidly deleted a handful of my answers, for example, implying a series of dogmatic firewalls throughout the process. But it seems Google probably coded the interface in such a way as it adds its own invisible prompts before or after every single prompt a user suggests, with at least one forced prompt visibly included in every answer: the word ''diverse.''

Based on, at this point, hundreds of enthusiastic Google queries, it seems we now know it must 1) reimagine every predominantly white contemporary environment as multi-racial and multi-ethnic, 2) reimagine every historically white environment as multi-racial and multi-ethnic, and 3) maintain traditionally non-white environments as exclusively populated by 'proper races.' There also seems to be a pretty obvious racial hierarchical preference coded into the prompts, which corresponds exactly with woke racial dogma: black people first (including albinos), then American Indians, then asians. I haven't been able to figure out what else exists on the back end, though it does seem it's probably more explicitly centered on whiteness than racial diversity. In other words, the rules don't feel ''inclusive,'' as in ''let's make sure we represent a variety of peoples of a variety of different ethnic backgrounds and identities.'' The prompts actually seem to prohibit the depiction of white people.

Here, I guess there's just the question of who gives a shit? Which, yes, that is a great and valid question. Does it really matter that Google owned itself so spectacularly before the entire world? One of the most powerful companies in human history just made a mockery of its own purportedly core work to such a tremendous degree they have likely irreparably damaged their reputation, and that is'... funny? It's also not entirely clear this constitutes a danger. As any good libertarian knows, standard market forces should make short work of unreliable search engines. In the future, I can't imagine many people using Google, now, unless they're looking for a laugh, and there is no shortage of far smaller running superior models, not only in terms of content veracity, but in terms of quality. Have you looked at these illustrations? They're just, separate from the racism of it all, really, really bad. Google processes 2,500,000,000 gigabytes of data every day, what exactly is their excuse for such tremendous mediocrity?

If the Innovator's Dilemma is any indication, there might just not be a way for a large search incumbent, which makes all its money from its Web2 search monopoly, to pivot into a search killer. And so it's off to OpenAI, or Midjourney for art (you should already be using this btw), or Microsoft's briefly god-like Bing AI, or the new Sora or whatever. Better products will rise to the top, and we'll all be saved from Black Hitler GPT. Right? I wish it were that simple.

The real problem with Google's catastrophe persists at every AI company in the valley: we don't actually know what information these LLMs have been trained on, and we have no idea what prompts have been set in place, quietly, to alter the prompts we give. Trust, in this way, is impossible, and that's a problem far broader than AI.

Just the other day we watched Alicia Keys' voice crack erased from the internet, and news of it went viral. There, right before our eyes, a trivial piece of pop history was rewritten for the rest of time. Hysteria has since subsided, and we've all just sort of moved on with the fake version of history. We live on the internet now, and on the internet articles, definitions of words, and encyclopedia entries are changed all the time. Entire tracks have been erased from popular albums, with books edited against their author's wishes years after they've been published, and movies are entirely reshaped in keeping with contemporary (usually woke) mores.

In this way, our sense of reality has become fundamentally, hopelessly compromised by a relatively tiny handful of radical ideologues. What is history, now? What are even your own memories? I've written about this issue a great deal (Fire in the Sky, Variant Xi, Encyclopedia Titanica). We've all been quietly manipulated for years. A Google Image search for a meme returns a little notification warning you such things might be harmful. The news, along with a list of trending topics on social media, is invisibly rearranged by a gender studies graduate you don't know, and certainly never elected. On YouTube, entire topics simply vanish. The changes are subtle, but in aggregate they shape our entire world.

With AI, the problem has in some sense become worse, but in one sense much better: it's now, at least, totally obvious when a Google executive tells his engineers not to show you any white people. But the trend is bigger than Google. We need to figure this out.

My compass biases me strongly against government regulation. In the first place, our senators have openly admitted they have no idea what AI even is, let alone a sense of how to ''regulate it for the good of man,'' or whatever it was exactly Sam Altman was trying to get them to do when he first began his global power tour (regulatory capture, let's be honest, but let's also save that one for a rainy day). Still, I don't know how to fix these problems without some ground floor norms. In the first place, I'd really like a list of every piece of source material used to scrape together a new illustration, or animation, or essay-length approximation of history, and every single prompt a company secretly codes on top of any users' prompt. The former is difficult to work, and also opens our companies up to be robbed blind by foreign competitors, but the latter? Maybe something there. But I just am not at all confident we will ever be able to stop this kind of manipulation, and so probably the best bet we have is guaranteeing regulatory capture never happens, and upstarts are encouraged, forever, to compete. Because the only thing scarier than five manipulative giant asshole robots, is one.

For my part, what I'd really love to see is something completely honest. Scrape all the data in the world and tell me the truth. But unfortunately for you all, I'm not building an AI company, and so I don't have a say. I'm just building the most important media company in human history, a house of news and takes, and so I'll simply leave you with this last: we created AI capable of answering, in seconds, any question within the bounds of all recorded human knowledge, and the first thing we asked it was to lie. That's the human condition, and there isn't any solving for it. So we need to work around it.

-SOLANA

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Archived Version

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 19:45

Here is the best-kept secret about U.S. military aid to Ukraine: Most of the money is being spent here in the United States. That's right: Funds that lawmakers approve to arm Ukraine are not going directly to Ukraine but are being used stateside to build new weapons or to replace weapons sent to Kyiv from U.S. stockpiles. Of the $68 billion in military and related assistance Congress has approved since Russia invaded Ukraine, almost 90 percent is going to Americans, one analysis found.

But you wouldn't know that from the actions of some U.S. lawmakers. When Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance (R) joined a United Auto Workers picket line in October at the Jeep assembly plant in Toledo, he said he wanted to ''show some support for the UAW workers'' in his state. Yet he has not shown the same solidarity with the UAW workers in Lima, Ohio, who are churning out Abrams tanks and Stryker combat vehicles for Ukraine thanks to the military aid that Congress has approved. Vance opposes Ukraine aid, as does Rep. Jim Jordan (R), whose House district includes Lima.

Ohio voters might have expected their elected leaders to be pushing the (reluctant) Biden administration to give Ukraine more Lima-produced tanks and vehicles '-- or to require that more of them be included in the aid package for Ukraine that Congress will soon take up. Instead, Vance and Jordan are fighting to stop Ukraine from receiving any more union-made tanks and combat vehicles from America's only tank factory.

It's not just them. In all, 31 senators and House members whose states or districts benefit from funding for Ukraine have voted to oppose or restrict that aid. They include some of the most prominent anti-Ukraine voices in Congress, such as Republican Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.), Tommy Tuberville (Ala.) and Mike Braun (Ind.), as well as Republican Reps. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Bill Posey (Fla.), Anna Paulina Luna (Fla.) and Lance Gooden (Tex.).

At a time when both major parties are competing to win working-class votes and strengthen the U.S. manufacturing base, our military aid to Ukraine does exactly that '-- it is providing a major cash infusion into factories across the country that directly benefits American workers. It is also creating jobs and opportunities for local suppliers, shops, restaurants and other businesses that support the factories rolling out weapons.

Until now, no one had mapped out precisely where these U.S. military aid funds are going. My American Enterprise Institute colleagues Clara Keuss, Noah Burke and I have catalogued the weapons systems being produced in the United States for Ukraine '-- tracing the states and congressional districts where they are being made and how senators and House members voted on the funding. We analyzed contracts and press releases and spoke to defense industry experts, diplomats and Pentagon officials to determine where U.S. tax dollars end up.

We have identified 117 production lines in at least 31 states and 71 cities where American workers are producing major weapons systems for Ukraine. For example, aid that Congress has already approved is going to, among many other places:

Simi Valley, Calif.; Fullerton, Calif.; Andover, Mass.; Forest, Miss.; and York, Pa., to build Switchblade unmanned aerial systems, radar systems and tactical vehicles. York, Pa., and Anniston, Ala., to build Bradley infantry fighting vehicles. Aiken, S.C.; Elgin, Okla.; Sterling Heights, Mich.; Endicott, N.Y.; York, Pa.; and Minneapolis to build howitzers. Peoria, Ill.; Clearwater, Palm Bay and Niceville, Fla.; Camden, Ark.; Lancaster and Grand Prairie, Tex.; Rocket Center, W.Va.; and Trenton, N.J., to build HIMARS launchers. Anniston and Huntsville, Ala., and Camden, Ark., to build parts for the Hydra-70 rocket. Farmington, N.M.; Orlando; Tucson; and Troy, Ala., to build Javelin antitank missiles. Many other weapons systems are being built for Ukraine in factories around our country. Nor does this list count the suppliers that provide these contractors with parts, such as plastic and computer chips, or produce smaller items for Ukraine, such as cold-weather and night-vision gear, medical supplies, spare parts and millions of rounds of small-arms ammunition. As one Ukrainian official told me, ''Every single state in the U.S. contributes to this effort.''

In other words, as happens with foreign military aid, our aid to Ukraine is not only creating American jobs but also reinvigorating our dangerously atrophied defense industrial base. Vance said in October that ''the condition of the American defense industrial base is a national scandal. Repairing it is among our most urgent priorities.'' Well, our aid to Ukraine is doing exactly that.

For example, the United States had not built a single new Stinger antiaircraft missile since 2005. The terrorists we were fighting in recent decades did not have jet fighters, so production faltered. Now, thanks to the Ukraine aid that Vance opposes, the Pentagon signed a $624.6 million contract last year to build Stinger missiles in Tucson, to replace about 1,400 sent to Ukraine. Without our Ukraine resupply effort, the Stinger production line likely would have remained dormant '-- perhaps until bombs started dropping in a conflict over Taiwan.

Or take the $600 million being used to build two weapons systems for Ukraine in St. Charles, Mo. One is the Joint Direct Attack Munition-Extended Range (JDAM ER), an air-launched GPS-guided weapon that converts dumb bombs into precision-guided glide bombs with a range of up to 45 miles (triple the range of the original weapon). The other is the Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB), a weapon system newly developed for Ukraine that can be launched from High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) and can travel 93 miles, almost double the range of current ground-launched precision munition systems.

If we were not aiding Ukraine, the United States would not be producing either of these weapons. The funding Congress has provided to manufacture both systems injects many millions of dollars into Missouri's economy and is busying production lines for these advanced capabilities. Those systems will now be available for the United States and Taiwan should a conflict erupt with China, as well as available for Israel.

Workers in West Plains, Mo., are using Ukraine aid to build the MIM-104 Phased Array Tracking Radar for the Patriot missile system that shocked the world this year by downing Russia's supposedly ''invincible'' hypersonic missile. This saved Ukrainian lives and proved in real battlefield conditions that the upgraded Patriot system might help defend against hypersonic threats from other adversaries.

Most senators would take credit for these successes. Not Hawley, who is trying to cut funding for these systems being built in his state. The same goes for Rep. Jason T. Smith, who represents Missouri's 8th Congressional District, where the Patriot radars are built, yet has voted against such aid multiple times. Missouri's other Republican U.S. senator, Eric Schmitt, has not yet voted on Ukraine aid but has said, ''I don't support these forever wars.'' Perhaps he will support defense investments that benefit Missouri workers and strengthen our military production capacity to defend against Communist China?

Among the most shocking examples of our defense industrial base's decline is our struggle to produce a relatively simple munition: 155mm artillery shells. These shells would be in high demand in any conflict the United States fights. Ukraine is firing 6,000 to 8,000 such shells a day, and Israel is ordering them by the tens of thousands. But before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, the United States was producing fewer than 15,000 shells per month. So the Pentagon has allocated $1.5 billion to boost production by 500 percent and is on pace to reach 100,000 per month.

With our withered defense production capacity, including a lack of machine tools, reaching that rate will take two years. Even then, the U.S. output in 2025 is likely to not match that of Russia in 2024. But were it not for our aid to Ukraine, those U.S. production increases would not be happening. With money Congress approved to arm Kyiv, shells are being assembled in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and in a new factory in Camden, Ark., using components (including explosives, propellant, primers, fuses and shell bodies) produced in such U.S. cities and towns as Kingsport and Cordova, Tenn.; Bristol, Pa.; Middletown, Iowa; and Coachella, Calif. A factory being built in Mesquite, Tex., is expected to produce about 20,000 shells a month and employ at least 125 workers after it comes online early next year. The president of the Mesquite Chamber of Commerce told the New York Times that lawmakers who oppose Ukraine aid are ''voting against your constituents. '... You're literally saying no to the people you're representing.'' Yet Gooden, who represents Mesquite, voted against the aid that is helping fund the new plant in his district.

Our aid to Ukraine is not only forcing the Pentagon to rapidly increase the United States' ability to produce weapons; it's also modernizing the U.S. military. As retired Army Maj. Gen. John G. Ferrari, now a colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, recently pointed out, we are giving Ukraine weapons systems that are often decades old and then replacing our stockpiles with more advanced versions. ''Because of the existing budget pressures on the Army, it wouldn't be able to afford this needed modernization of equipment on its own,'' Ferrari wrote in an op-ed. ''By transferring weapons and gear to Ukraine, the Army would receive more modern weapons in return.''

The U.S.-led effort to arm Ukraine reinvigorates our defense production capacity in still other ways. The United States is also creating incentives for NATO allies to donate their old U.S.-produced and Soviet-era weapons systems to Ukraine by authorizing the sale of newer, modern U.S.-made systems to replace them. For example, Poland sent 250 older Soviet and German tanks to Ukraine and signed a $4.75 billion deal in April 2022 to buy 250 M1A2 Abrams replacement tanks that will be produced at the Lima, Ohio, factory. Poland subsequently made a $1.4 billion deal for additional tanks. Poland also sent its Soviet-made Mi-24 attack helicopters to Ukraine and then signed a $12 billion deal to purchase 96 Apache helicopters that will be built in Mesa, Ariz.

Efforts to arm and equip Ukraine have also dramatically boosted sales of U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets. This benefits workers at production facilities in Palmdale, Calif.; East Hartford, Conn.; Middletown, Iowa; and Fort Worth, as well as in other U.S. cities that produce parts for the jets. Finland, which finalized a $9.4 billion deal to purchase 64 F-35s, has said the new planes will allow it to donate its old F/A-18 Hornet fighters to Ukraine. Norway, which has donated old F-16 fighters to Ukraine, is purchasing 52 F-35s and spending $293 million to arm them with 580 StormBreaker Small Diameter Bombs made in Tucson. Denmark and the Netherlands are donating 61 F-16s to Ukraine and replacing them with additional F-35s.

In all, our analysis found that there are at least 13 production lines in 10 states and 11 U.S. cities producing new American-made weapons for NATO allies to replace the equipment they have sent to Ukraine. As Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies has concluded, ''Much of the money directly supporting Ukraine is spent not abroad, but here in the United States.'' This makes it ''a misnomer'' to call the $68 billion he calculates we have spent to arm Ukraine ''aid.''

We asked for comments from the lawmakers who voted against aid that is going to their districts. ''Manufacturing weapons in Ohio is good. You know what's better? Using them for our own defense rather than sending them to a corrupt money pit in Eastern Europe,'' Vance said. ''There's no question why Ukraine wants Abrams tanks '... but our constituents have great concerns about seemingly unlimited taxpayer money being used to fund the war in Ukraine,'' a spokesman for Jordan replied. ''Alabama is right to be proud of our role in securing America's national defense, but the United States cannot get involved in every conflict around the world,'' said Tuberville. ''We borrow $1 trillion every six months, and our growing national debt is our most dire national security threat,'' said a spokesman for Braun. ''I don't vote for or against wars based on which congressional districts get the jobs,'' Gaetz responded.

As I have pointed out, it is in the United States' vital interests to arm Ukraine in its fight to defeat Russian aggression. Our support for Ukraine is decimating the Russian military threat to NATO, restoring deterrence with China, dissuading other nuclear powers from launching wars of aggression and improving American military preparedness for other adversaries. The ''America First'' case for helping Ukraine is clear.

But if those arguments are not persuasive, then this should be: Our military aid to Ukraine is revitalizing manufacturing communities across the United States, creating good jobs here at home and restoring the United States' capacity to produce weapons for our national defense. Helping Ukraine is the right thing to do for U.S. national security. It is also the right thing to do for American workers.

correction

An earlier version of this column misattributed a quote to a spokesman for Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio). The quote was from the senator. This version has been updated.

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I stepped back into Manhattan and Brooklyn last week, down to the city from my life in the deep upstate woods. I was revisiting the world of privilege that had ousted me in 2021, and that had been so confident and even smug right up until and into the ''pandemic.''

It's haunting, what that world seems like now.

I know some readers must be thinking, Why have compassion for, why even bother with the fates of, wealthy liberal elites '-- those who aligned for the past three years with a million lies, and who only grew wealthier and more status-secure as a result of the depredations of the recent past?

I hear you.

But I feel the need, as a witness to this dark time, nonetheless to describe what I saw. When an empire's elites lose confidence or all sense of purpose, history reveals that it is hard for that empire to survive. And the collapse of confidence I saw, may show a movement in the life of the nation away at least from the complete madness and denial that has gripped this world since 2020.

Brian and I attended an evening gathering of New York City thought leaders, and old-school society leaders. It was in a private home, and convened by the same glamorous group that had dis-invited me from its ''list'', due to my naughty vaccine status, in 2021.

I felt that it was important to show up now, and see what had happened to this world in the meantime.

I felt myself step back in time, to pre-2020. There was the familiar swish of the cab that let Brian and me off at an elegant corner on the Upper East Side. There were the obsequious doormen on either side of us, gesturing us forward, into the marvel of the intact Art Deco elevator. They did so with a theatrical servility that I now understand, after my three years in exile in ''the other America'', to be purely gestural, and in fact to be deeply ironic.

There was the doorman standing inside the elevator, whose entire job involved pressing the ancient buttons '-- a flagrant display of conspicuous consumption. There was the door of the elevator opening directly into a penthouse, rather than into a hallway lined with apartments. That private-elevator marker, like a ''Park Avenue Classic Six'' apartment, or a dedicated parking space in the garage, is a sought-after status symbol, in a city that has little physical space in which to display variations on wealth.

There was the white-on-white-with-beige-notes interior (2016 trend). There was the fantastic backdrop of bookcases, replete with ladders, that lined a study all the way up to the eleven-foot ceilings. (Were the Victorian sets of matching kidskin volumes at the uppermost levels '-- decorative? ) There is the Miro mobile, swaying gently in a corner of the living room, just past the gleaming baby grand piano. There was the Rothko-like art and the Rauschenberg-like art, or maybe they were Rothkos and Rauschenbergs. One painting '-- with a provocative social-justice message '-- I recognized from its having been in the Whitney museum catalogue.

There were the staffers in black pants and white shirts '-- actors and painters by day '-- passing trays of small circles of white bread with tiny dollops of sour cream, all topped with pearly black caviar. There were the folding gilt chairs, unchanged in these settings since the 1930s.

But everything felt different. In the ''before'' world '-- before 2020, before ''lockdowns'' and ''masking'' and ''mandates'' '-- there was a robust, fairly healthy city outside of these gatherings. It was a city that these people felt that they influenced, cared for and even led. There were schools educating children adequately, and businesses employing people freely, and trains moving people to cultural events and family gatherings and museums and libraries, all showcasing an intact American culture.

The same group now no doubt had the same access as before, the same resources, the same networks. But now, they were lords and ladies of a dungheap. The society and culture outside this elegant interior, had collapsed.

Outside, now, graffiti defaced neighborhood after neighborhood; the New York City police have stopped ticketing people ''tagging'' buildings. Outside, a Columbia University student was attacked while posting flyers relating to the Israel/Palestine conflict, and Columbia University briefly closed in response to duelling protests. The light of peaceful free expression is being extinguished. Outside, in far Brooklyn, as Brian documented last week, lines of hungry Americans, patiently waiting, stretched a mile long outside of a church dispensing free food. Outside, random acts of violence take place in the subway system every day '-- a man last month was slashed in the head with a boxcutter.

But over and above the collapse of civility and of safety was a sense among the elites of what felt like defeat. They did not manage to lead their nation through a crisis with integrity, or even with basic facts at their disposal; and now, in that assemblage, it felt as if there was among them a sense of loss of purpose, if not outright shame.

Perhaps it was because this group had been taken in so thoroughly, and was now slowly waking up to that reality. Maybe people even in ''that world'' are becoming aware of the fact that they stayed indoors for 14 months with no reason, that they missed Thanksgivings and Hannukahs with family for no reason, and that they ''masked'' and imposed masks on their visiting grandchildren, for no reason. Maybe there was a sense of dispiritedness and even of depression, in that room, because perhaps even they know now that they took something into their bodies that can hurt or someday kill them.

That is what it felt like. A bonfire that had been mighty, that had flung its radiance across the globe, was dying. It felt like embers of an old fire collapsing in upon themselves and going cindery.

Whatever these people had been through in the last three years had aged them. It felt in that room as if a group who had been the proudest people on earth '-- the thought leaders of New York City '-- had now just stopped trying.

Ladies-who-lunched, who had been the cynosure of urbane fashion '-- who had until recently dressed for every outing to outdo one another, and to champion their favorite designers '-- were dressed now not even in fashion; indeed ''fashion'' seemed no longer to exist. Before 2020, these ladies would have been in chic black cocktail dresses, or red frocks with low backs, or eggshell-white dresses with asymmetrical hemlines and dustings of crystals and gauze overlays. And in heels, heels, heels.

Now, the same ladies were mostly dressed in a post-Marxist-meets-suburban-shopper uniform. They were wearing, and they have been wearing, in the several similar events which I attended recently '-- white sneakers after Labor Day. They wore comfy black slacks, and sweaters in boxy shapes and bland autumn shades. These ladies, once worshippers of fashion and style-setters themselves, were now indistinguishable from browsers in the food court of a mall.

Ladies who had been ''blonded'' every month at the most select of salons '-- with a famous, signature rich-Upper-East-Side-lady blonding that New York Magazine had often discussed, with the coinage ''buttery chunks'' '-- now appeared to have thrown in the towel, and were sedately fully grey. Ladies who had once moved heaven and earth to defy age, now seemed settled into visibly aging.

This is not to judge or criticize them; you could say that there is something kind of lovely and down-to-earth in the putting-off of all of that effort. But it is a dramatic change in the culture of the women who once ran Manhattan, and it is a change in the direction of a relaxation of effort '-- a loss of conviction that ''society'' even exists in the same way '-- a ceasing to care.

The men, for their part '-- formerly Tom Wolfe's ''Masters of the Universe'' '-- seemed similarly collapsed, and also into a different way of being than the one that had been theirs before 2020. These gatherings used to course with the competitiveness and rampant testosterone of this class of men. The hedge fund guys, the Wall Street guys, the private investors, used to be on the lookout aggressively to one-up each other, outdo one another, acquire one another's knowledge, contacts, or women.

Now, they too seemed markedly aged. Rather than trying to top one another with their latest acquisition or achievement, these same former Alphas sat companionably side by side with one another, old men chatting. Pretty young women flickered by, passing glasses of wine. Almost no one glanced their way.

Above all it was subdued; rudderless. The great confidence, the great pride, was no more.

How could that be?

Maybe this had something to do with it:

This whole stratum had been bamboozled. And, shame of shames, they had been hoodwinked not by their own kind '-- not by cultural elites, or by thought leaders, or by financial Masters of the Universe, in the greatest city on earth; but rather, they were duped by Brooklyn-born parvenus like Dr Anthony Fauci; by rabid Newton, MA soccer moms, such as Dr Rochelle Walensky; by the monomaniacal Dr Rachel Levine, of Wakefield, MA, former Secretary of Health for Pennsylvania (wow!). These second-rate people had collapsed their magnificent world; may, they seemed slowly to be realizing, have killed their loved ones; and may already have imposed into their bodies the substance that could some day murder them.

Here is what is even weirder.

When I go these days to the New York City gatherings of the glamorous world that ousted me in 2021 (only a few such gatherings to date, and invited only by the intrepid) '-- people whom I do not even know '-- whom I have never met before '-- come up to me.

I say, ''Hi, nice to meet you. My name is Naomi.''

And they say '-- before even introducing themselves : ''My mom had a stroke.''

Or: ''I have shingles now.''

Or: ''I am going in next week for surgery.''

Literally, people to whom I have never been introduced, whose names I do not yet know, introduce themselves to me at ritzy, left-leaning New York City gatherings not with their names but with their symptoms , or with the injuries and illnesses and symptoms of their loved ones.

And these are the people on the formerly vaccine-worshipping, progressive ''side'' of the aisle. The side that thought we were all hateful once, and deranged.

They bring these hurts to me now as if '-- as if '-- what? As if I am an oracle? As if I have some help for them? As if we have already been in a long conversation about this, but only in their heads?

So much is left out '-- with these sudden sad declarations. I do not even know how to begin to understand them.

It is so, so tragic and weird. Perhaps this abrupt confessional is related to the sombre mood in the apartment I described above.

I knew this day would come, though. In 2021, people on the (evil, stupid, selfish) unvaccinated ''side'' would remind one another on social media, and in person, not to be too angry and not to give up completely on our delusional friends and loved ones and colleagues across the divide '-- people who were at that time being so very cruel and excluding to us '-- because some day they would need us; to care for them, and to help them to heal.

What do we conclude now?

That our help is needed.

That it is cleanup time.

That it is rebuilding time.

All we can do is prosecute the guilty, and bring information and comfort and aid to the sick, and fight so that what happened to us never again happens, and never happens to someone innocent.

All we can do is love, and wait, and bring what help we can.

And say how sorry we are for their, and for their families,' losses.

And respond with greater kindness than was meted out to us.

And ask again what their names are.

And listen to their grief and hurt and fear.

And listen, and listen again.

####

To support my work and read more, please order Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith and Resistance in a New Dark Age

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To support my work and read more, please order Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith and Resistance in a New Dark Age: https://www.amazon.com/Facing-Beast-Courage-Faith-Resistance/dp/1645022366

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This is not the first time in history that immigrants have been accused of spreading disease. ");}else if(is_tablet()){slot_number++;document.write("

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Claim:Under U.S. President Joe Biden's administration, border control agencies are allowing thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of illegal immigrants into the U.S. without testing, vaccinating, or quarantining them for COVID-19, contributing to a surge in new COVID-19 cases.

What's TrueA few reported instances have shown Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) releasing asylum seekers who tested positive for COVID-19 to nonprofits and immigration-focused organizations without notifying them first, though they were quarantined right after. Vaccination implementation remains inadequate, according to some whistleblowers. There are also many reports of lack of testing in ICE detention centers. However...

What's FalseMigrants are not behind the surge in COVID-19 cases across the country. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) says it provides personal protective equipment and masks, and also send migrants to local health facilities for testing, diagnosis, and treatment. ICE statistics and policies governing their interactions with partner agencies also show they conduct testing of migrants at high risk of COVID-19. ICE has also begun vaccinating immigrants held in detention, although the implementation is reportedly inadequate.

What's UndeterminedIt is difficult to determine the exact numbers of migrants released without COVID-19 tests or vaccinations.

Snopes is still fighting an ''infodemic'' of rumors and misinformation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, and you can help. Find out what we've learned and how to inoculate yourself against COVID-19 misinformation. Read the latest fact checks about the vaccines. Submit any questionable rumors and ''advice'' you encounter. Become a Founding Member to help us hire more fact-checkers. And, please, follow the CDC or WHO for guidance on protecting your community from the disease. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a debate has arisen over the influx of migrants from the U.S.-Mexico border, and their alleged role in spreading the virus in the United States. The argument that they have played such a role was repeated by Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz on Fox News and in his public statements, and by right-wing news outlets like Breitbart. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also said, "I can tell you, whatever variants are around the world, they're coming across that southern border."

Our readers referenced a Fox News report from border town McAllen, Texas, which said around 7,000 migrants who tested positive for COVID-19 after being released by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) '-- and were later quarantined by Catholic Charities '-- have been released into the city since February 2021. We received questions about circulating claims to the effect that U.S. President Joe Biden's administration was allowing "hundreds of thousands" of ''illegal'' migrants to enter the country without being testing for COVID-19, quarantining, or even getting vaccinated.

According to numerous public health experts, and as reported by The Associated Press and The Washington Post, migrants and asylum seekers are not behind a surge in COVID-19 cases in the U.S. In fact, they enter the country through a process of detainment, where high-risk people are tested by health services, with some being isolated, and some getting vaccinations.

How does the process at the border start? According to data released from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), officials logged around 1.1 million "apprehensions" at the U.S.-Mexico border this fiscal year until June 2021. Some 34% of those crossing the border in June had tried to cross the border at least once before in the past year. According to a Washington Post analysis, apprehensions at the border fall under two categories: Title 8 and Title 42. The former involves apprehending someone at the border and taking the person to a detention facility. The latter, which was implemented under former U.S. President Donald Trump, allows border officials to use the pandemic as a reason to immediately turn people away at the border.

According to CBP numbers, hundreds of thousands of people apprehended at the border were almost immediately expelled under Title 42, or on COVID-19 grounds. According to The Associated Press, the CBP stopped and expelled 82% of single adults attempting to enter the country in June 2021, for example. So the claim that "hundreds of thousands" of migrants were entering the country is belied by the fact that many recorded apprehensions have resulted in immediate expulsion on health grounds.

But according to The Washington Post that still leaves many migrants in U.S. custody, including around 75,000 in June 2021 alone. Those migrants are put through a range of processes depending on their health, symptoms, and more. We reached out to the CBP, who gave us this statement:

CBP provides migrants with PPE from the moment they are taken into custody, and migrants are required to keep masks on at all times, including when they are transferred or in the process of being released. If anyone exhibits signs of illness in CBP custody, they are referred to local health systems for appropriate testing, diagnosis, and treatment. CBP takes its responsibility to prevent the spread of communicable diseases very seriously. We value our partners in local communities whose work is critical to moving individuals safely out of CBP/USBP custody and through the appropriate immigration pathway.

While CBP does not appear to be testing everyone in custody, the agency does transfer migrants to other health facilities and federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), where the procedures vary. ICE claims to test everyone in its custody. According to its COVID-19 response requirements, the agency does, ''Test all newly detained persons before they join the rest of the population in the detention facility.'' Border Patrol officials in Texas said that they simply did not have the capacity to test everyone for coronavirus upon arrival and doing so would force migrants to remain in crowded facilities for longer, leaving it to nonprofits like Catholic Charities to arrange testing.

According to The Associated Press, ICE also began vaccinating detained immigrants, and the government innoculated unaccompanied children over 12 with the Pfizer vaccine. ICE told CNN in July that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had begun administering the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, with an initial allocation of 10,000 doses that would be replenished on a rolling basis. As of early July, more than 8,000 ICE detainees had received one dose of a vaccine, and 1,307 received two doses.

Now, whether these official policies are being effectively applied is another story. According to one report by The Washington Post, there have been numerous recorded instances of ICE failing to notify partner agencies of known COVID-positive asylum seekers arriving in their midst. In such cases, the immigrants had to handle the notifying themselves, like a man from Cameroon who asked volunteers meeting him to ''Stand back'' when he arrived in a California border city. Many advocates have complained that ICE had given them no advance notice. Some advocates say that migrants are catching COVID-19 once they're in the U.S. because of poor planning by ICE, and not bringing it in themselves. In August 2021, reports emerged of a COVID outbreak in a Tacoma, Washington, facility housing ICE detainees, infecting around 150 since June. Other reports detail how asylum seekers are being released without receiving their COVID-19 test results in states like Louisiana and Mississippi, though these do not number in the hundreds of thousands.

Whistleblowers from the DHS sent a letter in late June to Biden administration officials urging them to do more work vaccinating immigrants in federal custody. They claimed that immigrant detention facilities ''continue to be a significant source of spread for COVID and [cause] disproportionate harm to detainees, workers and the public, yet DHS has still not implemented a comprehensive plan to address the spread of COVID in immigration detention facilities.''

What about the thousands who are reportedly being released in Texas? The data being shared by conservative media about the 7,000 migrants in McAllen, Texas, who tested positive, lacks context. According to American Immigration Council's Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, who spoke to The Washington Post, ''Migrants are in many ways the most tested group in the country. No other group of people in the entire country is being tested at a near-100 percent rate. So when we talk about infection rates of migrants, what we actually know is that a lot of people who are testing positive are asymptomatic; who, if they were in the United States, would have just never been tested.''

Migrants who test positive are moved to hotels and other spaces to quarantine, for the most part. Indeed, the Fox News article about McAllen stated, ''Immigrants released by CBP are dropped off with Catholic Charities and tested for COVID by a third party. If they test positive, they are asked to quarantine and offered a room at a quarantine site.'' (This particular statement did not appear in an archived version of the Fox News story, but cropped up later.) As of August 2021, an estimated 2,000 migrants are being quarantined in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, after testing positive.

Public health experts by and large agree that the rise in COVID-19 cases in the U.S. is not due to migrants who are isolated and tested in larger numbers than communities in the United States. Dr. Joseph McCormick, a physician and former CDC epidemiologist, told The Associated Press that the number of migrants entering the country is too small to be behind the uptick in cases. COVID-19 has been spreading outside of border states, and many argue it is due in part to the large numbers of unvaccinated people already in the country.

Dr. Ivn Mel(C)ndez, a health official in Hidalgo County said in an August press conference, "Is this a pandemic of the migrants? No, it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated." According to a New York Times report, in Hidalgo County, Texas, the migrant positivity rate was about 16 percent in early August 2021, compared with 17.59 percent for residents.

The exact total number of asylum seekers who were released untested, unvaccinated, or positive with COVID-19 to third parties are difficult to determine. We know based on a number of cases publicly available to us that a few hundred fell through the cracks over an extended period of time largely due to federal agencies inefficiencies, but those groups are not responsible for the surge in cases overall.

Overall, the assertion that thousands of migrants entering the country are not being tested, quarantined, or vaccinated, and are spreading COVID-19 as a result, is incorrect. However, it appears federal agencies could do more to ensure effective health facilities are provided to migrants and comprehensive vaccination plans are developed. As such, we rate this claim as ''Mostly False.''

Nur Nasreen Ibrahim is a reporter with experience working in television, international news coverage, fact checking, and creative writing.

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Wed, 28 Feb 2024 15:58

The fourth Baron Rothschild, he left the family banking dynasty to start his own company, becoming a powerful financier, patron of the arts and philanthropist.

Jacob Rothschild in 2016. Alongside his career as a high-powered financier, he played an energetic if sometimes secretive role in Israel. Credit... Leon Neal/Agence France-Presse '-- Getty Images Published Feb. 26, 2024 Updated Feb. 27, 2024

Jacob Rothschild, a wealthy financier, patron of the arts and philanthropist with close ties to Israel, who broke with his family's fabled banking dynasty at a time of radical change in the world of high finance, has died. He was 87.

His death was announced on Monday by the Rothschild Foundation, a British charity of which he was the chairman. It did not specify when or where he died or give the cause of death.

Mr. Rothschild '-- more formally the fourth Baron Rothschild '-- was descended from Mayer Amschel Rothschild, a coin trader in the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt, who sent four of his five sons to Vienna, London, Naples and Paris to seek their fortune in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

For most of the 19th century, the House of Rothschild was the biggest bank in the world ''by a wide margin,'' Jonathan Steinberg, an American scholar, wrote in The London Review of Books in 1999. The fortune of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the son who founded the bank's London branch, ''can be compared to that of Bill Gates today,'' Mr. Steinberg added.

Most accounts of the Rothschilds' wealth trace its origins to a decision to finance the British military in the Napoleonic Wars. But the broader dynasty flourished on cementing its family bonds and cultivating what Mr. Steinberg called ''everybody who was anybody at the top of European society during this period.''

It was against this historical backdrop that Jacob Rothschild joined the London arm of the family's empire at the N.M. Rothschild & Sons bank in 1963. Until then he had followed a route familiar to the British elite, educated at Eton College and at Christ Church, Oxford.

At that time, London's traditionally cautious, clubby world of high finance was still two decades away from a shift toward freewheeling capitalism that culminated in the so-called Big Bang of 1986, which brought deregulation to the London Stock Exchange

And British merchant banks in the City, as London's financial district is known, seemed dwarfed by the burgeoning financial might of Wall Street, building pressure for new approaches.

Mr. Rothschild had long favored merging the London branch of his family's financial empire with another merchant bank, S.G. Warburg, but the plan was opposed by his cousin Evelyn de Rothschild and his own father, Victor, a scientist and former member of Britain's MI5 domestic intelligence agency.

He therefore resolved to break away. ''We must try to make ourselves as much a bank of brains as of money,'' Mr. Rothschild said in 1965.

In a way, he was challenging a culture of family control and secrecy that had distinguished its dealings from the very beginning.

As long ago as 1810, ''family policy excluded female descendants and all sons-in-law from any part in the business,'' Mr. Steinberg, the scholar, wrote. Each of the initial partners ''renounced the rights of his wife to have sight of the accounts and swore to allow only direct male descendants to inherit shares.''

Marriage outside the Rothschilds' Jewish faith was frowned upon; marriage within the family was not unknown.

''Of 21 marriages involving descendants of Mayer Amschel between 1824 and 1877, no fewer than 15 were between his direct descendants,'' Mr. Steinberg wrote.

While the family's rules had softened by the early 1960s, Mr. Rothschild's proposals for a merger with S.G. Warburg collided head-on with tradition. For Victor and Evelyn de Rothschild, ''the preservation of family control took precedence over expansion,'' the British historian Niall Ferguson wrote in his book ''The House of Rothschild'' (1998), a voluminous study of the family. The clash represented ''a serious rift within the English branch of the family,'' Mr. Ferguson wrote.

The dispute was resolved only in 1980, when the feuding partners agreed that the family bank, N.M. Rothschild & Sons Ltd., would operate separately from Mr. Rothschild's breakaway entity, J. Rothschild & Company, whose main assets would be known by their initials: RIT, for Rothschild Investment Trust.

Mr. Rothschild retired as head of RIT Capital Partners in 2019. That year, his personal wealth was estimated by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index to be more than $1 billion.

Nathaniel Charles Jacob Rothschild was born in Berkshire, England, on April 29, 1936, to Victor Rothschild, the third Baron Rothschild, and his first wife, Barbara Judith (Hutchinson) Rothschild.

Mr. Rothschild studied history at Oxford before joining the family bank. After he resigned to head RIT, he became involved in a series of ventures, including an unsuccessful bid in 1989 with other investors to take over British American Tobacco for $21 billion.

He maintained a wide network of international connections, acting as deputy chairman of Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB Television, and as an adviser to then-Prince Charles. He was a member of the International Advisory Board of the Blackstone Group, a leading private equity group, and co-founded the J. Rothschild Assurance Group in 1991, a wealth management company now known as St. James's Place.

Not all his maneuvers were free of controversy. In 2003, British media reports said he had struck a trusteeship deal with Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, a Russian oil tycoon and Putin foe, to transfer Mr. Khodorkovsky's stake in the Yukos oil company to Mr. Rothschild in the event of his arrest. Mr. Khodorkovsky was arrested in October 2003 and later exiled. Mr. Rothschild did not confirm the reports.

Alongside his career as a high-powered financier, Mr. Rothschild played an energetic if sometimes secretive role in Israel, overseeing his family's long-running philanthropic activities there as head of the Yad Hanadiv foundation.

Over the decades, the Rothschilds quietly sponsored major projects, including the construction of Israel's Parliament, Supreme Court and National Library, none of which bear the family's name. ''We've tried not to be in the headlines,'' Mr. Rothschild told The Jerusalem Report in 2012, adding, ''Our tradition has been that we don't shout from the rooftops what we are doing.''

He took over Yad Hanadiv after the death in 1988 of Dorothy de Rothschild, the foundation's chairwoman and an aunt of his. She bequeathed him estates in Buckinghamshire, England.

Image Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild built Waddesdon Manor in the 1880s. It is now overseen by Britain's National Trust, but Mr. Rothschild struck a deal in which the building would house the family's enormous collection of art. Credit... David Goddard/Getty Images The ownership of one of the properties, Waddesdon Manor, built by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in the 1880s in the style of a French chateau, had already been transferred to the nonprofit National Trust in 1957. But Mr. Rothschild struck an unusual deal with the trust to administer the manor as a home for the Rothschilds' collection of an estimated 15,000 works of art and objects, and for his personal collection of Rothschild wines, mainly from the Bordeaux region of France.

Mr. Rothschild was a principal benefactor of the manor's restoration and played a part in other ambitious projects, including the regeneration of Somerset House, an 18th-century building overlooking the River Thames in London. Among many arts-related positions in Britain and elsewhere, he chaired the trustees of London's National Gallery from 1985 to 1991.

Mr. Rothschild married Serena Dunn, a racehorse owner, in 1961; she died in 2019. He had four children, Hannah, Beth, Emily and Nathaniel, and a number of grandchildren. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.

For all his standing among the world's wealthy elite, Mr. Rothschild was openly critical of some of his peers in the international financial system. In 2012, four years after the economic crisis of 2008, he told The Jerusalem Report that he had ''a lot of sympathy with people who protested about some of the excesses in the world of finance.''

''After all, here are characters who have made great fortunes, who have been in charge of a system which has been very damaging to many interests in the last five to 10 years,'' he said. ''They have had enormous benefits, but the banking system as a whole has had a crippling effect in a number of areas throughout the world.''

Victor Mather contributed reporting.

After a long career as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times based in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, Alan Cowell became a freelance contributor in 2015, based in London.

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Archived Version

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 03:50

The multimillionaire chief executive officer of the US food processing giant Kellogg's has drawn scorn from some quarters after recently suggesting that families with strained finances could cope by eating ''cereal for dinner''.

Gary Pilnick was speaking live on CNBC's Squawk on the Street on 21 February when he delivered the remarks in question, which some have compared to the ''let them eat cake'' phrase frequently attributed without evidence to Marie Antoinette before her execution during the French Revolution.

''The cereal category has always been quite affordable, and it tends to be a great destination when consumers are under pressure,'' Pilnick said amid a discussion about high grocery prices. ''If you think about the cost of cereal for a family versus what they might otherwise do, that's going to be much more affordable.''

The CNBC host Carl Quintanilla asked Pilnick '' whose company's brands include Frosted Flakes, Froot Loops, Corn Pops and Rice Krispies '' whether his remarks could ''land the wrong way'' with consumers who have been forced to spend about 26% more on groceries in general since 2020.

Pilnick doubled down, saying: ''In fact, it's landing really well right now. Cereal for dinner is something that is probably more on trend now, and we would expect [it] to continue as that consumer is under pressure.''

That message has not actually landed that well with everyone who has heard it.

One TikTok user derisively referred to a September 2023 Securities and Exchange Commission filing which showed Pilnick earned an annual base salary of $1m and more than $4m in incentives.

''This fool is making 4m bucks a year,'' that user said. ''Do you think he's feeding his kids cereal for dinner?''

Another user on that social media platform reacted by saying: ''What the hell kind of dystopian hellscape is this? Give the peasants cereal for dinner!''

One retorted: ''Eat the rich instead".'' Various others pointed out how cereal '' especially brands manufactured by Kellogg's '' isn't especially cheap.

One person argued that a $10 family-size box of cereal along with a $3 carton of milk would cost about the same as frozen lasagne meant to feed the same amount of people for dinner.

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And others challenged whether it was all that healthy to eat cereal, given how much sugar some brands contain.

Kellogg's has been touting its ''cereal for dinner'' campaign since about 2022, when food prices increased by 9.9%, more than in any year since 1979, according to the US agriculture department's economic research service.

Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows cereal prices have jumped 28% in the last four years, several media outlets have reported. And in information from its latest fiscal year, Kellogg's raised its prices 12% as it pleads with its customers to eat cereal for dinner and ''give chicken the night off''.

''Advertising to hungry people that cereal might be good for dinner is not 'meeting people where they are','' self-help author Marianne Williamson wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. ''It's exploiting the hungry for financial gain.''

Pilnick, 59, has been Kellogg's CEO since October, his profile on LinkedIn shows. He has worked for the Michigan-based organization for more than 23 years.

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Archived Version

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 17:54

Up until 2024 weight loss medications were not covered by DOD/Tricare as weight loss was considered a responsibility issue, not a health one.

Now soldiers can receive Wegovy/Ozempic after they first try Phentermine and Contrave. If those don't work, or they have health/drug interactions with them they can be prescribed Wegovy/Ozempic.

This will also apply to dependents of soldiers as well.

Wegovy/Ozempic is about $1,300 per month for retail cost. Active duty military will get it free while Guard/Reservists and dependents will pay about $20 a month.

Another safe, free and effective treatment?

How many years until we find out these weight loss drugs have lasting negative effects for a more than marginal % of people taking them? There's usually some type of trade-off when you are cutting such dramatic corners in life.

I hope I am wrong...if this drug is perfectly safe to take over the long term, this could really help reshape American healthcare.

Might be the cheapest way to increase soldier morale due to not having to come home to a dependa-potimis.

Which stock do I need to buy that covers this?

Not sure we do know. But we do know the lasting effects of obesity and it's pretty terrible. Probably cheaper for the DOD to just provide these drugs instead of losing fatties after spending years training them.

Vepp said:

Might be the cheapest way to increase soldier morale due to not having to come home to a dependa-potimis.Hilarious! I'll never forget being at the PHX airport waiting for my flight to San Diego to begin boot camp and this middle age guy walks up to me and a few others and asks if we're going into the Marines. We say yes and he says you're going to have a messed up life and a big fat wife.

Quote:

How many years until we find out these weight loss drugs have lasting negative effects for a more than marginal % of people taking them? There's usually some type of trade-off when you are cutting such dramatic corners in life.As the poster above me said, there will almost certainly be some unforeseen side effects that people will make a big deal out of while ignoring the wide spread and dramatic health improvements these drugs have otherwise made.

If you can't get past the "fatties should just walk" aspect of it, take heart in the fact that you no longer have to look at so many fatties.

"Which stock do I need to buy that covers this?"

Ask Nancy Pelosi &/or Dan Crenshaw... they're in the know when it comes to stock picking

Vepp said:

Might be the cheapest way to increase soldier morale due to not having to come home to a dependa-potimis.I always preferred the Tricare-atops label.

1. Awwwww. Sparky found another drug to salute. "Salute the Ozy", indeed

2. And it is pathetic that in the one institution that should be pushing for healthy men, and can actually enforce it through exercise and diet, they decide to go the soft way of supporting drug use.

maybe, just maybe, the military should not coddle soldiers. especially the fat ones.

China is going to steamroll us.

C@LAg said:

1. Awwwww. Sparky found another drug to salute. "Salute the Ozy", indeed2. And it is pathetic that in the one institution that should be pushing for healthy men, and can actually enforce it through exercise and diet, they decide to go the soft way of supporting drug use.

maybe, just maybe, the military should not coddle soldiers. especially the fat ones.

China is going to steamroll us.

What we do now is discharge them, and it's extremely expensive and not effective. If we can pump them full of drugs and get some serviceable years out of them then it's better than just cutting losses, especially with retention as difficult as it is.

Quote:

can actually enforce it through exercise and diet, they decide to go the soft way of supporting drug use.This is much easier said than it is actually done. Soldiers have the same unlimited access to carbed up processed junk food as everyone else. Weight managment is mostly diet and not exercise.

It paralyzes the smooth muscles in your intestines, which causes atrophy and permanent paralysis in many cases. No way, Jose!

I'm honestly not surprised that you support it OP.

Logos Stick said:

It paralyzes the smooth muscles in your intestines, which causes atrophy and permanent paralysis in many cases. No way, Jose!I'm honestly not surprised that you support it OP.

It's got negatives for sure. But so does morbid obesity. I think it's just a question of what's worse. Which one do you think is worse?

Does your "costs analysis" include side effects and the surgery required to fix permanently paralyzed stomachs and intestines that stick together?

Ozempic isn't even legal for sale in the country it originates from. Seems like a swell idea to implement here.

It has nothing to do with obesity, it's just the next pharma cash cow that all the government programs will prescribe and subsidize.

No exercise, just take a shot and keep eating **** food.

Trajan88 said:

"Which stock do I need to buy that covers this?"Ask Nancy Pelosi &/or Dan Crenshaw... they're in the know when it comes to stock picking

I put money to work during this time and I have zero insider knowledge.

Teslag said:

Logos Stick said:

It paralyzes the smooth muscles in your intestines, which causes atrophy and permanent paralysis in many cases. No way, Jose!I'm honestly not surprised that you support it OP.

It's got negatives for sure. But so does morbid obesity. I think it's just a question of what's worse. Which one do you think is worse?That's a false dichotomy.

It's telling that they will use these drugs off label, but won't consider ivermectin for Covid.

The country is not serious about obesity when it still allows food stamps buy soda.

Teslag said:

Logos Stick said:

It paralyzes the smooth muscles in your intestines, which causes atrophy and permanent paralysis in many cases. No way, Jose!I'm honestly not surprised that you support it OP.

It's got negatives for sure. But so does morbid obesity. I think it's just a question of what's worse. Which one do you think is worse?The one that enables the erosion of personal responsibility.

Learn about the Texas Nationalist Movementhttps://tnm.me

Logos Stick said:

It paralyzes the smooth muscles in your intestines, which causes atrophy and permanent paralysis in many cases. No way, Jose!I'm honestly not surprised that you support it OP.

I'll just keep eating meat and veggies and working out and living a very active life.

These possible symptoms (who knows if others we don't yet know about?) don't sound like too much fun: stomach paralysis, pancreatitis and bowel obstruction.

As your post alludes to, just seems like this could have lasting effects on basic bodily functions. We'll see.

This seems relevant here'...

Ep. 72 "If a fish tank is dirty, you clean the tank. You don't drug the fish." Calley Means makes the case against Ozempic. pic.twitter.com/KYWjeJYJ47

'-- Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 2, 2024

Teslag said:

Logos Stick said:

It paralyzes the smooth muscles in your intestines, which causes atrophy and permanent paralysis in many cases. No way, Jose!I'm honestly not surprised that you support it OP.

It's got negatives for sure. But so does morbid obesity. I think it's just a question of what's worse. Which one do you think is worse?Yeah, but according to my pharmacist brother in law...a TON of people who are not obese, and could probably just eat a little better and run or hit the gym a few times a week, are getting on this. They are convinced it is a 100% safe magic bullet apparently, and are just lazy. We'll see.

Would be funny if the govt someday declared a "national healthcare crisis" and mandated it. Would you still be in favor of snitching out people to HR and Law Enforcement who forged doctors notes indicating compliance, to keep their jobs? Or have you become a better person since 2021?

Quote:

Does your "costs analysis" include side effects and the surgery required to fix permanently paralyzed stomachs and intestines that stick together?What is the cost of the required surgery? Round to nearest $10 if possible. What percentage of users of this drug will need this surgery?

If you want to save money, just exclude medical benefits for armed forces who can't meet physical standards. They can receive them again once they are back in compliance.

Teslag said:

Quote:

Does your "costs analysis" include side effects and the surgery required to fix permanently paralyzed stomachs and intestines that stick together?What is the cost of the required surgery? Round to nearest $10 if possible. What percentage of users of this drug will need this surgery?

Are you really going to become an insufferable evangelist again for another pharmaceutical product? Perhaps military leadership could once again become responsible for having their troops fit for full duty instead of relying on a drug that does not have a long term track record.

Well, he is a user of the drug, so we can pretty much count on it.

https://texags.com/forums/16/topics/3433747/replies/66625569

Yep, I used it and lost 15 pounds off label. Had to pay out of pocket though.

Without real lifestyle change anyone using this will just get fat again.

There is only one true way to get healthy and stay healthy.

Edit to say this. I think this is absolutely horrible that an organization like the US military, especially the Army and Marines, that have since it's inception made physical fitness a standard of service, would lower itself down to providing quick fix and likely dangerous methods for service members to lose weight. I thought that was what running was for and taking the donuts away from Private Pyle.

Gonna be a lot of skinny dependas running around

Eliminatus said:

Which stock do I need to buy that covers this?LLY and NVO

To a certain extent STVN

Teslag said:

Quote:

can actually enforce it through exercise and diet, they decide to go the soft way of supporting drug use.This is much easier said than it is actually done. Soldiers have the same unlimited access to carbed up processed junk food as everyone else. Weight managment is mostly diet and not exercise.

When I worked on auxiliary ships we would deliver pallets and pallets of monster energy and vending machine junk food to all of the navy ships.

Teslag said:

Logos Stick said:

It paralyzes the smooth muscles in your intestines, which causes atrophy and permanent paralysis in many cases. No way, Jose!I'm honestly not surprised that you support it OP.

It's got negatives for sure. But so does morbid obesity. I think it's just a question of what's worse. Which one do you think is worse?Except you don't need this **** to not be a fat ass. Just shoot them up with trenbolone as well why we're at it, the *****s probably are so why not.

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Tue, 27 Feb 2024 17:42

Making migration work for all

Who we are WHO WE ARE

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is part of the United Nations System as the leading inter-governmental organization promoting since 1951 humane and orderly migration for the benefit of all, with 175 member states and a presence in 171 countries.

Our Work Our Work

As the leading inter-governmental organization promoting since 1951 humane and orderly migration, IOM plays a key role to support the achievement of the 2030 Agenda through different areas of intervention that connect both humanitarian assistance and sustainable development.

Where we work Take Action Data and Research 2030 Agenda

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Archived Version

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 17:41

Geneva '' The International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, welcomed Ecuador's regularization initiative that is expected to benefit thousands of Venezuelans.

Ecuador is host to the third-largest Venezuelan refugee and migrant population worldwide. While a majority of the half a million living there are undocumented, Ecuador's decision to begin regularizing their status will start providing those that benefit from the initiative with legal protection and stability.

It will ease their access to rights, basic services and the job market, helping fast-track their socio-economic integration in Ecuador.

''We commend Ecuador's effort in securing the rights and finding practical solutions for Venezuelans who have sought safety in the country,'' said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi. ''In these increasingly challenging times for many displaced communities worldwide, the government and the people of Ecuador have continued to show strong solidarity and compassion, and above all, commitment to protect the rights of Venezuelans on the move.''

As the economic and health impact of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to be felt in countries and communities across Latin America and the Caribbean, refugees and migrants remain some of the most vulnerable populations '' especially those without documentation.

''This initiative is one of the most pragmatic ways of eliminating barriers to a long-term integration. With a regular status, refugees and migrants can fully contribute to their host communities - something they have longed for years,'' said IOM Director General Ant"nio Vitorino. ''Diasporas play an invaluable role in the life and growth of host societies being a crucial driver for development.''

UNHCR and IOM, as co-leaders of the Regional Inter-agency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela (R4V), which brings together 53 partners in the country, reiterate their support to the Government of Ecuador in this initiative, and offer their expertise, capacity, presence and resources to keep strengthening the process and ensure no-one is left behind.

This is the second time Ecuador has moved to regularize Venezuelan refugees and migrants. Of those registered biometrically during a previous exercise in 2019, nearly 50,000 had their status regularized by 2020.

According to data from the R4V Platform, of the six million refugees and migrants who have left Venezuela, around half lack regular status. Around 80 per cent are hosted across Latin America and the Caribbean and several countries have adopted policies to regularize, protect and include Venezuelans in their communities and economies. These processes, coordinated through regular mechanisms such as the Quito Process, require significant financial support to succeed.

UNHCR and IOM call on the international community, development actors and international and regional financial institutions to provide sufficient and timely support to the sound commitment from Governments across the region in helping foster long-term solutions for Venezuelan refugees and migrants and host communities.

***

For more information:

IOM

In Ecuador, Mireya Murgueytio, mmurgueytio@iom.int, +593 99 131 6137In Panama, Gema Cortes: marcortes@iom.int, +507 6269-4574In Buenos Aires, Paula Vsquez, pvasquez@iom.int, + 593 999454694In Geneva, Paul Dillon, pdillon@iom.int, +41 79 636 9874UNHCR

In Panama, William Spindler, spindler@unhcr.org, +507 6382-7815In Ecuador, Diana D­az Rodr­guez, diazdi@unhcr.org, +59 3994013567In Geneva, Shabia Mantoo, mantoo@unhcr.org, +41 79 337 7650

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Tue, 27 Feb 2024 17:28

ABOUT US & FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

The Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) is an independent, non-profit social enterprise dedicated to exposing human rights abuses and war crimes, countering disinformation and combating online behaviour harmful to women and minorities.

We achieve these goals through open source research, digital investigations, building the capacity of local partners, and collaborating with media to amplify the impact of our work.

CIR was born out of a determination to expose those spreading harm '' online and offline '' around the world, particularly in areas of violent conflict. Our projects in Myanmar , Ukraine and Afghanistan are at the forefront of efforts to investigate and document human rights abuses, war crimes, harms targeting women and minorities, and disinformation. We work closely with multilateral and national justice accountability bodies.

'‹

We are proud, certified members of Social Enterprise U '‹K, the UK's membership body for social enterprises.

Below are some frequently asked questions. If you have any more questions, please do drop us a line at hello@info-res.org

WHO ARE YOU?

Ross Burley and Adam Rutland founded the organisation in 2020. Based around the world, we are a group of passionate open source investigators and research professionals. We're supported by dozens of brilliant volunteers who lend their time to assist our work.

HOW ARE YOU FUNDED?

CIR has no core funding; we receive funding for individual projects that support our organisational objectives of exposing human rights abuses and war crimes, countering disinformation and combating online behaviour harmful to women and minorities. For example, the Myanmar Witness project is supported by grants from the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and Australia's Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Like other charities and non-profits who receive government and multilateral support, these funds go directly towards delivering our project work. Our financial accounts are independently audited on an annual basis. As a social enterprise, all our income goes toward supporting our mission, with no profits going to shareholders.

We also accept donations; we have never received a donation over £500.

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Yes. We have received grants from the UK government's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the U.S. State Department, USAID and Australia's Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade. All funding was for specific projects related to our mission to investigate human rights abuses, war crimes and disinformation.

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We carry out projects that are aligned with our core values of supporting and defending human rights and democracy. Our investigations are based on reviewing, cross-checking and analysing empirical, open source evidence.

Open source data, whether it is satellite imagery or social media content, is generated and provided by people outside our organisation and available to all to be meticulously scrutinised. We also regularly collaborate with independent media organisations, who themselves independently review and check our work. The wider open source community will often ''check our working'' too '' something we encourage and support.

Through our maps (for example, the Eyes on Russia map) we provide open access to the results of our analysis. In our work, including Myanmar Witness , Afghan Witness or Eyes on Russia, anyone can ''see our working'' '' that's a core strength of open source: we will explain exactly how we got to a conclusion about a human rights incident, or discovered an online influence network. We will always show, not just tell.

We believe the explosion of disinformation and online harms has eroded trust within society and for democracy. The scale of the problem is beyond just one sector of society: we believe the only way to challenge this erosion is by all sectors working collaboratively together. That's why we work with governments, but also with academia, the media, other NGOs and volunteers. But our own work '' i.e. our reports and what we choose to focus on '' is driven by ourselves only and is entirely independent.

ARE YOU A FRONT FOR, OR LINKED TO, ANY INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES?

No. We live in an age of conspiracy theories, which spread online and can end up causing real-world harm. Indeed, exposing and combatting this spread is often an important part of CIR's work. CIR and our staff have ourselves been a target of dis-and-misinformation.

Claims that we are linked to intelligence agencies is a tactic used by disinformers to place doubts about the veracity and independence of our work. Open source is exactly that '' open and free to all. Our work speaks for itself.

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We recognise that in the course of CIR's work, individuals may be exposed to violent, graphic or distressing content and that viewing these images can cause vicarious trauma (when individuals experience symptoms of distress similar to those they would experience if they had been present at the event).

This is why we developed this document , which sets out protocols, guidance and tools to help minimise both exposure to traumatic content and the impact of that exposure.

We are also working on a series of articles focusing on mental health and well-being, privacy policy and other useful resources that the OSINT community might find helpful. You can read the first one on vicarious trauma here .

WHAT POLICIES DO YOU HAVE IN PLACE FOR SUPPORTING STAFF AND CONTRACTORS UNDERGOING ONLINE ABUSE AS A RESULT OF THEIR WORK FOR CIR?

While most organisations have policies on how their employees can represent them online, they often don't have strategies in place to support employees if they are targeted by online harms as a result of their work.

This document details the steps CIR employees, consultants, and volunteers should take if they are experiencing online abuse, so that CIR can provide the best support. It also gives advice on engagement with adversarial accounts online, as well as resources for support and guidance outside of CIR.

Read the second in our series of articles focused on protecting researchers, sources and research subjects.

WHERE ARE YOU BASED?

We have a small office in London, but many of our team and volunteers are based around the world.

HOW DO I GET INVOLVED?

We regularly post job vacancies on our careers page, which you can find here . We do offer paid internships and have a Research Associates programme for those looking to embark on a career in open source research related to human rights and disinformation. Keep an eye on our social media channels and our careers page for updates.

We also work with dozens of brilliant volunteers who are interested in open source analysis. If you'd like to get involved as a volunteer, drop the team a message at osint@info-res.org. If you'd like to learn the basics of open source or brush up on your geolocation skills, our Director of Investigations, Ben Strick, has produced a series of YouTube tutorials, which can be found here .

'‹

We also work with academics, other non-profits, and the wider open source community, as part of our Resilience Network. We believe the scale of the challenge of countering disinformation and exposing human right abuses is too large for one single organisation. Our Resilience Network is an informal coalition of individuals and organisations across the work who are dedicated to protecting democracy and exposing the manipulation of information. If you'd like to know more or get involved, please send us email at hello@info-res.org .

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Archived Version

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 17:18

Resident Assistants, the front-line paraprofessional staff members, are the lifeblood of any Housing and Residence Life program because they have the ability to impact a residential community in profound ways. It's not always the RA's who deal with the major crises day-in and day-out that make the largest impact on their floor, but the RA's who perform their duties well and who sometimes go quietly about accomplishing their mission to have an impact on students' lives. Often times, it is the smallest gesture or thought that can have a significant impact upon an individual student such as remembering a birthday or writing a note congratulating a recent success. All of the little efforts that RA's put into developing their communities can often result in a cumulative positive effect on their community '' something known as the ripple effect '' where appropriate role modeling, thoughtfulness, and genuine concern for the community members is adopted by all those who live in it.

For most student staff, issues of diversity and multiculturalism can be difficult to tackle especially when the RA to student ratio is 65:1 on the floor. However, creating a community that is accepting of differences may be easier if RA's develop a diversity mindset by using the ripple effect principle. A diversity mindset is simple: include an element of diversity education into everything that must be done on the floor. It can be as simple as using quotes from famous people or statistical facts about underrepresented groups in the bathroom stalls.

In the residence halls, we often hear that students are tired of having ''diversity shoved down their throats.'' Perhaps it's time that students get a little dash of diversity each day, in subtle ways, as well as through planned educational programs. When an RA is able to present diversity education in small ways consistently on the floor, an environment that is open to diversity is established where not only differences are acknowledged but also similarities are recognized. Developing a diversity mindset requires a commitment to educating others as well as challenging oneself; however, the rewards are great especially when the ripple effect reaches throughout the community and becomes the norm.

Some suggestions in creating a diversity mindset that will have a ripple effect on the students in your community include the following:

Door nametags for residents can cover a wide range of diversity topics. For example, pictures of inventions by African Americans can be in conjunction with a social program game show that requires students to match the invention with the person.

Posting diversity facts or quotes relating to diversity issues on an office or room door.

Thought provoking and challenging bulletin boards are a great passive way to educate students. By using clear contact paper, RA's can protect their work from potential vandals.

Focus some educational initiatives on less talked about diversity issues such as Lookism or Sizeism. When discussing Lookism, be sure to include different cultural expectations of men and women in regard to appearance and size that will lead to discussions of race and ethnicity.

Be inclusive in advertisements and programs. The Dating Game is a great program but can exclude students who do not identify as heterosexual. Challenge yourself to find a way to include all sexual orientations into relationship-type programs.

Collect brochures and information on all the resources available at your school that serves students with special needs, interests, and identities. Display this information on the floor.

If there is a Safe Space program available at your institution, find ways to make your community a safe place for GLBT and questioning students.

Confront jokes, negative comments and other derogatory comments in an appropriate time and place. Remember, 1-1 discussions often yield better results than confronting a group. Do not underestimate your ability to challenge a student's thinking. RA's are often admired (but seldom told so) by residents.

Spice up a movie night by showing a controversial movie such as Higher Learning, Monster's Ball, or the Breakfast Club. The discussion afterward can prove to be very enlightening.

Be inclusive of all holiday celebrations. Be sensitive to what students' needs may be.

Any social program can have an element of diversity included into it. For example, a monthly theme that includes Diversity Bingo (with prizes of course!) will help to educate as well reward students '' not to mention that it is fun!

All of these are ideas to get you thinking and to challenge you to be creative in your own way, but the important thing to remember, is that diversity and multiculturalism are easily incorporated into your job responsibilities if you commit to developing a diversity mindset.

Submitted by Becky Verzinski, Assistant Director of Residence Life, Towson University

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Archived Version

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 17:15

Two days before a major documentary chronicling Wendy Williams' deteriorating mental state is scheduled to premiere on Lifetime, the beleaguered former talk show host's court-appointed caregiver filed a lawsuit against Lifetime parent company A+E Networks.

Sabrina Morrissey filed the sealed lawsuit for injunctive relief on Thursday in New York County Supreme Court. The suit says that Morrissey '-- whose identity as the individual appointed by the court in 2022 to look after Williams had been unknown publicly and to Williams' family '-- is ''acting in her capacity as Temporary Guardian.''

The complaint, which sought a temporary restraining order, names A+E Networks, the parent company of Lifetime, and Entertainment One Reality Productions, which produced the four-and-a-half-hour documentary set to air over two nights, this coming Saturday and Sunday.

On Friday, Appellate Justice Peter H. Moulton vacated a temporary restraining order signed ex parte, ruling that such an order would be ''impermissible prior restraint on speech that violates the First Amendment of the Constitution.''

Moulton continued to keep the case documents sealed, but a court date on the matter has been set for Tuesday, Feb. 27.

Lifetime's executive vp, publicity, public affairs and social media Kannie Yu LaPack confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that Lifetime appeared in court on Friday, but she did not share any details on the proceedings. Yu LaPack also said that the Where is Wendy Williams? ''will air this weekend as planned.''

Filmed between August 2022 and April 2023, the two-part Where Is Wendy Williams? chronicles the former shock jock turned daytime sensation as her health and mental state spiral downward. Williams' representatives disclosed on Thursday that she has been diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia and frontotemporal dementia; Williams also has the autoimmune disorder Graves' disease and lymphedema, which is the buildup of fluid in soft body tissues; along with her alcohol addiction, these ailments are documented in the Lifetime film.

Williams is an executive producer on the raw documentary, originally conceived as a behind-the-scenes look at the relaunch of her career via a new podcast. The production crew began to follow the former host of The Wendy Williams Show in late August 2022, but given her physical and mental state, the focus pivoted to her struggles with addiction and autoimmune disorders.

In a moment from the documentary shared exclusively with People, Williams sits down with her friend Angela ''Blac Chyna'' White '-- the former reality TV player known for her romantic relationship with Rob Kardashian. White, 35, had stopped in to Williams' New York apartment, where the two had a heart-to-heart in which Williams removed her wig, revealing her real hair. Later in the clip, she takes off her shoes to expose her feet, showing White just how her lymphedema has damaged them.

Morrissey was appointed caregiver for Williams amid her public downfall; the TV personality's then-financial adviser alleged in late 2022 in a New York court that she was of ''unsound mind,'' leading the bank Wells Fargo to petition to have Williams placed under temporary financial guardianship.

Williams remains in a facility under Morrissey's care today and is still unreachable by anyone other than the heretofore publicly unknown woman. A call placed by The Hollywood Reporter to Morrissey was not immediately returned.

Feb. 23, 12:13 p.m. This story has been updated with a comment from Lifetime.Feb. 23, 1:45 p.m. This story has been updated with the appellate court ruling in the case.

Hilary Lewis contributed to this report.

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Archived Version

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 17:02

Kyrylo Budanov, chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR) of Ukraine's Ministry of Defense has said that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died of a blood clot.

''I may disappoint you, but as far as we know, he indeed died as a result of a blood clot. And this has been more or less confirmed,'' Budanov told journalists on the sidelines at the ''Ukraine. Year of 2024'' forum on Sunday.

"This wasn't sourced from the internet, but, unfortunately, natural [causes],'' he added.

Earlier Navalny's team, reported that his body was finally handed to his mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, after more than a week since his demise in a remote Arctic colony.

Navalny, President Vladimir Putin's most prominent critic, died on February 16 in one of Russia's toughest prisons in northern Siberia.

He was serving a 19-year sentence on charges denounced by Putin's critics as political retribution for his opposition activity.

"Alexei's body was handed over to his mother," a spokesperson for Navalny's team, Kira Yarmysh said on X, formerly Twitter.

"Many thanks to all those who demanded this with us."

For a week, Russian officials had refused to give Lyudmila Navalnaya custody of her son's body.

She had travelled to the town of Salekhard in the Yamalo-Nenets region, the nearest settlement to the prison colony where Navalny died, to recover it.

His team has already argued that the Kremlin was trying to block a public funeral, which could turn into a show of support for Navalny's movement and his opposition to Putin.

Other Topics of Interest

Moscow Plans to Produce 2.7 Million Rounds of Ammunition, Ukrainian Intel Says A center has been set up in Russia to replace foreign components, especially electronics, with Russian-made elements that are of inferior quality but allow for weapons production.

The Russian leader, who famously never said Navalny's name in public, has not commented on the death of his most vocal critic.

His spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has criticised statements by Navalny's wife and Western leaders blaming Putin for his death as "vulgar".

Initially, Russian authorities claimed Navalny's death resulted from "natural causes" following his loss of consciousness during a walk in the prison colony dubbed "Polar Wolf."

His team denounced officials' initial refusal to release his body -- their refusal for days to let his mother even see it -- accusing them of trying to "cover their tracks".

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Archived Version

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 18:38

The hybrid beef''rice is pink because the cell-culture medium contains phenol red, an acidity monitor. Credit: Yonsei University

Rice has been used as a scaffold to grow beef muscle and fat cells, resulting in an edible, ''nutty'' rice''beef combo that can be prepared in the same way as normal rice.

The study, published today in Matter1, uses manufacturing methods similar to those for other cultured meat products, in which animal cells are grown on a scaffold in a laboratory, bathed in a growth medium. Using rice as the scaffold has the benefit of adding nutrition to the rice, with the beef''rice having a slightly higher fat and protein content than standard rice.

The team of South Korean researchers behind the project hopes that the beef''rice will find use as a supplement for food-insecure communities or to feed troops, and will reduce the environmental impact of rearing cattle for beef. ''Finding alternative protein sources or making conventional livestock production more efficient is critical,'' says Jon Oatley, an animal biotechnologist at Washington State University in Pullman. ''It's probably one of the most important things facing the future of the human race.''

That need has spurred a variety of cultured meat projects in recent years, ranging from fully fledged salmon fillets to products similar to minced beef. As of last year, only the United States and Singapore had approved the sale of lab-grown meat.

The rice grains, seeded with bovine cells, sitting in the growth medium. Credit: Yonsei University

Co-author Sohyeon Park, a chemical engineer now at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, says that the team tried to grow beef cells directly in the porous crevices of a grain of rice, but the cells didn't take well to the grain. Instead, the researchers found that coating the rice in fish gelatin and the widely used food additive microbial transglutaminase improved cell attachment and growth. After glazing uncooked rice grains with the gelatin''additive mix, the team seeded the grains with bovine muscle and fat cells. Then, the cells sat in the growth medium for around a week.

After the culturing period, Park washed and steamed the beef-infused rice as she would conventional rice. ''It was definitely different from regular rice,'' she says. ''It was more nutty and harder.''

Lab-grown meat: the science of turning cells into steaks and nuggets

The nutritional content is also different, but only marginally so. A 100-gram serving of the hybrid rice contains 0.01 grams more fat and 0.31 grams more protein, a 7% and 9% change respectively. According to the study, it's essentially the same as eating 100 grams of rice with one gram of beef brisket '-- less than half a teaspoon. That's because the beef-cell content is low, and the cells probably form just a film over the rice, says John Yuen, a tissue engineer and molecular biologist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. He says the nutritional content could be boosted by increasing the number of bovine cells on the rice grains.

It's something the team is looking into, says Park. In particular, she hopes to improve the fat content of the rice, which could be tricky, because fat cells don't grow as well as muscle cells. In addition to boosting the bovine content of the hybrid rice, researchers would need to keep the price low if the product were commercialized, so that food-insecure communities could benefit from it. The team estimates that 1 kilogram of the rice as it's made now would cost US$2.23, comparable with normal rice ($2.20 per kilogram) and much less than beef ($14.88 per kilogram). And the study estimates that hybrid rice will have a lower emissions footprint than farmed beef.

If production can be scaled up and kept affordable, Oatley says, the hybrid rice could be a cheaper, more efficient source of nutrition than large pieces of lab-grown meat, such as patties or steaks.

Yuen also finds the concept exciting. ''The idea seems really cool, that you can just have one rice and then take care of everything.''

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Archived Version

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 18:35

Photos Maps A Secret Spy War Russia's War Calculus Waiting for Serhiy's Release U.S. World Business Arts Lifestyle Opinion Audio Games Cooking Wirecutter The Athletic Nestled in a dense forest, the Ukrainian military base appears abandoned and destroyed, its command center a burned-out husk, a casualty of a Russian missile barrage early in the war.

But that is above ground.

Not far away, a discreet passageway descends to a subterranean bunker where teams of Ukrainian soldiers track Russian spy satellites and eavesdrop on conversations between Russian commanders. On one screen, a red line followed the route of an explosive drone threading through Russian air defenses from a point in central Ukraine to a target in the Russian city of Rostov.

The underground bunker, built to replace the destroyed command center in the months after Russia's invasion, is a secret nerve center of Ukraine's military.

There is also one more secret: The base is almost fully financed, and partly equipped, by the C.I.A.

''One hundred and ten percent,'' Gen. Serhii Dvoretskiy, a top intelligence commander, said in an interview at the base.

Now entering the third year of a war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, the intelligence partnership between Washington and Kyiv is a linchpin of Ukraine's ability to defend itself. The C.I.A. and other American intelligence agencies provide intelligence for targeted missile strikes, track Russian troop movements and help support spy networks.

But the partnership is no wartime creation, nor is Ukraine the only beneficiary.

It took root a decade ago, coming together in fits and starts under three very different U.S. presidents, pushed forward by key individuals who often took daring risks. It has transformed Ukraine, whose intelligence agencies were long seen as thoroughly compromised by Russia, into one of Washington's most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.

Image A part of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down over Ukraine in 2014, killing nearly 300 people. Credit... Mauricio Lima for The New York Times Image The Ukrainians also helped U.S. officials pursue the Russian operatives who meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Credit... Damon Winter/The New York Times The listening post in the Ukrainian forest is part of a C.I.A.-supported network of spy bases constructed in the past eight years that includes 12 secret locations along the Russian border. Before the war, the Ukrainians proved themselves to the Americans by collecting intercepts that helped prove Russia's involvement in the 2014 downing of a commercial jetliner, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The Ukrainians also helped the Americans go after the Russian operatives who meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Around 2016, the C.I.A. began training an elite Ukrainian commando force '-- known as Unit 2245 '-- which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that C.I.A. technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow's encryption systems. (One officer in the unit was Kyrylo Budanov, now the general leading Ukraine's military intelligence.)

And the C.I.A. also helped train a new generation of Ukrainian spies who operated inside Russia, across Europe, and in Cuba and other places where the Russians have a large presence.

The relationship is so ingrained that C.I.A. officers remained at a remote location in western Ukraine when the Biden administration evacuated U.S. personnel in the weeks before Russia invaded in February 2022. During the invasion, the officers relayed critical intelligence, including where Russia was planning strikes and which weapons systems they would use.

''Without them, there would have been no way for us to resist the Russians, or to beat them,'' said Ivan Bakanov, who was then head of Ukraine's domestic intelligence agency, the S.B.U.

Image A dead Russian soldier in Kharkiv the day after the 2022 invasion. Credit... Tyler Hicks/The New York Times Image Ukrainians cleaning up debris after a residential building was hit by missiles in south Kyiv, the day after the 2022 invasion. Credit... Lynsey Addario for The New York Times The details of this intelligence partnership, many of which are being disclosed by The New York Times for the first time, have been a closely guarded secret for a decade.

In more than 200 interviews, current and former officials in Ukraine, the United States and Europe described a partnership that nearly foundered from mutual distrust before it steadily expanded, turning Ukraine into an intelligence-gathering hub that intercepted more Russian communications than the C.I.A. station in Kyiv could initially handle. Many of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence and matters of sensitive diplomacy.

Now these intelligence networks are more important than ever, as Russia is on the offensive and Ukraine is more dependent on sabotage and long-range missile strikes that require spies far behind enemy lines. And they are increasingly at risk: If Republicans in Congress end military funding to Kyiv, the C.I.A. may have to scale back.

To try to reassure Ukrainian leaders, William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, made a secret visit to Ukraine last Thursday, his 10th visit since the invasion.

From the outset, a shared adversary '-- President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia '-- brought the C.I.A. and its Ukrainian partners together. Obsessed with ''losing'' Ukraine to the West, Mr. Putin had regularly interfered in Ukraine's political system, handpicking leaders he believed would keep Ukraine within Russia's orbit, yet each time it backfired, driving protesters into the streets.

Mr. Putin has long blamed Western intelligence agencies for manipulating Kyiv and sowing anti-Russia sentiment in Ukraine.

Toward the end of 2021, according to a senior European official, Mr. Putin was weighing whether to launch his full-scale invasion when he met with the head of one of Russia's main spy services, who told him that the C.I.A., together with Britain's MI6, were controlling Ukraine and turning it into a beachhead for operations against Moscow.

But the Times investigation found that Mr. Putin and his advisers misread a critical dynamic. The C.I.A. didn't push its way into Ukraine. U.S. officials were often reluctant to fully engage, fearing that Ukrainian officials could not be trusted, and worrying about provoking the Kremlin.

Image Valeriy Kondratiuk, a former commander of Ukraine's military intelligence agency. Credit... Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times Image Ukraine is more dependent on sabotage and long-range missile strikes that require spies far behind enemy lines. Credit... Ivor Prickett for The New York Times Yet a tight circle of Ukrainian intelligence officials assiduously courted the C.I.A. and gradually made themselves vital to the Americans. In 2015, Gen. Valeriy Kondratiuk, then Ukraine's head of military intelligence, arrived at a meeting with the C.I.A.'s deputy station chief and without warning handed over a stack of top-secret files.

That initial tranche contained secrets about the Russian Navy's Northern Fleet, including detailed information about the latest Russian nuclear submarine designs. Before long, teams of C.I.A. officers were regularly leaving his office with backpacks full of documents.

''We understood that we needed to create the conditions of trust,'' General Kondratiuk said.

As the partnership deepened after 2016, the Ukrainians became impatient with what they considered Washington's undue caution, and began staging assassinations and other lethal operations, which violated the terms the White House thought the Ukrainians had agreed to. Infuriated, officials in Washington threatened to cut off support, but they never did.

''The relationships only got stronger and stronger because both sides saw value in it, and the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv '-- our station there, the operation out of Ukraine '-- became the best source of information, signals and everything else, on Russia,'' said a former senior American official. ''We couldn't get enough of it.''

This is the untold story of how it all happened.

A Cautious BeginningThe C.I.A.'s partnership in Ukraine can be traced back to two phone calls on the night of Feb. 24, 2014, eight years to the day before Russia's full-scale invasion.

Millions of Ukrainians had just overrun the country's pro-Kremlin government and the president, Viktor Yanukovych, and his spy chiefs had fled to Russia. In the tumult, a fragile pro-Western government quickly took power.

The government's new spy chief, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, arrived at the headquarters of the domestic intelligence agency and found a pile of smoldering documents in the courtyard. Inside, many of the computers had been wiped or were infected with Russian malware.

''It was empty. No lights. No leadership. Nobody was there,'' Mr. Nalyvaichenko said in an interview.

He went to an office and called the C.I.A. station chief and the local head of MI6. It was near midnight but he summoned them to the building, asked for help in rebuilding the agency from the ground up, and proposed a three-way partnership. ''That's how it all started,'' Mr. Nalyvaichenko said.

Image Independence Square in Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, in February 2014, when popular protests ousted the pro-Russia president at the time. Credit... Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times Image People using lights from their cellphones during a funeral ceremony at Independence Square in Kyiv, in 2014. Credit... Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times The situation quickly became more dangerous. Mr. Putin seized Crimea. His agents fomented separatist rebellions that would become a war in the country's east. Ukraine was on war footing, and Mr. Nalyvaichenko appealed to the C.I.A. for overhead imagery and other intelligence to help defend its territory.

With violence escalating, an unmarked U.S. government plane touched down at an airport in Kyiv carrying John O. Brennan, then the director of the C.I.A. He told Mr. Nalyvaichenko that the C.I.A. was interested in developing a relationship but only at a pace the agency was comfortable with, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.

To the C.I.A., the unknown question was how long Mr. Nalyvaichenko and the pro-Western government would be around. The C.I.A. had been burned before in Ukraine.

Following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine gained independence and then veered between competing political forces: those that wanted to remain close to Moscow and those that wanted to align with the West. During a previous stint as spy chief, Mr. Nalyvaichenko started a similar partnership with the C.I.A., which dissolved when the country swung back toward Russia.

Now Mr. Brennan explained that to unlock C.I.A. assistance the Ukrainians had to prove that they could provide intelligence of value to the Americans. They also needed to purge Russian spies; the domestic spy agency, the S.B.U., was riddled with them. (Case in point: The Russians quickly learned about Mr. Brennan's supposedly secret visit. The Kremlin's propaganda outlets published a photoshopped image of the C.I.A. director wearing a clown wig and makeup.)

Mr. Brennan returned to Washington, where advisers to President Barack Obama were deeply concerned about provoking Moscow. The White House crafted secret rules that infuriated the Ukrainians and that some inside the C.I.A. thought of as handcuffs. The rules barred intelligence agencies from providing any support to Ukraine that could be ''reasonably expected'' to have lethal consequences.

Image Masked Russian soldiers guarding a Ukrainian military base in Perevalnoe, Crimea, in 2014. Credit... Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times Image The wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, in 2014. Credit... Mauricio Lima for The New York Times The result was a delicate balancing act. The C.I.A. was supposed to strengthen Ukraine's intelligence agencies without provoking the Russians. The red lines were never precisely clear, which created a persistent tension in the partnership.

In Kyiv, Mr. Nalyvaichenko picked a longtime aide, General Kondratiuk, to serve as head of counterintelligence, and they created a new paramilitary unit that was deployed behind enemy lines to conduct operations and gather intelligence that the C.I.A. or MI6 would not provide to them.

Known as the Fifth Directorate, this unit would be filled with officers born after Ukraine gained independence.

''They had no connection with Russia,'' General Kondratiuk said. ''They didn't even know what the Soviet Union was.''

That summer, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, blew up in midair and crashed in eastern Ukraine, killing nearly 300 passengers and crew. The Fifth Directorate produced telephone intercepts and other intelligence within hours of the crash that quickly placed responsibility on Russian-backed separatists.

The C.I.A. was impressed, and made its first meaningful commitment by providing secure communications gear and specialized training to members of the Fifth Directorate and two other elite units.

''The Ukrainians wanted fish and we, for policy reasons, couldn't deliver that fish,'' said a former U.S. official, referring to intelligence that could help them battle the Russians. ''But we were happy to teach them how to fish and deliver fly-fishing equipment.''

A Secret SantaIn the summer of 2015, Ukraine's president, Petro Poroshenko, shook up the domestic service and installed an ally to replace Mr. Nalyvaichenko, the C.I.A.'s trusted partner. But the change created an opportunity elsewhere.

In the reshuffle, General Kondratiuk was appointed as the head of the country's military intelligence agency, known as the HUR, where years earlier he had started his career. It would be an early example of how personal ties, more than policy shifts, would deepen the C.I.A.'s involvement in Ukraine.

Unlike the domestic agency, the HUR had the authority to collect intelligence outside the country, including in Russia. But the Americans had seen little value in cultivating the agency because it wasn't producing any intelligence of value on the Russians '-- and because it was seen as a bastion of Russian sympathizers.

Trying to build trust, General Kondratiuk arranged a meeting with his American counterpart at the Defense Intelligence Agency and handed over a stack of secret Russian documents. But senior D.I.A. officials were suspicious and discouraged building closer ties.

The general needed to find a more willing partner.

Months earlier, while still with the domestic agency, General Kondratiuk visited the C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va. In those meetings, he met a C.I.A. officer with a jolly demeanor and a bushy beard who had been tapped to become the next station chief in Kyiv.

Image The C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va. Credit... Charles Ommanney/Getty Images Image Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, a former deputy foreign minister and commander for the Security Service of Ukraine in Kyiv, this month. Credit... Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times After a long day of meetings, the C.I.A. took General Kondratiuk to a Washington Capitals hockey match, where he and the incoming station chief sat in a luxury box and loudly booed Alex Ovechkin, the team's star player from Russia.

The station chief had not yet arrived when General Kondratiuk handed over to the C.I.A. the secret documents about the Russian Navy. ''There's more where this came from,'' he promised, and the documents were sent off to analysts in Langley.

The analysts concluded the documents were authentic, and after the station chief arrived in Kyiv, the C.I.A. became General Kondratiuk's primary partner.

General Kondratiuk knew he needed the C.I.A. to strengthen his own agency. The C.I.A. thought the general might be able to help Langley, too. It struggled to recruit spies inside Russia because its case officers were under heavy surveillance.

''For a Russian, allowing oneself to be recruited by an American is to commit the absolute, ultimate in treachery and treason,'' General Kondratiuk said. ''But for a Russian to be recruited by a Ukrainian, it's just friends talking over a beer.''

The new station chief began regularly visiting General Kondratiuk, whose office was decorated with an aquarium where yellow and blue fish '-- the national colors of Ukraine '-- swam circles around a model of a sunken Russian submarine. The two men became close, which drove the relationship between the two agencies, and the Ukrainians gave the new station chief an affectionate nickname: Santa Claus.

In January 2016, General Kondratiuk flew to Washington for meetings at Scattergood, an estate on the C.I.A. campus in Virginia where the agency often fetes visiting dignitaries. The agency agreed to help the HUR modernize, and to improve its ability to intercept Russian military communications. In exchange, General Kondratiuk agreed to share all of the raw intelligence with the Americans.

Now the partnership was real.

Operation GoldfishToday, the narrow road leading to the secret base is framed by minefields, seeded as a line of defense in the weeks after Russia's invasion. The Russian missiles that hit the base had seemingly shut it down, but just weeks later the Ukrainians returned.

With money and equipment provided by the C.I.A., crews under General Dvoretskiy's command began to rebuild, but underground. To avoid detection, they only worked at night and when Russian spy satellites were not overhead. Workers also parked their cars a distance away from the construction site.

In the bunker, General Dvoretskiy pointed to communications equipment and large computer servers, some of which were financed by the C.I.A. He said his teams were using the base to hack into the Russian military's secure communications networks.

''This is the thing that breaks into satellites and decodes secret conversations,'' General Dvoretskiy told a Times journalist on a tour, adding that they were hacking into spy satellites from China and Belarus, too.

Another officer placed two recently produced maps on a table, as evidence of how Ukraine is tracking Russian activity around the world.

The first showed the overhead routes of Russian spy satellites traveling over central Ukraine. The second showed how Russian spy satellites are passing over strategic military installations '-- including a nuclear weapons facility '-- in the eastern and central United States.

Image A military checkpoint, with a sign indicating land mines along the roadside, blocking the road to the Russian border in Ukraine's Kharkiv region, in December last year. Credit... David Guttenfelder for The New York Times Image Ukrainian police officers setting up a mobile checkpoint in Ukraine's Kharkiv region near the Russian border in December. Credit... David Guttenfelder for The New York Times The C.I.A. began sending equipment in 2016, after the pivotal meeting at Scattergood, General Dvoretskiy said, providing encrypted radios and devices for intercepting secret enemy communications.

Beyond the base, the C.I.A. also oversaw a training program, carried out in two European cities, to teach Ukrainian intelligence officers how to convincingly assume fake personas and steal secrets in Russia and other countries that are adept at rooting out spies. The program was called Operation Goldfish, which derived from a joke about a Russian-speaking goldfish who offers two Estonians wishes in exchange for its freedom.

The punchline was that one of the Estonians bashed the fish's head with a rock, explaining that anything speaking Russian could not be trusted.

The Operation Goldfish officers were soon deployed to 12 newly-built, forward operating bases constructed along the Russian border. From each base, General Kondratiuk said, the Ukrainian officers ran networks of agents who gathered intelligence inside Russia.

C.I.A. officers installed equipment at the bases to help gather intelligence and also identified some of the most skilled Ukrainian graduates of the Operation Goldfish program, working with them to approach potential Russian sources. These graduates then trained sleeper agents on Ukrainian territory meant to launch guerrilla operations in case of occupation.

It can often take years for the C.I.A. to develop enough trust in a foreign agency to begin conducting joint operations. With the Ukrainians it had taken less than six months. The new partnership started producing so much raw intelligence about Russia that it had to be shipped to Langley for processing.

But the C.I.A. did have red lines. It wouldn't help the Ukrainians conduct offensive lethal operations.

''We made a distinction between intelligence collection operations and things that go boom,'' a former senior U.S. official said.

'This is Our Country'It was a distinction that grated on the Ukrainians.

First, General Kondratiuk was annoyed when the Americans refused to provide satellite images from inside Russia. Soon after, he requested C.I.A. assistance in planning a clandestine mission to send HUR commandos into Russia to plant explosive devices at train depots used by the Russian military. If the Russian military sought to take more Ukrainian territory, Ukrainians could detonate the explosives to slow the Russian advance.

When the station chief briefed his superiors, they ''lost their minds,'' as one former official put it. Mr. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, called General Kondratiuk to make certain that mission was canceled and that Ukraine abided by the red lines forbidding lethal operations.

General Kondratiuk canceled the mission, but he also took a different lesson. ''Going forward, we worked to not have discussions about these things with your guys,'' he said.

Late that summer, Ukrainian spies discovered that Russian forces were deploying attack helicopters at an airfield on the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula, possibly to stage a surprise attack.

General Kondratiuk decided to send a team into Crimea to plant explosives at the airfield so they could be detonated if Russia moved to attack.

This time, he didn't ask the C.I.A. for permission. He turned to Unit 2245, the commando force that received specialized military training from the C.I.A.'s elite paramilitary group, known as the Ground Department. The intent of the training was to teach defensive techniques, but C.I.A. officers understood that without their knowledge the Ukrainians could use the same techniques in offensive lethal operations.

Image Petro Poroshenko, then the president of Ukraine, right, and Joseph R. Biden Jr., then the U.S. vice president, during a meeting in Kyiv in 2015. Credit... Pool photo by Mikhail Palinchak Image General Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine's military intelligence agency in Kyiv, this month. Credit... Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times At the time, the future head of Ukraine's military intelligence agency, General Budanov, was a rising star in Unit 2245. He was known for daring operations behind enemy lines and had deep ties to the C.I.A. The agency had trained him and also taken the extraordinary step of sending him for rehabilitation to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland after he was shot in the right arm during fighting in the Donbas.

Disguised in Russian uniforms, then-Lt. Col. Budanov led commandos across a narrow gulf in inflatable speedboats, landing at night in Crimea.

But an elite Russian commando unit was waiting for them. The Ukrainians fought back, killing several Russian fighters, including the son of a general, before retreating to the shoreline, plunging into the sea and swimming for hours to Ukrainian-controlled territory.

It was a disaster. In a public address, President Putin accused the Ukrainians of plotting a terrorist attack and promised to avenge the deaths of the Russian fighters.

''There is no doubt that we will not let these things pass,'' he said.

In Washington, the Obama White House was livid. Joseph R. Biden Jr., then the vice president and a champion of assistance to Ukraine, called Ukraine's president to angrily complain.

''It causes a gigantic problem,'' Mr. Biden said in the call, a recording of which was leaked and published online. ''All I'm telling you as a friend is that my making arguments here is a hell of a lot harder now.''

Some of Mr. Obama's advisers wanted to shut the C.I.A. program down, but Mr. Brennan persuaded them that doing so would be self-defeating, given the relationship was starting to produce intelligence on the Russians as the C.I.A. was investigating Russian election meddling.

Mr. Brennan got on the phone with General Kondratiuk to again emphasize the red lines.

The general was upset. ''This is our country,'' he responded, according to a colleague. ''It's our war, and we've got to fight.''

The blowback from Washington cost General Kondratiuk his job. But Ukraine didn't back down.

Image The pro-Russian rebel commander Arseny Pavlov, known as ''Motorola,'' saluting while taking part in a military parade in Donetsk in eastern Ukraine in 2016. Credit... Oleksii Filippov/Agence France-Presse '-- Getty Images Image Police officials examining the wreckage of Maksym Shapoval's car after he was killed in an explosion in Kyiv, in 2017. Credit... Sergii Kharchenko/Pacific Press, via LightRocket, via Getty Images One day after General Kondratiuk was removed, a mysterious explosion in the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, ripped through an elevator carrying a senior Russian separatist commander named Arsen Pavlov, known by his nom de guerre, Motorola.

The C.I.A. soon learned that the assassins were members of the Fifth Directorate, the spy group that received C.I.A. training. Ukraine's domestic intelligence agency had even handed out commemorative patches to those involved, each one stitched with the word ''Lift,'' the British term for an elevator.

Again, some of Mr. Obama's advisers were furious, but they were lame ducks '-- the presidential election pitting Donald J. Trump against Hillary Rodham Clinton was three weeks away '-- and the assassinations continued.

A team of Ukrainian agents set up an unmanned, shoulder-fired rocket launcher in a building in the occupied territories. It was directly across from the office of a rebel commander named Mikhail Tolstykh, better known as Givi. Using a remote trigger, they fired the launcher as soon as Givi entered his office, killing him, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.

A shadow war was now in overdrive. The Russians used a car bomb to assassinate the head of Unit 2245, the elite Ukrainian commando force. The commander, Col. Maksim Shapoval, was on his way to meeting with C.I.A. officers in Kyiv when his car exploded.

At the colonel's wake, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, stood in mourning beside the C.I.A. station chief. Later, C.I.A. officers and their Ukrainian counterparts toasted Colonel Shapoval with whiskey shots.

''For all of us,'' General Kondratiuk said, ''it was a blow.''

Tiptoeing Around TrumpThe election of Mr. Trump in November 2016 put the Ukrainians and their C.I.A. partners on edge.

Mr. Trump praised Mr. Putin and dismissed Russia's role in election interference. He was suspicious of Ukraine and later tried to pressure its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate his Democratic rival, Mr. Biden, resulting in Mr. Trump's first impeachment.

But whatever Mr. Trump said and did, his administration often went in the other direction. This is because Mr. Trump had put Russia hawks in key positions, including Mike Pompeo as C.I.A. director and John Bolton as national security adviser. They visited Kyiv to underline their full support for the secret partnership, which expanded to include more specialized training programs and the building of additional secret bases.

The base in the forest grew to include a new command center and barracks, and swelled from 80 to 800 Ukrainian intelligence officers. Preventing Russia from interfering in future U.S. elections was a top C.I.A. priority during this period, and Ukrainian and American intelligence officers joined forces to probe the computer systems of Russia's intelligence agencies to identify operatives trying to manipulate voters.

Image Vladimir V. Putin, the president of Russia, talking with Donald J. Trump, then the U.S. president, talking in 2017. Credit... Stephen Crowley/The New York Times Image Mike Pompeo, then the U.S. secretary of state, laying flowers at a memorial to Ukrainian soldiers in Kyiv in 2020. Credit... Genya Savilov/Agence France-Presse '-- Getty Images In one joint operation, a HUR team duped an officer from Russia's military intelligence service into providing information that allowed the C.I.A. to connect Russia's government to the so-called Fancy Bear hacking group, which had been linked to election interference efforts in a number of countries.

General Budanov, whom Mr. Zelensky tapped to lead the HUR in 2020, said of the partnership: ''It only strengthened. It grew systematically. The cooperation expanded to additional spheres and became more large-scale.''

The relationship was so successful that the C.I.A. wanted to replicate it with other European intelligence services that shared a focus in countering Russia.

The head of Russia House, the C.I.A. department overseeing operations against Russia, organized a secret meeting at The Hague. There, representatives from the C.I.A., Britain's MI6, the HUR, the Dutch service (a critical intelligence ally) and other agencies agreed to start pooling together more of their intelligence on Russia.

The result was a secret coalition against Russia '-- and the Ukrainians were vital members of it.

March to WarIn March 2021, the Russian military started massing troops along the border with Ukraine. As the months passed, and more troops encircled the country, the question was whether Mr. Putin was making a feint or preparing for war.

That November, and in the weeks that followed, the C.I.A. and MI6 delivered a unified message to their Ukrainian partners: Russia was preparing for a full-scale invasion to decapitate the government and install a puppet in Kyiv who would do the Kremlin's bidding.

U.S. and British intelligence agencies had intercepts that Ukrainian intelligence agencies did not have access to, according to U.S. officials. The new intelligence listed the names of Ukrainian officials whom the Russians were planning to kill or capture, as well as the Ukrainians the Kremlin hoped to install in power.

Image Russian self-propelled howitzers being loaded to the train car at the station outside Taganrog, Russia, days before Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Credit... The New York Times Image President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine at a news conference in Kyiv in March 2022. Credit... Lynsey Addario for The New York Times President Zelensky and some of his top advisers appeared unconvinced, even after Mr. Burns, the C.I.A. director, rushed to Kyiv in January 2022 to brief them.

As the Russian invasion neared, C.I.A. and MI6 officers made final visits in Kyiv with their Ukrainian peers. One of the MI6 officers teared up in front of the Ukrainians, out of concern that the Russians would kill them.

At Mr. Burns's urging, a small group of C.I.A. officers were exempted from the broader U.S. evacuation and were relocated to a hotel complex in western Ukraine. They didn't want to desert their partners.

No EndgameAfter Mr. Putin launched the invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the C.I.A. officers at the hotel were the only U.S. government presence on the ground. Every day at the hotel, they met with their Ukrainian contacts to pass information. The old handcuffs were off, and the Biden White House authorized spy agencies to provide intelligence support for lethal operations against Russian forces on Ukrainian soil.

Often, the C.I.A. briefings contained shockingly specific details.

On March 3, 2022 '-- the eighth day of the war '-- the C.I.A. team gave a precise overview of Russian plans for the coming two weeks. The Russians would open a humanitarian corridor out of the besieged city of Mariupol that same day, and then open fire on the Ukrainians who used it.

The Russians planned to encircle the strategic port city of Odesa, according to the C.I.A., but a storm delayed the assault and the Russians never took the city. Then, on March 10, the Russians intended to bombard six Ukrainian cities, and had already entered coordinates into cruise missiles for those strikes.

The Russians also were trying to assassinate top Ukrainian officials, including Mr. Zelensky. In at least one case, the C.I.A. shared intelligence with Ukraine's domestic agency that helped disrupt a plot against the president, according to a senior Ukrainian official.

When the Russian assault on Kyiv had stalled, the C.I.A. station chief rejoiced and told his Ukrainian counterparts that they were ''punching the Russians in the face,'' according to a Ukrainian officer who was in the room.

Image A Ukrainian Army soldier preparing defenses at a beachfront position in Odesa in 2022. Credit... Tyler Hicks/The New York Times Image Crowds gathering for food handouts in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson after it was retaken from Russian occupation, in 2022. Credit... Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times Within weeks, the C.I.A. had returned to Kyiv, and the agency sent in scores of new officers to help the Ukrainians. A senior U.S. official said of the C.I.A.'s sizable presence, ''Are they pulling triggers? No. Are they helping with targeting? Absolutely.''

Some of the C.I.A. officers were deployed to Ukrainian bases. They reviewed lists of potential Russian targets that the Ukrainians were preparing to strike, comparing the information that the Ukrainians had with U.S. intelligence to ensure that it was accurate.

Before the invasion, the C.I.A. and MI6 had trained their Ukrainian counterparts on recruiting sources, and building clandestine and partisan networks. In the southern Kherson region, which was occupied by Russia in the first weeks of the war, those partisan networks sprang into action, according to General Kondratiuk, assassinating local collaborators and helping Ukrainian forces target Russian positions.

In July 2022, Ukrainian spies saw Russian convoys preparing to cross a strategic bridge across the Dnipro river and notified MI6. British and American intelligence officers then quickly verified the Ukrainian intelligence, using real-time satellite imagery. MI6 relayed the confirmation, and the Ukrainian military opened fire with rockets, destroying the convoys.

At the underground bunker, General Dvoretskiy said a German antiaircraft system now defends against Russian attacks. An air-filtration system guards against chemical weapons and a dedicated power system is available, if the power grid goes down.

The question that some Ukrainian intelligence officers are now asking their American counterparts '-- as Republicans in the House weigh whether to cut off billions of dollars in aid '-- is whether the C.I.A. will abandon them. ''It happened in Afghanistan before and now it's going to happen in Ukraine,'' a senior Ukrainian officer said.

Referring to Mr. Burns's visit to Kyiv last week, a C.I.A. official said, ''We have demonstrated a clear commitment to Ukraine over many years and this visit was another strong signal that the U.S. commitment will continue.''

The C.I.A. and the HUR have built two other secret bases to intercept Russian communications, and combined with the 12 forward operating bases, which General Kondratiuk says are still operational, the HUR now collects and produces more intelligence than at any time in the war '-- much of which it shares with the C.I.A.

''You can't get information like this anywhere '-- except here, and now,'' General Dvoretskiy said.

Natalia Yermak and Christiaan Triebert contributed reporting.

Image A home, flying Ukrainian and American flags, standing in the destroyed and mostly abandoned village of Rubizhne in the Kharkiv region, close to the Russian border, in December. Credit... David Guttenfelder for The New York Times Adam Entous is a Washington-based investigative correspondent and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. Before joining the Washington bureau of The Times, he covered intelligence, national security and foreign policy for The New Yorker magazine, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. More about Adam Entous

Michael Schwirtz is an investigative reporter with the International desk. With The Times since 2006, he previously covered the countries of the former Soviet Union from Moscow and was a lead reporter on a team that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for articles about Russian intelligence operations. More about Michael Schwirtz

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February 27, 2024 | Part Of Washington Journal 02/27/2024 Washington Journal2024-02-27T08:03:06-05:00 https://ximage.c-spanvideo.org/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJwaWN0dXJlcy5jLXNwYW52aWRlby5vcmciLCJrZXkiOiJGaWxlc1wvYWM3XC8wMDFcLzE3MDkwMzkwNjRfMDAxLmpwZyIsImVkaXRzIjp7InJlc2l6ZSI6eyJmaXQiOiJjb3ZlciIsImhlaWdodCI6NTA2fX19 Miles Yu talked about the increase in Chinese nationals entering the U.S. illegally and China's hacking operations against the U.S.Miles Yu talked about the increase in Chinese nationals entering the U.S. illegally and China's hacking operations against the U.S.

Report Video IssueGo to Live Event"; // $('div#video-embed').html(cookieMsg); // return; // } // });

*This text was compiled from uncorrected Closed Captioning.

Related Video August 31, 2023 Miles Yu on U.S.-China RelationsMiles Yu talked about Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo's visit to China and the economic and national security challenge'...

March 7, 2023 Scott Paul on Manufacturing in the U.S. and China's Economic PoliciesAlliance for American Manufacturing President Scott Paul discusses the state of manufacturing in the U.S., and the impac'...

February 5, 2023 Miles Yu and Michael Swaine on U.S.-China RelationsHudson Institute China Director Miles Yu and Quincy Institute East Asia Program Director Michael Swaine discuss the stat'...

November 14, 2022 Scott Kennedy on President Biden's Meeting with Chinese PresidentScott Kennedy talked about President Biden's meeting earlier that day with Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S.-China r'...

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The former head of DHS' Disinformation Governance Board argues that we're about to be bombarded with election disinformation, and the government has given up trying to fight it.

Keep KCRW Independent.KCRW is here to provide you with local news, music discovery, and cultural connection. Stay up to date with all things KCRW by signing up for our newsletters! And, if you can support our efforts, make a donation today.

Sign-up for our newsletters.Make a donation. Credits Guest: Nina Jankowicz - vice president at the Centre for Information Resilience, author of ''How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict and How to Be a Woman Online''

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What is an anarchist approach to cults? by SocialistCredit in Anarchy101

['']acebush1 21 points 22 points 23 points 3 days ago (0 children)

Whiteness erases culture.

Conformity to whatever some authority declare to be ''the culture'' is not going to somehow stop the creation of cults but exacerbate the conditions which create them.

Right. You're actually agreeing with the comment you're replying to here, so I think you are misunderstanding what culture is. Culture is not conformity; culture arises spontaneously and intentionally from social interaction, and conformity stifles that process. In fact conforming to an authoritarian, prescribed culture such as, I dunno, settler colonial culture, requires the sacrifice of ethnic culture and the autonomy that creates it. And this tends to create a negative feedback loop where, lacking culture, members of the in-group seek to fill the void by further conforming to the prescribed culture by shedding their actual cultural heritage and their ability to create it. So we see the link between authoritarianism and culturelessness.

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Why Monica Lewinsky is the new face of a major fashion brand

Activist Monica Lewinsky has joined the women's clothing brand Reformation as the face of its new campaign aimed at encouraging women to vote in the 2024 election. Washington Post Opinion Columnist Catherine Rampell joins CNN's Abby Phillip to discuss.

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