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18 July 21
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The entire exercise is meant to keep uncertainty alive among the rubes about the clear results of the election.
n Thursday afternoon, out in Arizona, there was a hearing in the state senate regarding the extended farce now in its third month out at the fairgrounds. You will be shocked, I’m sure, to know that it’s now feeding back on itself, a Möbius strip for dicks, in such a way that it never may end, which is sort of the point, because the entire exercise is meant to keep uncertainty alive among the rubes about the clear results of the election. From the Arizona Republic:
Suggesting that the Senate’s review may not be nearing its end, Fann said during a hearing at the Capitol that she expects the demands for additional materials will end up in court, setting up yet another legal battle in the saga that has seen the county and state lawmakers spar over the scope of the Legislature’s subpoena power. Also during the hearing, the Senate’s top contractor on the review recommended reviving plans to go door to door to inquire about some residents’ participation in last year’s general election. The Senate had put an effort to dispatch canvassers on hold after the U.S. Department of Justice raised concerns that it could amount to voter intimidation and violate federal civil rights protections.
See? Everything old (and stupid) is new (and stupid) again.
Logan also raised several issues that Republican lawmakers have questioned for months as some argued to overturn the state’s presidential election results.
He noted concerns about ink bleeding through on ballots, a controversy that flared around Election Day after the county provided voters with felt-tipped markers at polling places. The marks that voters made bled through the opposite side of the ballots, but county officials noted that the columns on each side were not aligned to ensure that did not affect how votes were counted. Still, more than two months after the county delivered about 2.1 million ballots to Cyber Ninjas pursuant to a Senate subpoena, Logan said more analysis is needed on that issue.
Sharpies again! No wonder the U.S. Congress has begun to wonder what the Cyber Ninjas are up to out in the desert. Oversight Committee chairman Rep. Jamie Raskin sent them a letter asking, politely, where this whole bughouse ratfcking campaign is actually headed.
We are concerned about your company’s role in this highly unusual effort, given Cyber Ninjas’ apparent lack of experience in conducting election-related audits; reports that the company engaged in sloppy and insecure audit practices that compromised the integrity of ballots and voting equipment and were questioned by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ); and evidence that you and other individuals funding the audit have sought to advance the “big lie” of debunked voter fraud allegations in the November 2020 presidential election…
The Committee is seeking to determine whether the privately funded audit conducted by your company in Arizona protects the right to vote or is instead an effort to promote baseless conspiracy theories, undermine confidence in America’s elections, and reverse the result of a free and fair election for partisan gain.
Welcome to the NFL, Cyber Ninjas.
One of the really hilarious elements about Thursday’s hearing was the fact that the election officials in Maricopa County were watching and tweeting, refuting what the Cyber Ninjas and their legislative allies were saying in real time. To wit:
It’s “complicated” and “difficult” for Senate contractors to do this audit because they are not qualified to do this audit. It’d be like asking Doug Logan to play point guard for the Suns. That would also be “complicated” and “difficult.”Chris Paul was unavailable for comment.
And the fact that they’re again talking about going door-to-door gives the entire game away. (I would advise Arizona voters to keep garden hoses and buckets of dead fish handy against the arrival of the Cyber Ninjas.) This is a political perpetual-motion machine that is designed never to finish its purported “job.” As is the case with all ratfcking, the process itself is the point.
The investigation by the Guardian and 16 other media organizations suggests widespread and continuing abuse of NSO's hacking spyware. (image: Guardian Design)
ALSO SEE: FT Editor Among 180 Journalists
Identified by Clients of Spyware Firm
Spyware sold to authoritarian regimes used to target activists, politicians and journalists, data suggests
uman rights activists, journalists and lawyers across the world have been targeted by authoritarian governments using hacking software sold by the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, according to an investigation into a massive data leak.
The investigation by the Guardian and 16 other media organisations suggests widespread and continuing abuse of NSO’s hacking spyware, Pegasus, which the company insists is only intended for use against criminals and terrorists.
Pegasus is a malware that infects iPhones and Android devices to enable operators of the tool to extract messages, photos and emails, record calls and secretly activate microphones.
The leak contains a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that, it is believed, have been identified as those of people of interest by clients of NSO since 2016.
Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based nonprofit media organisation, and Amnesty International initially had access to the leaked list and shared access with media partners as part of the Pegasus project, a reporting consortium.
The presence of a phone number in the data does not reveal whether a device was infected with Pegasus or subject to an attempted hack. However, the consortium believes the data is indicative of the potential targets NSO’s government clients identified in advance of possible surveillance attempts.
Forensics analysis of a small number of phones whose numbers appeared on the leaked list also showed more than half had traces of the Pegasus spyware.
The Guardian and its media partners will be revealing the identities of people whose number appeared on the list in the coming days. They include hundreds of business executives, religious figures, academics, NGO employees, union officials and government officials, including cabinet ministers, presidents and prime ministers.
The list also contains the numbers of close family members of one country’s ruler, suggesting the ruler may have instructed their intelligence agencies to explore the possibility of monitoring their own relatives.
The disclosures begin on Sunday, with the revelation that the numbers of more than 180 journalists are listed in the data, including reporters, editors and executives at the Financial Times, CNN, the New York Times, France 24, the Economist, Associated Press and Reuters.
The phone number of a freelance Mexican reporter, Cecilio Pineda Birto, was found in the list, apparently of interest to a Mexican client in the weeks leading up to his murder, when his killers were able to locate him at a carwash. His phone has never been found so no forensic analysis has been possible to establish whether it was infected.
NSO said that even if Pineda’s phone had been targeted, it did not mean data collected from his phone contributed in any way to his death, stressing governments could have discovered his location by other means. He was among at least 25 Mexican journalists apparently selected as candidates for surveillance over a two-year period.
Without forensic examination of mobile devices, it is impossible to say whether phones were subjected to an attempted or successful hack using Pegasus.
NSO has always maintained it “does not operate the systems that it sells to vetted government customers, and does not have access to the data of its customers’ targets”.
In statements issued through its lawyers, NSO denied “false claims” made about the activities of its clients, but said it would “continue to investigate all credible claims of misuse and take appropriate action”. It said the list could not be a list of numbers “targeted by governments using Pegasus”, and described the 50,000 figure as “exaggerated”.
The company sells only to military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies in 40 unnamed countries, and says it rigorously vets its customers’ human rights records before allowing them to use its spy tools.
The Israeli minister of defence closely regulates NSO, granting individual export licences before its surveillance technology can be sold to a new country.
Last month, NSO released a transparency report in which it claimed to have an industry-leading approach to human rights and published excerpts from contracts with customers stipulating they must only use its products for criminal and national security investigations.
There is nothing to suggest that NSO’s customers did not also use Pegasus in terrorism and crime investigations, and the consortium also found numbers in the data belonging to suspected criminals.
However the broad array of numbers in the list belonging to people who seemingly have no connection to criminality suggests some of NSO clients are breaching their contracts with the company, spying on pro-democracy activists and journalists investigating corruption, as well as political opponents and government critics.
That thesis is supported by forensic analysis on the phones of a small sample of journalists, human rights activists and lawyers whose numbers appeared on the leaked list.
The research, conducted by Amnesty’s Security Lab, a technical partner on the Pegasus project, found traces of Pegasus activity on 37 out of the 67 phones examined.
The analysis also uncovered some sequential correlations between the time and date a number was entered into the list and the onset of Pegasus activity on the device, which in some cases occurred just a few seconds later.
Amnesty shared its forensic work on four iPhones with Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto that specialises in studying Pegasus, which confirmed they showed signs of Pegasus infection. Citizen Lab also conducted a peer-review of Amnesty’s forensic methods, and found them to be sound.
The consortium’s analysis of the leaked data identified at least 10 governments believed to be NSO customers who were entering numbers into a system: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, India, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Analysis of the data suggests the NSO client country that selected the most numbers – more than 15,000 – was Mexico, where multiple different government agencies are known to have bought Pegasus. Both Morocco and the UAE selected more than 10,000 numbers, the analysis suggested.
The phone numbers which were selected, possibly ahead of a surveillance attack, spanned more than 45 countries across four continents. There were more than 1,000 numbers in European countries that, the analysis indicated, were selected by NSO clients.
The presence of a number in the data does not mean there was an attempt to infect the phone. NSO says there were other possible purposes for numbers being recorded on the list.
Rwanda, Morocco, India and Hungary denied having used Pegasus to hack the phones of the individuals named in the list. The governments of Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates and Dubai did not respond to invitations to comment.
The Pegasus project is likely to spur debates over government surveillance in several countries suspected of using the technology. The investigation suggests the Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán appears to have deployed NSO’s technology as part of his so-called war on the media, targeting investigative journalists in the country as well as the close circle of one of Hungary’s few independent media executives.
The leaked data and forensic analyses also suggest NSO’s spy tool was used by Saudi Arabia and its close ally, UAE, to target the phones of close associates of the murdered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the months after his death. The Turkish prosecutor investigating his death was also a candidate for targeting, the data leak suggests.
Claudio Guarnieri, who runs Amnesty International’s Security Lab, said that once a phone was infected with Pegasus, a client of NSO could in effect take control of a phone, enabling them to extract a person’s messages, calls, photos and emails, secretly activate cameras or microphones, and read the contents of encrypted messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal.
By accessing GPS and hardware sensors in the phone, he added, NSO’s clients could also secure a log of a person’s past movements and track their location in real time with pinpoint accuracy, for example by establishing the direction and speed a car was travelling in.
The latest advances in NSO’s technology enable it to penetrate phones with “zero-click” attacks, meaning a user does not even need to click on a malicious link for their phone to be infected.
Guarnieri has identified evidence NSO has been exploiting vulnerabilities associated with iMessage, which comes installed on all iPhones, and has been able to penetrate even the most up-to-date iPhone running the latest version of iOS. His team’s forensic analysis discovered successful and attempted Pegasus infections of phones as recently as this month.
Apple said: “Security researchers agree iPhone is the safest, most secure consumer mobile device on the market.”
NSO declined to give specific details about its customers and the people they target.
However, a source familiar with the matter said the average number of annual targets per customer was 112. The source said the company has 45 customers for its Pegasus spyware.
For the willfully unvaccinated, it may be easier to accept the preexisting risk of contracting covid than to embrace the small but unfamiliar risks posed by the vaccines. (photo: Katherine Frey/WP/Getty Images)
In Utah, and across the U.S., doctors are facing a wave of preventable COVID deaths—and trying to convince the hesitant that “it doesn’t have to be this way.”
ear the close of the First World War, Ferdinand Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander, rejected a ceasefire request from the Germans. The two sides were actively negotiating the Armistice; it was clear that the end of the war was imminent. Still, the negotiations continued for several more days, and between Foch’s refusal, on November 8, 1918, and the signing of the Armistice, just after 5 A.M. on November 11th, nearly seven thousand men were killed and thousands more were injured. News that the war would end at 11 A.M. that day was transmitted immediately to both Allied and Central commanders. Still, as Adam Hochschild detailed in a 2018 essay for The New Yorker, the fighting continued: there were more casualties on the final day of the First World War than on D Day, in 1944. The last American killed in combat died at 10:59 A.M.
A century later, we are again losing Americans to a war that could already have ended. Nearly all COVID-19 deaths in the United States are now avoidable. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, data suggest that more than ninety-nine per cent of COVID deaths in recent months were among Americans who weren’t fully vaccinated—a finding so extraordinary that one might question its accuracy if similar statistics weren’t being reported in study after study after study. Six months after the COVID vaccines became available, more than forty per cent of American adults have not been fully vaccinated. The broad numbers don’t tell the full story: vaccine uptake is hugely variable across the U.S., and so more contagious variants are struggling to spread in some communities while inflicting real damage in others. Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to have been immunized; Vermont’s immunization rate is roughly twice that of Mississippi, where fifty-seven per cent of adults have not been fully immunized. Last month, half of American adults said that they lived in a household in which everyone had been at least partially vaccinated, even as a quarter reported that no one in their household had received a single dose. We are, increasingly, living in two Americas.
Early in the pandemic, when I was caring for COVID-19 patients during New York City’s apocalyptic surge, I met Scott Aberegg and Tony Edwards, two critical-care physicians from the University of Utah who’d flown in to help. At the time, most of America remained unaffected by the virus, but New York State was recording a tenth of all the new cases in the world; hundreds of doctors, nurses, and respiratory therapists from across the country had volunteered to help a city reeling from thousands of COVID deaths each week. In early April, 2020, Aberegg, Edwards, and I stood around a nursing station in a makeshift I.C.U., covered from head to toe in P.P.E., as alarms pinged and monitors flashed all around us. I felt a mix of gratitude and awe. The virus had shut the city down; we didn’t know how to treat it; nurses and doctors had died of it. And these guys had run toward the fire.
Since then, Aberegg and Edwards have cared for I.C.U. patients in each subsequent COVID wave: the surge that hit the South last summer, then the viral inferno that engulfed the nation in the winter. Earlier this month, Aberegg sent me an e-mail. “The unvaccinated are dying en masse out west,” he wrote. Aberegg described one man who had “looked pretty good on arrival” but was dead within thirty-six hours; he said he’d seen husbands and wives, both unvaccinated, who were dying of COVID-19. In the U.S., a fourth wave is under way. It’s smaller, more circumscribed, and more manageable—and yet it is especially tragic, because it comes at the eleventh hour.
When I caught up with Aberegg by phone, he told me that, last month, the number of COVID admissions in his I.C.U. had slowed to a trickle. But, by the end of June, cases had started to rise. He began fielding calls from hospitals in neighboring states asking if they could transfer their critically ill patients to his facility, at the University of Utah. By the Fourth of July, half of his hospital’s medical I.C.U. beds were occupied by COVID patients. Most were in their fifties; some were in their thirties, he said. The oldest patient he could remember was in his sixties.
Aberegg told me about a recent case. In late June, he received a call from a small-town hospital in a neighboring state. A man in his late fifties was struggling to breathe, and doctors were debating whether to intubate him. The man’s hospital, like some others in that area, didn’t have full-time critical-care doctors, and so throughout the day Aberegg offered guidance by phone. Eventually, the team of doctors decided to fly the man to the hospital where Aberegg works, in Salt Lake City. He learned that the man’s wife was also ill with COVID-19.
In Utah, the man was intubated. “We thought he would just kind of ride it out,” Aberegg said. “That it would be a two-week ordeal, then he’d start to get better. But that night the bottom fell out.” Despite various ventilator maneuvers, the man’s oxygen levels plummeted; his blood pressure cratered and, eventually, his heart stopped. When it was clear that he wouldn’t live, his wife—who was now receiving care at Aberegg’s hospital, as well—was wheeled into the room so that she could hold his hand as he took his final breath.
During our conversation, I asked Aberegg how it felt to care for so many critically ill COVID patients, many of them middle-aged or younger, at a time when life-saving vaccines are widely available. “There’s a big internal conflict,” he said. “On the one hand, there’s this sense of ‘Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.’ There’s a natural inclination to think not that they got what they deserved, because no one deserves this, but that they have some culpability because of the choices they made.” He went on, “When you have that intuition, you have to try to push it aside. You have to say, That’s a moral judgment which is outside my role as a doctor. And because it’s a pejorative moral judgment, I need to do everything I can to fight against it. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t remain somewhere in the recesses of my mind. This sense of, Boy, it doesn’t have to be this way.”
Aberegg shies away from raising the topic of vaccination with critically ill patients and their families. “It’s a very uncomfortable conversation,” he said. “You don’t want to point fingers or assign blame. Because people are so sick, so many of our conversations in the I.C.U. are already fraught and emotional and challenging. The last thing I want is to invite more of that. It’s become almost a third rail.” Aberegg’s hospital requires visitors to show proof of prior coronavirus infection or vaccination before they enter the I.C.U. Because of this policy, he said, “We end up doing a lot of telephone updates.”
Aberegg, who’s originally from northeastern Ohio, sees vaccine hesitancy not just in his work but in his personal life. His parents, who are politically conservative, got immunized only because he has been an I.C.U. physician fighting the coronavirus for the better part of a year and a half. Many of their friends and acquaintances remain unvaccinated. He told me about the father of a good friend who was recently injured in an occupational accident that left him with multiple broken bones. Even as a bedbound septuagenarian with a neck brace, he refuses to get vaccinated. He described another older acquaintance who told him, “We’re not drinking that Kool-Aid.”
“I said, ‘The unvaccinated are dropping like flies around here!’ ” Aberegg recalled. “But they just blow me off. People want to make their own decisions, even if they’re poor ones. They don’t want to be forced to do anything. It’s part of their identity. But it does make you wonder how informed their choices are. It’s like riding a motorcycle without a helmet. The wakeup call always comes too late.”
Tony Edwards, who trained under Aberegg, now works at a community hospital about twenty miles southwest of the University of Utah, on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. When I spoke with him in early July, he, too, told me that coronavirus cases had increased markedly at his hospital. (Utah currently has the nation’s sixth-worst coronavirus outbreak.) In early June, there were days when not a single medical I.C.U. room at Edwards’s hospital housed a COVID patient; now they account for about a third of the critically ill patients in his I.C.U. The most striking feature of this wave is that “they’re all young,” Edwards said. “I can’t remember treating a single older COVID patient in the past couple months. It feels like they either got it, and they’re gone, or they got vaccinated, and they’re safe.”
Like Aberegg, Edwards told me that it’s not unusual for families to be admitted to an I.C.U. together; when we spoke, he was caring for two couples in their forties. Unlike Aberegg, however, he is very direct when speaking with patients’ families about getting vaccinated. “The first few times unvaccinated patients came in, I wouldn’t bring it up—it felt too raw,” Edwards said. “But I’ve gotten so frustrated that I now have no problem being straight with them. It’s the most aggressive I’ve been with any medical recommendation in my career.” In Edwards’s experience, families almost always say that they’ll get immunized as soon as possible. “Everyone is, like, Yeah, O.K., you’re right, head nod, head nod,” he said. “Then I follow up in a few days and they just kind of look at me sheepishly.” Recently, the wife of a critically ill patient told him that she would get vaccinated that day. She didn’t, and, not long after, she became a patient along with her husband. “I walk in one morning and I’m, like, Oh, there’s two patients with the same last name—what’s up with that?” he said.
With the advent and availability of vaccines, Edwards assumed that he wouldn’t be gearing up for another coronavirus wave. But four in ten adults in Utah are not fully vaccinated. “I try not to feel angry, but it’s hard,” he said. “I try to be fair. I know I’m a well-off white doctor who understands science and medicine. The vaccine came to my place of work and I just rolled up my sleeve. I get that it’s harder for other people. But at this point it’s, like, C’mon, man, this is the most important thing you can do for your health. I’m frustrated, and I don’t know what to do to make myself un-frustrated.”
I’ve followed a similar path in my own thinking. Before the coronavirus pandemic, I assumed that the seeds of vaccine hesitancy—directed, usually, toward shots for diseases like measles—lay in the success of vaccination; if someone had never confronted the devastating paralysis of polio, or the rib-fracturing cough of pertussis, it might be easy for them to question the efficacy or safety of vaccines. The risks of illness might seem distant and amorphous, whereas the risks of vaccination—however spurious—could feel vivid and tangible. As the coronavirus began to spread, I figured that it would change that equation. Surely, faced with a lethal, contagious, economy-destroying pathogen that had upended every aspect of society, even ardent vaccine skeptics would get on board.
That prediction, it turns out, was incorrect. The coronavirus has unleashed unprecedented havoc, killing more than six hundred thousand Americans and potentially leaving millions more with lingering symptoms; COVID vaccines are safe, effective, free, and accessible. Still, millions of Americans remain susceptible to death and disease by choice. Having developed vaccines of astonishing efficacy, we have failed to convince huge segments of the population that those vaccines are worth taking. Scientific success has foundered on the rocks of tribalist mistrust.
What would it take to reach something closer to full vaccination? There are four main levers available to policymakers. Education is the most obvious one: after a year of vaccine talk, it may feel like there’s nothing left to say, but many people still have questions about whether, where, and when they can get vaccinated; recent polling suggests that a majority of Americans—including four in ten who’ve been immunized—either believe or are unsure about at least one vaccine myth. At the same time, more than eighty per cent of unvaccinated individuals say that they would turn to a doctor when deciding whether to get a shot. So it is not too late for conversation to change minds.
Incentives are another lever: states are experimenting with everything from free beer and lottery tickets to college scholarships and cash payments. (Evidence on the effect of these initiatives is mixed, but some research suggests that they may temporarily boost uptake.) Full F.D.A. approval is another: nearly a third of those who remain on the fence say that such an approval would make them more likely to get vaccinated. (Currently, even though hundreds of millions of doses have been administered, COVID shots are given under an Emergency Use Authorization; Pfizer and Moderna recently applied for approval, but it’s unclear how soon they might receive it.) Finally, there are mandates. Increasingly, vaccination is a requirement for living on a college campus, working in an office, flying internationally, attending a concert. (Although the public is evenly divided on vaccine passports, many Republican governors have issued orders or signed laws prohibiting or constraining their use; the Biden Administration has said that it will not introduce a national vaccine mandate or registry, but, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, businesses can require on-site employees to get immunized.) It’s possible that all of these factors—combined, perhaps, with fear of the Delta variant—could push some holdouts over the line.
I asked Edwards what, if anything, he thought might tip the scales for people unsure about the COVID vaccines. He was at a loss, but connected me with two women he works with at one of his hospital’s clinics, who, despite helping people suffering from the aftereffects of COVID-19, have elected not to get vaccinated. (The medical center where they work strongly encourages staff and patients to get immunized.)
Ashlianne Carroll worked in a car dealership before starting as the clinic’s receptionist, in December of 2019. She’s pregnant with twins, due in January, and nearly everyone in her family—her father, her three brothers, their wives and children—has been immunized. Carroll herself gets the flu vaccine every year, but “that’s been around forever,” she told me. “We know the long-term effects. I don’t trust the COVID vaccine yet. There hasn’t been enough testing. All the stuff you hear about side effects makes it not worth it to me.” Carroll said that she’d read reports online of the vaccines’ being linked to stillbirths. “Even if there’s a small chance, why risk it?” she said. To her, contracting the coronavirus seems like the less ominous possibility. Her husband, his parents, and his siblings all got COVID last year; none were hospitalized. “I feel like I’m in good enough health that it won’t be an issue for me even if I do get it,” she said.
Nicole Howard, who works closely with Edwards as a medical assistant, has similar views. Howard had a mild case of COVID in January—low-grade fever, chest congestion, body aches. But she told me that this prior infection, and the immunity it confers, has no bearing on her decision not to get immunized. (The C.D.C. recommends that even people who’ve had COVID be vaccinated, to better prepare their immune systems to fight reinfection.) “I hear about these variants, and I do wonder if it’s possible I could get it again,” she said. “But I’m thirty-one. I’m healthy. I don’t have any underlying medical conditions.” In her clinic, Howard regularly encounters people suffering from the short- and long-term consequences of COVID-19. I asked her how it felt knowing that some of the coronavirus patients she cares for are younger than she is. “Most are older,” she said. “I’m not afraid of COVID. I won’t live my life in fear.”
Howard emphasized that she takes other precautions against the coronavirus: she wears a mask in public, maintains physical distance, and washes her hands frequently. But, when it comes to COVID vaccines, at least for the time being, she’s made her decision. “You can put me in a lottery, you can give me free Starbucks for a year, but it’s not going to change my mind,” she said. “Because it’s not about that for me. It’s about what the vaccine could do to me in the future. My personal feeling is that the COVID vaccines got pushed out too fast. They weren’t studied for long enough. We don’t know what’s going to happen five years down the road. You see these horror stories. Blood clots, stroke, myocarditis. I’m in my childbearing years. Will it cause fertility issues? Will it negatively impact my unborn child?” (The COVID vaccines do not alter your DNA, cause infertility, or affect fetal development; the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been linked to extremely rare instances of dangerous blood clots, and the mRNA vaccines to a marginally higher risk of myocarditis, especially in young men—but, in both cases, the benefits of vaccination far outweigh the risks, and over all the COVID vaccines are among the most intensely monitored and effective in history.) Howard said it’s possible that she’ll reconsider “in a year or two,” if “there’s been more testing and more long-term follow-up,” and if she doesn’t see any issues. What of the possibility of infection—from Delta or another, even more infectious variant—between now and then? “Well,” she said. “I guess that’s just a risk I’m willing to take.”
In the days since speaking with Carroll and Howard, I’ve considered the reasons for the gap between my views and theirs. It’s not that they think COVID-19 is a hoax; they have witnessed firsthand the consequences of infection, just as I have. It’s not that they belong to social networks that are deeply skeptical of vaccines; on the contrary, they work in a medical setting, and most of their friends and family members have been immunized. Still, having weighed the strength of the vaccine science, the likelihood of low-probability events, and the unknowns that remain, they have arrived at conclusions very different from mine.
I used to think that fear could push many hesitant people to get vaccinated—that watching COVID put a friend on a ventilator would make one rush to get a shot. But fear seems to work in unpredictable ways. It’s possible to shift one’s gaze away from the gravely ill and onto those who contracted the virus but escaped unscathed. It’s possible to be more afraid of the vaccine than of the virus. Perhaps the psychology of risk plays a role: for the willfully unvaccinated, it may be easier to accept the preëxisting risk of contracting COVID than to embrace the incredibly small but unfamiliar risks posed by the vaccines. Many people seem to believe either that they won’t contract the virus or that their illness won’t be that bad—a natural and attractive view for younger Americans, but a risky one. Nearly ninety per cent of Americans over the age of sixty-five—people of all races, ethnicities, income brackets, and political persuasions—have received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine. Those facing the greatest risk seem to have an easier time taking an accurate measure of it.
But smaller risks can still be considerable—and, with more infectious variants on the rise, the virus is growing more dangerous to those who remain susceptible. In states where vaccine hesitancy is high, its consequences are already stark. In recent weeks, some of the country’s low-vaccination areas have begun driving a national doubling of daily coronavirus cases, and experiencing a spike in hospitalizations and deaths.
Death is a loss in all its forms. Still, some ends are more comprehensible than others. We might take as inevitable the loss of life in the pitch of war, but casualties suffered in the battle’s final moments, when peace is so clearly at hand, carry with them an added senselessness. Today’s coronavirus deaths are senseless. We’ve been offered a ceasefire. It’s past time we take it.
In this July 21, 1963, file photo, Gloria Richardson, head of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee, pushes a National Guardsman's bayonet aside as she moves among a crowd of African Americans to convince them to disperse in Cambridge, Md. (photo: AP)
Richardson was at the forefront of various civil rights demonstrations in Cambridge, Md.
ivil rights activist Gloria Richardson, whose fearlessness was famously immortalized in a photo of her pushing away a National Guardsman’s bayonet during a 1963 protest, has died at age 99.
Tya Young, her granddaughter, told the Associated Press that Richardson died in her sleep Thursday. She was one of the few women with leadership roles during the civil rights movement, and as The Root reported back in 2015, her actions continue to inspire various Black activists to this day.
Richardson was born in Baltimore. Her family later moved to Cambridge, Md. when she was six. She attended Howard University at 16 and graduated with sociology degree in 1942. In the early 1960s, Richardson joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and later worked with other community members to start the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee in 1962.
This organization focused on public-housing discrimination health care access.
From The Root’s interview with Richardson:
“Cambridge was built on the SNCC model,” Richardson says. “It may have been 400-500 people who helped with the movement.”
But CNAC did differ from SNCC in one key area: “We weren’t nonviolent,” Richardson says. “White folks would come there shooting at your houses, and people responded.”
As the black community became more vocal in demanding equal rights, tension began to escalate. In June 1963, businesses went up in flames as both blacks and whites took up arms, Richardson says. “It was like a little war, really,” she says. “In a certain period of time, it was almost every night.”
The National Guard was eventually called in as a result of the violence. Richardson met with then-U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and other leaders to broker the “Treaty of Cambridge” in July 1963, which ordered equal access to public facilities in the city. Richardson signed it, but never agreed to end the protests in Cambridge. The treaty ultimately failed after the local government demanded that it be passed by a local referendum.
That same year, Richardson was also on stage at the March on Washington as one of six women listed on the program. She was not allowed to speak.
The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 led to a slowing down of the Cambridge movements, and eventually, the National Guard left the city. Richardson resigned from the CNAC in 1964, married her second husband, and moved to New York City–where she continued to work out of the spotlight.
Richardson’s granddaughter Young told the AP that she didn’t seek recognition for her actions in Cambridge.
“She did it because it needed to be done, and she was born a leader,” Young said.
Sidney Powell at a press conference with Rudy Giuliani and other lawyers for then-president Donald Trump after the election. (photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty ImageS)
hings are heating up in a Michigan federal court around the Big Lie, with lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood facing sanctions for bringing a series of election fraud lawsuits that had no apparent basis in law or fact.
This is an extremely important development for the rule of law and the integrity of the judicial system, as it comes on the heels of a New York state appeals court’s decision suspending Rudy Giuliani from practicing law in that state for allegedly lying to the courts. Recall that Team Trump brought 65 post-election lawsuits around the Big Lie, roundly losing 64 for lack of evidence and other legal flaws — including through the pens of Trump-appointed judges.
Here’s the problem for lawyers accused of lying in court: Courts, unlike politicians, are bound by rules of evidence and procedure. They have no choice but to follow the facts and the law. Otherwise, their decisions will be reversed by an appeals court. When it comes to the 2020 election litigation, some judges are finally stepping up to punish lawyers — who are otherwise constrained by ethical rules as a precondition to maintaining a law license — for apparently abusing the courts in order to spread public disinformation for political gain.
Powell and other lawyers brought four lawsuits in battleground states that included Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia. All four were expeditiously rejected all the way to the U.S Supreme Court. A federal court in Arizona called Powell’s case “sorely wanting of relevant or reliable evidence,” a Wisconsin judge called her pleas for relief the stuff of a “mythical time machine,” and U.S. District Judge Linda Parker dismissed Powell’s Michigan case for relying on “nothing but speculation and conjecture.” Powell also faces defamation lawsuits by Dominion Voting Systems and another manufacturer for touting the claim that the companies’ machines fraudulently helped President Biden win the 2020 election. Filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., the Dominion lawsuit alleges that “Dominion’s founder, Dominion’s employees, Georgia’s governor, and Georgia’s secretary of state have been harassed and have received death threats” as a result.
On Monday, Judge Parker held a six-hour hearing on whether Powell, Wood and the other lawyers who proffered such nonsense in court should be sanctioned. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen an affidavit that makes so many leaps,” she noted about one particularly galling piece of evidence. “This is really fantastical. So my question to counsel here is: How could any of you as officers of the court present this affidavit?” Shockingly, counsel for the lawyers reportedly questioned Parker’s objectivity during the hearing, to which the judge shot back, “I would caution you to not question my procedure. You’re here to answer my questions.”
As I explained last year, lawyers practicing in federal court are bound by Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which requires attorneys to certify upon signing any document filed in court — or making any oral argument based on such a document — that it is “not being presented for any improper purpose,” that its claims “are warranted by existing law” and that “the factual contentions have evidentiary support.” Lawyers (and their clients) can be slapped with monetary fines or other sanctions for violations, including an order directing them to pay the other sides’ attorneys’ fees and costs. Rule 11 and state court equivalents are further bolstered by the American Bar Association Model Rules of Professional Conduct and other ethical standards.
In 1991, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Chambers v. Nasco to impose sanctions totaling nearly $1 million, noting that such a penalty may be “necessary to the integrity of the courts” because “tampering with the administration of justice ... involves far more than an injury to a single litigant. It is a wrong against the institutions set up to protect and safeguard the public.” This is precisely why the likes of Giuliani, Powell and Wood are in such hot water. Courts know that the corrosive effect of lawyers’ shenanigans could be longstanding and incalculable. Without swift accountability, an unethical attorney's behavior sets a precedent that weakens the U.S. legal system writ large.
Wood and attorney Emily Newman tried to distance themselves from Powell, asserting that their respective roles were minimal. Wood claimed to not even know that his name was added to the Michigan lawsuit, suggesting he merely told Powell “if she needed my help, I would help her from a trial lawyer standpoint.” Powell retorted that she “did specifically ask Mr. Wood for his permission” to add his name, and counsel for the city of Detroit, David Fink, called Wood’s claim “blatantly false” given his concurrent statements on social media. Parker has given the parties two weeks to file additional papers, with lawyers for the Powell side asking for more hearings with witnesses.
For someone like me who has taught civil procedure to law students for more than 15 years, this tale is the stuff of exam hypotheticals — not something lawyers and judges often see in real life. Judge Parker said she “heard nothing” indicating that the lawyers had done their “minimal duty that any attorney has in presenting a sworn affidavit.” Unlike voters, who can be duped through widespread lies from politicians and via social media, courts are duty-bound to look for substantiated evidence and established law before moving forward with someone’s claim. Rule 11 recognizes that lawyers might be motivated to lie, so it sets up a system designed to deter unethical conduct in the future. Bad things can happen to lawyers who try to "play" judges.
As Americans continue to reel from the Jan. 6 insurrection, with a wide majority of those polled expecting election-related violence in the future, judges are right to be vigilant about slamming the courthouse doors to unscrupulous lawyers willing to exploit the judicial system for cynical advantage. For Powell, Wood and the others who allegedly perpetuated a fraud about a legitimate election in our hallowed courts of law, sanctions are probably coming. And the penalty should be severe.
Husada Utama hospital. (photo: AFP)
The US government is investigating a series of health incidents in the Austrian capital Vienna involving its diplomats and other administration staff.
The syndrome is unexplained, but US scientists say it is most probably caused by directed microwave radiation.
It was first found in Cuba in 2016-17.
US and Canadian diplomats in Havana complained of symptoms ranging from dizziness, loss of balance, hearing loss and anxiety to something they described as "cognitive fog".
The US accused Cuba of carrying out "sonic attacks", which it strongly denied, and the incident led to increased tension between the two nations.
A 2019 US academic study found "brain abnormalities" in the diplomats who had fallen ill, but Cuba dismissed the report.
The Vienna cases first came to light in the New Yorker magazine on Friday and were later confirmed by the US State Department, which said it was "vigorously investigating".
Reuters quoted an Austrian foreign ministry statement saying it was "working with the US authorities on jointly getting to the bottom of this".
Vienna has long been a centre for diplomatic activity and has had a reputation as a hotspot for espionage, particularly during the Cold War.
Countries like the US have a large diplomatic presence there.
The city is currently hosting indirect talks between Iran and the US over attempts to resurrect the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
Cases of the condition have been reported elsewhere in the world, but US officials say the numbers in Vienna are greater than in any other city apart from Havana.
In June, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a wide-ranging review into the causes of the illness.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (photo: AFP)
Sea snot, drought, dead flamingos and burning plastic waste: rising concerns about environmental problems are shaking the president's government
hen a group of Turkish environmental campaigners submitted the paperwork to establish a political party last September, they didn't expect any problems.
The law was clear, and setting up a new party had always been an easy job: you present the documents to the interior ministry, and in no time you've got yourself an official political party.
But fast forward 10 months and Koray Dogan, co-spokesperson for Turkey's Green Party, says they still haven’t been able to legally establish their party.
“More than a dozen political parties have been established while we are waiting. They just wouldn’t allow us to do it,” he told Middle East Eye (MEE).
“They had a bunch of excuses, from the Covid-19 pandemic to bureaucratic obstacles. But they never told us the actual reason."
Dogan suspects that the government has an ulterior motive. “They would like to design the politics to their benefit,” he said.
In recent months, environmental disasters and climate change concerns have risen up Turkey’s political agenda.
Earlier this year, a severe drought threatened water resources in cities such as Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir.
Experts warn drought is now a reality for Turkish citizens as 60 percent of Turkey doesn't receive enough rainfall. “A serious water crisis is rapidly approaching within the next decade if the government doesn’t change its policies,” Murat Turkes, a climate science professor, told a local news outlet.
Last week, a regular observer of Lake Tuz revealed that thousands of newly born flamingos were lying dead in the dried-up part of the basin, due to severe drought.
The plight of the flamingos horrified the nation. Mehmet Emin Öztürk, a nature photographer, told local media that Lake Tuz had been “a paradise for flamingos, but now [it has] turned into a nightmare”.
Last month, the country was shocked as vast amounts of smelly sea snot - a slimy organic matter also known as marine mucilage - appeared in the Sea of Marmara.
The outbreak, which was believed to be the largest on record worldwide, triggered a massive public outcry and reached as far as the Dardanelles.
The root cause of the spongy crust that threatens marine life is climate change and pollution, as increasing water temperatures combined with wastewater runoff to produce the sea snot explosion in the inland sea, which has only two waterways that reach out to the Black Sea and the Aegean.
The issue was quickly politicised. Pro-government media blamed Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu of the opposition CHP party for not continuing plans to build an advanced wastewater system near the Golden Horn. The opposition blamed the government for not taking steps to ensure that all the cities surrounding the Sea of Marmara have undertaken the necessary measures to stop wastewater pollution.
Growing concern
Can Selcuki, the general manager of polling company Istanbul Economy Research, told MEE that polls indicate that voters’ interest in climate change and environmental problems is increasing considerably.
A poll the company conducted last month showed 76 percent of people were worried about the Sea of Marmara.
“More than 85 percent of the respondents in our poll knew about the sea snot. It is an incredible number,” he said. “The youth especially are more troubled by it.”
Nearly six million young people will be able to vote in the next election in 2023 for the first time.
Another poll, conducted by the German Marshall Fund in March and April, revealed that 83 percent of Turkish respondents would like their country to take a more active role in combating climate change.
Ankara is still yet to ratify the Paris climate deal due to economic reasons; Turkey wants exemptions in carbon emissions as it is a developing nation.
Meanwhile, hundreds of protesters in Ikizdere, Rize - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s hometown and his stronghold - have been demonstrating since March against a mining project sanctioned by a presidential decree that is destroying a luscious valley called Iskencedere.
The contractor, Cengiz Construction, has deep ties to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Erdogan himself. The 16 million tonnes of rock that would be dug out is slated to be used in the construction of a new port in Rize.
Dogan, the Greens spokesperson, believes the government is concerned that the environment is becoming increasingly important to the public and it is failing to address their concerns.
Meanwhile, the opposition is using this situation to their advantage.
For example, nationalist IYI Party leader Meral Aksener seized on the Ikizdere protests and invited one of the older female protesters to speak about the issue at the party’s parliamentary group, an event that received widespread media coverage.
With Turkey’s new presidential system, even the smallest parties could play a role in the next presidential elections, scheduled for 2023. Several polls indicate support for Erdogan is at a historic low, and any strong opposition candidate would have an excellent chance of defeating him.
“We obviously don’t have a giant presence but people naturally think about our party because our expertise and agenda are all about the environment and climate change,” Dogan said. “We could contribute a lot to any political coalition with what we represent.”
Poor record
Meanwhile, Erdogan continues to push for his mammoth Kanal Istanbul project, which aims to dig a new waterway in parallel with the Bosphorus. Apart from the extra population it would bring to already-congested Istanbul, and the destruction of the farms and green spaces in the area, the project would also harm the delicate maritime balance in the Sea of Marmara.
A poll by Istanbul Economy Research conducted last month across 12 cities revealed that opposition against the project has increased eight percent in a year, amounting to 60 percent of respondents.
“The government doesn’t have a very good score card when it comes to the environment,” Selcuki said.
“Our research indicates 52 percent of the population oppose public investments if they harm the environment. And the government doesn’t want this group to have a platform and talk about these issues.”
Just last week, Erdogan's government had another setback: Ankara repealed a ban it imposed eight days prior on plastic waste imports, following lobbying by the local plastic industry.
A Greenpeace report in May revealed that Turkey received almost 40 percent of the UK’s plastic waste exports (209,642 tonnes) in 2020, nearly half of which was mixed plastic that is mostly non-recyclable.
The report found that European Union (EU) member states also exported 20 times more plastic waste to Turkey in 2020 than in 2016 - about 447,000 tonnes - making it the largest export country for plastic waste from the EU.
Dogan believes the government’s track record on environmental pollution is mixed.
On the one hand, Erdogan's wife Emine has been promoting a "zero waste” project all over the country that aims to separate recyclable waste from non-recyclable waste in public buildings, and Ankara also regularly promotes tree-planting campaigns.
“But when it comes to plastic waste, we cannot even recycle our own [at home] because we can't separate it from general waste,” Dogan said.
“We produce 3.5 million tonnes of plastic waste in a year. Only 400 tonnes of the waste is processed. The rest is basically dumped into nature through burning or other means. That's why, for example, importing waste from the Netherlands is cheaper.”
Dogan believes that the economy is the only priority for the government and it ignores other issues, such as the environment.
"You cannot create a forest, an ecosystem of its own, by just planting trees all around and creating a landscape."
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