The U.S. Government’s Indictment of Julian Assange Poses Grave Thre...
▻https://diasp.eu/p/8870014
The U.S. Government’s Indictment of Julian Assange Poses Grave Threats to Press Freedom
#Assange #Wikileaks #press #journalism #democracy #freespeech #PressFreedom
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Glen Greenwald, Micah Lee - 20190412
▻https://theintercept.com/2019/04/11/the-u-s-governments-indictment-of-julian-assange-poses-grave-threats-t
In April, 2017, Pompeo, while still CIA chief, delivered a deranged speech proclaiming that “we have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us.” He punctuated his speech with this threat: “To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now.”
From the start, the Trump DOJ has made no secret of its desire to criminalize journalism generally. Early in the Trump administration, Sessions explicitly discussed the possibility of prosecuting journalists for publishing classified information. Trump and his key aides were open about how eager they were to build on, and escalate, the Obama administration’s progress in enabling journalism in the U.S. to be criminalized.
Today’s arrest of Assange is clearly the culmination of a two-year effort by the U.S. government to coerce Ecuador — under its new and submissive president, Lenín Moreno — to withdraw the asylum protection it extended to Assange in 2012. Rescinding Assange’s asylum would enable the U.K. to arrest Assange on minor bail-jumping charges pending in London and, far more significantly, to rely on an extradition request from the U.S. government to send him to a country to which he has no connection (the U.S.) to stand trial relating to leaked documents.
Indeed, the Trump administration’s motive here is clear. With Ecuador withdrawing its asylum protection and subserviently allowing the U.K. to enter its own embassy to arrest Assange, Assange faced no charges other than a minor bail-jumping charge in the U.K. (Sweden closed its sexual assault investigation not because they concluded Assange was innocent, but because they spent years unsuccessfully trying to extradite him). By indicting Assange and demanding his extradition, it ensures that Assange — once he serves his time in a London jail for bail-jumping — will be kept in a British prison for the full year or longer that it takes for the U.S. extradition request, which Assange will certainly contest, to wind its way through the British courts.
The indictment tries to cast itself as charging Assange not with journalistic activities but with criminal hacking. But it is a thinly disguised pretext for prosecuting Assange for publishing the U.S. government’s secret documents while pretending to make it about something else.
Whatever else is true about the indictment, substantial parts of the document explicitly characterize as criminal exactly the actions that journalists routinely engage in with their sources and thus, constitutes a dangerous attempt to criminalize investigative journalism.
The indictment, for instance, places great emphasis on Assange’s alleged encouragement that Manning — after she already turned over hundreds of thousands of classified documents — try to get more documents for WikiLeaks to publish. The indictment claims that “discussions also reflect Assange actively encouraging Manning to provide more information. During an exchange, Manning told Assange that ‘after this upload, that’s all I really have got left.’ To which Assange replied, ‘curious eyes never run dry in my experience.’”
But encouraging sources to obtain more information is something journalists do routinely. Indeed, it would be a breach of one’s journalistic duties not to ask vital sources with access to classified information if they could provide even more information so as to allow more complete reporting. If a source comes to a journalist with information, it is entirely common and expected that the journalist would reply: Can you also get me X, Y, and Z to complete the story or to make it better? As Edward Snowden said this morning, “Bob Woodward stated publicly he would have advised me to remain in place and act as a mole.”
Investigative journalism in many, if not most, cases, entails a constant back and forth between journalist and source in which the journalist tries to induce the source to provide more classified information, even if doing so is illegal. To include such “encouragement” as part of a criminal indictment — as the Trump DOJ did today — is to criminalize the crux of investigative journalism itself, even if the indictment includes other activities you believe fall outside the scope of journalism.
As Northwestern journalism professor Dan Kennedy explained in The Guardian in 2010 when denouncing as a press freedom threat the Obama DOJ’s attempts to indict Assange based on the theory that he did more than passively receive and publish documents — i.e., that he actively “colluded” with Manning:
The problem is that there is no meaningful distinction to be made. How did the Guardian, equally, not “collude” with WikiLeaks in obtaining the cables? How did the New York Times not “collude” with the Guardian when the Guardian gave the Times a copy following Assange’s decision to cut the Times out of the latest document dump?
For that matter, I don’t see how any news organisation can be said not to have colluded with a source when it receives leaked documents. Didn’t the Times collude with Daniel Ellsberg when it received the Pentagon Papers from him? Yes, there are differences. Ellsberg had finished making copies long before he began working with the Times, whereas Assange may have goaded Manning. But does that really matter?
Most of the reports about the Assange indictment today have falsely suggested that the Trump DOJ discovered some sort of new evidence that proved Assange tried to help Manning hack through a password in order to use a different username to download documents. Aside from the fact that those attempts failed, none of this is new: As the last five paragraphs of this 2011 Politico story demonstrate, that Assange talked to Manning about ways to use a different username so as to avoid detection was part of Manning’s trial and was long known to the Obama DOJ when they decided not to prosecute.
There are only two new events that explain today’s indictment of Assange: 1) The Trump administration from the start included authoritarian extremists such as Sessions and Pompeo who do not care in the slightest about press freedom and were determined to criminalize journalism against the U.S., and 2) With Ecuador about to withdraw its asylum protection, the U.S. government needed an excuse to prevent Assange from walking free.
A technical analysis of the indictment’s claims similarly proves the charge against Assange to be a serious threat to First Amendment press liberties, primarily because it seeks to criminalize what is actually a journalist’s core duty: helping one’s source avoid detection. The indictment deceitfully seeks to cast Assange’s efforts to help Manning maintain her anonymity as some sort of sinister hacking attack.
The Defense Department computer that Manning used to download the documents which she then furnished to WikiLeaks was likely running the Windows operating system. It had multiple user accounts on it, including an account to which Manning had legitimate access. Each account is protected by a password, and Windows computers store a file that contains a list of usernames and password “hashes,” or scrambled versions of the passwords. Only accounts designated as “administrator,” a designation Manning’s account lacked, have permission to access this file.
The indictment suggests that Manning, in order to access this password file, powered off her computer and then powered it back on, this time booting to a CD running the Linux operating system. From within Linux, she allegedly accessed this file full of password hashes. The indictment alleges that Assange agreed to try to crack one of these password hashes, which, if successful, would recover the original password. With the original password, Manning would be able to log directly into that other user’s account, which — as the indictment puts it — “would have made it more difficult for investigators to identify Manning as the source of disclosures of classified information.”
Assange appears to have been unsuccessful in cracking the password. The indictment alleges that “Assange indicated that he had been trying to crack the password by stating that he had ‘no luck so far.’”
Thus, even if one accepts all of the indictment’s claims as true, Assange was not trying to hack into new document files to which Manning had no access, but rather trying to help Manning avoid detection as a source. For that reason, the precedent that this case would set would be a devastating blow to investigative journalists and press freedom everywhere.
Journalists have an ethical obligation to take steps to protect their sources from retaliation, which sometimes includes granting them anonymity and employing technical measures to help ensure that their identity is not discovered. When journalists take source protection seriously, they strip metadata and redact information from documents before publishing them if that information could have been used to identify their source; they host cloud-based systems such as SecureDrop, now employed by dozens of major newsrooms around the world, that make it easier and safer for whistleblowers, who may be under surveillance, to send messages and classified documents to journalists without their employers knowing; and they use secure communication tools like Signal and set them to automatically delete messages.
But today’s indictment of Assange seeks to criminalize exactly these types of source-protection efforts, as it states that “it was part of the conspiracy that Assange and Manning used a special folder on a cloud drop box of WikiLeaks to transmit classified records containing information related to the national defense of the United States.”
The indictment, in numerous other passages, plainly conflates standard newsroom best practices with a criminal conspiracy. It states, for instance, that “it was part of the conspiracy that Assange and Manning used the ‘Jabber’ online chat service to collaborate on the acquisition and dissemination of the classified records, and to enter into the agreement to crack the password […].” There is no question that using Jabber, or any other encrypted messaging system, to communicate with sources and acquire documents with the intent to publish them, is a completely lawful and standard part of modern investigative journalism. Newsrooms across the world now use similar technologies to communicate securely with their sources and to help their sources avoid detection by the government.
The indictment similarly alleges that “it was part of the conspiracy that Assange and Manning took measures to conceal Manning as the source of the disclosure of classified records to WikiLeaks, including by removing usernames from the disclosed information and deleting chat logs between Assange and Manning.”
Netanyahu’s Coalition May Help Stave Off Indictment - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/world/middleeast/netanyahus-coalition-may-help-stave-off-indictment.html
Netanyahu protégé de la justice pour prix de son élection. Ca ne traîne pas !
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who emerged from this week’s election poised to win a fourth consecutive term, may benefit from an effort by his right-wing coalition to protect him from prosecution on possible corruption charges.
At least one right-wing party expected to join his new governing coalition has been open about its goal of passing a law granting immunity to Israeli Parliament members, including prime ministers.
Mr. Netanyahu, who worked on Wednesday to consolidate support for a new coalition, is on track to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, but also the first to be charged with a crime while in office.
“If Netanyahu gains the public’s trust in the coming elections,” Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Union of Right Wing Parties, wrote on Twitter last month, “it will be imperative to enact a law that will prevent him standing trial.”
Mr. Smotrich said parliamentary immunity was necessary to honor the people’s democratic choice and ensure smooth government. By Wednesday, his party was projected to win five seats in the 120-seat Knesset, or parliament.
An aide said on Wednesday that Mr. Smotrich was demanding the post of justice minister and another leader of his party wanted to be minister of education.
#Candida_Auris: The Fungus Nobody Wants to Talk About - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/health/candida-auris-hospitals.html
Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
In 30 years, I’ve never faced so tough a reporting challenge — and one so unexpected. Who wouldn’t want to talk about a fungus?
Last year, I began spade work on a series of articles about drug-resistant microbes: bacteria and fungi that have developed the ability to evade common medicines that we have used for decades.
Early on, I stumbled onto a compelling example. A woman in Alaska named Sari Bailey woke up one morning with green and yellow gunk coming out of her ear. Her doctor told her it was an ear infection and prescribed antibiotics. They didn’t work. Turns out she had a drug-resistant infection that rooted on her mastoid bone, just behind the ear. It nearly killed her and required multiple surgeries to clear.
Le champignon Candida auris est une menace maîtrisable - Sciences et Avenir
▻https://www.sciencesetavenir.fr/sante/le-champignon-candida-auris-est-une-menace-maitrisable_132898
« Une infection mystérieuse recouvre le monde entier dans un climat de secret », titrait le New York Times le 6 avril 2019. À l’origine de cet intitulé angoissant, il y a l’émergence du champignon Candida auris, qui a causé plusieurs épidémies et des morts dans des hôpitaux répartis sur le globe. Mais si ce nouveau germe est effectivement résistant à plusieurs traitements et difficile à éliminer des surfaces contaminées, il ne constitue cependant pas une menace majeure pour l’humanité.
[…]
ANTIBIORESISTANCE. S’il ne faut pas minimiser l’importance de ces épidémies de levures, surtout pour les personnes fragiles, le danger est cependant moindre que du côté des bactéries multirésistantes. Selon l’Organisation Mondiale de la Santé (OMS), en l’absence de politique adaptée, 10 millions de personnes dans le monde pourraient mourir de ces infections en 2050, éclipsant les huit millions qui devraient mourir du cancer cette année.
Wikipedia Isn’t Officially a Social Network. But the Harassment Can Get Ugly. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/us/wikipedia-harassment-wikimedia-foundation.html
Unlike social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, Wikipedia relies largely on unpaid volunteers to handle reports of harassment.
In response to complaints about pervasive harassment, the Wikimedia Foundation, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and supports its community of volunteers, has promised new strategies to curb abuse. In recent months, the foundation has rolled out a more sophisticated blocking tool that it hopes can better control the harassment plaguing some users.
Sydney Poore, a community health strategist with the foundation, said that when the free encyclopedia was established in 2001, it initially attracted lots of editors who were “tech-oriented” men. That led to a culture that was not always accepting of outside opinions, said Ms. Poore, who has edited Wikipedia for 13 years.
“We’re making strong efforts to reverse that,” she said, “but it doesn’t happen overnight.”
A few informed clicks on any Wikipedia article can reveal the lengthy discussions that shape a published narrative. According to interviews with Wikipedians around the world, those digital back rooms are where harassment often begins. A spirited debate over a detail in an article can spiral into one user spewing personal attacks against another.
“If you out yourself as a feminist or L.G.B.T., you will tend to be more targeted,” said Natacha Rault, a Wikipedia editor who lives in Geneva and founded a project that aims to reduce the gender gap on the website.
On French-language Wikipedia, where Ms. Rault does much of her editing, discussions about gender can often lead to vitriol. Ms. Rault said there were six months of heated debate about whether to label the article on Britain’s leader, Theresa May, with the feminine version of “prime minister” (première ministre), rather than the masculine one (premier ministre).
Wikipedians also began to discuss the “content gender gap,” which includes an imbalance in the gender distribution of biographies on the site. The latest analysis, released this month, said about 18 percent of 1.6 million biographies on the English-language Wikipedia were of women. That is up from about 15 percent in 2014, partially because of activists trying to move the needle.
“The idea is to provide volunteer administrators with a more targeted, more nuanced ability to respond to conflicts,” Ms. Lo said.
Partial blocks are active on five Wikipedias, including those in Italian and Arabic, and foundation staff members expect it to be introduced to English-language Wikipedia this year. The foundation is also in the early stages of a private reporting system where users could report harassment, Ms. Lo said.
But there are limits to how effective institutional change can be in curbing harassment on Wikipedia. In the case of Mx. Gethen, their harasser kept posting from different IP addresses, making it difficult for a blocking tool to be effective.
Although the abuser no longer haunts their internet presence, Mx. Gethen said the sometimes hostile culture on Wikipedia had reduced their editing on the site.
“I’m not getting paid for this,” they said. “Why should I volunteer my time to be abused?”
#CBP terminates controversial $297 million #Accenture contract amid continued staffing struggles
#Customs_and_Border_Protection on Thursday ended its controversial $297 million hiring contract with Accenture, according to two senior DHS officials and an Accenture representative.
As of December, when CBP terminated part of its contract, the company had only completed processing 58 applicants and only 22 had made it onto the payroll about a year after the company was hired.
At the time, the 3,500 applicants that remained in the Accenture hiring pipeline were transferred to CBP’s own hiring center to complete the process.
CBP cut ties with Accenture on processing applicants a few months ago, it retained some services, including marketing, advertising and applicant support.
This week, the entire contract was terminated for “convenience,” government speak for agreeing to part ways without placing blame on Accenture.
While government hiring is “slow and onerous, it’s also part of being in the government” and that’s “something we have to accept and deal with as we go forward,” said one of the officials.
For its efforts, CBP paid Accenture around $19 million in start-up costs, and around $2 million for 58 people who got job offers, according to the officials.
Over the last couple of months, CBP explored how to modify the contract, but ultimately decided to completely stop work and return any remaining funds to taxpayers.
But it’s unclear how much money, if any, that will be.
In addition, to the funds already paid to Accenture, CBP has around $39 million left to “settle and close the books” with the company, an amount which has yet to be determined.
In November 2017, CBP awarded Accenture the contract to help meet the hiring demands of an executive order on border security that President Donald Trump signed during his first week in office. The administration directed CBP to hire an additional 7,500 agents and officers on top of its current hiring goals.
“We were in a situation where we needed to try something new” and “break the cycle of going backwards,” said a DHS official about why the agency started the contract.
Meanwhile, hiring remains difficult for the agency amid a surge of migrants at the southern border that is stretching CBP resources thin.
It “continues to be a very challenging environment,” said one official about hiring efforts this year.
In fact, one of the reasons that CBP didn’t need Accenture to process applicants, is because the agency didn’t receive as many applications as it initially planned for.
The agency has been focused on beating attrition and has been able to recently “beat it by a modest amount,” said the official. “Ultimately we would like to beat it by a heck of a lot, but we’re not there yet.”
▻https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/05/politics/cbp-terminate-hiring-contract-accenture/index.html
#frontières #contrôles_frontaliers #USA #Ests-Unis #complexe_militaro-industriel #business
Border Profiteers
On a recent sunny spring afternoon in Texas, a couple hundred Border Patrol agents, Homeland Security officials, and salespeople from a wide array of defense and security contractors gathered at the Bandera Gun Club about an hour northwest of San Antonio to eat barbecue and shoot each other’s guns. The techies wore flip-flops; the veterans wore combat boots. Everyone had a good time. They were letting loose, having spent the last forty-eight hours cooped up in suits and ties back at San Antonio’s Henry B. Gonzalez convention center, mingling and schmoozing, hawking their wares, and listening to immigration officials rail about how those serving in enforcement agencies are not, under any circumstances, Nazis.
These profiteers and bureaucrats of the immigration-industrial complex were fresh from the 2019 #Border_Security_Expo —essentially a trade show for state violence, where law enforcement officers and weapons manufacturers gather, per the Expo’s marketing materials, to “identify and address new and emerging border challenges and opportunities through technology, partnership, and innovation.” The previous two days of panels, speeches, and presentations had been informative, a major in the Argentine Special Forces told me at the gun range, but boring. He was glad to be outside, where handguns popped and automatic rifles spat around us. I emptied a pistol into a target while a man in a Three Percenter militia baseball hat told me that I was a “natural-born killer.” A drone buzzed overhead until, in a demonstration of a company’s new anti-drone technology, a device that looked like a rocket launcher and fired a sort of exploding net took it down. “This is music to me,” the Argentine major said.
Perhaps it’s not surprising the Border Security Expo attendees were so eager to blow off steam. This year’s event found many of them in a defensive posture, given the waves of bad press they’d endured since President Trump’s inauguration, and especially since the disastrous implementation of his family separation policy, officially announced by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions in April of 2018, before being rescinded by Trump two-and-a-half months later. Throughout the Expo, in public events and in background roundtable conversations with reporters, officials from the various component parts of the Department of Homeland Security rolled out a series of carefully rehearsed talking points: Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) need more money, personnel, and technology; taking migrants to hospitals distracts CBP officers from their real mission; and the 1997 Flores court settlement, which prohibits immigration enforcement agencies from detaining migrant families with children for more than twenty days, is undermining the very sovereignty of the United States. “We want a secure border, we want an immigration system that has integrity,” Ronald Vitiello, then–acting head of ICE, said in a keynote address to the hundreds of people gathered in San Antonio. “We have a generous immigration system in this country, but it has to have integrity in order for us to continue to be so generous.”
More of a technocrat than his thuggish predecessor Thomas Homan, Vitiello also spoke at length about using the “dark web” to take down smugglers and the importance of having the most up-to-date data-management technology. But he spoke most adamantly about needing “a fix” for the Flores settlement. “If you prosecute crimes and you give people consequences, you get less of it,” he said. “With Flores, there’s no consequence, and everybody knows that,” a senior ICE official echoed to reporters during a background conversation immediately following Vitiello’s keynote remarks. “That’s why you’re seeing so many family units. We cannot apply a consequence to a family unit, because we have to release them.”
Meanwhile, around 550 miles to the west, in El Paso, hundreds of migrants, including children and families, were being held by CBP under a bridge, reportedly forced to sleep on the ground, with inadequate medical attention. “They treated us like we are animals,” one Honduran man told Texas Monthly. “I felt what they were trying to do was to hurt us psychologically, so we would understand that this is a lesson we were being taught, that we shouldn’t have crossed.” Less than a week after the holding pen beneath the bridge closed, Vitiello’s nomination to run ICE would be pulled amid a spate of firings across DHS; President Trump wanted to go “in a tougher direction.”
Family Values
On the second day of the Border Security Expo, in a speech over catered lunch, Scott Luck, deputy chief of Customs and Border Protection and a career Border Patrol agent, lamented that the influx of children and families at the border meant that resources were being diverted from traditional enforcement practices. “Every day, about 150 agents spend their shifts at hospitals and medical facilities with illegal aliens receiving treatment,” he said. “The annual salary cost for agents on hospital watch is more than $11.5 million. Budget analysts estimate that 13 percent of our operational budget—the budget that we use to buy equipment, to buy vehicles for our men and women—is now used for transportation, medical expenses, diapers, food, and other necessities to care for illegal aliens in Border Patrol custody.”
As far as Luck was concerned, every dollar spent on food and diapers is one not spent on drones and weapons, and every hour an agent spends guarding a migrant in a hospital is an hour they don’t spend on the border. “It’s not what they signed up for. The mission they signed up for is to protect the United States border, to protect the communities in which they live and serve,” he told reporters after his speech. “The influx, the volume, the clutter that this creates is frustrating.” Vitiello applied an Orwellian inversion: “We’re not helping them as fast as we want to,” he said of migrant families apprehended at the border.
Even when discussing the intimate needs of detained migrant families, the language border officials used to describe their remit throughout the Expo was explicitly militaristic: achieving “operational control,” Luck said, requires “impedance and denial” and “situational awareness.” He referred to technology as a “vital force multiplier.” He at least stopped short of endorsing the president’s framing that what is happening on the border constitutes an invasion, instead describing it as a “deluge.”
According to the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank, the U.S. immigrant population has continued to grow—although at a slower rate than it did before the 2007 recession, and undocumented people appear to make up a smaller proportion of the overall population. Regardless, in fiscal year 2018, both ICE and CBP stepped up their enforcement activities, arresting, apprehending, and deporting people at significantly higher rates than the previous year. More than three times as many family members were apprehended at the border last year than in 2017, the Pew Research Center reports, and in the first six months of FY 2019 alone there were 189,584 apprehensions of “family units”: more than half of all apprehensions at the border during that time, and more than the full-year total of apprehended families for any other year on record. While the overall numbers have not yet begun to approach those of the 1980s and 1990s, when apprehensions regularly exceeded one million per year, the demographics of who is arriving at the United States southern border are changing: fewer single men from Mexico and more children and families from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—in other words, an ever-wider range of desperate victims of drug gangs and American policies that have long supported corrupt regimes.
This change has presented people like Luck with problems they insist are merely logistical: aging Border Patrol stations, he told us at the Expo, “are not luxurious in any way, and they were never intended to handle families and children.” The solution, according to Vitiello, is “continued capital investment” in those facilities, as well as the cars and trucks necessary to patrol the border region and transport those apprehended from CBP custody to ICE detention centers, the IT necessary to sift through vast amounts of data accumulated through untold surveillance methods, and all of “the systems by which we do our work.”
Neither Vitiello nor Luck would consider whether those systems—wherein thousands of children, ostensibly under the federal government’s care, have been sexually abused and five, from December through May of this year, have died—ought to be questioned. Both laughed off calls from migrant justice organizers, activists, and politicians to abolish ICE. “The concept of the Department of Homeland Security—and ICE as an agency within it—was designed for us to learn the lessons from 9/11,” Vitiello said. “Those needs still exist in this society. We’re gonna do our part.” DHS officials have even considered holding migrant children at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to the New York Times, where a new $23 million “contingency mass migration complex” is being built. The complex, which is to be completed by the end of the year, will have a capacity of thirteen thousand.
Violence is the Point
The existence of ICE may be a consequence of 9/11, but the first sections of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border—originally to contain livestock—went up in 1909 through 1911. In 1945, in response to a shift in border crossings from Texas to California, the U.S. Border Patrol and the Immigration and Naturalization Service recycled fencing wire and posts from internment camps in Crystal City, Texas, where more than a hundred thousand Japanese Americans had been imprisoned during World War II. “Although the INS could not erect a continuous line of fence along the border, they hoped that strategic placement of the fence would ‘compel persons seeking to enter the United States illegally to attempt to go around the ends of the fence,’” historian Kelly Lytle Hernández, quoting from government documents, writes in Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. “What lay at the end of the fences and canals were desert lands and mountains extremely dangerous to cross without guidance or sufficient water. The fences, therefore, discouraged illegal immigration by exposing undocumented border crossers to the dangers of daytime dehydration and nighttime hypothermia.”
Apprehension and deportation tactics continued to escalate in the years following World War II—including Operation Wetback, the infamous (and heavily propagandized) mass-deportation campaign of 1954—but the modern, militarized border era was greatly boosted by Bill Clinton. It was during Clinton’s first administration that Border Patrol released its “Strategic Plan: 1994 and Beyond,” which introduced the idea of “prevention through deterrence,” a theory of border policing that built on the logic of the original wall and hinges upon increasing the “cost” of migration “to the point that many will consider it futile to continue to attempt illegal entry.” With the Strategic Plan, the agency was requesting more money, officers, and equipment in order to “enhance national security and safeguard our immigration heritage.”
The plan also noted that “a strong interior enforcement posture works well for border control,” and in 1996, amid a flurry of legislation targeting people of color and the poor, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which empowered the federal government to deport more people more quickly and made it nearly impossible for undocumented immigrants to obtain legal status. “Before 1996, internal enforcement activities had not played a very significant role in immigration enforcement,” the sociologists Douglas Massey and Karen A. Pren wrote in 2012. “Afterward these activities rose to levels not seen since the deportation campaigns of the Great Depression.” With the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2002, immigration was further securitized and criminalized, paving the way for an explosion in border policing technology that has further aligned the state with the defense and security industry. And at least one of Border Patrol’s “key assumptions,” explicitly stated in the 1994 strategy document, has borne out: “Violence will increase as effects of strategy are felt.”
What this phrasing obscures, however, is that violence is the border strategy. In practice, what “prevention through deterrence” has meant is forcing migrants to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in the desert, putting already vulnerable people at even greater risk. Closing urban points of entry, for example, or making asylum-seekers wait indefinitely in Mexico while their claims are processed, pushes migrants into remote areas where there is a higher likelihood they will suffer injury and death, as in the case of seven-year-old Jakil Caal Maquin, who died of dehydration and shock after being taken into CBP custody in December. (A spokesperson for CBP, in an email response, deflected questions about whether the agency considers children dying in its custody a deterrent.) Maquin is one of many thousands who have died attempting to cross into the United States: the most conservative estimate comes from CBP itself, which has recovered the remains of 7,505 people from its southwest border sectors between 1998 and 2018. This figure accounts for neither those who die on the Mexican side of the border, nor those whose bodies remain lost to the desert.
Draconian immigration policing causes migrants to resort to smugglers and traffickers, creating the conditions for their exploitation by cartels and other violent actors and increasing the likelihood that they will be kidnapped, coerced, or extorted. As a result, some migrants have sought the safety of collective action in the form of the “caravan” or “exodus,” which has then led the U.S. media and immigration enforcement agencies to justify further militarization of the border. Indeed, in his keynote address at the Expo, Luck described “the emerging prevalence of large groups of one hundred people or more” as “troubling and especially dangerous.” Later, a sales representative for the gun manufacturer Glock very confidently explained to me that this was because agents of al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia, were embedded with the caravans.
Branding the Border
Unsurprisingly, caravans came up frequently at the Border Security Expo. (An ICE spokesperson would later decline to explain what specific threat they pose to national security, instead citing general statistics about the terrorist watchlist, “special interest aliens,” and “suspicious travel patterns.”) During his own keynote speech, Vitiello described how ICE, and specifically its subcomponent Homeland Security Investigations, had deployed surveillance and intelligence-gathering techniques to monitor the progress of caravans toward the border. “When these caravans have come, we’ve had trained, vetted individuals on the ground in those countries reporting in real time what they were seeing: who the organizers were, how they were being funded,” he said, before going on an astonishing tangent:
That’s the kind of capability that also does amazing things to protecting brands, property rights, economic security. Think about it. If you start a company, introduce a product that’s innovative, there are people in the world who can take that, deconstruct it, and create their own version of it and sell it as yours. All the sweat that went into whatever that product was, to build your brand, they’ll take it away and slap it on some substandard product. It’s not good for consumers, it’s not good for public safety, and it’s certainly an economic drain on the country. That’s part of the mission.
That the then–acting director of ICE, the germ-cell of fascism in the bourgeois American state, would admit that an important part of his agency’s mission is the protection of private property is a testament to the Trump administration’s commitment to saying the quiet part out loud.
In fact, brands and private industry had pride of place at the Border Security Expo. A memorial ceremony for men and women of Border Patrol who have been killed in the line of duty was sponsored by Sava Solutions, an IT firm that has been awarded at least $482 million in federal contracts since 2008. Sava, whose president spent twenty-four years with the DEA and whose director of business development spent twenty with the FBI, was just one of the scores of firms in attendance at the Expo, each hoping to persuade the bureaucrats in charge of acquiring new gear for border security agencies that their drones, their facial recognition technology, their “smart” fences were the best of the bunch. Corporate sponsors included familiar names like Verizon and Motorola, and other less well-known ones, like Elbit Systems of America, a subsidiary of Israel’s largest private defense contractor, as well as a handful of IT firms with aggressive slogans like “Ever Vigilant” (CACI), “Securing the Future” (ManTech), and “Securing Your Tomorrow” (Unisys).
The presence of these firms—and indeed the very existence of the Expo—underscores an important truth that anyone attempting to understand immigration politics must reckon with: border security is big business. The “homeland security and emergency management market,” driven by “increasing terrorist threats and biohazard attacks and occurrence of unpredictable natural disasters,” is projected to grow to more than $742 billion by 2023 from $557 billion in 2018, one financial analysis has found. In the coming decades, as more people are displaced by climate catastrophe and economic crises—estimates vary between 150 million and 1 billion by 2050—the industry dedicated to policing the vulnerable stands to profit enormously. By 2013, the United States was already spending more on federal immigration enforcement than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined, including the FBI and DEA; ICE’s budget has doubled since its inception in 2003, while CBP’s has nearly tripled. Between 1993 and 2018, the number of Border Patrol agents grew from 4,139 to 19,555. And year after year, Democrats and Republicans alike have been happy to fuel an ever more high-tech deportation machine. “Congress has given us a lot of money in technology,” Luck told reporters after his keynote speech. “They’ve given us over what we’ve asked for in technology!”
“As all of this rhetoric around security has increased, so has the impetus to give them more weapons and more tools and more gadgets,” Jacinta Gonzalez, a senior campaign organizer with Mijente, a national network of migrant justice activists, told me. “That’s also where the profiteering comes in.” She continued: “Industries understand what’s good for business and adapt themselves to what they see is happening. If they see an administration coming into power that is pro-militarization, anti-immigrant, pro-police, anti-communities of color, then that’s going to shape where they put their money.”
By way of example, Gonzalez pointed to Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who spent $1.25 million supporting Trump’s 2016 election campaign and followed that up last year by donating $1 million to the Club for Growth—a far-right libertarian organization founded by Heritage Foundation fellow and one-time Federal Reserve Board prospect Stephen Moore—as well as about $350,000 to the Republican National Committee and other GOP groups. ICE has awarded Palantir, the $20 billion surveillance firm founded by Thiel, several contracts worth tens of millions of dollars to manage its data streams—a partnership the agency considers “mission critical,” according to documents reviewed by The Intercept. Palantir, in turn, runs on Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing service provided by the world’s most valuable public company, which is itself a key contractor in managing the Department of Homeland Security’s $6.8 billion IT portfolio.
Meanwhile, former DHS secretary John Kelly, who was Trump’s chief of staff when the administration enacted its “zero-tolerance” border policy, has joined the board of Caliburn International—parent organization of the only for-profit company operating shelters for migrant children. “Border enforcement and immigration policy,” Caliburn reported in an SEC filing last year, “is driving significant growth.” As Harsha Walia writes in Undoing Border Imperialism, “the state and capitalism are again in mutual alliance.”
Triumph of the Techno-Nativists
At one point during the Expo, between speeches, I stopped by a booth for Network Integrity Systems, a security firm that had set up a demonstration of its Sentinel™ Perimeter Intrusion Detection System. A sales representative stuck out his hand and introduced himself, eager to explain how his employer’s fiber optic motion sensors could be used at the border, or—he paused to correct himself—“any kind of perimeter.” He invited me to step inside the space that his coworkers had built, starting to say “cage” but then correcting himself, again, to say “small enclosure.” (It was literally a cage.) If I could get out, climbing over the fencing, without triggering the alarm, I would win a $500 Amazon gift card. I did not succeed.
Overwhelmingly, the vendors in attendance at the Expo were there to promote this kind of technology: not concrete and steel, but motion sensors, high-powered cameras, and drones. Customs and Border Patrol’s chief operating officer John Sanders—whose biography on the CBP website describes him as a “seasoned entrepreneur and innovator” who has “served on the Board of Directors for several leading providers of contraband detection, geospatial intelligence, and data analytics solutions”—concluded his address by bestowing on CBP the highest compliment he could muster: declaring the agency comparable “to any start-up.” Rhetoric like Sanders’s, ubiquitous at the Expo, renders the border both bureaucratic and boring: a problem to be solved with some algorithmic mixture of brutality and Big Data. The future of border security, as shaped by the material interests that benefit from border securitization, is not a wall of the sort imagined by President Trump, but a “smart” wall.
High-ranking Democrats—leaders in the second party of capital—and Republicans from the border region have championed this compromise. During the 2018-2019 government shutdown, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson told reporters that Democrats would appropriate $5.7 billion for “border security,” so long as that did not include a wall of Trump’s description. “Walls are primitive. What we need to do is have border security,” House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn said in January. He later expanded to CNN: “I’ve said that we ought to have a smart wall. I defined that as a wall using drones to make it too high to get over, using x-ray equipment to make it too wide to get around, and using scanners to go deep enough not to be able to tunnel under it. To me, that would be a smart thing to do.”
Even the social democratic vision of Senator Bernie Sanders stops short at the border. “If you open the borders, my God, there’s a lot of poverty in this world, and you’re going to have people from all over the world,” he told Iowa voters in early April, “and I don’t think that’s something that we can do at this point.” Over a week later, during a Fox News town hall with Pennsylvania voters, he recommitted: “We need border security. Of course we do. Who argues with that? That goes without saying.”
To the extent that Trump’s rhetoric, his administration’s immigration policies, and the enforcement agencies’ practices have made the “border crisis” more visible than ever before, they’ve done so on terms that most Democrats and liberals fundamentally agree with: immigration must be controlled and policed; the border must be enforced. One need look no further than the high priest of sensible centrism, Thomas Friedman, whose major complaint about Trump’s immigration politics is that he is “wasting” the crisis—an allusion to Rahm Emanuel’s now-clichéd remark that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” (Frequently stripped of context, it is worth remembering that Emanuel made this comment in the throes of the 2008 financial meltdown, at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council, shortly following President Obama’s election.) “Regarding the border, the right place for Democrats to be is for a high wall with a big gate,” Friedman wrote in November of 2018. A few months later, a tour led by Border Patrol agents of the San Ysidro port of entry in San Diego left Friedman “more certain than ever that we have a real immigration crisis and that the solution is a high wall with a big gate—but a smart gate.”
As reasonable as this might sound to anxious New York Times readers looking for what passes as humanitarian thinking in James Bennet’s opinion pages, the horror of Friedman’s logic eventually reveals itself when he considers who might pass through the big, smart gate in the high, high wall: “those who deserve asylum” and “a steady flow of legal, high-energy, and high-I.Q. immigrants.” Friedman’s tortured hypothetical shows us who he considers to be acceptable subjects of deportation and deprivation: the poor, the lazy, and the stupid. This is corporate-sponsored, state-sanctioned eugenics: the nativism of technocrats.
The vision of a hermetically sealed border being sold, in different ways, by Trump and his allies, by Democrats, and by the Border Security Expo is in reality a selectively permeable one that strictly regulates the movement of migrant labor while allowing for the unimpeded flow of capital. Immigrants in the United States, regardless of their legal status, are caught between two factions of the capitalist class, each of which seek their immiseration: the citrus farmers, construction firms, and meat packing plants that benefit from an underclass of unorganized and impoverished workers, and the defense and security firms that keep them in a state of constant criminality and deportability.
You could even argue that nobody in a position of power really wants a literal wall. Even before taking office, Trump himself knew he could only go so far. “We’re going to do a wall,” he said on the campaign trail in 2015. However: “We’re going to have a big, fat beautiful door on the wall.” In January 2019, speaking to the American Farm Bureau Association, Trump acknowledged the necessity of a mechanism allowing seasonal farmworkers from Mexico to cross the border, actually promising to loosen regulations on employers who rely on temporary migrant labor. “It’s going to be easier for them to get in than what they have to go through now,” he said, “I know a lot about the farming world.”
At bottom, there is little material difference between this and what Friedman imagines to be the smarter, more humane approach. While establishment liberals would no doubt prefer that immigration enforcement be undertaken quietly, quickly, and efficiently, they have no categorical objection to the idea that noncitizens should enjoy fewer rights than citizens or be subject to different standards of due process (standards that are already applied in deeply inequitable fashion).
As the smorgasbord of technologies and services so garishly on display at the Border Security Expo attests, maintaining the contradiction between citizens and noncitizens (or between the imperial core and the colonized periphery) requires an ever-expanding security apparatus, which itself becomes a source of ever-expanding profit. The border, shaped by centuries of bourgeois interests and the genocidal machinations of the settler-colonial nation-state, constantly generates fresh crises on which the immigration-industrial complex feeds. In other words, there is not a crisis at the border; the border is the crisis.
CBP has recently allowed Anduril, a start-up founded by one of Peter Thiel’s mentees, Palmer Luckey, to begin testing its artificial intelligence-powered surveillance towers and drones in Texas and California. Sam Ecker, an Anduril engineer, expounded on the benefits of such technology at the Expo. “A tower doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t care about being in the middle of the desert or a river around the clock,” he told me. “We just let the computers do what they do best.”
A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/health/drug-resistant-candida-auris.html
Un effet méconnu de l’utilisation des #pesticides (qui s’additionne à l’utilisation intempestive des #antibiotiques) dans l’#agriculture : le développement de #mycoses résistantes aux antimycosiques chez l’être humain.
Antibiotics and antifungals are both essential to combat infections in people, but antibiotics are also used widely to prevent disease in farm animals, and antifungals are also applied to prevent agricultural plants from rotting. Some scientists cite evidence that rampant use of fungicides on crops is contributing to the surge in drug-resistant fungi infecting humans.
#effondrement #collapsologie #catastrophe #fin_du_monde #it_has_begun #Anthropocène #capitalocène
on l’ajoute à la troisième compilation :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/680147
Article sur le sujet en français et antérieur
►https://seenthis.net/messages/722711
In San Francisco, Making a Living From Your Billionaire Neighbor’s Trash - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/07/us/trash-pickers-san-francisco-zuckerberg.html
A military veteran who fell into homelessness and now lives in government subsidized housing, Mr. Orta is a full-time trash picker, part of an underground economy in San Francisco of people who work the sidewalks in front of multimillion-dollar homes, rummaging for things they can sell.
Trash picking is a profession more often associated with shantytowns and favelas than a city at the doorstep of Silicon Valley. The Global Alliance of Waste Pickers, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, counts more than 400 trash picking organizations across the globe, almost all of them in Latin America, Africa and southern Asia.
But trash scavengers exist in many United States cities and, like the rampant homelessness in San Francisco, are a signpost of the extremes of American capitalism. A snapshot from 2019: One of the world’s richest men and a trash picker, living a few minutes’ walk from each other.
Mr. Orta, 56, sees himself as more of a treasure hunter.
“It just amazes me what people throw away,” he said one night, as he found a pair of gently used designer jeans, a new black cotton jacket, gray Nike running sneakers and a bicycle pump. “You never know what you will find.”
Nick Marzano, an Australian photographer who publishes a glossy magazine, Mission Gold, which documents the world of trash pickers in San Francisco, estimates there are several hundred garbage scavengers in the city.
“It’s a civic service as I see it,” Mr. Marzano said. “Rather than this stuff going to landfill the items are being reused.”
Mr. Marzano says there is overlap among trash picking and homelessness and public drug use — the street conditions that have ranked at the top of residents’ concerns for several years. But he sees trash picking, and the spontaneous sidewalk markets that pop up in neighborhoods like the Mission and Tenderloin, as a form of entrepreneurship.
“It’s the primary form of income for people who have no other income,” he said.
Attacks by White Extremists Are Growing. So Are Their Connections. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/03/world/white-extremist-terrorism-christchurch.html
In a manifesto posted online before his attack, the gunman who killed 50 last month in a rampage at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, said he drew inspiration from white extremist terrorism attacks in Norway, the United States, Italy, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
His references to those attacks placed him in an informal global network of white extremists whose violent attacks are occurring with greater frequency in the West.
An analysis by The New York Times of recent terrorism attacks found that at least a third of white extremist killers since 2011 were inspired by others who perpetrated similar attacks, professed a reverence for them or showed an interest in their tactics.
The connections between the killers span continents and highlight how the internet and social media have facilitated the spread of white extremist ideology and violence.
In one instance, a school shooter in New Mexico corresponded with a gunman who attacked a mall in Munich. Altogether, they killed 11 people.
#extrême_droite #agression #terrorisme #cartographie #visualisation
Debris from India’s anti-satellite test could put the space station at risk, says NASA - MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/613256/debris-from-indias-anti-satellite-test-could-put-the-space-station
The blast destroyed a satellite but also created 400 pieces of debris, threatening the safety of astronauts on the International Space Station, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said.
The controversial launch: Last week India announced it had shot down one of its own satellites, thus joining the group of four “space powers” (including Russia, China, and the US). It seems to have been an attempt at a show of strength ahead of an upcoming election this month.
The impact: Unfortunately, by breaking up the satellite, India added significantly to the growing problem of space junk. Bridenstine said that the 400 pieces of debris included about 60 trackable pieces that are at least 10 centimeters in size, the New York Times reported. It’s also put people in danger, he said. The satellite itself was destroyed at the fairly low altitude of 180 miles (300 kilometers) but 24 of the pieces of debris have reached a point higher than the ISS, which orbits at an altitude of 254 miles (408 km).
Strong words: “That is a terrible, terrible thing, to create an event that sends debris at an apogee that goes above the International Space Station,” Bridenstone said in a recorded meeting with NASA staff yesterday. “That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight. It’s unacceptable and NASA needs to be very clear about what its impact to us is.”
Drug Sites Upend Doctor-Patient Relations: ‘It’s Restaurant-Menu Medicine’ - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/technology/for-him-for-hers-get-roman.html
On the sites, people self-diagnose and select the drug they want, then enter some personal health and credit card information. A doctor then assesses their choice, with no in-person consultation. If approved, the medicine arrives in the mail days or weeks later.
The sites invert the usual practice of medicine by turning the act of prescribing drugs into a service. Instead of doctors making diagnoses and then suggesting treatments, patients request drugs and physicians serve largely as gatekeepers.
Much like Uber, which argues that it is not a transportation company even as it connects drivers and passengers, the drug sites argue that they are tech platforms, not health providers. The sites connect consumers — and often process their payments — to doctors who may prescribe drugs and pharmacies that can ship the medications.
To comply with state laws, the doctors work for separate companies that cater to the sites. The doctors are typically paid for each health consultation, or by the hour, not the number of prescriptions written. The sites generate revenue for themselves by charging service or processing fees to consumers, the doctors or both.
The new wave of sites that market drugs directly to consumers began popping up several years ago, promising to streamline medical care with software.
Several gained traction with cheeky TV commercials, billboard ads and social media feeds featuring sexual imagery like cactuses. They use slick packaging, wrapping doses of Viagra in condom-size envelopes or sending chocolate along with birth control pills.
The premise is so attractive to investors that Hims and Ro have raised nearly $100 million each. They have also tapped experts for advice, including Dr. Joycelyn Elders, a former surgeon general who is a medical adviser to Ro, and men’s health specialists at leading hospitals.
Dr. Elders said she had signed on to advise Ro to promote accurate information about sexual health.
The Food and Drug Administration generally prohibits pharmaceutical companies from marketing medicines for unapproved uses, as they have not been federally vetted for safety and effectiveness. Over the last decade, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson have each paid fines of more than $2 billion to settle government charges of illegally marketing unapproved drug uses.
Doctors are permitted to practice medicine as they see fit, including prescribing drugs for unapproved uses. Mr. Ip of Kick noted that doctors regularly prescribed propranolol to treat anxiety.
#Big_pharma #Médecine #Pharmacie #Internet #Le_fric_avant_tout
A Jewish Councilman Who Said ‘#Palestine Does Not Exist’ Loses Seat on Immigration Committee - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/31/nyregion/kalman-yeger-israel-palestine.html
... as more Palestinian immigrants have settled in New York, the political calculus has grown slightly more complicated, as seen last week, when Kalman Yeger, a Brooklyn councilman who represents the Orthodox Jewish community of Borough Park, took to Twitter on Wednesday to state that “Palestine does not exist.”
A mettre avec l’évolution de la situation aux États-Unis (et du #New-York_Times ) vis à vis de la Palestine :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/752002
Netanyahu is LGBT-friendly at AIPAC. At home, he’s homophobe-friendly - Israel Election 2019 - Haaretz.com
Jewish American leaders accepted the prime minister’s apology after his racist statement in 2015, so don’t expect anything different if he belatedly apologizes for legitimizing anti-LGBT rhetoric this time around
Amir Tibon Washington
Apr 02, 2019
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/elections/.premium-lgbt-friendly-at-aipac-netanyahu-is-homophobe-friendly-at-home-1.7
WASHINGTON — Israel’s LGBT community has frequently criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his habit of speaking positively about the community when he addresses overseas audiences, but then ignoring their demands in Israel and aligning himself with the religious parties who oppose gay rights. But he seems to have broken his own record for hypocrisy in the lead-up to Election Day.
>> Israel election 2019: full coverage
Last week, in a speech delivered via video to the annual AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, Netanyahu said — in English, of course — that equality for sexual minorities is one of the values Israel shares with the United States of America. He said that both countries are places where no citizen is discriminated against based on their sexual orientation.
Netanyahu at AIPAC praises Israel and U.S. for not discriminating against LGBT community
Israel is clearly the most “gay-friendly” country in the Middle East, with Tel Aviv a proud LGBT stronghold. And yes, great progress has been made over the past three decades in the fight to end discrimination based on sexual orientation — but that is mostly thanks to the Israeli legal system Netanyahu and his political allies are looking to weaken if they win on April 9.
>> Read more: Gantz-Netanyahu faceoff is suddenly infested by fake social media accounts ■ Phone hacking? Fake Twitter accounts? You ain’t seen nothing yet | Analysis ■ Netanyahu proves once again he can turn filth into gold
If you think Netanyahu genuinely cares about this issue, you may need to check your assumptions. On Monday, less than a week after once more using the LGBT community as an applause line at AIPAC, the prime minister gave legitimacy to the ugliest form of homophobia on prime time Israeli television.
He did it in order to push back against an investigative story about suspicious social media accounts that praised him and spread false, libelous “information” about his political rivals. The article was published in the New York Times and, separately, in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth.
Two people “cured” of HIV. But we don’t have a cure for HIV.
▻https://africasacountry.com/2019/04/two-people-cured-of-hiv-but-we-dont-have-a-cure-for-hiv
Earlier this month, The New York Times and others published, in violation of a media embargo, world-shaking headlines of a “cure” for HIV.
#Climate_Change Claims a Lake, and an Identity - The New York Times
►https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/07/07/world/americas/bolivia-climate-change-lake-poopo.html
After surviving decades of water diversion and cyclical El Niño droughts in the #Andes, #Lake_Poopó basically disappeared in December. The ripple effects go beyond the loss of livelihood for the #Quispes and hundreds of other fishing families, beyond the migration of people forced to leave homes that are no longer viable.
Climate Change Claims a Lake, and an Identity
NICHOLAS CASEY, The New-York Times, le 7 juillet 2016
#effondrement #collapsologie #catastrophe #fin_du_monde #it_has_begun #Anthropocène #capitalocène
on l’ajoute donc à la troisième compilation :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/680147
Lawsuits Lay Bare Sackler Family’s Role in Opioid Crisis - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/health/sacklers-oxycontin-lawsuits.html
The Sacklers had a new plan.
It was 2014, and the company the family had controlled for two generations, Purdue Pharma, had been hit with years of investigations and lawsuits over its marketing of the highly addictive opioid painkiller OxyContin, at one point pleading guilty to a federal felony and paying more than $600 million in criminal and civil penalties.
But as the country’s addiction crisis worsened, the Sacklers spied another business opportunity. They could increase their profits by selling treatments for the very problem their company had helped to create: addiction to opioids.
The filings cite numerous records, emails and other documents showing that members of the family continued to push aggressively to expand the market for OxyContin and other opioids for years after the company admitted in a 2007 plea deal that it had misrepresented the drug’s addictive qualities and potential for abuse.
In addition to New York and Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Utah have filed suit against members of the family. Last month, a coalition of more than 500 counties, cities and Native American tribes named the Sacklers in a case in the Southern District of New York, bringing the family into a bundle of 1,600 opioids cases being overseen by a federal court judge in Cleveland.
In 2009, two years after the federal guilty plea, Mortimer D.A. Sackler, a board member, demanded to know why the company wasn’t selling more opioids, email traffic cited by Massachusetts prosecutors showed.
In 2011, as states looked for ways to curb opioid prescriptions, family members peppered the sales staff with questions about how to expand the market for the drugs. Mortimer asked if they could sell a generic version of OxyContin in order to “capture more cost sensitive patients,” according to one email. Kathe, his half sister, suggested studying patients who had switched to OxyContin to see if they could find patterns that could help them win new customers, according to court filings in Massachusetts.
The lawsuits brought by the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts, Letitia James and Maura Healey, named eight Sackler family members: Kathe, Mortimer, Richard, Jonathan and Ilene Sackler Lefcourt — children of either Mortimer or Raymond Sackler — along with Theresa Sackler, the elder Mortimer’s widow; Beverly Sackler, Raymond’s widow; and David Sackler, a grandson of Raymond.
Purdue’s business was fundamentally changed after the F.D.A. approved OxyContin in 1995. The company marketed the drug as a long-acting painkiller that was less addictive than shorter-acting rivals like Percocet and Vicodin, a strategy aimed at reducing the stigma attached to opioids among doctors.
While the Sacklers “have reduced Purdue’s operations and size, Rhodes continues to grow and sell opioids for the benefit of the Sackler families,” the New York suit contends.
By 2016, Rhodes, though little known to the public, had a greater share of the American prescription opioid market than Purdue, according to a Financial Times analysis. Together, the companies ranked seventh in terms of the market share of opioids.
Purdue temporarily abandoned plans to pursue Project Tango in 2014, but revived the idea two years later, this time pursuing a plan to sell naloxone, an overdose-reversing drug, according to the Massachusetts filing. A few months later, in December 2016, Richard, Jonathan and Mortimer Sackler discussed buying a company that used implantable drug pumps to treat opioid addiction.
In recent years, the Sacklers and their companies have been developing products for opioid and overdose treatment on various tracks. Last year, Richard Sackler was awarded a patent for a version of buprenorphine, a drug that blocks opioid receptors, administered by mouth in a thin film. In March, the F.D.A. fast tracked the company’s application for an injectable drug for emergency treatment of overdoses.
Fait très rare, cet article comporte de nombreuses photos des membres de la famille Sackler
Marines seize an airfield and small island while testing tactics for fight against China
▻https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2019/03/21/marines-seize-an-airfield-and-small-island-alongside-special-opera
/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-mco.s3.amazonaws.com/public/NM7YIJKJEBBRXESJLOOLXALMOI.jpg)
Marines with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, or MEU, seized a small island and airfield with elite special operations airmen and soldiers as part of a test of its future fighting concept.
That fighting concept, known as expeditionary advanced base operations, or EABO, will see Marines spread thinly across the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, operating from small bases — a tactic that will help Marines stay alive in a high-end fight with China.
EABO is still in the early stages of experimentation. The concept recently was signed off by Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Robert B. Neller, but still awaits the signature of Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson.
It’s a fight that will require assistance from the other services and the recent exercise that spanned March 11–14 included participation by U.S. Air Force 353rd Special Operations Group and soldiers with 1st Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group, according to details in a command release.
[…]
The exercise kicked off with the insertion of Marine reconnaissance via a military free-fall jump over Ie Shima Training Facility on Ie Jima Island, which is located off the coast of Okinawa, Japan, according to details in a command release.
Grunts with 1st Battalion, 4th Marines then carried out a long-range raid to seize the island’s airfield, moving nearly 600 miles by MV-22 Ospreys supported by KC-130 air refuelers, the command release detailed.
Au moins une paire de F-35 était de sortie dans un raid à longue distance…
(puisqu’on vous dit qu’il marche !)
vu par RT.com qui souligne l’absence quasi complète d’écho médiatique.
The US just ‘invaded’ an island in the East China Sea & no one noticed — RT Op-ed
▻https://www.rt.com/op-ed/455053-souch-china-sea-invade-us
Just recently, the US military launched a full-on invasion of an island in the East China Sea to send a strong message to China, and yet barely any mainstream media outlet has covered the story or its massive implications.
[…]
Media blackout
No one will come right out and say it, but it certainly seems as though the US military is actively preparing for a third world war. If this media blackout on the implications of these recent developments wasn’t bad enough; even more bizarre is the complete silence from the media on the enormous geopolitical activity itself.
A brief search of Google News reveals that only a handful of media outlets even covered the event, many of which are not typically regarded as internationally mainstream sources. A ProQuest search for media coverage of the story in fact returned zero results. The most prominent western outlet that covered the story is Business Insider, as well as a number of military sites.
I cannot find any mention of this story on any of the major news sites, whether it’s CNN, MSNBC, the Guardian, BBC, the New York Times – take your pick. Remember that the adversarial, independent and free media who is entrusted with informing you and keeping you up to date barely even mentions geopolitical manoeuvres that could lead to a global conflict.
How the Battle Over Israel and Anti-Semitism Is Fracturing American Politics - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/magazine/battle-over-bds-israel-palestinians-antisemitism.html
Joel Rubin said: “The problem for center-left groups that are more critical of Israel is that the Jewish donor class is comfortable with current U.S. policies. They just don’t like Trump on other issues.” In October, just weeks before the 2018 midterm election, as the Democratic leadership was working to take back the House, a Democratic staff member, who asked not to be named for fear of professional retaliation, told me that it was important to retain the support of all major donors, not just the most liberal ones. Referring to two of the largest Jewish donors to Democrats, on opposite ends of the political spectrum, the staff member said: “Our members need George Soros and Haim Saban. And they need everything in between.”
#Sanders, who outraised Hillary Clinton early in the 2016 primaries by obtaining millions of small-donor contributions, was immune to pressure from donors like Saban. “If you don’t rely on a traditional fund-raising model, then you have more freedom on these types of issues,” Rhodes said. “You’re not worried about the one-hour phone call that you’re going to have to do after the presidential debate with a really angry donor.”
A mettre avec l’évolution de la situation aux États-Unis (et du #New-York_Times ) vis à vis de la Palestine :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/752002
Tate Galleries Will Refuse Sackler Money Because of Opioid Links - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/arts/design/tate-modern-sackler-britain-opioid-art.html
“The Sackler family has given generously to Tate in the past, as they have to a large number of U.K. arts institutions,” a Tate statement said.
"We do not intend to remove references to this historic philanthropy. However, in the present circumstances we do not think it right to seek or accept further donations from the Sacklers.”
Si je comprends bien, cela veut dire qu’ils ne retireront pas le nom des Sackler des lieux déjà sponsorisés... futilités.
Tate’s statement came two days after Britain’s National Portrait Gallery said it would not accept a long-discussed $1.3 million donation from the London-based Sackler Trust, one of the family’s charitable foundations. It said the decision was taken jointly by the gallery and Trust.
But the Thursday announcement, affecting Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London, as well as Tate Liverpool and Tate St. Ives in Cornwall, could have a bigger impact in the art world. All these galleries are major tourist attractions as well as home to large, high-profile exhibitions.
In an email, a spokesman for the Mortimer and Raymond Sackler family said, “We deeply sympathise with all the communities, families and individuals affected by the addiction crisis in America. The allegations made against family members in relation to this are strongly denied and will be vigorously defended in court.” He did not comment on Tate’s decision.
Ne parlons pas du Valium, qui fut la première cause des richesse de la famille Sackler. Surtout pas. Une drogue à la fois, isn’t it ? Quinze ans plus tôt.
“The Sackler family has been connected with the Met for more than a half century,” Mr. Weiss’s statement said. “The family is a large extended group and their support of The Met began decades before the opioid crisis.”
Museums Cut Ties With Sacklers as Outrage Over Opioid Crisis Grows - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/arts/design/sackler-museums-donations-oxycontin.html
In Paris, at the Louvre, lovers of Persian art knew there was only one place to go: the Sackler Wing of Oriental Antiquities. Want to find the long line for the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Head for the soaring, glass-walled Sackler Wing.
For decades, the Sackler family has generously supported museums worldwide, not to mention numerous medical and educational institutions including Columbia University, where there is a Sackler Institute, and Oxford, where there is a Sackler Library.
But now some favorite Sackler charities are reconsidering whether they want the money at all, and several have already rejected any future gifts, concluding that some family members’ ties to the opioid crisis outweighed the benefits of their six- and sometimes seven-figure checks.
In a remarkable rebuke to one of the world’s most prominent philanthropic dynasties, the prestigious Tate museums in London and the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York, where a Sackler sat on the board for many years, decided in the last week that they would no longer accept gifts from their longtime Sackler benefactors. Britain’s National Portrait Gallery announced it had jointly decided with the Sackler Trust to cancel a planned $1.3 million donation, and an article in The Art Newspaper disclosed that a museum in South London had returned a family donation last year.
On Monday, as the embarrassment grew with every new announcement, a Sackler trust and a family foundation in Britain issued statements saying they would suspend further philanthropy for the moment.
“The current press attention that these legal cases in the United States is generating has created immense pressure on the scientific, medical, educational and arts institutions here in the U.K., large and small, that I am so proud to support,” Theresa Sackler, the chair of the Sackler Trust, said in a statement. “This attention is distracting them from the important work that they do.”
The Guggenheim’s move was perhaps the most surprising, and not just because it was the first American institution known to cut ties with its Sackler supporters.
Mortimer D.A. Sackler, a son of Mortimer Sackler, sat on the Guggenheim’s board for nearly 20 years and the family gave the museum $9 million between 1995 and 2015, including $7 million to establish and support the Sackler Center for Arts Education.
The Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum had been the scene of protests related to the Sacklers. One last month, led by the photographer Nan Goldin, who overcame an OxyContin addiction, involved dropping thousands of slips of white paper from the iconic gallery spiral into its rotunda, a reference to a court document that quoted Richard Sackler, who ran Purdue Pharma, heralding a “blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition.”
Last Thursday, the Guggenheim, like other American museums, stated simply that “no contributions from the Sackler family have been received since 2015 and no additional gifts are planned.”
But a day later, amid more articles about British museums rejecting Sackler money, the Guggenheim amended its statement: “The Guggenheim does not plan to accept any gifts.”
‘Terrorism’ and antisemitism
►https://africasacountry.com/2019/03/terrorism-and-antisemitism
After all, would any elected official, in Washington or anywhere else, accept the notion that the Palestinians (or Lebanon or Syria) had the right to use force against the “terrorist threat” posed by Israel’s FLLF? Or the right to target Eitan, Ben-Gal, Dagan or Sharon for assassination (targeted killing) because of their direct role in this “terrorist” campaign? Or the right to target the kibuztim where, according to Bergman, many of the FLLF bombs were manufactured? Can one imagine a columnist in a major US newspaper claiming that civilians accidentally killed in the process should be considered mere “collateral damage,” or insisting that such uses of force should be celebrated as courageous, determined actions in the moral fight against the scourge of “terrorism” around the world?
On what basis then can Israel, the United States, or any other country claim the right to target terrorist leaders, bomb terrorist bomb making facilities or use deadly force against demonstrators because of an alleged connection to a terrorist organization?
Acknowledging that Palestinians have been the perpetrators of “terrorism” against Israel but also the victims of Israeli “terrorism” thus threatens to upend the entirety of the hegemonic discourse on “terrorism.”
Over the past few weeks, pundits like Bari Weiss and #Bret_Stephens have repeatedly condemned Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar’s allegedly anti-Semitic remarks while proclaiming their readiness to accept “legitimate criticism” of Israel that is based not on slander but on a “ foundation in truth .” Yet, they have not written a single word about the extraordinary revelations contained in Rise and Kill First, a book written by their own Times colleague and based on accounts from Israeli sources who were involved in the operation or knew of it at the time.
On August 8, 1983, Thomas Friedman described on the front page of the New York Times how a Peugeot car packed with 200 pounds of TNT “detonated around noon, when the surrounding stores and vendor’s stalls were jammed with shoppers.” The bombing killed 33 and wounded 125 and, he added, “appeared to have had no other immediate objective than to kill as many civilians as possible.”
Bergman’s book finally answered a question the Times reporter (and countless other journalists) repeatedly asked at the time: who was behind this extraordinarily violent campaign of terrorism against Palestinians and their leftist Lebanese allies? And yet, over the past 13 months, Friedman has not written a single word about the topic. He has, however, found the time to condemn Representative Omar’s “anti-Semitic” tweets.
NASA Cancels First All-Female Spacewalk Over Spacesuit Sizes - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/science/female-spacewalk-canceled.html
It hadn’t been planned as a historic mission, yet it would have represented a moment of sorts: the first all-female spacewalk.
But that moment will have to wait, NASA said Monday, because of a somewhat basic issue — spacesuit sizes.
The two astronauts who were scheduled to walk together in space on Friday, Anne C. McClain and Christina H. Koch, would both need to wear a medium-size torso component. But only one is readily available at the International Space Station.
Warnings of a Dark Side to A.I. in Health Care - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/science/health-medicine-artificial-intelligence.html
Similar forms of artificial intelligence are likely to move beyond hospitals into the computer systems used by health care regulators, billing companies and insurance providers. Just as A.I. will help doctors check your eyes, lungs and other organs, it will help insurance providers determine reimbursement payments and policy fees.
Ideally, such systems would improve the efficiency of the health care system. But they may carry unintended consequences, a group of researchers at Harvard and M.I.T. warns.
In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Science, the researchers raise the prospect of “adversarial attacks” — manipulations that can change the behavior of A.I. systems using tiny pieces of digital data. By changing a few pixels on a lung scan, for instance, someone could fool an A.I. system into seeing an illness that is not really there, or not seeing one that is.
_ Software developers and regulators must consider such scenarios, as they build and evaluate A.I. technologies in the years to come, the authors argue. The concern is less that hackers might cause patients to be misdiagnosed, although that potential exists. More likely is that doctors, hospitals and other organizations could manipulate the A.I. in billing or insurance software in an effort to maximize the money coming their way. _
In turn, changing such diagnoses one way or another could readily benefit the insurers and health care agencies that ultimately profit from them. Once A.I. is deeply rooted in the health care system, the researchers argue, business will gradually adopt behavior that brings in the most money.
The end result could harm patients, Mr. Finlayson said. Changes that doctors make to medical scans or other patient data in an effort to satisfy the A.I. used by insurance companies could end up on a patient’s permanent record and affect decisions down the road.
Already doctors, hospitals and other organizations sometimes manipulate the software systems that control the billions of dollars moving across the industry. Doctors, for instance, have subtly changed billing codes — for instance, describing a simple X-ray as a more complicated scan — in an effort to boost payouts.
Hamsa Bastani, an assistant professor at the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, who has studied the manipulation of health care systems, believes it is a significant problem. “Some of the behavior is unintentional, but not all of it,” she said.
#Intelligence_Artificielle #Médecine #Manipulation #Economie_santé
A New Age of Warfare: How #Internet Mercenaries Do Battle for Authoritarian Governments - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/us/politics/government-hackers-nso-darkmatter.html
The proliferation of companies trying to replicate NSO’s success and compete in what Moody’s estimates is a $12 billion market for so-called lawful intercept spyware has set off a fierce competition to hire American, Israeli and Russian veterans of the world’s most sophisticated intelligence agencies — and for the companies to poach talent from one another.
In late 2017, NSO executives grew concerned about a spate of resignations. Private detectives hired to investigate soon found themselves on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, tailing a group of former NSO employees — all veterans of Israel’s Intelligence Unit 8200 — going back and forth to work at a research facility.
The building was owned by a company affiliated with DarkMatter, an Emirati firm that had quietly hired the Israelis to develop technologies for the U.A.E. to conduct cyberoperations against perceived enemies at home and abroad.
Opinion | Shedding Any Last Illusions About the Saudis - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/opinion/saudi-arabia-crown-prince-jamal-khashoggi.html
Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy with a particularly stern form of Islam, has always been high on the list of human-rights violators. But with the ascent of Prince Mohammed’s father, King Salman, to the throne in January 2015, and with Prince Mohammed’s subsequent emergence as the heir and the power behind the throne, the pace of arrests, repression and executions rose to levels unseen in two decades.
According to a Saudi group that tracks political prisoners, Prisoners of Conscience, more than 2,600 Saudi dissidents — including scientists, writers, lawyers and women’s rights campaigners — were locked up in the kingdom while the crown prince was building his image abroad as a reformer. His celebrated decision to let women drive, in the best known example, was accompanied by the imprisonment of the women who had campaigned for the right.
Promis, juré : quand Trump sera parti, les USA ne soutiendront plus cette terrible dictature en #arabie_saoudite !
MBS approved ’intervention’ against dissidents : NYT report | News | Al Jazeera
▻https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/03/mbs-approved-intervention-dissidents-nyt-report-190318075621971.html
More than a year before the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia’s powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS, approved a secret campaign to silence dissenters, the New York Times has reported.
The campaign included surveillance, kidnapping, detention and torture of Saudis, said the report published on Sunday citing the US officials who have read classified intelligence reports about the effort.
American officials referred to it as the Saudi Rapid Intervention Group, the Times said.