Fux Stoking violence.........

Fox News accused of stoking violence after Tucker Carlson ‘revolt’ prediction

Martin Pengelly

Fox News is driving political violence in the US, a media watchdog warned, after the primetime host Tucker Carlson predicted “revolt” against the Biden administration.

In a Monday night monologue targeting the White House and military leaders over the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Carlson demanded resignations. He also said: “When leaders refuse to hold themselves accountable over time, people revolt. That happens.

“We need to change course immediately and start acknowledging our mistakes. The people who made them need to start acknowledging them or else the consequences will be awful.”

Angelo Carusone, president and chief executive of Media Matters for America, a progressive group, said: “When there’s another big violent rightwing flashpoint that captures attention, way too many in media will wonder out loud: ‘How did this happen?’ ‘Were there the signs?’

“You don’t need to wade into the online fever-swamps to see the cauldron of extremism simmering. Fox News is ratcheting up heat and legitimising nightly.

“Fox News, not Facebook, will be the driver of the next insurrection. Plain and simple.”

Fox News declined to comment.

Misinformation spread through Facebook and other platforms has been widely blamed for stirring up political violence including the deadly assault on the US Capitol on 6 January, by Trump supporters seeking to overturn the election.

Earlier this month, a man from North Carolina was detained after parking his van near the Capitol in Washington and claiming to have a bomb while voicing anti-government grievances on a Facebook livestream.

Charged with threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction and attempting to use an explosive device, Floyd Ray Roseberry faces life in prison. He told a judge he had not taken his “mind medication”. A court-appointed psychologist found him to have bipolar disorder.

Some defendants in cases stemming from the 6 January attack have cited “Foxitis”, saying too much exposure to Fox News convinced them the election was stolen by Democrats.

Carlson is not the only prominent rightwinger to raise the idea of armed revolt.

On Sunday, the North Carolina Republican congressman Madison Cawthorn, a gadfly on the extreme right of the party, said at an event in his state that Joe Biden was not properly elected.

He also said widespread election fraud, which supporters of Donald Trump continue to claim without evidence, would “lead to one place, and that’s bloodshed”.

“And I will tell you,” Cawthorn said, “as much as I am willing to defend our liberty at all costs, there’s nothing that I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American. And the way that we can have recourse against that is if we all passionately demand that we have election security in all 50 states.”

A spokesman for Cawthorn told CNN the congressman was “clearly advocating for violence not to occur over election integrity questions” and “fears others would erroneously choose that route and strongly states that election integrity issues should be resolved peacefully and never through violence”.

Facebook transparency tool.......

Thousands of posts around January 6 riots go missing from Facebook transparency tool

The social media company said it was a technical error, and has been fixed, but tens of thousands of posts are still missing.

BY MARK SCOTT

Scores of Facebook posts from the days before and after the January 6 Capitol Hill riots in Washington are missing.

The posts disappeared from Crowdtangle, a tool owned by Facebook that allows researchers to track what people are saying on the platform, according to academics from New York University and Université Grenoble Alpes.

The lost posts — everything from innocuous personal updates to potential incitement to violence to mainstream news articles — have been unavailable within Facebook's transparency system since at least May, 2021. The company told POLITICO that they were accidentally removed from Crowdtangle because of a limit on how Facebook allows data to be accessed via its technical transparency tools. It said that the error had now been fixed.

Facebook did not address the sizeable gap in its Crowdtangle data publicly until contacted by POLITICO, despite ongoing pressure from policymakers about the company's role in helping spread messages, posts and videos about the violent insurrection, which killed five people. On Friday, U.S. lawmakers ordered the company to hand over reams of internal documents and data linked to the riots, including details on how misinformation, which targeted the U.S. presidential election, had spread.

It is unclear how many posts are still missing from Crowdtangle, when they will be restored, and if the problem solely affects U.S. content or material from all of Facebook's 2.4 billion users worldwide. The academics who discovered the problem estimate that tens of thousands of Facebook posts are currently missing.

"If Facebook knew about this, and just didn't tell anyone, I think researchers should be pretty concerned about that fact," Laura Edelson, an academic at NYU and part of the team that found the missing data, told POLITICO. Edelson is in an ongoing battle with Facebook over a separate research project about what political ads are displayed within the feeds — a project the company says breaks its privacy policy.

Transparency battle

The failure to disclose the lost posts, which was due to a technical error, comes at a difficult time for Facebook and its efforts to promote transparency around what people see within its network.

After an internal battle, the company is currently dismantling the Crowdtangle team after researchers and journalists used the tool repeatedly to trace how far-right, extremist and false content circulated widely across both Facebook and Instagram. The tech giant also published its own report this month on what content was most widely viewed during the second quarter of this year, primarily highlighting viral spam and links to mainstreams sites like YouTube.

But after the New York Times was handed details about the most widely viewed posts from the first three months of the year, Facebook was forced to disclose similar statistics for that period. They showed that misinformation around COVID-19 was still among the most popular content on the site despite the company's efforts to clamp down on it.

The latest episode underscores longstanding concerns about transparency on Facebook.

"Researchers do assume that they are getting all the public content from Facebook pages that are indexed by Crowdtangle," said Edelson. "Those assumptions have been violated in this case."

In response to POLITICO, Facebook said it had now fixed the error related to the missing Crowdtangle data, and that all the original posts were still available directly via Facebook. A spokesperson also said that roughly 80 percent of the missing posts flagged by both NYU and Université Grenoble Alpes researchers should not have been available on Crowdtangle, either because they had subsequently deleted or made private by Facebook users. She declined to comment on how many posts, in total, had gone missing from the Crowdtangle platform.

"We appreciate the researchers bringing these posts to our attention," said the Facebook spokesperson.

'Something was clearly wrong'

The researchers first discovered the missing posts after comparing two versions of a Crowdtangle database of Facebook content produced by U.S. media outlets between September 2020 and January 2021.

After the Capitol Hill riots, the academics said they had planned to analyze what type of content Facebook had removed related to the insurrection to meet its content moderation policies. But they soon discovered that up to 30 percent of the posts collected in the weeks around the January 6 riots — roughly from December 28, 2020 to January 11, 2021 — from the second Crowdtangle database were missing compared to the original.

"We came up tens of thousands of posts short. We knew something was clearly wrong," said Edelson. "We were able to find some of the posts that we couldn't find on Crowdtangle, but we were able to find that they were still available on Facebook. That's when we knew, OK, this isn't us, there is some kind of real bug here."

It is unclear how extensive the problem with the Crowdtangle data is.

Facebook did not comment on how many posts were still missing from the system, and POLITICO's review of the academics' work found that less than half of the roughly 50,000 missing posts were currently available via the transparency tool. The remaining Facebook content was no longer accessible, either because it had been deleted or made private on the global platform, and therefore was not automatically collected on Crowdtangle.

The academics flagged the issue to Facebook on August 3 — hours before the company suspended Edelson and two other researchers' accounts, including their access to Crowdtangle, for their separate work around political ads.

The researchers said they had not heard back from the company about the missing data, even though academics, journalists and policymakers continue to use the transparency tool in efforts to uncover what happened during the Capitol Hill riots.

"Obviously, my situation with Facebook is not ideal. But I think even leaving aside questions of who has permission to access Crowdtangle data and other forms of Facebook transparency data, I think, at this point, Facebook has lost a tremendous amount of credibility," said Edelson. "And I don't really know how they are going to get it back."

Travel list....

Tourists, industry in limbo after EU drops US from safe travel list

It is up to individual countries to decide whether to follow the EU’s recommendation.

BY HANNE COKELAERE AND JILLIAN DEUTSCH

The EU’s decision to take the United States off its approved travel list, just months after it was included, has upset the travel industry — but it doesn’t bring transatlantic travel to a crashing halt.

EU countries agreed to take the U.S. off the list Monday, in a decision that also saw Israel, Kosovo, Lebanon, Montenegro and North Macedonia dropped.

The move means U.S. travelers could once again face restrictions on nonessential trips to Europe, although countries can lift that ban for fully vaccinated tourists.

The "decisive" factor was a surge in coronavirus cases in the U.S., an EU diplomat said. The country, which is dealing with a daily average of 155,000 newly reported infections, had previously been placed on a "watch list" as a result of climbing case numbers, according to two diplomats.

The EU last year recommended that countries put a temporary stop on nonessential trips from outside the EU, arguing that a coordinated approach was crucial in convincing governments to lift travel restrictions within the bloc.

Its list of non-EU countries from which travel is nonetheless considered safe is updated every two weeks, based on an assessment of criteria such as the countries’ health status, their approach to the pandemic, the trustworthiness of their data and their willingness to reciprocate. 

Because the EU's recommendation is nonbinding, the impact of the decision to remove the U.S. from the list will depend on whether individual countries choose to follow it — something that is not yet clear.

It’s in countries' interest — and that of the EU’s free-travel zone — that they follow EU travel measures, for the sake of coherence, but “it is, and remains, a recommendation,” one EU diplomat said.

Croatia, for instance, has taken a more liberal approach to travel from outside the EU, allowing third-country nationals traveling for tourist reasons to enter with a negative test or proof of vaccination or recovery.

Mato Franković, the mayor of Dubrovnik, said in an interview earlier this month: “You see that things are pretty much under control … even if we have really a lot of people now in all destinations throughout Croatia.”

For the travel industry, the decision spells trouble.

The decision “is extremely disappointing for Europe’s airlines and our ailing tourism sector,” Jennifer Janzen, of airline lobby group A4E, said Monday, arguing that “with the spread of the Delta variant in communities on both sides of the Atlantic, it’s clear that air travel is not the source.”

The recommendation is “bad news” for travel agents, too, Eric Drésin, secretary-general of industry group ECTAA, said. Besides expected business losses, which risk “further fragilizing the companies," the decision "shows that we are still in the midst of the pandemic,” he said, warning that it would be a blow to people's confidence that they can travel safely.

Both called on U.S. and EU decision-makers to lift restrictions for travelers who got vaccinated, tested, or who have recovered from the virus.

History repeats...

As Hurricane Ida Strands Thousands, the Police Would Rather Focus on “Anti-Looting” Patrols

Some residents worry the approach “will put more Black lives in particular in danger.”

SAMANTHA MICHAELS

As Hurricane Ida pummeled Louisiana on Sunday, blowing roofs off buildings and knocking out power to the entire city of New Orleans, hundreds of thousands of people were left stranded without air-conditioning and refrigeration in sweltering summer temperatures. Along the state’s coast, some residents remained trapped by floodwaters, begging for rescue. The storm, one of the strongest hurricanes to ever hit the United States, has drawn comparisons to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“[T]he city is powerless and underwater & they’re using their resources for…anti looting.”

But as the damage grew on Sunday, the New Orleans Police Department, rather than diverting all its resources to deliver food and water to vulnerable residents, announced another priority: sending out “anti-looting” officers to protect businesses and their capital. Police Superintendent Shaun Ferguson argued that people would take advantage of the electricity outage for their own illegal gains. “Without power, that creates opportunities for some, and we will not tolerate that,” he said in a video on Facebook on Sunday, standing beside Mayor LaToya Cantrell. “We will implement our anti-looting deployment to ensure the safety of our citizens, ensure the safety of our citizens’ property.”

Just to emphasize the point: In the middle of a natural disaster, with elderly people stuck at home in dangerous heat, as boats and helicopters scour the state to find people who fled to their attics and rooftops, the cops seems less interested in helping residents access life-saving essentials than they do in criminalizing them. “[T]he city is powerless and underwater,” one lawyer with the Twitter handle Jane, Esq. tweeted, “& they’re using their resources for…anti looting. [T]his is a poster example for defund the police.”

As of Monday, the New Orleans police department had already made several arrests for stealing.”This is a state felony,” Ferguson said at a Monday briefing, according to the Associated Press, “and we will be booking you accordingly.” He said his officers were working 12-hour shifts with the Louisiana National Guard to prevent thefts. It’s “all hands on deck,” he said. 

Residents objected to the police’s strategy. “[P]eople’s lives are in danger,” Ko Bragg, a New Orleans-based editor at Scalawag, tweeted, “and an anti–looting patrol, whatever dystopian bullshit that is, will put more Black lives in particular in danger.”

The police department’s response brings back memories from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when the media and law enforcement propagated rumors about looting and crime—misinformation that ultimately hampered relief efforts and left people stranded without basic necessities for far too long. If you haven’t listened already to Floodlines, the podcast series hosted by Vann Newkirk II about Hurricane Katrina, it’s worth your time. In the series, Newkirk II traces how the real story of people trying to keep each other alive was warped into inflammatory and often false news clips about looting and lawlessness that blamed victims for their own trauma, especially Black residents unable to evacuate from the storm. Here’s a glimpse at some more reporting in the Frontlines transcript:

Newkirk II: The city was mostly blacked out by the storm, and the media relied on partial and often secondhand reports…And a particular narrative began to emerge: chaos.

Archival news clip: Gangs of thieves who armed themselves from local stores now roam the streets, looting even the hospitals. It’s forced state officials to divert scarce resources to neighborhood patrols, hoping that a show of force will keep the looting in check.

…

Newkirk II: Reporters seemed especially interested in images of people taking TVs or Jordans. You would see the same reels of the same Black people going into the same stores, over and over.

…

Newkirk II: There were a lot of reporters trying to make a distinction between good looters and bad looters. But the fixation on looting in the first place was a distraction.

Archival news clip: This is the center of one of the great centers of America, New Orleans. Here we have a virtual refugee camp with thousands of people waiting for some sort of help—medical, food, water, you name it. And then over there, the police. Scores of police officers are concerned about one looter who’s in that supermarket.

Newkirk II: It was like all the suffering was invisible to some people. All they could see was crime.

After Hurricane Katrina, as false rumors spread that the Superdome where people were sheltering had turned into a war-zone of rape and murder, journalists reported that hundreds of police officers in New Orleans were called away from their rescue work to deal with “lawlessness.” The paranoia about crime got so intense that the Red Cross waited weeks to come to the city. Some trapped residents told Frontlines that it felt dehumanizing to see officers standing guard with rifles rather than delivering aid. “So I didn’t understand why they was doing that instead of being down here helping us or bringing food and water. Like, why are we being treated like dogs?” said Le-Ann Williams, then a 14-year-old girl whose family took shelter at the city’s convention center. ProPublica reported that a police commander told his officers they had permission to shoot “looters.”

And sure enough, New Orleans officers gunned down at least 10 people after the storm. In one instance, officers responding to a distress call opened fire on two groups of Black people who were not armed and had been crossing the Danziger Bridge in search of food and water, injuring at least four people and killing two, including a man with developmental disabilities who was shot in the back.

Hurricane Ida’s landfall came exactly 16 years to the day after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. But as Police Superintendent Ferguson urged New Orleans residents to avoid crime and “be vigilant,” and as his officers booked people into jail for alleged theft, it appears that even after all these years, law enforcement in the city haven’t changed much.

This is from 2017...

ALL THE TIMES DONALD TRUMP SAID THE U.S. SHOULD GET OUT OF AFGHANISTAN

Trump is expected to announce Monday night that he’s sending several thousand more U.S. troops to fight in the 16-year war.

Jon Schwarz and Robert Mackey

FOR years as a reality TV star, Donald Trump demanded that the United States leave Afghanistan. Among other things, he said that the U.S. had “wasted an enormous amount of blood and treasure” and “wasted lives” there, that the war was “nonsense,” and that instead we should “rebuild the USA.”

On Monday night, as president, Trump is expected to announce that he’s sending several thousand more American troops to fight in the 16-year war.

There are currently about 8,400 U.S. soldiers stationed there, as well as approximately 6,000 from other members of NATO. The number of American troops in Afghanistan peaked at 100,000 in 2011. A total of 3,539 coalition soldiers have died during the war.

Afghanistan was barely mentioned during the 2016 presidential campaign. The GOP platform did not say much on the subject. “A Republican president will work with all regional leaders to restore mutual trust,” it read. Trump said nothing about it during his convention and inaugural speeches, and essentially nothing in his campaign book, “Crippled America.”

During an October 2015 interview with CNN, Trump was asked whether he believed “that American boots should stay on the ground in Afghanistan.” He replied, “We made a terrible mistake getting involved there in the first place.” He added: “Are they going to be there for the next 200 years? At some point, what’s going on?”

However, he did qualify his statement. “I would leave the troops there, begrudgingly,” he said. “You probably have to because that thing will collapse about two seconds after they leave.” (A few weeks later Trump denied he’d said that the Afghanistan war was a mistake.)

Below, in reverse chronological order, are Trump’s statements on Twitter and television calling for the U.S. to withdraw.

November 2013:

Do not allow our very stupid leaders to sign a deal that keeps us in Afghanistan through 2024-with all costs by U.S.A. MAKE AMERICA GREAT!

November 21, 2013

We have wasted an enormous amount of blood and treasure in Afghanistan. Their government has zero appreciation. Let's get out!

March 2013:

We should leave Afghanistan immediately. No more wasted lives. If we have to go back in, we go in hard & quick. Rebuild the US first.

January 2013:

I agree with Pres. Obama on Afghanistan. We should have a speedy withdrawal. Why should we keep wasting our money -- rebuild the U.S.!

January 14, 2013

Let’s get out of Afghanistan. Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.

December 2012:

Karzai of Afghanistan is not sticking with our signed agreement. They are dropping us like dopes. Get out now and re-build U.S.!

September 2012:

84% of US troops wounded & 70% of our brave men & women killed in Afghanistan have all come under Obama. Time to get out of there.

August 2012:

Why are we continuing to train these Afghanis who then shoot our soldiers in the back? Afghanistan is a complete waste. Time to come home!

March 13, 2012

“Afghanistan is a total and complete disaster,” Trump said in the first seconds of that vlog post (which was deleted from the Trump Organization’s YouTube channel after the 2016 election, but preserved by The Intercept).

“Let’s get with it, get out of Afghanistan,” Trump argued then. “We’ve wasted billions and billions of dollars, and more importantly, thousands and thousands of lives — not to mention all of these young men and women that come home and they really have problems.”

February 2012:

It is time to get out of Afghanistan. We are building roads and schools for people that hate us. It is not in our national interests.

February 27, 2012

In this last tweet, Trump linked to a Fox and Friends interview in which he said, “What are we doing there? These people hate us. As soon as we leave, it’s all going to blow up anyway. And you say, ‘What are we doing there?’ We’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars, trillions of dollars on this nonsense. … What are we doing? We’re a debtor nation. We can’t build our own schools, yet we build schools in Afghanistan.”

December 2011:

On CNN, Trump declared that the U.S. should “get out” of Afghanistan, adding, “We have to rebuild our country. We’re rebuilding. You know, you go to Afghanistan. There is a school. It gets blown up. We rebuild it. We build a road to the school. They both get blown up. We rebuild. In the meantime, if you want to build a school in Brooklyn or Iowa or California, you can’t build them.”

October 2011:

When will we stop wasting our money on rebuilding Afghanistan? We must rebuild our country first.

This was stupid from the start... But remember who made the withdrawal deal....

Afghan conflict: Trump hails deal with Taliban to end 18-year war

From BBC

Mr Trump said 5,000 US troops would leave Afghanistan by May and he would meet Taliban leaders in the near future, without specifying where.

The US and Nato allies have agreed to withdraw all troops within 14 months if the militants uphold the historic deal.

Talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban are due to follow.

Under the agreement, the militants also agreed not to allow al-Qaeda or any other extremist group to operate in the areas they control.

The US invaded Afghanistan weeks after the September 2001 attacks in New York by al-Qaeda, then based in Afghanistan. The Taliban were ousted from power but became an insurgent force that by 2018 was active in more than two-thirds of the country.

More than 2,400 US troops have been killed during the conflict. About 12,000 are still stationed in the country.

What else did Trump say about the deal?

Speaking at the White House, Mr Trump congratulated Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and "the people of the United States for having spent so much in terms of blood, in terms of treasure, and treasury."

He said the Taliban had been trying to reach an agreement with the US for a long time, and that he had faith in the deal because "everyone is tired of war."

The president added that US troops had been killing terrorists in Afghanistan "by the thousands" and now it was "time for someone else to do that work and it will be the Taliban and it could be surrounding countries".

"I really believe the Taliban wants to do something to show we're not all wasting time," he added. "If bad things happen, we'll go back with a force like no-one's ever seen."

What happened in Doha?

The deal was signed by US special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and Taliban political chief Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar with Mr Pompeo as a witness.

In a speech, Mr Pompeo urged the militant group to "keep your promises to cut ties with al-Qaeda".

Mr Baradar said he hoped Afghanistan could now emerge from four decades of conflict.

"I hope that with the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Afghanistan the Afghan nation under an Islamic regime will take its relief and embark on a new prosperous life," he said.

Afghanistan's government did not take part in the US-Taliban talks, but said it was ready to negotiate with the Taliban.

What's in the agreement?

In addition to withdrawing US and allied troops, the deal also provides for a prisoner swap.

Some 5,000 Taliban prisoners and 1,000 Afghan security force prisoners would be exchanged by 10 March, when talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government are due to start.

The US will also lift sanctions against the Taliban and work with the UN to lift its separate sanctions against the group.

In Kabul, activist Zahra Husseini said she feared the deal could worsen the situation for women in Afghanistan.

"I don't trust the Taliban, and remember how they suppressed women when they were ruling," the 28-year-old told AFP.

"Today is a dark day, and as I was watching the deal being signed, I had this bad feeling that it would result in their return to power rather than in peace."

Remember this from 2020?? Let's look back.

A cautious peace for Afghanistan

By Secunder Kermani, BBC News, Kabul

US, Afghan and Taliban officials have all been careful to avoid calling today's agreement in Doha "a peace deal." But in Afghanistan, a sense of cautious optimism has been rising.

The Afghan war has been a bloody stalemate for years now, with the Taliban increasingly controlling or contesting more territory, yet unable to capture and hold major urban centres.

With this has come a growing realisation - by both the Taliban and the US - that neither side is capable of an outright military victory.

This deal now opens the door to wide-ranging talks between the militants and Afghan political leaders.

But these discussions will be much more challenging - somehow there will have to be a reconciliation between the Taliban's vision of an "Islamic Emirate" and the democratic modern Afghanistan that has been created since 2001.

The priority for many ordinary Afghans, at least in the short term, is a substantive reduction in violence. We'll find out in the coming weeks, when the warmer spring weather generally heralds the start of "fighting season", if that will happen.

What reaction has there been?

• UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stressed "the importance of sustaining the nationwide reduction in violence, for the benefit of all Afghans"
• Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg: "We went in together in 2001, we are going to adjust [troop levels] together and when the time is right, we are going to leave together, but we are only going to leave when conditions are right"
• UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace: "I welcome this small but important step towards the chance for Afghans to live in peace, free from terrorism... We remain absolutely committed to building an Afghanistan that is a strong partner for decades to come"
• Donald Trump's former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, has criticised the deal, and said it endangered American lives by "legitimising" the Taliban

How did US-Taliban talks come about?

Since 2011, Qatar has hosted Taliban leaders who have moved there to discuss peace in Afghanistan. It has been a chequered process. A Taliban office was opened in 2013, and closed the same year amid rows over flags. Other attempts at talks stalled.

In December 2018, the militants announced they would meet US officials to try to find a "roadmap to peace". But the hard-line Islamist group continued to refuse to hold official talks with the Afghan government, whom they dismissed as American "puppets".

Following nine rounds of US-Taliban talks in Qatar, the two sides seemed close to an agreement.

Washington's top negotiator announced last September that the US would withdraw 5,400 troops from Afghanistan within 20 weeks as part of a deal agreed "in principle" with Taliban militants.

Days later, Mr Trump said the talks were "dead", after the group killed a US soldier. But within weeks the two sides resumed discussions behind the scenes.

A week ago the Taliban agreed to a "reduction of violence" - although Afghan officials say at least 22 soldiers and 14 civilians have been killed in Taliban attacks over that period.

Nearly 3,500 members of the international coalition forces have died in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion.

The figures for Afghan civilians, militants and government forces are more difficult to quantify. In a February 2019 report, the UN said that more than 32,000 civilians had died. The Watson Institute at Brown University says 58,000 security personnel and 42,000 opposition combatants have been killed.

There needs to be a test to see if you qualify to be in Congress. Congress is were stupid people can get a job...

Madison Cawthorn didn't learn the right lesson from January 6

Analysis by Chris Cillizza

The insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6 was a seminal moment in American politics and our country's history. It was the logical result of a president who lied to the country about, well, just about everything -- including that he lost the 2020 election. It was a slashing wound on the body politics, one that is still scarring over.

North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R) doesn't see it that way. Or at least he hasn't grasped that angry and inflammatory rhetoric in the service of political expedience has real-world consequences.

In a speech at a county event for the North Carolina GOP, Cawthorn said that the 2020 election was "rigged" and "stolen"( it wasn't) and that reality (it's not) would "lead to one place, and that's bloodshed."

He wasn't done! Added Cawthorn:

"And I will tell you, as much as I am willing to defend our liberty at all costs, there's nothing that I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American. And the way that we can have recourse against that is if we all passionately demand that we have election security in all 50 states."

Don't make him lead a violent uprising, America: Admit that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump despite the fact that there is ZERO evidence of widespread election fraud despite a slew of recounts and lawsuits brought by the Trump forces!

Cawthorn spokesman Luke Ball told CNN that he was "CLEARLY advocating for violence not to occur over election integrity questions." Which, well, no, it's not at all clear.

See, because when you demand that people acknowledge a falsehood (the "Big Lie" that the election was stolen) or else, then you're not really advocating against violence. And if that's your goal -- as Cawthorn's spokesman suggested it is -- then you need to articulate it far, far better than the congressman did.

Given what we saw happen on January 6 -- five people dead, more than 100 police officers injured, 500-plus people arrested for their roles on that day -- the only responsible thing for lawmakers in both parties is to completely condemn the attempted use of force to change an election reality that they don't like.

Cawthorn, even if you give him the benefit of the doubt about what he meant to say, isn't doing that. What is he doing? Playing to the Trumpist base of the Republican Party by continuing to push the Big Lie because he knows that it guarantees applause.

Dangerous rhetoric doesn't simply drift into the ether.

It finds its way into the ears and minds of people who don't know that politicians are simply posturing for praise. They think this is the truth. And they get angry when someone like Cawthorn says the election was stolen. So when words like "bloodshed" are thrown out and calls to "defend our liberty at all costs" are made, there is a segment of people hearing those messages that wants to do something about it.

None of this, unfortunately, is a theoretical discussion. January 6 happened. And unless elected officials like Cawthorn grasp the responsibility they bear to tell people the truth about the election, there's every reason to believe there will be future incidents that echo the insurrection at the US Capitol.

Taxing Its Ability to Purify Drinking Water

Florida’s COVID Surge Is Taxing Its Ability to Purify Drinking Water

Oxygen normally used in the process has been needed to save lives.

MATT SIMON

Last week, the Tampa Bay water utility announced a rather bizarre side effect of Florida’s out-of-control COVID surge: It wasn’t getting enough deliveries of liquid oxygen to treat its water. More than 17,000 COVID patients—who require supplemental oxygen to stay alive—are now hospitalized across the state, and there isn’t enough oxygen to go around. 

Even with vaccines widely available, the pandemic is worse than it’s ever been in Florida. The state is averaging over 20,000 cases and over 200 deaths a day, putting an incredible strain on its hospital system. Just over half of Florida’s total population is fully vaccinated.

“What we know is that the lack of liquid oxygen is due to a driver shortage and the need for available supplies to be diverted to local hospitals due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” says Brandon Moore, spokesperson for Tampa Bay Water. (Requests for comment sent to Matheson Tri-Gas, their oxygen supplier, were not immediately returned.) This comes a week after Orlando’s mayor asked residents to limit water use for the same reason.

Add water problems to the growing list of consequences of a pandemic that’s now primarily hospitalizing the unvaccinated. That means less space and resources for non-COVID patients who show up in the ER, and now less oxygen for the systems that provide clean water to Floridians.

But why do you need even more oxygen in your H2O? Tampa Bay Water trucks in liquid oxygen, which it converts to gas, and then adds a spark of electricity to convert it to ozone. This is used in two separate facilities for two separate purposes, says Moore: At a surface-water treatment plant, the ozone kills nasties like bacteria and viruses, and at a different plant it breaks down hydrogen sulfide, a naturally occurring gas that smells like rotten eggs. 

The utility needs a whole lot of liquid oxygen—seven to nine tanker truckloads of it a week, between the two facilities—both to disinfect water and ensure that it doesn’t come out of taps smelling like holy hell. “Liquid oxygen converted to ozone is one of the most powerful—if not the most powerful—disinfectant in the water industry,” says Moore.

Tampa Bay Water’s liquid oxygen supply has been reduced by about half, Moore says. So they’re diverting the oxygen they’ve got to the treatment plant to sufficiently disinfect the water, since they can’t alter that process. They can, however, substitute sodium hypochlorite, also known as bleach, for ozone at the plant that gets rid of the hydrogen sulfide. But given the crunch, the utility is asking customers to cut back on water use, like watering lawns and washing cars. “In this scenario, the less water needed for demand means less water to treat,” says Moore. But, he adds, “it’s very important that residents know that the quality of the drinking water remains safe.” 

At the same time, it’s very important that COVID patients get the supplemental oxygen they need. COVID-19 brutalizes the lungs, interfering with the transfer of oxygen from the air into the bloodstream, which is needed to keep the heart, brain, and other vital organs working properly. The target oxygen saturation for the blood is above 92 percent—get below 90 percent and you start feeling shortness of breath. (At the hospital, they measure this by slipping a device called a pulse oximeter over a patient’s finger, which fires beams of light to noninvasively measure the oxygen in their blood.) Once saturation drops below 90 percent, doctors should put a COVID-19 patient on supplemental oxygen, advises the Centers for Disease Control.

But if only it were that simple with COVID, which plays a nasty trick on the human body. “Getting decreased oxygenation because of lung injury is not surprising,” says Nona Sotoodehnia, a cardiologist at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “What is surprising in COVID is the degree to which people aren’t uncomfortable with this critically low oxygen they have.”

Sotoodehnia’s research shows that just 10 percent of COVID patients presenting to the emergency room experience shortness of breath. They aren’t necessarily asymptomatic—other problems like fatigue, fever, and coughing cause them to seek help. But without shortness of breath, these patients had no way of knowing that their blood oxygen levels may have actually plummeted. In other words, they likely needed to be on supplemental oxygen long before they showed up at a hospital.

“If you’re coming into the hospital with a critically low oxygen saturation of 70 percent, you have missed a huge opportunity to start life-saving treatment early,” says Sotoodehnia. “And so that’s the key difference between COVID-19 and other lung pathologies.” Scientists still aren’t sure why COVID has this effect; one hypothesis is that while the virus clearly damages the lungs, it may not decrease the compliance of the organ, or the ability of the lungs to pump air, so some people don’t get that sense that they’re having trouble breathing. 

Another key factor in Florida’s oxygen shortage may be the demographics of who the new surge is affecting most: younger people. “Compared to prior waves of COVID-19, this surge has led to hospitalizations of a greater proportion of younger individuals, partly because more older individuals are vaccinated,” says Sotoodehnia. “Younger patients in general have better survival than older ones, so they stay on the ventilator longer in hopes of making it. This means greater oxygen utilization by patients and greater need for oxygen for hospitals.” 

There is a sliver of good news: The use of ozone to treat water is much less common in the US than it is in Europe, so the troubles in Florida may (hopefully) be isolated incidents. “In the US, chlorine is more commonly used for disinfection than ozone, and chlorine does not require pure O2,” says David Sedlak, director of the Berkeley Water Center at the University of California, Berkeley. 

The frustrating news, though, is that the oxygen shortage in Florida was entirely preventable. If everyone gets their shot, you can keep watering your lawn.

Defies judge... Oh yea, it's Flor-i-daaaaaaaaaaa

Florida defies judge and punishes 2 school districts over masks

By ANDREW ATTERBURY

The Florida Department of Education on Monday defied a recent ruling from a state judge and leveled its first sanctions against school board members who rejected the DeSantis administration’s orders on local mask mandates.

State officials withheld monthly salaries from board members in Alachua and Broward counties who supported the mask requirements, marking a major turning point in the weekslong fight over face coverings in schools.

“We’re going to fight to protect parents' rights to make health care decisions for their children,” Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran said in a statement. "What’s unacceptable is the politicians who have raised their right hands and pledged, under oath, to uphold the Constitution but are not doing so.”

The fines come even as a circuit court judge on Friday ruled the DeSantis administration lacked authority to punish schools for implementing up mask mandates. DeSantis had vowed to appeal the decision, but the sanctions leveled Monday from the education department appears to be a repudiation of the judge’s ruling. The judge in that case, Leon County Circuit Judge John Cooper, ruled from the bench on Friday and an official order has yet to be posted by the court.

The move by the state department of education is the latest development in the weekslong fight over masking students in Florida amid the surge in coronavirus cases. Already, 11 counties have rejected the governor’s rules preventing schools from mandating masks, including school districts in three Republican-leaning counties.

The battle has also roped in the Biden administration, which has pledged to financially support local school boards that are punished, igniting a clash between Washington and the GOP governor.

Even before the state announced it was taking away salaries, Republican-leaning Brevard County on Monday approved a mask mandate for students after striking down the idea just two weeks ago.

Alachua and Broward were the first two school boards to pass mask mandates in the face of an executive order and emergency rules from the DeSantis administration that sought to block local Covid-19 measures. In Broward county, the monthly pay for a school board member is about $3,897.

The DeSantis administration argues that the “Parents’ Bill of Rights” measure, approved by the GOP-dominated Florida Legislature and signed into law earlier this year, prohibits schools from mandating masks.

Jan. 6 probe

Jan. 6 probe takes first step to obtaining phone records — possibly those of lawmakers

The panel probing the Capitol riot didn't identify the names of the people whose communications it's seeking, but the list could include fellow lawmakers.

By NICHOLAS WU

The select panel investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection on Monday asked a broad group of telecommunication companies to preserve records related to the attack — a request that could include communications from some members of Congress.

Apple, AT&T, Verizon and 32 other companies received requests from the Jan. 6 committee for records from April 1, 2020, to Jan. 31, 2021. Select panel chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) asked the companies for specific individuals’ records, and while the names of those people were redacted from the publicly released orders, Thompson indicated last week that the request for communications of relevant individuals could touch on fellow lawmakers.

Investigators on the Democrat-led Jan. 6 committee are seeking clarity on phone calls between former President Donald Trump and members of Congress during the attack, among other communications. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) are among those known to have spoken with Trump on Jan. 6.

Nearly three dozen companies, including Verizon, T-Mobile, Gab, Discord and Twitter, received requests from the Jan. 6 select committee to preserve records in a letter dated Monday. While names of covered officials were not included in the public copies of the requests, the panel's latest bid for information is bound to be politically fraught.

Outraged GOP lawmakers have already called the committee's interest in communications records of their colleagues an “authoritarian” overreach by Democrats. Although two anti-Trump Republicans now sit on the select panel, most voted against its establishment, and GOP senators filibustered a bill that would have created an independent commission on Jan. 6.

In a Friday letter to Thompson, sent ahead of an expected phone records request, Rep. Jim Banks (Ind.), one of two House Republicans Speaker Nancy Pelosi blocked from serving on the select committee, said the panel's inquiries had "no conceivable legislative purpose."

Congress has long had power to police its own members — and often does through the Ethics Committee — though it has rarely taken the step of directly seeking their communications. But Democrats have made clear they view their departure as a warranted response to the Jan. 6 attack. And the select panel’s request asks for a large amount of information, including metadata, text messages, and emails.

It's the third major request within days from the Jan. 6 committee, which expanded its investigation last week with demands for records from federal agencies and social media companies on the insurrection, extremism and efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The last time such a high-profile committee investigation obtained congressional phone records was during the first impeachment probe of then-President Trump. House investigators then released call details that included contacts between Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and associates of Trump who were connected to his effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden.

Though the committee’s preservation request is broad, it’s unclear how much information the companies will turn over willingly or the panel will ultimately have to take further measures to obtain. (Thompson indicated he would send a more specific request for documents at a later date.) Some of the companies listed, like ProtonMail, have made their ability to encrypt or shield requests from investigators a selling point to their users.

Among the officials whose communications could draw interest from the select committee:

Former President Donald Trump

One of the biggest unanswered questions from Jan. 6 is what the White House and Trump were doing that day to respond. News outlets have revealed some of Trump’s actions, but the select committee may try to seek the former president’s calls as it tries to build a more detailed timeline of events on Jan. 6. The only reported information on Trump’s Jan. 6 conversations have come voluntarily from his allies.

Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio

Jordan, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee and a close Trump ally, spoke to the former president more than once on Jan. 6, as POLITICO reported on Sunday. Although the existence of his calls is already in the public record, the committee could seek to establish an exact timeline and match up his contacts with what is already known about the events at the White House and the Pentagon.

Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida

Gaetz, also a close Trump ally, took part in one of Jordan’s phone calls with Trump, according to a source with knowledge of the call. That source said the two lawmakers asked the president to tell his supporters to stand down, an assertion the committee is likely to want more information on.

Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania

Perry, who joined other House Republican colleagues in an effort to overturn the election results, also played a role in the turmoil at the top of the Justice Department. He had helped introduce acting Civil Department chief Jeffrey Clark to Trump and told him that Clark was receptive to his baseless claims of election fraud, according to The New York Times.

Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama

Brooks took part in the rally outside the White House on Jan. 6 and was also sued by Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who alleged he and other Trump allies incited the insurrection. Brooks denies the allegations and has tried to dismiss the lawsuit, saying he spoke at the rally in his official capacity as a lawmaker. The matter is still pending in federal court in Washington, D.C.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy

McCarthy's Jan. 6 call with Trump — and his description to colleagues of Trump’s reply — already figured in Trump’s second impeachment trial earlier this year. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) said McCarthy described getting heated while urging the then-president to call off his supporters and that Trump essentially defended the rioters by saying they appeared more upset than McCarthy about the election results.

Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani

Giuliani also appears to have been involved in the effort to call senators on Jan. 6 as Trump and his allies tried to lean on members of the Senate to object to election results. One such call, in which Giuliani mistakenly dialed another person when he meant to call Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), was published online by The Dispatch.

Former acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman

Pittman was the head of the Capitol Police’s intelligence division during the insurrection, and her handling of the insurrection and the department’s preparation before the riot have come under scrutiny. A bipartisan report by two Senate panels found that officers reported hearing from Pittman only once over the radio during the attack, and not at all from then-Chief Steven Sund.

State and local Republicans

The Jan. 6 committee is poised to home in on Trump’s specific efforts to overturn the election leading up to that day. And the record is already replete with examples of unusual calls between the sitting president and local election officials tasked with certifying the outcome of the 2020 vote.

Trump browbeat Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in early January, a call that Raffensperger himself warned could prompt a criminal probe. He spoke with two Michigan GOP election officials in an effort to convince them to gum up the state’s certification process. And he reportedly attempted to speak with state officials in other states Biden won. The select committee appears interested in Trump’s pre-Jan. 6 communications with these officials as well.

Electric Car Future

The Major Problems Blocking America’s Electric Car Future

The electric future is coming. But how quickly is less certain.

By DANIEL YERGIN

Just a decade and a half ago, the then-CEO of General Motors Co. Rick Wagoner observed to Larry Burns, at the time GM’s head of research and strategy, that not many industries stay the same for a century. But the automobile industry, Wagoner added with some anxiety, had so far been the exception. Its business model remained that pioneered by Henry Ford with the Model T a century earlier — “gas-fueled, run by an internal combustion engine, rolling on four wheels.” “What’s the car of the next hundred years going to look like?” Wagoner asked.

Recently, I asked Wagoner about that conversation. “The focus then was on making the internal combustion engine better,” he replied. “I was asking, ‘If we were starting the industry today, what would be different?’”

A pretty clear answer about how different came earlier this month from President Joe Biden when he issued an executive order setting out the goal that “50 percent of all new passenger cars and light vehicles sold in 2030” should be electric. In the order, he instructed government agencies to implement regulatory policies to achieve that goal. “There’s a vision of the future that is now beginning to happen,” said the president. This vision clearly does not involve making the internal combustion engine better.

In response to government policies, automakers are committing many tens of billions of dollars over the next 10 years to EV development. Targets may be motivating. But no matter how much money is spent, shifting such a vast industrial and consumer ecosystem that is so basic to the economy faces big challenges, with the result that the share of new car sales that are EVS by 2030 will more likely be about 25 percent. The challenges still have to be met.

It was in 2008 that an initial glimmer of what is now Biden’s vision appeared with the arrival on the road of the first commercial electric car of modern times — the Tesla Roadster. At the time, the all-electric Roadster looked like a novelty. Moreover, its appearance was somewhat accidental. Five years earlier, a young electric vehicle enthusiast, J.B. Straubel, had lunch at a fish restaurant in Los Angeles with Elon Musk, trying to convince him about the potential of an electric plane. When Musk showed no interest, Straubel switched to an electric car. It was an idea originally championed by Thomas Edison more than a century ago, but which had failed in the face of the Model T. But in 2008, Musk jumped at the idea. Some years later, Musk said that without that lunch, “Tesla wouldn’t exist, basically.”

The Roadster, starting at over $100,000, was not exactly a mass market car. But there soon were other early entrants. Nissan, where engineers had been working on an electric car for more than two decades, introduced the Nissan Leaf in 2010, the same year that General Motors came out with the Chevy Volt. GM followed up in 2016 with the Bolt, a major project accomplished in double-time under the then-head of development and now-CEO Mary Barra.

Now let us fast forward just a few years. Today, automakers around the world are racing to catch up with Tesla and bring out a full slate of electric vehicles. General Motors has set the goal of going all-electric by 2035. Mercedes just leapfrogged with a goal of being all-electric for light vehicles by 2030. “The EV shift is picking up speed. … The tipping point is getting closer,” Mercedes CEO Ola Källenius said last month. “This step marks a profound reallocation of capital.”

The No. 1 factor speeding the shift to EVs is governments putting an increasingly heavy foot on the accelerator. The European Union is proposing tough regulations on carbon dioxide emissions from cars made or sold in Europe that would effectively ban the sale of new cars with internal combustion engines after 2035. California and Massachusetts similarly have announced ambitions to ban new cars with internal combustion engines by 2035. Biden has now upped the ante by pressing automakers for that 50 percent electric goal by 2030. Governments around the world are also fueling consumers’ purchases of EVs with generous tax incentives and subsidies, and emission standards are becoming ever more stringent. Just this month, the Biden administration proposed tougher fuel efficiency standards in the U.S. This will drive up the cost of conventional cars with the aim of pushing more new car buyers to switch to electric instead. In Shanghai, China, the city offers free license plates for what Beijing calls “new energy vehicles,” while consumers must go through an auction to get a license plate for a car with a traditional engine.

It will take time for EV adoption to have a major impact on emissions as cars stay on the road for a long time — the average in the U.S. is 12 years. But a total EV fleet for light vehicles would have a direct emissions impact. “Light vehicles” are responsible for about 16 percent of human CO2 emissions in the United States (and about 6 percent on a global basis).

But as the shift to EVs speeds up, three big challenges stand out. One is the mining and supply chains to support that shift. Batteries require a lot of minerals, and that means a lot of mining and transporting of materials. According to mining and energy specialist Mark Mills, a thousand-pound electric car battery requires the moving of 500,000 pounds of earth in the course of mining. But battery costs have come down enormously. A step-up in government and private sector research will drive costs down further and improve performance.

Very large and complex new supply chains will be required to replace those that deliver gasoline to motorists. Today, many of these supply chains are dominated by China, with which tensions are obviously rising. China, for instance, currently controls 80 percent of the lithium battery supply chains. To reduce the current high dependence on China, U.S. automakers are building battery factories in the United States — General Motors in partnership with Korea’s LG Chem, and Ford in partnership with Korea’s SK Innovation. Ford is also making an EV partnership and a half billion-dollar investment in start-up Rivian, which is introducing electric vans for Amazon deliveries and all-terrain EV trucks and SUVs this year. Expect “energy security” — the mantra that has dominated policy for half a century — to give way to “battery security,” with government policies backing it up.

But the scale of what is required should not be underestimated. It will be a massive job to build up a supply system that supports the current 600,000 new EVs annually into one capable of supporting Biden’s goal of about 9 million annual new car sales by 2030. Just to get to Biden’s 2030 goal of 50 percent would require a 15-fold increase in annual production of electric cars over a short eight-year period.

The second challenge is ensuring the infrastructure to support EVs in the post-gasoline era. That means the building of a ubiquitous EV charging infrastructure and the modernization and expansion of the electric grid. The grid also needs to be 100 percent reliable — a requirement that the recent major power disruptions in California and Texas underline. As the futurist Peter Schwartz puts it, the entire electric system becomes part of the electric automobile supply chain.

These requirements are embodied in the new infrastructure bill that the Senate just passed. In championing the bill, the White House emphasizes competition with China — “U.S. market share” of EVs “is only one-third the size of the Chinese market.” And this, it adds, “must change.” To that end, it puts $73 billion into modernizing and expanding the nation’s electric grid and clean energy. It also apportions $7.5 billion “to build out a national network of EV chargers” as part of the administration’s goal “to accelerate the adoption of EVs.”

A group of House Democrats jumped in this month to propose that the $7.5 billion be increased more than ten-fold — to $85 billion. But the system that currently “charges” cars — gasoline stations — was developed by the private sector without government support. A long-term viable EV charging system needs a business model that is also based on the private sector and is not dependent on the federal government and shifting policies.

The third challenge involves the public — the people who buy automobiles. For most people, their biggest capital expenditure, after their homes, are their cars. It is simply too soon to know how eager people, beyond early adopters, will be to shift away from something they have always known — gasoline-powered cars — to something that is new for them: electric vehicles. And that’s true even as battery improvements extend driving range. But confidence will grow as they see EVs on the road and in their neighbors’ driveways, as the choice and range of models and features increases, and as automakers step up their commercial drive to push buyers to make the switch.

It’s just 18 years since a lunch at a fish restaurant in Los Angeles with Elon Musk launched the idea of electric cars. And now an auto industry that seemed immutable in its business and unlikely to change is — in its second century — tipping into the future. How fast it tips will only become clear in the next few years.

Remember, Taliban are STUPID, UNEDUCATED, STONEAGE, BRAINWASHED SHITS! There is no negotiations...

Split U.N. Security Council urges Taliban to allow travel, aid

The vote came shortly before the U.S. moved its last troops out of Afghanistan.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS

A divided U.N. Security Council pressed the Taliban on Monday to live up to pledges to let people leave Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrew its forces but China and Russia refused to back the resolution, which they portrayed as diverting blame for chaos surrounding the U.S. pullout.

Sponsored by the U.S., Britain and France, the measure also calls for letting humanitarian aid flow, upholding human rights and combating terrorism.

“The eyes of all Afghans are watching this council, and they expect clear support from the international community. And this lack of unity is a disappointment for us and for them,” French Deputy Ambassador Nathalie Broadhurst said after the vote, in which Russia and China abstained.

Still, British Ambassador Barbara Woodward called it “an important step towards a unified international response.”

The vote came shortly before the U.S. moved its last troops out of Afghanistan, ending America’s longest war, and four days after a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport gate killed at least 169 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members. The bombing has been blamed on an Islamic State group affiliate.

French President Emmanuel Macron said Sunday that the resolution would propose a U.N.-controlled “safe zone” in Kabul for humanitarian operations. But the resolution ultimately called instead for “all parties to allow full, safe, and unhindered access” for aid groups.

U.N. diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, said the resolution involved some compromises but made key points about permitting aid and travel.

The council “expects that the Taliban will adhere to” commitments about letting Afghans and foreigners depart safely, the resolution says.

The Taliban have said they will allow normal travel after assuming control of the Kabul airport following the U.S. withdrawal, and the U.S. and about 100 other nations said in a statement Sunday that the militants had given assurances that people with travel documents would still be able to leave.

Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia complained that the resolution wasn’t specific enough about terror threats, didn’t speak to the “brain drain” effect of evacuating Afghans and didn’t address the economic and humanitarian consequences of . Washington freezing the Afghan government’s U.S. accounts following the Taliban takeover earlier this month.

“We can see in this an attempt to shift the blame for the failure and collapse of the 20 years of the presence of the United States and their allies in the region upon the Taliban and all the countries in the region that will have to deal with the results of this,” Nebenzia said.

China criticized the U.S. for civilian casualties in a drone strike that American officials said hit a vehicle carrying multiple Islamic State suicide bombers.

While the council resolution is meant as a statement of international expectations, it doesn’t include provisions for enforcing them. The U.N. already has longstanding sanctions against various Taliban figures and groups.

Woodward called the resolution a “first response,” noting that the council does have the leverage to lift sanctions or expand them.

Meanwhile, the U.N. children’s arm said Monday that it was working to reunite dozens of children and parents separated during the massive, hasty airlift ahead of the U.S. withdrawal.

UNICEF brought seven children back to their parents in Kabul on Saturday and has traced the parents of roughly 70 more children to other countries, said Herve De Lys, UNICEF’s representative in Afghanistan.

Because of conflict, drought and other problems, about 10 million children now need humanitarian aid in Afghanistan, De Lys said.

Insane Hardliners.......

Trump acolytes poised to push out Senate dealmakers

In the five states where Republican senators are retiring, the midterm elections could usher in a wave of hardliners who are nothing like their GOP predecessors.

By MARC CAPUTO

If Senate Republicans seem conservative now, just wait until next year. The 2022 midterms could usher in a wave of full-spectrum MAGA supporters who would turn the GOP conference an even deeper shade of red — and make the Senate a lot more like the fractious House.

In the five states where Republican senators are retiring, the primary election fields to succeed them are crowded with Donald Trump supporters who have made loyalty to the former president a cornerstone of their campaigns.

The three top candidates to succeed Sen. Richard Burr in North Carolina have all denounced his vote to convict Trump in his last impeachment trial. In Pennsylvania, the four leading candidates to succeed Sen. Pat Toomey — who, like Burr, was formally rebuked by the state party for his impeachment vote — have embraced Trump’s calls for an “audit” of the state’s presidential election results, to varying degrees.

The absolute fealty to Trump is only part of the change this class of candidates would herald. There are institutional implications for the Senate as well. The bipartisan infrastructure deal Ohio’s Sen. Rob Portman helped broker? Six of the top GOP candidates vying to replace him have rejected it.

At least five current House members have announced they are running for the open Senate seats, nearly all of whom are more hard-line conservative than the senators they’d replace.

Most of the newcomers would accelerate the GOP’s transition from tea party to Trump party, complicating the job of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who broke with Trump after the Jan. 6 riots that led to the president’s second impeachment.

“Trump has reshaped the Republican Party. We’re now a blue-collar party. We're an America first party,” said Michael Whatley, the chair of the North Carolina GOP. “It’s a different party than it was when [retiring Missouri Sen.] Roy Blunt and Richard Burr first got elected. And I don't think the party is going back. It’s tough on China, protect the border, fight for the Second Amendment, fight for life. That has been an enormously popular agenda with the base.”

McConnell has already indicated his willingness to intervene in GOP primary battles — even against Trump-backed candidates — if he perceives there are electability issues that might endanger the party’s chances of winning the seat. It’s an acknowledgment of a Senate landscape where Republicans have little room for error in their bid to win back the majority in the evenly divided chamber.

Already that dynamic is leading to tensions in Missouri, where GOP officials worry the candidacy of former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens — who resigned office amid a 2018 sex scandal — will jeopardize the party’s chances of holding Blunt’s seat.

Greitens, the Republican primary frontrunner, made it clear in a March radio interview that he has no intention of following in the footsteps of Blunt, a deal-maker and close McConnell ally.

“Unfortunately, Roy Blunt has been out siding with Mitch McConnell,” the former governor said. “He’s been criticizing the president of the United States over what happened on Jan. 6. He’s been criticizing the president of the United States for not coming to Joe Biden's inauguration, where obviously, everyone in Missouri, saw Roy Blunt there.”

All of the Republicans seeking the Missouri Senate seat are different in style and tone from Blunt, said Republican former state Sen. John Lamping.

“Roy is a super-super insider and that’s not what the base wants,” Lamping said. “No one is running to be a Roy Blunt senator. They’re running to be a Donald Trump senator. If somebody becomes a serious threat, they’ll be accused by their opponents of being more like Roy Blunt.”

The change in the composition of the GOP conference might be even greater than expected. Beyond the five senators who have announced their retirements, questions are swirling about the plans of three additional Republicans in the chamber — South Dakota’s John Thune, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Iowa’s Chuck Grassley — who have not formally announced their candidacies and could be replaced by more Trump-aligned candidates. Thune and Murkowski have run afoul of Trump, who has already endorsed Republican Kelly Tshibaka against Murkowski.

Though a Trumpier Senate could cause McConnell fits, a top Republican strategist involved in Senate campaigns downplayed the risks to McConnell but acknowledged a change would come if the MAGA firebrands replace the five retiring senators.

“All of these [retiring senators] are good communicators, but their style is different. They enjoy moving legislation along behind the scenes. That’s what they’re good at and that’s why they're in the Senate,” said the strategist, who spoke freely on condition of anonymity. “Politics certainly on our side — and I think across the board — is becoming more of a very public, very vocal fight over the issues. Sometimes that can lead to results, but it's less about what’s happening behind the scenes and moving the football a yard at a time down the field and it’s more, maybe, of a Hail Mary on every snap.”

Those stylistic distinctions are glaring in Alabama, where Trump has endorsed Rep. Mo Brooks for retiring Sen. Richard Shelby’s seat. Brooks, a House Freedom Caucus member, is best known for speaking at the Jan. 6 rally in Washington that preceded the Capitol riots and urging the crowd to "start taking down names and kicking ass."

Shelby, who’s chaired both the Appropriations and Banking committees, is Alabama’s longest-serving senator. In a sign of his productive relationship with current Appropriations Chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Leahy released a statement upon Shelby’s retirement describing him as “a true statesman, and a man of his word.“

Trump paired his endorsement of Brooks with criticism of McConnell and Shelby, who is backing his former chief of staff, Katie Britt, in the race.

“I see that the RINO Senator from Alabama, close friend of Old Crow Mitch McConnell, Richard Shelby, is pushing hard to have his ‘assistant’ fight the great Mo Brooks for his Senate seat,” Trump said in a recent written statement that used the acronym for a “Republican in name only.”

McConnell responded by saying that being called an “Old Crow” was “quite an honor" because "Old Crow is Henry Clay's favorite bourbon."

Trump has also backed North Carolina Rep. Ted Budd, another House Freedom Caucus member who voted against certifying the presidential results and, along with fellow Senate candidate and former Rep. Mark Walker, joined a lawsuit to overturn the presidential election.

While Trump’s endorsement is a major boost in a GOP primary, it’s not always determinative. In Alabama’s 2017 special primary runoff for Senate, Trump endorsed appointed Sen. Luther Strange over former Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who won the race only to lose in the general election.

Brett Doster, who worked for Moore’s campaign, said candidates like Moore have prevailed in some primaries over Trump-endorsed candidates when the GOP electorate believed in their conservative bonafides.

“What’s happened inside the Republican Party, for now, is that people are waiting around to see if Trump will be around or not, but he remains a litmus test,” Doster said.

Pennsylvania stands alone among the GOP primary contests because it’s a swing state that Trump lost in 2020 — and one that Democrats have reasonable hopes of flipping. In a sign of the ideological variation, Toomey’s vote to convict Trump has become an issue in the primary campaign — and not every prospective Republican in the race condemns him for it.

Trump’s allies have vowed to punish one potential candidate in the race who has stood by Toomey, former Rep. Ryan Costello. A one-time aide to former party-switching Sen. Arlen Specter, Craig Snyder, also joined the race as an anti-Trump Republican, though most party insiders don’t see him gaining much traction.

Some believe that Trump’s relentless efforts to overturn the election results in Pennsylvania could backfire in a general election because the electorate is “more anti-Biden than pro-Trump,” said former Pennsylvania Rep. Phil English, who acknowledged that Trump’s influence is still a powerful force in the party.

But former state GOP Chair Rob Gleason cautions against any belief that Trump’s influence has waned in primary politics. He said Biden’s recent declining poll numbers amid the deadly withdrawal of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and the increase of Covid cases nationwide has led to a renewed sense of energy among Trump supporters.

“Primaries have low turnout but you can count on the Trump people because they’re still coming to rallies, they still fly Trump flags, they still wave Trump signs,” Gleason said. “In all of these states we’re talking about, Trump supporters are still really active and because of all the problems with this presidency now, they don’t just feel more energized. They feel vindicated.”

Effort to cut emissions

Kerry in Japan to discuss effort to cut emissions

He is also scheduled to visit China.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS

U.S. climate envoy John Kerry was in Tokyo on Tuesday to discuss efforts to fight climate change with top Japanese officials ahead of a United Nations conference in November.

Kerry was scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi, Environment Minister Shinjiro Koizumi, as well as Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Hiroshi Kajiyama.

Kerry arrived in Japan on Monday and will fly out on Tuesday evening to China for more climate talks — his second trip to the country under President Joe Biden’s administration.

In his talks with Koizumi, Kerry was expected to discuss decarbonization efforts and cooperation between the two countries ahead of the U.N. climate conference, known as COP26, to be held in Glasgow in the first half of November.

During a visit to London last month, Kerry called on global leaders to work together and accelerate actions needed to curb rising temperatures to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. He urged China to join the U.S. in urgently cutting carbon emissions.

China is the world’s top carbon emitter, followed by the United States. Japan is fifth.

Many countries have pledged to eliminate net carbon emissions by 2050. Japan has promised to strive to reduce its emissions by 46% from 2012 levels, up from an earlier target of 26%, to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. China has also set a goal to reach carbon neutrality by 2060.

Suga has said Japan will try to push the reduction as high as 50% to be in line with the European Union.

In order to achieve that target, Japan’s Environment Ministry is seeking a significant budget increase to promote renewable energy and decarbonizing programs. The Trade and Industry Ministry plans to use large subsidies to promote electric vehicles and wind power generation, according to a draft budget proposal for 2022.

The Trade and Industry Ministry, in its draft basic energy plan released in July, said the share of renewables should be raised to 36-38% of the power supply in 2030 from the current target of 22-24%. The plan maintains the current 20-22% target for nuclear energy as officials remain undecided over what to do with the nuclear industry that has struggled since the 2011 Fukushima disaster. The plan cuts the use of fossil fuel from 56% to 41%.

During his Sept. 1-3 China visit, Kerry is expected to meet with his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua.

Immunity passport

Macron gambled on coronavirus immunity passport — and won

The French president stuck his neck out, banking that the public would support his plan. And so far, it’s been a success.

BY CLEA CAULCUTT

It has been a nail-biting summer for officials at the top of the French government. Would Emmanuel Macron's controversial decision to force people to carry a vaccine passport if they wanted to visit everywhere from a bar to a museum backfire and fuel the country's protest movement?

Each week, officials at the Elysée and in the prime minister’s office anxiously waited for the figures on the size of the protests to roll in. Now, as the country approaches its target of giving 50 million people at least one jab by the end of August, many of those officials are heaving a sigh of relief.

“We are patting ourselves on the back, though we know we have not yet reached results that are completely satisfactory,” said one government adviser. "Macron took a firm decision, and the French gave him their vote of confidence. The protests have remained marginal.”

Macron’s decision to bring in the vaccine passport on the eve of the summer holidays was a jaw-dropper.

The COVID immunity pass — a digital or paper certificate that contains proof of vaccination, of immunity or of a negative test — is needed to get into cafés, bars, restaurants, hospitals, museums, galleries, and on trains, planes and coaches. On Monday, the scheme was extended to the employees of all venues that are open to the public.

Although there was some watering down of the plans at first — waiters were told they would not have to check IDs as well as vaccine certificates, and most shopping malls would be exempt — the government held fast.

A lot of people weren't happy. Every week, protesters take to the streets of Paris, Marseille and other cities, for a variety of reasons. Some are anti-vax, others claim to be pro-liberty and then there are those who are just fed up with Macron. But the figures have not taken off. Last weekend, around 160,000 people took to the streets, down from 175,000 the previous week and 215,000 in mid-August, according to figures from the interior ministry.

Early comparisons with the Yellow Jackets movement that shook the president in 2018 and 2019 have proven wide of the mark. Macron’s rivals also failed to capitalize on discontent, with far-right leader Marine Le Pen reluctant to upset her voters, who are split over the pass, and the Socialists clumsily backing mandatory jabs but not the pass.  

Meanwhile, millions have headed to vaccination centers. According to the French prime minister’s office, 12 million people have been vaccinated since Macron announced the introduction of the coronavirus passport.

'The best moment of his handling of the crisis'

It’s the view of many doctors that the coronavirus passport flattened the curve of the pandemic this summer, just as France was facing a steep third wave fueled by the more contagious Delta variant and the lifting of lockdown measures.

“It saved tens of thousands of lives,” said Martin Blachier, a public health consultant. “The French were reluctant [to get the jab] and he crafted a message that was heard. It was the best moment of his handling of the crisis, maybe even of his tenure.”

The figures so far are looking promising. Some 83 percent of the French population over the age of 12 have received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to France’s COVID tracker. The number of daily cases has dropped to under 14,000, after peaking at about 24,000 in mid-August. The number of patients in intensive care increased in August but appears to be leveling off at under 3,000.

An uptick in the epidemic is expected with the return of students and pupils to classrooms in September, but “the risk of a cataclysm has been avoided,” said Blachier. According to him, if the vaccination rate had remained where it was before the summer — when less than 50 percent of the population had received a first dose — there would have been a lot more admissions into hospitals, which would have meant overstretched wards and more deaths.

But others are not as enthusiastic about the pass.

“It’s hard to know what impact it had,” said Nicolas Bruder, head of an intensive care unit at the Timone hospital in Marseille. “If you look at the map of France, cases have increased where there have been big gatherings in touristic areas [despite the pass].”

But in his hospital, the introduction of the pass — as well as the announcement that the jab would be mandatory for health workers — led to a leap in vaccination rates. More than 70 percent of his staff are vaccinated, compared to over 50 percent in June.

And that’s the point. Proponents say the health pass has worked because people reacted by getting vaccinated, which protects them from developing serious conditions even if they do get the virus.

“The pass creates a false sense of security because it throws together people who are vaccinated, and therefore can transmit the disease, and people who have been tested negative,” said Blachier. “If people had reacted by getting tested every couple of days, the pass would have had the opposite effect, accelerating the epidemic, and leading to a lot more deaths.”

But they didn’t. “It was a political move, a means to an end. Some wanted to introduce mandatory jabs, but the question was how do we get there,” said the government adviser.

750,000 households could be evicted....

Goldman Sachs says 750,000 households could be evicted this year unless Congress acts

By Matt Egan

If Congress doesn't implement a new eviction ban, three-quarters of a million American households could be evicted later this year, according to new research.

Goldman Sachs estimates that between 2.5 million and 3.5 million households are significantly behind on rent, owing a combined $12 billion to $17 billion to landlords.

Those renters appeared to be safe from eviction until at least October until the Supreme Court last week struck down the Biden administration's ban on evictions, indicating that further action must come from Congress. At the same time, most state-level restrictions on evictions are scheduled to expire over the next month, which the Goldman Sachs analysts noted in the Sunday night report.

"The end of the eviction moratorium is likely to result in a sharp and rapid increase in eviction rates in coming months unless Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) funding is distributed at a much faster pace or Congress addresses the issue," the report said.

Without faster aid or new legislation, Goldman Sachs estimates 750,000 households will face eviction this fall and winter. The Wall Street bank noted that roughly half of all US eviction filings resulted in eviction between 2006 and 2016.

Part of the problem appears to be trouble getting government aid out the door.

The process of recovering back rent through the emergency rental assistance program has been "disappointingly slow," Goldman Sachs analysts wrote. Even though the US Treasury Department has dispersed $25 billion to state and local governments — and has another $20 billion available — just $4.5 billion has been distributed, according to the report.

The Census Bureau estimated last week that about 1.3 million people are very likely to get evicted in the next two months. That same report estimated that more than 2.2 million people applied for rental assistance through state or local governments and either did not hear back or were denied.

"The strength of the housing and rental market suggests landlords will try to evict tenants who are delinquent on rent unless they obtain federal assistance," Goldman Sachs analysts wrote.

The firm predicted evictions could be "particularly pronounced in the cities hardest hit by the coronavirus" because those areas have stronger apartment rental markets.

An eviction crisis, should it emerge, would not only cause hardship for individual families, it could also impact the pandemic and the economic recovery — as well as inflation.

Goldman Sachs (GS)estimates a "small drag" on spending and job growth from the projected 750,000 evictions and an easing of shelter inflation in 2022. "The implications for Covid infections and public health are probably more severe," the report said.

You can smell the GOP panic in the air.....

January 6 committee to ask telecommunications companies to preserve phone records of members of Congress who participated in 'Stop the Steal' rally

By Ryan Nobles, Zachary Cohen, Annie Grayer and Whitney Wild

The House Select Committee investigating the deadly January 6 riot is set to request that a group of telecommunications companies preserve the phone records of a group of GOP members of Congress and former President Donald Trump, as well as members of the Trump family, who played some role in the "Stop the Steal" rally that served as the prelude to the Capitol insurrection.

The records request is the first step in the committee's investigatory process and could signal the direction they plan to go when they call witnesses.

It is unclear what means the committee will use to compel the telecommunications companies to cooperate with their request. The committee does have subpoena power, but requesting the information -- especially from members of Congress -- could lead to a lengthy legal battle.

The committee decided against making public the names of the lawmakers whose records they are targeting, three sources told CNN. But multiple sources familiar with the committee's work have confirmed for CNN at least part of list including many of the members of Congress included in the request.

According to the sources, this group was targeted because the committee concluded each of these lawmakers played some role in the "Stop the Steal" rally. They either attended, spoke, actively planned or encouraged people to attend.

The list is said to be evolving and could be added to as the investigation steps up. As of now it includes Republican Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Paul Gosar also of Arizona, Mo Brooks of Alabama, Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Jody Hice of Georgia and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.

In addition to their connection to the rally, this group also represents some of former Trump's most loyal supporters in Congress, many of whom continue to peddle Trump's false claims about the 2020 election. Many of these members also voted to object to the election results on the day of the insurrection.

A spokesperson for the Select Committee declined to comment on the lawmakers and members of Trump's family included in the preservation of records request list.

Select Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, previously said publicly that the committee would be asking for the phone records of "several hundred" individuals. In addition to the members of Congress, CNN has learned the committee will also request the records of the former President be preserved, as well as his daughter Ivanka, his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, as well as his daughter-in-law Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is Trump Jr.'s girlfriend and worked on the campaign.

While asking for the phone records of these individuals may not come as a surprise, there is one notable name not expected to be included in this group of requests. Sources say House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's name was not included. McCarthy notably spoke to the former President during the height of the riot. The contents of that call are expected to be of great interest to the committee. Thompson has repeatedly not ruled out calling McCarthy to testify in front of the committee if that is where the investigation leads. That doesn't mean that committee will never request his records, they just are choosing not to at this stage of the investigation.

CNN has reached out to the members of Congress on the list for a response, but Republicans have already reacted negatively to the prospect of the committee requesting this information. Rep. Jim Banks, whom McCarthy originally picked to serve as the ranking member on the committee but was turned away by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, sent Thompson a letter on Friday, warning him against taking this step.

"Rifling through the call logs of your colleagues would depart from more than 230 years of Congressional oversight," the Indiana Republican wrote. "This type of authoritarian undertaking has no place in the House of Representatives and the information you seek has no conceivable legislative purpose."

Jordan, who is among those whose records the committee is requesting, last week warned that there could be political retribution.

"I have nothing to hide," he said, but added that "if they cross this line," Republicans will keep asking questions about their Democratic colleagues.

Brooks tweeted later Monday morning, "'#Socialists & 'Pelosi Republicans' (Cheney & Kinzinger) seek my phone records? Three results: 1 Total waste of taxpayer money. 2 Boredom for who looks at my records. 3 Russian Collusion Hoax 2.0. Why not subpoena Socialists who support BLM & ANTIFA?"