Stephan: Two hundred thousand of us are dead of the coronavirus. Here is the story of the Trump Covid-19 effort told from the inside. It is, of course, yet another account of criminality, incompetence, and self-advancement.
Max Kennedy Illustration by Joao Fazenda
Months before Bob Woodward’s book “Rage” documented President Trump’s efforts to deceive Americans about the peril posed by covid-19, Robert F. Kennedy’s twenty-six-year-old grandson tried to blow the whistle on the President’s malfeasance from an improbable perch—inside Trump’s coronavirus task force.
In April, Max Kennedy, Jr., despite having signed a nondisclosure agreement, sent an anonymous complaint to Congress detailing dangerous incompetence in the Administration’s response to the pandemic. On the phone recently from Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, Kennedy explained why he’d alerted Congress. “I just couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I was so distressed and disturbed by what I’d seen.”
How did a Kennedy end up in a sensitive role in the Trump Administration? After graduating from Harvard, in 2016, Kennedy did some time at consulting and investment firms; he planned to take the LSAT in March, but the pandemic cancelled it. At loose ends, he responded to a friend’s suggestion that he join a volunteer task force that Jared Kushner was forming, to get vital personal protective equipment, such as masks, to […]
Stephan: Water is destiny. I have been writing about this for more than a decade, and it amazes me how little effort worldwide is being made to prepare for what is already happening, let alone what is going to happen. This report lays it out.
One in four children worldwide will be living in areas of extremely high water stress by 2040, researchers estimated
From erratic rainfall to severe droughts, global warming is increasing competition for water around the world, with water-related conflicts on the rise.
According to the WRI, more than two billion people live in countries experiencing “high” water stress.
Conserving forests, wetlands and watersheds, including those around cities, can help absorb rainfall, helping stem crop losses from flooding and drought.
From Yemen to India, and parts of Central America to the African Sahel, about a quarter of the world’s people face extreme water shortages that are fueling conflict, social unrest and migration, water experts said on Wednesday.
With the world’s population rising and climate change bringing more erratic rainfall, including severe droughts, competition for scarcer water is growing, they said, with serious consequences.
“If there is no water, people will start to move. If there is no water, politicians are going to try and get their hands on it and they might start to fight over it,” warned Kitty van der Heijden, head of […]
Stephan: This report of one of several water wars already underway, tells me two things. This is a growing trend; and 2) This is a world where a small group of dedicated digital warriors in or out of government can skew the course of history. Another example is the ongoing Russian trollwork to influence American voters to favor Trump, just as they did in the 2016 election.
Workers move iron girders from a crane at the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), near Guba in Ethiopia, on December 26, 2019. Credit: EDUARDO SOTERAS / AFP/ Getty
It took only a few weeks to plan the cyberattack—and a few more to abandon the world of ethical hacking for the less noble sort. But they would do anything for the Nile, the four young Egyptians agreed.
With that, the group calling themselves the Cyber_Horus Group in late June hacked more than a dozen Ethiopian government sites, replacing each page with their own creation: an image of a skeleton pharaoh, clutching a scythe in one hand and a scimitar in the other. “If the river’s level drops, let all the Pharaoh’s soldiers hurry,” warned a message underneath. “Prepare the Ethiopian people for the wrath of the Pharaohs.”
“There is more power than weapons,” one of the hackers, who asked not to be identified by name, told Foreign Policy. Also, it was a pretty easy job, the hacker added.
A few weeks later and thousands of miles away, a 21-year-old Ethiopian named Liz applied […]
Stephan: Trump and his operation, what was once the U.S. government, are undeniably criminal. At the moment the United States is run by a fascist kleptocracy that is in the process of making itself legal and normal. November 3rd will determine what happens.
The latest bombshell book on the Trump administration reveals new details on the special counsel investigation into the president’s relationship with Moscow.
Andrew Weissmann
“The team led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, failed to do everything it could to determine what happened in the 2016 election, shying away from steps like subpoenaing President Trump and scrutinizing his finances out of fear he would fire them, one of Mr. Mueller’s top lieutenants argued in the first insider account of the inquiry,” The New York Timesreported Monday.
“The team took elaborate steps to protect its files of evidence from the risk that the Justice Department might destroy them if Mr. Trump fired them and worked to keep reporters and the public from learning what they were up to, Mr. Weissmann wrote in “Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation,” which Random House will publish next week,” the newspaper reported. “While he speaks reverently of Mr. Mueller, he also says his boss’s diffidence made him ill-suited for aspects of shepherding the politically charged investigation. He saw Mr. Mueller […]
Julian E. Barnes and David E. Sanger, - The New York Times
Stephan: Lest there be any doubt.
Russia has become an authoritarian country under President Vladimir V. Putin, and little in its foreign policy occurs without his knowledge or blessing, national security officials have repeatedly said.Credit…Pool photo by Mikhail Klimentyev
WASHINGTON — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is most likely continuing to approve and direct interference operations aimed at raising President Trump’s re-election chances, a recent C.I.A. analysis concluded, a signal that intelligence agencies continue to back their assessment of Russian activities despite the president’s attacks.
The assessment was disseminated in support of sanctions imposed this month on Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russian Ukrainian lawmaker who has spread information critical of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. It is consistent with intelligence officials’ warning to lawmakers in January that Russia was interfering on Mr. Trump’s behalf, a briefing that outraged Republicans and eventually helped oust Joseph Maguire from his post as acting director of national intelligence.
The C.I.A. has moderate confidence in its analysis, a lower degree of certainty than its 2016 assessment of Mr. Putin’s preferences, in part […]
