1658: Spaving

Show 1567 there was a mention of how meal worms for humans were different than meal worms for animals. I don’t know about the meal worms, but my uncle was a farmer with an IAMS dog food plant close to his farms. I asked him one day why he didn’t sell his grain to the IAMS plant. He said while they paid better they were way too picky in the quality of the grain. So he sold to Cargil. Not a joke!

Viper 515

Executive Producer / Actor

Hey Adam, I'm a knight and I just stopped driving a Tesla Model 3 for Uber last week. I live in Orange County, CA and have been at 30% on the 10. It's not a big deal. As an Uber driver I only had to charge once a day when though I did the equivalent of a weeks worth of driving in that time but when I did charge it cost me $10 compared to the $70+ it would cost to full a gas tank here in SoCal. The chargers here are plentiful, there's practically one on every other block. While they certainly have issues in cold weather, hot weather is where they thrive. The heat pumps they use are incredibly efficient. My recommendation to anyone is southern California is that a 2 car family should have an electric and an ICE car to get the max benefits of each. I agree that the earth saving benefits of electric cars are bogus but there really is a savings when it comes to energy. If you have any questions about electric cars I would be happy to answer them. I've driven far more in one than most people ever will and they're fantastic cars that require very little maintenance.

Adam,

I

was listening to Sunday's show and I believe you are right about the

government forcing the "fake meat" on us. A thought came to me about how

they would do it. They'll use the public school system as they always

do. You will soon see a "pilot program", subsidized by the government,

through the Dept. of Education. It will start in a poor inner city

school district's elementary school lunch program, pushing the fake meat

as a healthy alternative. Then, as the fake meat industry scales up,

it will spread to school districts across the country. Now you have

kids all over the country eating this government subsidized fake meat,

so as they age out of school and become consumers, they will be quite

used to the crap they've been fed for the last 10-12 years. There you

go....they've normalized it, with our tax dollars.

TYFYC,

Lance

See the attached letter to Columbia U’s president from 13 Trump-appointed judges, led by Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho and two others. (I’ve argued before Judge Ho—uncommonly smart.) Federal clerkships are coveted positions—but for the time being, these judges won’t hire Columbia students as clerks.

The CNN report revealed that there were many more episodes of gunfire than the Pentagon has ever admitted, in the wake of the suicide attack in the final days of the American evacuation of Kabul. The reporting included a video obtained by CNN captured by a Marine’s GoPro camera that had not been seen publicly in full before.

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Coffee drinkers are leaving [Starbucks](https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/SBUX)’s [SBUX 0.21%increase; green up pointing triangle](https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/SBUX) loyalty program. Chips Ahoy cookies are lingering longer on grocery-store shelves. Fewer customers are ordering at fast-food drive-throughs and kiosks, pressuring companies such as Wendy’s and [McDonald’s]

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Interesting history fact: this almost was called Gorsuch Deference.

The original case was filed by the EPA head, Anne Gorsuch (Mother of

Supreme Court's very own Neil Gorsuch). Many SCOTUS cases carry the

names of the heads of agencies. Due to changes in policy positions,

restructuring of the appeal, etc., the main Appellate in the case before

the Supreme Court became Chevron. Thus, the reason for the name.

It will be poetic if Neil gets to write the majority opinion in

overturning Chevron Deference (which seems likely by many court

watchers).

Adam—I got ahold of the indictment. Attached is a copy with my highlighting and a few annotations. The document is 54 pages, but the highlighting makes it a quick read. There are 14 counts brought against Rep. Cuellar and his wife, including conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering, bribery, and a public official acting as the agent of a foreign principal.

This thing has it all: It’s a blow-by-blow description of how an allegedly corrupt government official purportedly succumbed to greed and ceded control of legislative initiatives to multiple foreign interests (Mexican and Azerbaijani). The Azerbaijan piece even involves appropriations to the _Military Industrial Complex_ 🥳🎉. Predictably, the Cuellars allegedly used their ill-gotten gains for all kinds of personal items including a new car, a $12,000 bespoke gown, and even their tax bill.

I wonder if the M5M will use this as a balance against all the Trump stuff: “It just goes to show that the justice system is totally objective and fair, so the cases pending against Trump are all legitimate and not politically motivated in the least.”

You know this stuff is happening all over Congress; the Cuellars were just sloppy enough to get caught. Exhibit A in the case for term limits.![[1833000-1833391-cuellar indictment (file copy).pdf]]

After the beginning of the war in early 2022, Western countries collectively froze about $300 billion worth of foreign reserves belonging to the Russian Central Bank, €200 billion of which is held in various European financial institutes. For a brief time, the EU considered appropriating the entire amount to turn it into aid for Ukraine, but the plan was quickly abandoned due to the myriad of legal problems it would pose.

Instead, the current idea is to use only the interest-generated profits of the frozen cash, estimated to be worth up to €3 billion a year, and use it to buy more weapons for Ukraine. EU countries’ representatives met in Brussels to hammer out the details on Wednesday, and managed to come to a preliminary agreement that is expected to be formalized by the 27 finance ministers next Tuesday.

In the past days, all eyes were on Belgium where the vast majority of Russia’s frozen cash is held. Until now, Brussels insisted on continuing to keep the corporate taxes collected on the windfall profits in the last two years, about €1.7 billion in total, angering many of its allies.

The Belgian government argued that it used over €1 billion of that money to buy weapons for Ukraine anyway, but others—including Germany, which earmarked nearly €30 billion for Ukraine alone—accused the country of “double-counting” its contributions and using the assets frozen by joint EU decision to boost its own economy.

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A Maryland high school teacher was arrested after he allegedly used artificial intelligence to create phony audio, planting racist and antisemitic words into the voice of his boss, authorities said Thursday.

Dazhon Darien, a physical education teacher and the athletic director at Pikesville High School, was accused of falsifying the voice of principal Eric Eiswert in January, authorities said.

"We now have conclusive evidence that the recording was not authentic," Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough told reporters in Towson. "It's been determined the recording was generated through the use of artificial intelligence technology."

Darien was charged with disrupting school activities and other counts.

"As you could imagine, this has been a very difficult time for [the] Pikesville High School community, principal Eiswert and his family," Baltimore County Public Schools Superintendent Myriam Rogers said.

A judge signed on Wednesday afternoon an arrest warrant for Darien, who was caught Thursday morning at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.

Darien was scheduled to fly to Houston when security questioned whether he had properly packed his gun for travel, McCullough said.

Darien's name was run through police records, and the warrant showed up, leading to his arrest, McCullough added.

McCullough stopped short of saying whether Darien was seeking to flee.

Darien was also charged with theft, retaliation against a witness and stalking.

He and Eiswert had been at odds over ''work performance challenges'' with Darien's contract possibly ''not being renewed next semester,'' according to the arrest warrant.

"Through their investigation, detectives allege that Mr. Darien, who was athletic director at the high school, made the recording to retaliate against the principal, who had launched an investigation into the potential mishandling of school funds," McCullough said.

Eiswert had been following up on a $1,916 payment Darien allegedly authorized for an assistant girls soccer coach, who the head coach and players said never assisted the team, police said.

Eiswert had also reprimanded Darien for terminating a coach without his approval, police said.

Eiswert was widely admonished when the viral audio seemed to capture him spewing hateful rhetoric, mocking Black and Jewish people.

The voice initially believed to have been Eiswert's said Black students were unable to "test their way out of a paper bag," according to the court document.

"The recording went on to make disparaging comments about Jewish individuals and two teachers ... who 'should have never been hired' at the school," the warrant said.

Eiswert has always insisted that the recording, which was sent to Darien and two other teachers the night of Jan. 16, was fake.

The audio spread quickly on social media and "had profound repercussions," causing "significant disruptions for the PHS staff and students," according to the arrest warrant.

Eiswert has been on paid administrative leave since the recording went viral.

District appointees have run the school since Eiswert's departure, and the temporary administrators will stay on the job through the end of the school year, Rogers said.

"We will work with principal Eiswert and the Pikesville community concerning next year," Rogers added.

Investigators linked the email TJFOUST9@gmail.com, which was used to send the audio, to an internet service provider registered to Darien's grandmother, according to the warrant.

The recovery phone number for the Google account had a 213 area code, registered to Darien, a Southern California native, police said.

A forensic analyst contracted by the FBI also found that the recording "contained traces of AI-generated content with human editing after the fact," the arrest warrant said.

Darien was shown to have used the Baltimore County Public Schools' network to access OpenAI tools and Microsoft Bing Chat services on Dec. 18 and 19 and Jan. 15, a day before the audio clip was sent out, police said.

Darien and his family could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday.

The school district will seek to fire Darien, Rogers said.

Eiswert could not be immediately reached for comment on Thursday.

A rep for the principal's union said he's relieved that ''responsible people are being held accountable,'' but is worried that harm caused by the fake audio could be long-lasting.

''I continue to be concerned about the damage these actions have caused for Principal Eiswert, his family, the students and staff of Pikesville High School, and the Black and Jewish community members,'' Council of Administrative and Supervisory Employee executive director Billy Burke said in a statement. ''I hope there is deliberate action to heal the trauma caused by the fake audio and that all people can feel restored.''

David K. Li David K. Li is a senior breaking news reporter for NBC News Digital.

Julia Jester contributed.

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Just a few years ago no one had even heard the word Ozempic. Almost overnight, the drug previously used to treat type 2 diabetes became a household name. By the end of the decade, 30 million people are predicted to be on it. For comparison, that means that Ozempic is on track to do as well as birth control pills and Prozac\u2014a blockbuster medication.

A little over a year ago we had a fiery debate on Honestly about these revolutionary weight-loss drugs and our cultural understanding of obesity. On one side of the debate, people saw Ozempic as the golden answer we\u2019ve been searching for. After all, obesity is the second biggest cause of cancer.

On the other hand was another argument: Why are we putting millions of people on a powerful new drug when we don\u2019t know the risks? Plus, doesn\u2019t this solution ignore why we gained so much weight in the first place?

A year later, all of those questions are still up for debate. Our latest guest on Honestly, journalist Johann Hari, has spent the last year trying to find answers, traveling the world investigating weight-loss drugs and. . . taking them himself.

In his latest book, Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs, Johann investigates what we know and what we don\u2019t know about how these drugs work, their risks and benefits, how our food system sets us up to fail, and how movements like \u201Cfat pride\u201D and \u201Chealthy at any size\u201D have completely altered the conversation. (He also discloses how the Dalai Lama fat-shamed him after he asked the religious leader about homophobic statements he had made.)

I asked Johann: How do these new drugs impact our brains, our guts, and our mood? What are the hidden risks? Are they really a permanent solution to the obesity crisis?

To listen to our conversation, click below\u2014or scroll down for an edited transcript.

On discovering Ozempic:

Bari Weiss: When we last saw each other, we were both fatter. I was at a very wealthy home in L.A. when the wife of the couple said \u201CI love your podcast, you should really do it on video,\u201D and I said something self-deprecating like \u201CI gained 20 to 25 pounds and I hate seeing myself on camera.\u201D She looked me dead in the eye, took me up to a mini fridge in her home, and pulled out the pen and said, \u201CCan I give you some?\u201D I took it there on the spot. The craziest thing happened to me: the next week it was if I was full from a cup of water. I had never experienced the feeling of being so satiated with nothing. I was no longer interested in food. I shed 15 to 20 pounds of my Covid weight.

How did you first find out about Ozempic?

Johann Hari: It was the winter of 2022, when the world was opening up again. I got invited to a party for the first time in years, thrown by an Oscar-winning actor. In the Uber on the way there, I was thinking, Oh God, I\u2019ve gained so much weight, and I was dreading it. Then I remembered that everyone had gained weight. And I thought, I\u2019m going to see these Hollywood stars with a bit of pudge on them. It\u2019s going to be fascinating.

I arrived at the party and it\u2019s not just that they hadn\u2019t gained weight. . . everyone was gaunt. Everyone was like their own Snapchat filter: tighter and clearer. I said to a friend of mine, \u201CWow, it looks like everyone really did take up Pilates during lockdown.\u201D And I must have had a confused look because she said, \u201CJohann, you know it\u2019s not Pilates, don\u2019t you?\u201D I had no idea what she was talking about.

So she pulled up an image of an Ozempic pen. And I learned about the existence of these drugs.

On why these drugs are \u201Cmagic\u201D:

BW: You make the argument that this new set of drugs might be seen or come to be seen as profoundly transformative to our culture as the invention of the Pill and the smartphone. Make that case.

JH: There are three ways in which these drugs could be magic. The first is the most obvious. They could just solve the problem.

The second way in which it could be magic is more disturbing: it could be like a magic trick. It could be like the conjurer who shows you a card trick while secretly picking your pocket. It could be that it\u2019s giving us this benefit, but at the same time it\u2019s screwing us over.

The third way I actually think is the one that\u2019s most likely: if you think about all the classic stories about magic that we grew up with, like Aladdin, you find the lamp, the genie appears, you make your wish, and your wish comes true. But never quite in the way you imagined. Think about Fantasia: you unleash the magic and the magic runs away from you and has all these unpredictable effects.

On how we got here and the food industry:

BW: Let\u2019s talk about how we got here in the first place\u2014how we got to a place where millions of people are shooting themselves with a drug whose consequences we don\u2019t fully know. How did we get to a place where in the richest, freest country in the history of the world, 40 percent of people are obese?

JH: It literally happens everywhere people move from eating a diet mostly based on whole foods that are fresh and prepared on the day they eat them to mostly eating foods built in factories out of chemicals in a process that isn\u2019t actually called cooking\u2014it\u2019s called manufacturing.

There\u2019s an experiment that really drove this home to me: there\u2019s a brilliant scientist called Professor Paul Kenny. He\u2019s the head of neuroscience at Mount Sinai and he grew up in Dublin in Ireland. When he was in his 20s, he moved to San Diego and he quickly clocked, Whoa, Americans don\u2019t eat like Irish people did at the time. There was way more processed food, way more sugary, fatty food. And he started to feel like this different kind of food wasn\u2019t just affecting his gut; it was changing his brain and what he wanted. So he designed an experiment to test this.

He got a load of rats and he put them in a cage. And he raised them with nothing to eat but the kind of fresh, whole foods that rats evolved to eat throughout their lives. And when they had this food, they would eat when they were hungry, and then they would stop.

Then Professor Kenny introduced them to the American diet. And he put it in the cage alongside the healthy food. And the rats went crazy for the American diet. As Professor Kenny put it to me, within a couple of days, they were different animals. And they very rapidly all became obese.

Then Professor Kenny tweaked the experiment again: he took away all the American food and left them with nothing but the healthy food again. What happened is they refused to eat anything. When the American food was taken away, it was like they no longer recognized the healthy food as healthy food at all. It was only when they were literally starving that they went back and ate it.

On being fat-shamed by the Dalai Lama:

BW: How did we get to a place where we are knowingly and happily eating petrochemicals and sawdust?

JH: You\u2019re reminding me of one of the real low points of my life. It was Christmas Eve 2009 at 1 p.m. I went to my local branch of KFC and I said my standard order, which is so revolting I won\u2019t repeat it on a podcast, and the guy behind the counter said, \u201CJohann, I\u2019m really glad you\u2019re here,\u201D and he said, \u201CWait a minute,\u201D and he went behind where they fried all the chicken and came back with a massive Christmas card in which everyone who worked there had written, \u201CTo our favorite and best customer.\u201D And one of the reasons my heart sank is I thought, This isn\u2019t the fried chicken shop I come to the most. It was genuinely chilling. It was one of the two lowest moments in my fat life, along with the time the Dalai Lama fat-shamed me, but that\u2019s another story I can tell you later if you want. He\u2019s a horrible bitch, but. . .

BW: Wait, I\u2019m sorry, we need to hear the Dalai Lama fat-shaming story.

JH: It was actually genuinely quite upsetting. So I was a baby journalist, I must have been, I don\u2019t know, 25, and I got sent to interview the Dalai Lama. And I believe, even when you really agree with a powerful person, and I actually agree with the Dalai Lama on resisting communist tyranny for example, you should challenge them. So I looked up: Has the Dalai Lama ever done anything wrong? Turns out, he thinks disabled people are being punished for what they did in a previous life. That seems quite bad to me. He\u2019s quite anti-gay. \u201CYou shouldn\u2019t use the other holes\u201D is an actual quote from the Dalai Lama.

So I go to interview him, and the first 20 minutes I\u2019m asking about all the stuff we agree on, the brave resistance to communist tyranny. And then I started asking him about this stuff, and he started pretending that he didn\u2019t speak English. And I said, \u201CYour Holiness, I know you speak English. You just gave a speech in English. I know you can understand me.\u201D And his goons\u2014I assume that\u2019s not their official title\u2014were giving me really dirty looks, and I thought they were going to throw me out, and I was meant to have an hour. So I thought, I\u2019ll bring it back to something where we agree. So I said, \u201CYou know, Your Holiness, you\u2019ve always been very critical of income inequality in Western countries.\u201D And he said, \u201CYeah, I don\u2019t see why people need so much money. We each only have one stomach.\u201D And then he said, \u201CExcept you, you clearly have at least three.\u201D I was like, Wait, isn\u2019t the Dalai Lama meant to love blades of grass and rocks? Is he calling me fat? Is that what\u2019s happening here?

And it wasn\u2019t my finest moment as a journalist, but I said, \u201CWell, you\u2019re quite fat as well.\u201D And when I later wrote about this, I got the world\u2019s first ever Buddhist death threat, which I was thrilled about. I wrote back and said, \u201CYou\u2019re going to have at least three lives as a wood louse now.\u201D So yeah, it wasn\u2019t ideal. Where are you now, Dalai Lama? Let\u2019s send him an Ozempic pen.

On the risks of these weight-loss drugs:

BW: Talk about the side effects of taking the drug.

JH: There\u2019s a brilliant scientist I interviewed called Professor Jean-Luc Faillie, who\u2019s at the University Hospital in Montpellier in France. He looked at loads of the diabetics who\u2019d taken these drugs between 2006 and 2012, and he compared them to an almost identical group of diabetics who had not taken these drugs. And what he found, if he\u2019s right, is really alarming. He found that they increase your risk of thyroid cancer by between 50\u201375 percent.

It\u2019s important to not misunderstand that. That doesn\u2019t mean that if you take these drugs you have a 50\u201375 percent percent chance of getting thyroid cancer. If that was the case, there\u2019d be bonfires of Ozempic all over the world. What it means is, whatever your thyroid cancer risk was at the start, it will go up\u2014if he\u2019s right, and this is highly disputed\u2014by 50\u201375 percent.

BW: Is there any research into Ozempic muting people\u2019s ability to experience pleasure, happiness, even ambition?

JH: This was fascinating to me. I asked all these leading scientists, What\u2019s it doing to my brain? And they all gave me a variant of \u201CCome back to me in a few years, maybe we\u2019ll know.\u201D

One theory about how these drugs could be working, and I stress it is a speculative theory, is that in your brain you have something called your reward center, which basically motivates you to do anything pleasurable: eat, have sex, see your friends, etc. And one theory about these drugs is that they are dampening the reward centers in your brain. You and I are eating fewer Big Macs because we don\u2019t want it as much because we don\u2019t get as much of a reward from it, because our reward centers have been dampened. Now if that\u2019s right, that obviously raises a question: If it\u2019s dampening my desire for an In-N-Out burger, is it dampening my desire to write my next book or to have sex?

On how culture contributes to the obesity crisis:

BW: The New York Times recently profiled this woman who identifies as a \u201Cfat activist,\u201D named Virginia Sol Smith. And here\u2019s what the Times writes about Smith: \u201CSol Smith says that parents need not be concerned about how many Oreos their children eat. . . . If parents put restrictions on food, then children will never figure out how to eat according to their own bodies\u2019 own needs, she explained.\u201D I\u2019d love for you to respond to that logic.

JH: The idea that you\u2019ll learn your body\u2019s needs from Oreos is a profound misunderstanding. The kind of food we\u2019re eating is so different from the food that we evolved for that we do not have nutritional wisdom when it comes to this food. There isn\u2019t an innate nutritional wisdom that your child will discover about an Oreo. No human before us encountered an Oreo.

On other solutions to obesity:

BW: Let\u2019s talk about some solutions to the deeper problem. You traveled with your nephew, who has recently lost a hundred pounds, to Japan, which has a food culture so different from the food culture in America, and they have not experienced the same obesity crisis that we have here in America. Tell us a little bit about what you discovered on that trip and lessons that those of us who are concerned about this crisis might learn from it.

JH: So Japan has 4 percent obesity. Americans have 42.5 percent obesity. But Japan shows us that is not inevitable, right?

I went to a Japanese school, a normal middle-class school, with a thousand kids. It was bizarre walking around this school. There were no overweight children in this school. Every school in Japan has to employ a professional nutritionist. Her job is to design the meals. All processed food is banned.

So I go to the school and I\u2019m watching these kids eating these unbelievably healthy meals. And I said to them, \u201CSo what\u2019s your favorite food?\u201D And one of them goes, \u201CMy favorite food is broccoli.\u201D Another one goes, \u201CMy favorite food is white fish.\u201D And another one goes, \u201CI like boiled white rice.\u201D

And I turned to my translator and I said, \u201CAre these kids fucking trolling me? Their favorite food is broccoli?\u201D She said, \u201CWe teach our children to love healthy food, don\u2019t you?\u201D No Japanese person understood why I was shocked.

One of the funniest experiences I ever had was trying to explain the concept of \u201Cfat pride\u201D to Japanese people. They were just completely baffled.

They have a law; it was so bizarre witnessing. . . in 2008, in Japan, obesity went up by 0.4 percent, and there was a massive national freakout. And they introduced a law called the Metabo Law. And the law says every company in Japan has to weigh its entire staff on a particular day. And if your weight has gone up, you have to make a plan with your employer to bring it down. And if as a company overall your staff\u2019s weight has gone up, you are fined by the government.

I went to this company in Tokyo. You arrive at the company; it scans your face and says, \u201CHi, Bari, you walked 13,000 steps yesterday. You are 112th in the company\u2019s ranking.\u201D It might also say, \u201CBy the way, Suzy, who works at the desk next to you, hasn\u2019t weighed herself in the last two weeks. Could you remind her?\u201D

For me, the most moving experience I had was when I went to a place called Ogimi. It sounds almost mythical. It\u2019s the oldest village in the world. It\u2019s in Okinawa. They\u2019ve got 215 homes and 190 people are older than 90 years old. Japan has, by far, the longest life expectancy in the world, but more than that, people are healthy almost until they die.

So I go to their little community center. The first person who walked through the door was a 102-year-old woman called Matsu Fukuchi, who walked there on her own, from her house up the mountain. This is what you get if you solve the obesity crisis.

I went to countries that have begun to solve the obesity crisis. I went to Mexico, where they\u2019ve got a sugar tax. I went to the Netherlands, where they give obese children personal trainers, and where they took sugary drinks out of schools. We can solve this crisis. We do not have to tolerate this being done to us. It shouldn\u2019t be the case that half the population of the United States wants to inject itself with a risky drug to prevent an even riskier medical condition.

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The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through Bookshop.org links in this article.","feature_image_alt":"Ozempic: Magic Pill or Devil\u2019s Bargain?","feature_image_caption":"Illustration by The Free Press; image via Getty.","feature_image":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb93d7f39-5edc-4f64-818b-7fb16d19f649_1206x861.jpeg","comment_id":"144416731","comments":true,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","created_at":"2024-05-07T22:00:46.838Z","updated_at":"2024-05-07T22:00:46.838Z","published_at":"2024-05-07T22:00:46.838Z","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"url":"https://www.thefp.com/p/ozempic-magic-pill-or-devils-bargain","excerpt":"Johann Hari is half the man he was due to the weight-loss drug. 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l(e){return!!("object"==typeof e&&null!==e&&e.advertising_token&&e.identity_expires&&e.refresh_from&&e.refresh_token&&e.refresh_expires)}class d{constructor(e,t,s,i){this._baseUrl=e.baseUrl,this._clientVersion=t,this._logInfo=s,this._logWarn=i}createArrayBuffer(e){const t=new Uint8Array(e.length);for(let s=0;s{s=e,i=t}));return this._logInfo("Sending refresh request",e),(0,o.RD)(t,{success:t=>{try{if(e.refresh_response_key){this._logInfo("Decrypting refresh API response");const r=this.createArrayBuffer(atob(t));window.crypto.subtle.importKey("raw",this.createArrayBuffer(atob(e.refresh_response_key)),{name:"AES-GCM"},!1,["decrypt"]).then((e=>{this._logInfo("Imported decryption key"),window.crypto.subtle.decrypt({name:"AES-GCM",iv:r.slice(0,12),tagLength:128},e,r.slice(12)).then((e=>{const t=String.fromCharCode(...new Uint8Array(e));this._logInfo("Decrypted to:",t);const r=JSON.parse(t),o=this.ResponseToRefreshResult(r);"string"==typeof o?i(o):s(o)}),(e=>this._logWarn("Call to UID2 API 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t=e.split("@");if(2===t.length&&!t.some((e=>""===e)))return{address:t[0],domain:t[1]}}static isGmail(e){return e===this.GMAIL_DOMAIN}static dropExtension(e){let t=arguments.length>1&&void 0!==arguments[1]?arguments[1]:this.EMAIL_EXTENSION_SYMBOL;return e.split(t)[0]}static normalizeAddressPart(e,t,s){let i=e;return t&&(i=i.replaceAll(this.EMAIL_DOT,"")),s&&(i=this.dropExtension(i)),i}}(0,i.A)(t,"EMAIL_EXTENSION_SYMBOL","+"),(0,i.A)(t,"EMAIL_DOT","."),(0,i.A)(t,"GMAIL_DOMAIN","gmail.com");class s{constructor(e,t,s){this._baseUrl=e.baseUrl,this._serverPublicKey=e.cstg.serverPublicKey,this._subscriptionId=e.cstg.subscriptionId,this._optoutCheck=e.cstg.optoutCheck,this._logInfo=t,this._logWarn=s}hasStatusResponse(e){return"object"==typeof e&&e&&e.status}isCstgApiSuccessResponse(e){return this.hasStatusResponse(e)&&"success"===e.status&&l(e.body)}isCstgApiOptoutResponse(e){return this.hasStatusResponse(e)&&"optout"===e.status}isCstgApiClientErrorResponse(e){return 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Thu, 09 May 2024 16:39

A band of state Attorneys Generals are urging President Joe Biden not to hand over several vast pandemic powers to the World Health Organization (WHO), the Daily Caller first learned.

Led by Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, 22 state attorneys generals wrote a letter to Biden, obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller, voicing their concern over potential plans to give the WHO a series of powers in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. World governments have been discussing the amendments that would give the WHO more leeway to help ''prevent, prepare for and respond to pandemics.'' (RELATED: Bret Weinstein Warns Tucker WHO Is Making 'Troubling' Moves To Control Health Emergency Responses)

The state AGs voiced their skepticism of giving more power to the WHO over the handling of a global health crisis, saying that the amendments go too far, the letter reads.

READ THE LETTER:

''First, the two proposed instruments would transform the WHO from an advisory, charitable organization into the world's governor of public health. The WHO currently lacks authority to enforce its recommendations,'' the letter says.

''Second, the federal government cannot delegate public health decisions to an international body. The U.S. Constitution doesn't vest responsibility for public health policy with the federal government. It reserves those powers for the States. Even if the federal government had such power, Article II, Section 2 requires approval by the United States Senate,'' the letter continues.

The letter also adds that the state AGs are worried about the amendments paving the way for ''global surveillance infrastructure.'' The current proposed amendments ask signatories to ''cooperate, in accordance with national law, in preventing misinformation and disinformation,'' the AGs write.

A coalition of GOP senators previously petitioned the president to ask him to refuse to give such powers to the WHO. Lawmakers will discuss the amendments at the World Health Assembly (WHA), which will take place from May 27 to June 1, Fox News reported. Members could delay the vote on the amendments to have more time to discuss the regulations, though the Biden administration has previously backed the May timeline, KFF reported.

Concerning the amendments, the WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus believes that the proposal could help create a more ''equitable global response'' to future pandemics, according to KFF. Some of the elements being considered in the amendments include how different elements, including communications, financing and oversight, would be handled in the event of a global pandemic, KFF reported.

''The COVID-19 pandemic exposed fundamental flaws with the WHO and other public health institutions. These entities breached public trust and are unquestionably in need of reform. The proposed measures, however, would only exacerbate the WHO's underlying problems and enable more civil liberties violations during future 'emergencies.' Accordingly, we will resist any attempt to enable the WHO to directly or indirectly set public policy for our citizens,'' the letter concludes.

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Thu, 09 May 2024 15:30

Stack Overflow, a legendary internet forum for programmers and developers, is coming under heavy fire from its users after it announced it was partnering with OpenAI to scrub the site's forum posts to train ChatGPT. Many users are removing or editing their questions and answers to prevent them from being used to train AI '-- decisions which have been punished with bans from the site's moderators.

Stack Overflow user Ben posted on Mastodon about his experience editing his most successful answers to try to avoid having his work stolen by OpenAI.

(Image credit: @ben@m.benui.ca)Ben continues in his thread, "[The moderator crackdown is] just a reminder that anything you post on any of these platforms can and will be used for profit. It's just a matter of time until all your messages on Discord, Twitter etc. are scraped, fed into a model and sold back to you."

Harsh words, but words that ring true with fellow Stack Overflow users who are joining the post protest. Users are also asking why ChatGPT could not simply share the source of the answers it will dispense in this new partnership, both citing its sources and adding credibility to the tool. Of course, this would reveal how the sausage of LLMs is made, and would not look like the shiny, super-smart generative AI assistant of the future promised to users and investors.

Site moderators preventing high-popularity posts from being deleted is legally above-board. Angry users claim they are enabled to delete their own content from the site through the "right to forget," a common name for a legal right most effectively codified into law through the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Among other things, the act protects the ability of the consumer to delete their own data from a website, and to have data about them removed upon request. However, Stack Overflow's Terms of Service contains a clause carving out Stack Overflow's irrevocable ownership of all content subscribers provide to the site.

Users who disagree with having their content scraped by ChatGPT are particularly outraged by Stack Overflow's rapid flip-flop on its policy concerning generative AI. For years, the site had a standing policy that prevented the use of generative AI in writing or rewording any questions or answers posted. Moderators were allowed and encouraged to use AI-detection software when reviewing posts.

Beginning last week, however, the company began a rapid about-face in its public policy towards AI. CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar spent his quarterly blog post praising the merits of generative AI, saying "the rise of GenAI is a big opportunity for Stack." Moderators were quickly (and somewhat informally) instructed to cease removal of AI-generated questions and answers on the forum.

Join the experts who read Tom's Hardware for the inside track on enthusiast PC tech news '-- and have for over 25 years. We'll send breaking news and in-depth reviews of CPUs, GPUs, AI, maker hardware and more straight to your inbox.

Stack is not alone in reversing a principled stance on AI for profit; Valve also silently removed its AI-art ban on Steam, allowing over 1,000 AI-powered games to flood the storefront. Stack Overflow's partnership with OpenAI also follows the LLM company's recent push for increased partnerships and marquee deals, including their major announcement of a $100 billion datacenter to be built with Microsoft.

The rampant chasing of money in the insanely-profitable AI marketplace is exciting, but should be tempered; AI may consume a quarter of the U.S.'s power grid by just 2030, according to reports from industry professionals and agencies.

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Thu, 09 May 2024 15:28

Belgium, the country holding the vast majority of Russian assets frozen in the EU after the invasion of Ukraine, has finally given in to the increasing EU and G7 pressure to transfer the tax revenue collected on the windfall profits to Ukraine starting next year, according to a document obtained by Politico. The gesture allowed the EU countries to agree on using said profits to fund Ukraine during a Council meeting on Wednesday, May 8th.

After the beginning of the war in early 2022, Western countries collectively froze about $300 billion worth of foreign reserves belonging to the Russian Central Bank, '‚¬200 billion of which is held in various European financial institutes. For a brief time, the EU considered appropriating the entire amount to turn it into aid for Ukraine, but the plan was quickly abandoned due to the myriad of legal problems it would pose.

Instead, the current idea is to use only the interest-generated profits of the frozen cash, estimated to be worth up to '‚¬3 billion a year, and use it to buy more weapons for Ukraine. EU countries' representatives met in Brussels to hammer out the details on Wednesday, and managed to come to a preliminary agreement that is expected to be formalized by the 27 finance ministers next Tuesday.

In the past days, all eyes were on Belgium where the vast majority of Russia's frozen cash is held. Until now, Brussels insisted on continuing to keep the corporate taxes collected on the windfall profits in the last two years, about '‚¬1.7 billion in total, angering many of its allies.

The Belgian government argued that it used over '‚¬1 billion of that money to buy weapons for Ukraine anyway, but others'--including Germany, which earmarked nearly '‚¬30 billion for Ukraine alone'--accused the country of ''double-counting'' its contributions and using the assets frozen by joint EU decision to boost its own economy.

Finally, Belgium did change its mind but made sure that everyone knew it wasn't because of the outside pressure by stressing it was a ''voluntary'' decision. At the same time, it also specified that it would release the tax profits only from 2025 onwards, while the official statement reads as if Brussels would want to maintain the possibility of backtracking on its word any minute.

''The Belgian federal government is prepared to consider a voluntary arrangement from fiscal year 2025 onwards with the EU/G7 to transfer the windfall national corporate taxation from frozen Russian sovereign assets,'' the statement reads.

Besides the corporate tax revenue, Belgium found even more cash to be freed up by forcing Euroclear, the company holding the frozen assets, to reduce its handling fees from 1% to 0.3%. The EU ambassadors agreed to use this extra amount to create an ''emergency buffer'' managed by the European Central Bank (ECB) that's saved to cover legal litigation costs in case Russia were to challenge the decision.

Belgium's change of heart probably happened in large part due to the EU Council's Belgian presidency's desire to finalize the agreement before its time runs out at the end of next month. In the end, the 'gesture' of renouncing the future tax revenues did help cement the deal, which now means an additional '‚¬3 billion worth of weapons to Ukraine every year.

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Thu, 09 May 2024 12:54

Swine fever is putting the production of Parma ham, an award winning Italian food exported all over the world, at risk.

The ever-increasing number of cases counted in Emilia Romagna is endangering the supply chain. Several wild boar carcasses were found in the area and, after analysis, were found to be infected with the disease

The danger is not for human health, but for the commercial sector, which for months has been struggling to stay afloat by dealing with the continuous restrictions that see new countries refuse to import Parma's famous ham. And the companies, with exports blocked, are calling for drastic measures.

Currently, according to La Repubblica, at least 15 Parma ham producers can no longer export to Canada, a country that does not accept products from restricted areas. But China, Japan and Mexico have also blocked exports, and the United States and Australia could next.

The threat is the passage of the virus from wild boars to pigs, a spread that would put livestock farms at serious risk. The Region is now calling for drastic action to eradicate the virus in order to help farms. The Coldiretti union, which points out that the sector is worth over '‚¬20 billion to the economy, therefore wants to mobilise the army in a cull of wild boar to save the industry.

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. Do remember to come back and check The Euro Weekly News website for all your up-to-date local and international news stories and remember, you can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

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Thu, 09 May 2024 11:36

Dr. Peter Daszak was called before the Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Wednesday morning May 01, 2024, to answer for the actions of EcoHealth Alliance.Background

WED. May 01, 2024, four long years after the SARS-COV-2 outbreak collapsed the economy and global population numbers alike, EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, faced the bipartisan House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, during Wednesday's hearing.

Daszak, with few, if any allies, was grilled by Democrats and Republicans alike related to the safety of EcoHealth's research, his oversight of work at the Wuhan virology lab and delays sharing information about risky gain-of-function research with federal officials.

Reports, submitted two years after the outbreak, show that EcoHealth Alliance had engaged in risky experiments conducted in 2019 that made a coronavirus in mice more pathogenic'--the approach known as gain-of-function research.While the United States Government and Regulatory agencies stand divided on the origins of the SARS-COV-2 outbreak, the belief in the ''zoonotic jump'' narrative has proven to be about $10 billion-times-more lucrative, to promote.

Following a $300M grant from the American Rescue Plan, the USDA immediately began implementing new rule changes for mandatory tracking, tracing, and surveillance through the Animal Plant Health Investigation System (APHIS), using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) ear tags in cattle and bison.

In addition to implementing RFID tags, the USDA is currently proposing a total reconstruction of its APHIS program, dropping ''Plants'' from its surveillance system to focus solely upon ''Animal Disease Surveillance,'' in the new APHIS-15 proposal, created from the One Health approach.

According to USDA Under Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs, Jenny Lester Moffitt, ''using this One Health approach will benefit the country for many years to come by better enabling us to rapidly detect new disease threats and provide intelligence to our public health partners.''The new Strategic Framework, released in February of 2022, outlined how the agency would ''advance surveillance of SARS-COV-2 and other emerging zoonotic diseases as directed by President Biden's American Rescue Plan (ARP). Early detection and response to pathogens with zoonotic potential while still in animals is essential in limiting or preventing human outbreaks.''

As previously reported, justifications for these drastic regulatory actions are entirely predicated upon the single assertion that zoonotic jumps are possible through meat consumption.

However, a cursory review of these regulatory actions appears to reveal another Covid-era public-private attempt at marketplace manipulation, as opposed to an honest effort at ''limiting or preventing human outbreaks.''

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RFID Ear TagsWith few exceptions, the sales, trade, or purchase of all meat products require USDA certification. The USDA's tight grip on the certification program has led to an artificial consolidation of meat processing facilities. Approximately 85 percent of the processing facilities in the U.S. are owned by four multinational conglomerates.

In addition, over the past three years the United States has become a net importer of beef, while U.S. cattle inventories have hit a 50-year low. Although Congress recently passed a country-of-origin labeling requirement, U.S. cattle required to have RFID ear tags are far outpaced by imported beef from countries like Brazil, without similar regulatory burdens. This gives corporations like the Brazilian-owned JBS, a sizable advantage over U.S. producers who must meet USDA regulations in order to gain access to the same market.

Of the 5,500 total facilities left in the nation, the bulk of U.S. cattle are processed through a mere handful of these centralized, USDA certified sites. For example, a Cargill-owned processing facility in Wichita, Kansas, processes 5,400 head of cattle per day. Once the processing begins, there's absolutely no possible way to track hamburger or meat cuts from 5,400 different cows'--completely obliterating any claim that RFID ear tags will help prevent human infection.

In terms of RFID ear tags, the exact same concept applies to dairy products. Although the USDA is only testing dairy cattle for H5N1 (Avian Flu), not beef cattle, ear tags are incapable of providing source identification once the process begins.

Dairies, similar to the four multinational beef packers, are supplied by smaller family farms. The milk is collected and hauled to consolidated processing facilities like Land-O-Lakes, Tillamook, Kraft Heinz, Dairy Farmers of America, Nestl(C), or Danone.

Once again, RFID ear tags serve absolutely zero means of disease tracking or tracing once the milk enters into the pasteurization process.

Ironically, pasteurization, the process of cooking milk to remove pathogens, was introduced at the turn of the century during the first industrial food shift. In order to ship longer distances and provide access to global populations, family-owned farms with pasture-raised, vitamin-rich dairy, gave way to manufacturing lines of cheese, cream, and highly processed milk products.

As with most of our food supply, and nearly every industry today; what began as an innocent means of safely reaching global markets, gave rise to centralized monopolies and powerful government interventionist tactics.

Within the U.S., these structures have become particularly problematic as Administrative and regulatory agencies operate as a revolving-door for selected and protected corporations. Often referred to as public-private partnership agreements, or stakeholder capitalism, entire market shifts are planned, implemented, and enforced between the fine print of these corporate-government partnership agreements.

The Future: Our World in DataThe USDA just announced that it will no longer be providing a major cattle inventory report. The July Cattle Inventory Report, which is only one of two inventory reports released each year, will be no more.

The National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) announced it's also canceling all county estimates for crops and livestock starting this year, after enduring steep budget cuts from the most recent appropriations bills.

The Biden Administration used its discretionary authority to reallocate USDA funding towards housing, rental assistance, greenhouse-gas-emissions reporting, advancements to minority-owned businesses, tracking, tracing, and surveillance of waste water, and disease surveillance.

Amid these massive shifts in priorities, the RFID ear tags will merely serve to further consolidate agriculture through limitations on data access.

Without the July cattle report, industry experts have concerns that only those with access to the RFID ear tag data will know exactly where the cattle market sits. Similarly, Climate-Smart Commodities have been prioritized. An entire section of the USDA website now provides data specific to ''Climate-Smart Commodities.'' In an increasingly volatile market, access to data could shift liquidity risk ratios of lending institutions that prioritize Climate-Smart portfolios over traditional commodities.

H.R 4366 Rural Development and Appropriations BudgetLocal '' Decentralized '' KYC '' TRUSTThe facts are simple. If the true aim is reducing risks of human infection, regardless of zoonotic possibilities, the focus should be on the restoration of local, decentralized and redundant supply chains.

Should an animal test positive for a Foreign Animal Disease (FAD), the COVID-19 science tells us that isolation and quarantine are vital steps to take to stop the spread of infection. Both actions are much easier to accomplish in smaller decentralized herds, where natural immunity then becomes herd-immunity.

However, rather than working with states to rapidly approve more localized processing facilities, the USDA and the EPA are instead working to shut them down.

Eventually, the RFID ear tags will be used as the sole means of tracking vaccinations, GHG emissions and compliance'--a system that has drawn criticisms due to its interoperability and parallels to digital ID, or vaccine passports.

The push for global food surveillance might appear to be a new song, but the story being weaved is as old as time. This story is of compelled compliance, and control. A mankind original story that begins with planning who has access to the marketplace, and ends only upon redistribution and further consolidation of resources.

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

American writer and lecturer

Bruce Harold Lipton is an American writer and lecturer whose work has been dismissed by some peers as pseudoscience.[1] By his own admission, Lipton's ideas have not received attention from mainstream science.[2] Lipton has not published original scientific research in a peer-reviewed medical journal in 30 years.

Beliefs and advocacy Lipton received a B.A. in biology from C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University in 1966 and a PhD in developmental biology from the University of Virginia in 1971.[3] From 1973 to 1982, he taught anatomy at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, before joining St. George's University School of Medicine as a professor of anatomy for three years.[3] Lipton has said that sometime in the 1980s, he rejected atheism and came to believe that the way cells function demonstrates the existence of God.[4][5] Since 1993, he has taught primarily at alternative and chiropractic colleges and schools.[3][6] Lipton has lectured at the New Zealand College of Chiropractic.[7]

In 2010, Katherine Ellison wrote in her opinion column in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment that Lipton "remains on the sidelines of conventional discussions of epigenetics" and quoted him saying that mainstream science basically ignored him.[2] In Science-Based Medicine, David Gorski called Lipton a "well-known crank" and likened his idea to the law of attraction, also known as "The Secret": "wanting something badly enough makes it so".[8] He also criticized the support Lipton's ideas received from Deepak Chopra, calling both of them "quackery supporters".[9]

Lipton has been known to express opposition to vaccinations, specifically with regard to a supposed association between vaccines and autism that has been firmly discredited:[10][11] "The most important issue we have to face is this very serious issues about vaccines...The question of whether this [vaccines] is beneficial or not is now coming to the front because we are finding a very very epidemic increase in regard to allergic reactions or hypersensitivity. We're also finding that people are bringing in the concept that autism seems to associated with the widespread use of vaccines".[12][13] He seems to believe that "forcing the immune system to respond to these vaccinations in such an abnormal way is not in the best interest of the body's system" and that for vaccines to work, they must be "natural".[14] He often uses the naturalistic fallacy.

These anti-vaccine viewpoints contradict the overwhelming scientific consensus, which firmly establishes the safety and effectiveness of vaccines in preventing various diseases.[15][16][17]

Books The Biology of Belief '' Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles (2005)Spontanous Evolution: Our Positive Future and a Way to Get There from Here (2010)The Honeymoon Effect: The Science of Creating Heaven on Earth (2013)The Biology of Belief '' 10th Anniversary Edition (2015)See also New ThoughtPaul PearsallQuantum mysticismReferences ^ "Gene Genie: The struggle of cell biologist Bruce Lipton". Irish Independent. May 25, 2014. ^ a b Ellison, Katherine (2010). "New Age or "New Biology"?". Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. 8 (2): 112. Bibcode:2010FrEE....8..112E. doi:10.1890/1540-9295-8.2.112 . Lipton remains on the sidelines of conventional discussions of epigenetics. Mainstream science has basically ignored him, he says'--something he may in fact have encouraged, with his extraordinarily unrestrained enthusiasm. ^ a b c Lipton, Bruce (December 13, 2013). "Curriculum Vitae". brucelipton.com. [self-published source ] ^ Miller, David Ian (November 14, 2005). "Finding My Religion: Bruce Lipton, cell biologist and author of "The Biology of Belief," says it's our beliefs, not our DNA, that control our biology". SF Gate . Retrieved April 15, 2014 . ^ Kohn, Rachael (July 5, 2013). "Spiritual Scientists: the researchers finding God in a petri dish". ABC Online . Retrieved April 11, 2020 . ^ "Eat, pray, lie: Holistic wellness scams in the age of social media". February 27, 2020 . Retrieved August 14, 2023 . ^ "Bruce Lipton Community Lecture '' The New Biology". chiropractic.ac.nz. Retrieved August 13, 2023. ^ Gorski, David (February 4, 2013). "Epigenetics: It doesn't mean what quacks think it means". Science-Based Medicine. ^ Gorski, David (June 13, 2011). "Choprawoo returns, this time with help from Bruce Lipton". ScienceBlogs . Retrieved August 14, 2023 . ^ Taylor, Luke E.; Swerdfeger, Amy L.; Eslick, Guy D. (June 17, 2014). "Vaccines are not associated with autism: an evidence-based meta-analysis of case-control and cohort studies". Vaccine. 32 (29): 3623''3629. doi:10.1016/j.vaccine.2014.04.085. ISSN 1873-2518. PMID 24814559. ^ Zerbo, Ousseny; Qian, Yinge; Yoshida, Cathleen; Fireman, Bruce H.; Klein, Nicola P.; Croen, Lisa A. (January 2, 2017). "Association Between Influenza Infection and Vaccination During Pregnancy and Risk of Autism Spectrum Disorder". JAMA pediatrics. 171 (1): e163609. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2016.3609. ISSN 2168-6211. PMID 27893896. ^ You might not want to scroll down! Dr. Bruce Lipton "BE AWARE OF THIS!" , retrieved October 30, 2023 ^ Bruce Lipton - Immunology and Vaccines , retrieved October 30, 2023 ^ "Dr Bruce Lipton: His views on Vaccinations - we've got it all wrong! - GreenplanetFM Podcast". iHeart . Retrieved October 30, 2023 . ^ "Communicating science-based messages on vaccines". Bulletin of the World Health Organization. 95 (10): 670''671. October 1, 2017. doi:10.2471/BLT.17.021017. ISSN 0042-9686. PMC 5689193 . PMID 29147039. ^ Dub(C), ve; Ward, Jeremy K.; Verger, Pierre; MacDonald, Noni E. (April 1, 2021). "Vaccine Hesitancy, Acceptance, and Anti-Vaccination: Trends and Future Prospects for Public Health". Annual Review of Public Health. 42 (1): 175''191. doi:10.1146/annurev-publhealth-090419-102240 . ISSN 0163-7525. PMID 33798403. S2CID 232774243. ^ "Why is vaccination so important?". Norwegian Institute of Public Health. August 13, 2018 . Retrieved October 30, 2023 . External links Official website

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Wed, 08 May 2024 19:32

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Scene of a television episode

William Shatner as James T. Kirk and Nichelle Nichols as Lt. Uhura in the 1968 Star Trek episode, "Plato's Stepchildren."In the episode of Star Trek: The Original Series titled "Plato's Stepchildren", season 3 episode 10, first broadcast November 22, 1968, Uhura (played by black actress Nichelle Nichols) and Captain Kirk (played by white actor William Shatner) kiss. The episode is often cited as the first example of an interracial kiss on television.[1][2]

Background [ edit ] The first interracial kiss on television is debated, with several examples identified in the 1950s. For example, Shatner had another interracial kiss more than 10 years earlier on a 1958 episode of The Ed Sullivan Show, when he kissed France Nuyen, a person of Asian ancestry. This was during a scene from the Broadway production of The World of Suzie Wong.[3]

Production [ edit ] In the first season episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", first broadcast in October 1966, there is a friendly kiss between Uhura, played by Nichols and Christine Chapel, played by Majel Barrett.[citation needed ] Later in the season, in the episode "Space Seed", there is also a kiss between characters played by Ricardo Montalbn and Madlyn Rhue.[citation needed ]

In the second season episode "Mirror, Mirror," first broadcast on October 6, 1967, Kirk and Lt. Marlena Moreau, played by BarBara Luna, an actress of Filipino-European ancestry, kiss on the lips. Meanwhile, Mirror-Sulu, played by Japanese-American actor George Takei, kisses Uhura's neck.[citation needed ]

In "Plato's Stepchildren," which was broadcast in 1968, the kiss is involuntarily forced by psychokinesis. Shatner recalls in Star Trek Memories that NBC insisted their lips never touch, using the technique of turning their heads away from the camera to conceal this. However, Nichols writes in her 1994 autobiography, Beyond Uhura, that the kiss was real, even during takes in which her head obscures their lips.[4] She also gave this account in multiple recorded interviews.

When NBC executives learned of the kiss they became concerned it would anger TV stations in the Deep South.[5] Earlier in 1968, NBC had expressed similar concern over a musical sequence in a Petula Clark special in which she touched Harry Belafonte's arm, a moment that has been incorrectly cited as the first physical contact on American television between a man and woman of different races.[6] At one point during negotiations, the idea was brought up of having Spock kiss Uhura instead (as Spock was half Vulcan),[7] but William Shatner insisted that they stick with the original script.[8] NBC finally ordered that two versions of the scene be shot'--one in which Kirk and Uhura kissed and one in which they did not.[9] Having successfully filmed the former version of the scene, Shatner and Nichelle Nichols deliberately flubbed every take of the latter version, thus forcing the episode to go out with the kiss intact.[10][11]

As Nichols recounts:[12]

Knowing that Gene was determined to air the real kiss, Bill shook me and hissed menacingly in his best ham-fisted Kirkian staccato delivery, "I! WON'T! KISS! YOU! I! WON'T! KISS! YOU!"

It was absolutely awful, and we were hysterical and ecstatic. The director was beside himself, and still determined to get the kissless shot. So we did it again, and it seemed to be fine. "Cut! Print! That's a wrap!"

The next day they screened the dailies, and although I rarely attended them, I couldn't miss this one. Everyone watched as Kirk and Uhura kissed and kissed and kissed. And I'd like to set the record straight: Although Kirk and Uhura fought it, they did kiss in every single scene. When the non-kissing scene came on, everyone in the room cracked up. The last shot, which looked okay on the set, actually had Bill wildly crossing his eyes. It was so corny and just plain bad it was unusable. The only alternative was to cut out the scene altogether, but that was impossible to do without ruining the entire episode. Finally, the guys in charge relented: "To hell with it. Let's go with the kiss." I guess they figured we were going to be cancelled in a few months anyway. And so the kiss stayed.

Reception [ edit ] There are no records of any public complaints about the scene.[13] Nichols observed that "Plato's Stepchildren", which first aired on November 22, 1968, "received a huge response. We received one of the largest batches of fan mail ever, all of it very positive, with many addressed to me from girls wondering how it felt to kiss Captain Kirk, and many to him from guys wondering the same thing about me. However, almost no one found the kiss offensive," except from a single mildly negative letter from one white Southerner who wrote: "I am totally opposed to the mixing of the races. However, any time a red-blooded American boy like Captain Kirk gets a beautiful dame in his arms that looks like Uhura, he ain't gonna fight it."[13] Nichols said "for me, the most memorable episode of our last season was 'Plato's Stepchildren.'"[14]

In 2016, TVline ranked the kiss as one of the top 20 moments of Star Trek.[15] In 2016, Radio Times ranked the kiss as the 25th best moment in all Star Trek, including later spin-off series.[16] The cultural impact of the kiss was noted by National Geographic, in 2016.[17] WhatCulture ranked this the 8th best romantic-sexual moment in Star Trek.[18]

See also [ edit ] "Rejoined", a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode in which two female Trills kissGolden Boy, Lorna Moon and Sammy Davis Jr. 1964References [ edit ] ^ "After 40 Years, Star Trek 'Won't Die' ". Space.com. 7 September 2006. Archived from the original on 8 October 2009 . Retrieved March 23, 2011 . ^ Christian H¶hne Sparborth (September 5, 2001). "Nichols Talks First Inter-Racial Kiss". TrekToday. Archived from the original on February 29, 2012 . Retrieved March 23, 2011 . ^ Tom Lisanti (25 April 2016). "William Shatner on Broadway, Before His Trek Through the Universe". New York Public Library. Archived from the original on 23 September 2021 . Retrieved 23 September 2021 . ^ Nichols, Nichelle (1994). Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories. New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons. pp. 195''198. ^ Nichols, p.195 ^ "Harry Belafonte 'Speaking Freely' Transcript". First Amendment Center. Archived from the original on 1 January 2014 . Retrieved May 13, 2013 . ^ Bernardi, Daniel Leonard (1998). Star Trek and History: Race-ing toward a White Future. Rutgers University Press. p. 38. ISBN 9780813524665. Archived from the original on March 13, 2022 . Retrieved August 15, 2012 '' via Google Books. ^ "Little-known sci-fi fact: Uhura's famed Trek kiss wasn't meant to be with Kirk". Blastr. 19 April 2013. Archived from the original on 24 October 2016 . Retrieved 24 October 2016 . ^ "Nichelle Nichols bio at NNDB.com". Archived from the original on 14 October 2016 . Retrieved 24 October 2016 . ^ Nichols, pp. 195-196 ^ Nichelle Nichols also claimed this to be fact in an August 2006 Comedy Central online interview, recorded the day of her participation in the network's roast of Shatner. ^ Nichols, p. 196 ^ a b Nichols, pp.196-197 ^ Nichols, p.193 ^ Mason, Charlie (2016-07-19). "Star Trek's 20 Most Memorable Moments". TVLine. Archived from the original on 2019-03-27 . Retrieved 2019-07-04 . ^ "The 50 Greatest Star Trek moments of all time - 6". Radio Times. Archived from the original on 2019-03-27 . Retrieved 2019-07-06 . ^ " 'Star Trek' Is Right About Almost Everything". National Geographic News. 2016-06-16. Archived from the original on 2019-07-04 . Retrieved 2019-07-04 . ^ Marion (2013-10-06). "Star Trek: 10 Sexy Moments That Made Geeks Feel Hot Under The Collar". WhatCulture.com. Archived from the original on 2019-07-08 . Retrieved 2019-07-08 .

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Wed, 08 May 2024 19:00

U.S. World Business Arts Lifestyle Opinion Audio Games Cooking Wirecutter The Athletic President Trump, with Sylvester Stallone and former and current boxers in attendance, signed a posthumous pardon for Jack Johnson on Thursday. Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times WASHINGTON '-- For more than 100 years, Jack Johnson's legend as the first black heavyweight boxing champion has been undisputed, but his legacy had been tarnished by a racially tainted criminal conviction.

His battles against white opponents, in the ring and outside of it, gave rise to ''The Great White Hope'' play and movie and he came to be lionized as a barrier breaker.

But the criminal conviction from 1913 that most would find abhorrent today '-- for transporting a white woman across state lines '-- haunted Johnson well after his death in 1946 and motivated politicians and celebrities for years to advocate for a pardon, however symbolic.

On Thursday in the Oval Office, Johnson posthumously found an unexpected champion: President Trump.

Although his own record on civil rights has come under question, often harshly, Mr. Trump, flanked by boxing champions and Sylvester Stallone, the actor who brought the case to his attention, signed an order pardoning Johnson.

The president called Johnson ''a truly great fighter'' who ''had a tough life'' but served 10 months in federal prison ''for what many view as a racially motivated injustice.'' Mr. Trump said the conviction took place during a ''period of tremendous racial tension in the United States.''

Mr. Trump has often found himself in the center of fiery debates over race and sports, and civil rights in general, repeatedly admonishing N.F.L. players, a majority of them black, who have knelt during the national anthem at games to protest racism and police brutality.

Hours before he announced the pardon, he told Fox News that he agreed with the N.F.L.'s new policy requiring players to stand for the national anthem or remain in the locker room before games, saying of those who did not stand, ''maybe you shouldn't be in the country.''

The president also came under sustained criticism several months ago after making remarks sympathetic to white supremacists after a deadly rally by them in Charlottesville, Va.

''This, isolated, is a good gesture to right a miscarriage of justice,'' said Stefanie Brown James, a Democratic political consultant. ''However, there are a lot of current, modern-day issues that he could address as the living president that he chooses not to. I'm just personally tired of symbolism.''

Still, in Johnson, Mr. Trump found a way in one swoop of the pen to stake a claim on civil rights and rebuke his predecessor, Barack Obama, for not taking action on an issue that seemed in line with the principles of fighting injustice that he had championed.

Though other presidents passed up the chance to pardon him, Mr. Trump noted that the last resolution in Congress calling for the pardon was while Mr. Obama was in office, in 2015.

''They couldn't get the president to sign it,'' Mr. Trump said.

A spokesman for Mr. Obama declined to comment Thursday. But in late 2009, Robert Gibbs, the president's press secretary, told reporters that the Justice Department had recommended against a pardon.

A former Obama administration official said Thursday that the Justice Department made that recommendation because it was their policy to focus on grants of clemency that could still have a positive effect on people who are still living.

In a television interview, Mr. Obama's attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., had also raised the fact there was a history of domestic violence accusations against Johnson.

Johnson's cause had attracted a range of supporters, including Senator John McCain and the filmmaker Ken Burns, who made a documentary about the case in 2005 called ''Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.'' Linda Haywood, a woman in Chicago who traces her lineage to Johnson, also has campaigned for him for years and attended the Oval Office ceremony.

Image Jack Johnson. Credit... Bain News Service, via Library of Congress Johnson, who won the heavyweight title in 1908 and was ostentatious and outspoken in a way black celebrities rarely were at the time, was convicted in 1913 of violating the Mann Act on charges that he had transported a white woman across state lines ''for immoral purposes.'' The woman Johnson transported, Belle Schreiber, worked as a prostitute and had been one of the heavyweight champion's many lovers.

Johnson was sentenced to a year in prison, but he fled the country for several years, returning in 1920 to serve a 10-month sentence.

Decades after Johnson was convicted under the Mann Act, his case drew significant attention as a gross miscarriage of justice.

When reporters were let into the Oval Office on Thursday, Mr. Trump was sitting with a large, ornate title belt from the World Boxing Council propped up in front of him.

Mauricio Sulaiman Saldivar, the president of the W.B.C., thanked Mr. Trump for taking what he called a ''huge step'' and declared Thursday a great day for the sport and the world.

Mr. Trump turned to Mr. Stallone and joked that he was not sure whether his best look was Rambo or Rocky. The president kidded Mr. Stallone, who through a representative declined an interview request, about not wanting reporters called into the Oval Office.

''I have stage fright,'' Mr. Stallone said.

Ms. Haywood thanked the president as well, saying the pardon was a long time coming.

''I am overwhelmed,'' she said, adding that her family had been ''deeply shamed that my uncle went to prison'' and regretted that older relatives had not lived to see this day.

''I appreciate you rewriting history,'' Ms. Haywood said. ''My family can go forward knowing the pain and the shame has been replaced.''

The W.B.C., one of boxing's sanctioning bodies, invited luminaries of the sport, including the current champion Deontay Wilder and a retired one, Lennox Lewis, to the ceremony, according to Tim Smith, the vice president for communications at Haymon Boxing.

Wilder said that when he and others met privately with the president, Mr. Trump talked about Mr. Lewis's past fights and marveled at Mr. Wilder's perfect 40-0 record. The president also spoke about what a privilege it was to sign the pardon for Johnson when his predecessors had not, Mr. Wilder said.

Although he did not vote for Mr. Trump and said the president had not done enough to improve the lives of black people, Mr. Wilder said Thursday's events improved his perception of the president.

''This is a big step forward, especially for the black community for the simple fact he didn't have to do it,'' Mr. Wilder said. ''Hopefully, this ain't one thing '-- you do one great deed, then that's it.''

Not only was Johnson the first black man to win the heavyweight world championship, but he also was the rare black man of his era who was brash and unapologetic about his wealth and success. He taunted his opponents in the ring and dated white women, which was taboo, and in some places illegal, at the time.

After Johnson had won the heavyweight title, many in white society advocated for a white fighter '-- ''the great white hope'' '-- to step up and win the title back. James J. Jeffries, a former champion who had been in retirement, took up that challenge. But Johnson decimated Jeffries, a victory that sparked violent white backlash in the form of riots across the country.

That fight would later serve to secure Johnson's place in the history books as it inspired the 1967 play ''The Great White Hope'' and the 1970 movie of the same name.

''Johnson was one of the few people in sports who transcended sports,'' said Mike Silver, a boxing historian. ''He transcended the athletic world to become really part of the culture and the racial history of the country.''

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How many people did Thomas Jefferson own?Thomas Jefferson enslaved over 600 human beings throughout the course of his life. 400 people were enslaved at Monticello; the other 200 people were held in bondage on Jefferson's other properties. At any given time, around 130 people were enslaved at Monticello.Was Thomas Jefferson a ''Good Slave Holder?''Though it surprises many, one of the most common questions guides are asked at Monticello is some form of: ''was Jefferson a good slave owner?'' It seems many people asking this question are struggling to understand how Jefferson treated the people he held in bondage. Some are trying to understand how he could profess to love liberty and yet own human beings. The reality at Monticello is that treatment of the people Jefferson enslaved was typical for the time and region. Jefferson wrote that he wished to ameliorate the conditions of slavery and treat people less harshly than other violent slaveholders, but he still forced people to labor for the wealth and luxury of his white family. This force was upheld through violence, the threat of violence, family separation, and emotional, psychological, and sexual abuse. Even at the home of Thomas Jefferson, a man who professed to abhor slavery and love liberty, there is no such thing as a ''good'' slaveholder.Were people beaten at Monticello?Yes. People at Monticello were physically beaten. Several overseers had a reputation for cruelty and violence: Gabriel Lilly, William Page, and William McGeehee. There are no documents of Thomas Jefferson personally beating a slave, but such actions were uncommon for slaveholders. Most slaveholders would consider such physical labor beneath them, and hired overseers to perform the actual administration of violence. Thomas Jefferson did order physical punishment.

Overseers and Violence at MonticelloHow could Jefferson write ''all men are created equal'' and still own human beings?Thomas Jefferson wrote that slavery was evil, yet never freed the vast majority of people he held in bondage. Jefferson wrote about the differences between groups of people based on emerging ideas about race in his Notes of the State of Virginia and in many personal letters. The racist ideas promoted by European Enlightenment philosophers strongly influenced Jefferson's worldview, and his writings confirm he harbored the same racist beliefs as many of his peers. He knew slavery was wrong, yet rationalized his ownership of others through a sense of paternalistic racism, writing that freeing them was like ''abandoning children.'' It is impossible to understand the Trans-Atlantic slave trade or American chattel slavery without understanding the context of Enlightenment racism. Whereas slavery has been officially illegal in the United States for over 150 years, the racist ideas that undergirded the system remain.How did Jefferson acquire his slaves?Jefferson acquired most of the over six hundred people he owned during his life through the natural increase of enslaved families. He acquired approximately 175 enslaved people through inheritance: about 40 from the estate of his father, Peter Jefferson, in 1764, and 135 from his father-in-law, John Wayles, in 1774. Jefferson purchased fewer than twenty slaves in his lifetime.

Did Jefferson think that slavery was profitable?Jefferson knew slavery was the primary economic engine for the South. Jefferson directly profited from the labor of enslaved people on his four quarter farms and at his retreat home, Poplar Forest. Tobacco was a labor-intensive crop that required a considerable enslaved labor force, and Jefferson was generally concerned about his profit. Additionally, the people themselves were profitable. In Virginia, unlike the Caribbean, enslaved women achieved fertility rates that allowed for a self-reproducing enslaved population. Planters could satisfy the demand for slave labor without having to import slaves from Africa. Many slaveowners, including Jefferson, understood that female slaves'--and their future children'--represented the best means to increase the value of his holdings, what he called ''capital.'' This would have been especially true after the abolishment of the slave trade in 1807 in America, which prohibited the importation of new enslaved people and thus increased the value of the people already living in bondage. "I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm," Jefferson remarked in 1820. "What she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption." An enslaved couple, Minerva and Bagwell Granger, came close to fulfilling Jefferson's disturbing calculation; they had nine children between 1787 and 1810.

Did Jefferson buy and sell enslaved people?Jefferson did buy and sell human beings. He purchased slaves occasionally, because of labor needs or to unite spouses. Despite his expressed "scruples" against selling slaves except "for delinquency, or on their own request," he sold more than 110 in his lifetime, mainly for financial reasons. Seventy-one people were sold from his Goochland and Bedford county plantations in three sales in the 1780s and 1790s. Chronic runaways and resisters like Sandy, James Hubbard, and Billy were almost invariably sold. At least three individuals (Mary Hemings Bell, Robert Hemings, and Brown Colbert) were sold at their own request. Jefferson also ''gifted'' eighty-five people to family members and to provide dowries for his sister and daughters. His record of slaves "alienated" from his ownership'--whether by sale or gift'--in the ten-year period from 1784 to 1794 listed 160 men, women, and children.Did enslaved people escape Monticello?Yes. There were over twenty known escapees from Monticello from 1769 to 1819.

Did Jefferson free anyone he enslaved?Yes. Thomas Jefferson freed two people during his life. He freed five people in his will. He allowed two or three people to escape without pursuit, and recommended informal freedom for two others. In total, of the more than six hundred people Jefferson enslaved, he freed only ten people '' all members of the same family.

For more information about the people Jefferson freed, see People Enslaved at Monticello Who Gained Freedom.

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Multi-racial culture in Louisiana

Redbone is a term historically used in much of the southern United States to denote a multiracial individual or culture. Among African Americans the term has been slang for a fairer-skinned Black person.[1] In Louisiana, it also refers to a specific, geographically and ethnically distinct group.

Definition [ edit ] Look up

redbone in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

In Louisiana, the Redbone cultural group consists mainly of the families of migrants to the state following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The term "Redbone" became disfavored as it was a pejorative nickname applied by others; however, in the past 30 years, the term has begun to be used as the preferred description for some creole groups, including the Louisiana Redbones.[2]

Louisiana Redbone cultural group [ edit ] Map of Louisiana and Texas showing parishes and counties historically associated with Louisiana Redbone people.[3] Traditional Redbone parishes and counties

Louisiana

Texas

The Louisiana Redbones historically lived in geographically and socially isolated communities in the southwestern Louisiana parishes, ranging from Sabine Parish in the northwest and Rapides Parish near the center of the state down to Calcasieu Parish in the southwest,[4] including parts of Orange County, Texas and Newton County, Texas. This area is roughly coextensive with what was once known as the Neutral Ground or Sabine Free State, an area of disputed sovereignty from 1806 to 1821 that was primarily bound on the east by the Calcasieu River and the Sabine River on the west.[5] Most families ancestral to the Louisiana Redbones came from South Carolina (where they were at times classified in some census records as "other free persons"),[4] although some families came from other Southeastern states. A review of newspaper articles, land grants, census records and other documents referring to the Redbones indicates that the main settlements of Redbones to southwestern and south central Louisiana and southeastern Texas took place over the course of many years,[6] although some members of Redbone families are noted as settling in the Neutral Ground before 1818 when the land was finally and officially considered part of the United States.[7]

The ambiguity of the origins of the members of the Redbone community and the cultural attitudes held by those living in the same region as the Redbone community but who were not part of it is shown in a letter written in 1893 by Albert Rigmaiden, Calcasieu parish treasurer, to McDonald Furman, a South Carolinian who conducted private ethnological research.[8] Rigmaiden wrote that he was unable to explain how the name Redbone originated and stated that

they are neither white nor black & as well as I can find out, the oldest ones came from S.C many years ago ... they are not looked on as being -- Negros -- Indian nor White people.[9]

Historically, members of the Redbone ethnic group lived in three areas. One community lived along Ten Mile Creek in Rapides Parish and Allen Parish. Members of this community were referred to as "Ten Milers"[10][11] or as "Red Bones."[12] in the 19th century. A second community was along Bearhead creek in what is now Beauregard Parish. A third community was established in Newton County, Texas and Orange County, Texas. 19th century newspapers tended to refer to members of this community simply as "mulattos,"[13][14] and members of the Texas community were not able to vote.

In the frontier of Southwestern Louisiana, the settlers successfully resisted classification as non-white. In 1837 and 1849, several of the members of the Redbone community were indicted for illegal voting on the charge that they were of color rather than white. The state court found them all not guilty, thus establishing that the Redbone community would be legally considered white in the state of Louisiana.[10]

However, references to the Redbone community and its members in 19th century newspapers tend to be wildly divergent, ranging from making no mention of racial makeup,[10][15] to stating that the members were white,[10] to stating that the members were African American[16][17] to stating that the members were of Indian extraction[18] to the assertion that the members were of unspecified mixed race.[19] These newspaper references do have the commonality of all pertaining to violent actions either in the community or perpetrated by members of the community.

Two incidents of violence in Louisiana are particularly notable, one due to the statement of Webster Talma Crawford and one due to amount of newspaper coverage the incident received. The Westport Fight occurred December 24, 1881 in southern Rapides Parish. According to the Crawford account, friction between the more recent settlers and the Redbones had been simmering for much of the month before exploding into a fight that involved several families in the community and ended in the burning down of a store owned by some of the recent non-Redbone settlers.[20] The Bearhead Creek incident took place in what is now southern Beauregard Parish on August 2, 1891. This battle also occurred due to similar tensions between Redbone and more recent, non-Redbone settlers. It left six men dead and several others wounded.[21]

In Texas, one incident of violence is notable. In May 1856 in Orange County, Texas, in the town of Madison (now Orange, Texas), Clark Ashworth was arrested for the theft of a hog. Ashworth was bound over for trial and his bond was paid by his cousin Sam Ashworth. Sam and a friend met the deputy sheriff Samuel Deputy who had arrested Clark on these charges and challenged him to a gun fight. The deputy sheriff arrested Sam Ashworth on the charges of abusive language from Negroes. Justice of the Peace A. N. Reading ruled that Sam Ashworth was a mulatto and not exclusively black, but neither was he white. Reading then sentenced Ashworth to 30 lashes on the bare back. The sheriff, Edward C. Glover, who was friendly to members of the Redbone community, allowed Sam to escape before sentence could be carried out. Sam Ashworth and his cousin, Jack Bunch, then murdered deputy sheriff Samuel Deputy as he crossed a river with his friend A. C. Merriman. Sheriff Glover organized a posse to hunt for Ashworth but only included Glover's and Ashworth's friends. The posse did not find the wanted men. Thereafter, other attempts were made to find Ashworth and Bunch that were not successful. In the aftermath of this incident, members of the Redbone community in Orange County were harassed; their homes and businesses were burned and plundered. Many living in Orange County moved to Louisiana. Over the coming weeks, a war raged between two groups. Those in support of Glover and the Redbones became known as "regulators" while those who supported Merriman became known as "moderators."[22][23]

These incidents illustrate the friction between some (mainly new) non-Redbone settlers to the region and the existing Redbone population. It is incidents such as these that may have cemented the non-Redbone view of this population as being both clannish and violent; however, a close reading of the incidents reveals that the tensions causing the fights arose primarily due to the prejudices of the non-Redbone settlers. The census records from the early to late 19th century list many non-Redbone families settling in the same regions as the Redbones,[24] and these settlers, from the evidence of the records, lived peacefully with members of the Redbone families, even, in many cases, marrying into Redbone families.[25]

During the era of mandated racial segregation under Jim Crow laws (ca. 1870s to 1965) schools accepted Redbone students as white[26] and a review of United States Census records in the late 19th and early 20th century shows that families traditionally considered as members of the Redbone community were mainly (although not always) recorded as white. Additionally, according to the marriage and census records, individuals who were from these families married either other members of the Redbone community or individuals who were listed in the census records as white and not members of the Redbone community.[25]

Academically, the group has been termed "largely unstudied."[4]

In literature [ edit ] Campbell, Will D. The Glad River, 1982Greg Iles. Natchez Burning, 2014,James Lee Burke. Morning for Flamingos, 1990In film [ edit ] In the film The 6th Man (1997), R.C. St John (played by Michael Michele), in reference to her light colored skin.In the Netflix series Master of None (2015), Denise (played by Lena Waithe) uses the term to refer to a light skinned black person.In the television series P-Valley (2020), Autumn Knight (played by Elarica Johnson), in reference to her heritage/ethnicity.In the television series ''Insecure'', Issa Dee (played by Issa Rae) uses the term to refer to Nathan, a fair skinned black love interest.In music [ edit ] The American funk rock band Redbone is named after the term as the founding members were all of mixed ancestry.The 2016 song "Redbone" by Childish Gambino is named after the term.See also [ edit ] MelungeonSabine Free StateAdams''On­s TreatyRegulator''Moderator WarBrass AnklesCajunsAcadiansMulattoLouisiana Creole peopleHigh yellowReferences [ edit ] ^ Ozburn, Ren(C)e. "A Redbone's Reality". The Los Angeles Review . Retrieved 26 September 2023 . ^ Bartl, Renate (2020). American Tri-Racials: African-Native Contact, Multi-Ethnic Native American Nations, and the Ethnogenesis of Tri-Racial Groups in North America (Dr. phil. thesis). Munich, Germany: Ludwig Maximilians-Universit¤t LMU M¼nchen. pp. 312''313. doi:10.5282/edoc.26874. ^ Marler, Don C. (2003). Redbones of Louisiana. Hemphill, Texas: Dogwood Press. ISBN 1-887745-21-1. ^ a b c Everett, C.S. "Brass Ankles/Red Bones," Vol. Ed. Celeste Ray, 6 Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (University of North Carolina Press 2007), pp. 102-104 ^ See Adams-On­s Treaty. ^ "Ancestry® - Genealogy, Family Trees & Family History Records". ^ Claims to Land Between the Rio Hondo and Sabine Rivers in Louisiana. Communicated to the Senate January 31, 1825 ^ "Charles James McDonald Furman papers, 1804-1903". ^ "REDBONE REDBONE". ^ a b c d The Baton Rouge Daily Advocate, 28 August 1857 p. 2 ^ New Orleans Times-Picayune, 9 September 1877 ^ New Orleans Times-Picayune 6 August 1891 p.8New Orleans Times-Picayune 5 August 1891 p.1The New York Times 5 August 1891New Orleans Times Picayune 3 July 1897 p.8 ^ Galveston Weekly News (Galveston, Tex.), Vol. 13, No. 17, Ed. 1, Tuesday, July 15, 1856 ^ The Weekly Telegraph (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 22, No. 19, Ed. 1 Wednesday, July 23, 1856 ^ New Orleans Times-Picayune 3 July 1892 ^ The Springfield Daily Republican 28 August 1857 ^ The New York Times 28 August 1857 ^ New Orleans Times Picayune 6 August 1891 ^ New Orleans Times Picayune 5 August 1891 ^ "REDBONES IN THE NEUTRAL STRIP OR NO MAN'S LAND by Webster Talma Crawford". ^ Dallis Morning News 4 August 1891Times-Picayune 5 August 1891, p.1Times Picayune August 6, 1891Baton Rouge Daily Advocate 7 August 1891Times-Picayune August 9, 1891New Orleans Item 11 August 1891Dallas Morning News 11 September 1891 ^ "Mulattoes: The Orange County War of 1856". ^ Galveston Weekly News June 6, 1856 - July 25, 1856 ^ "U.S. Federal Census Collection - Ancestry.com". ^ a b "Ancestry® - Genealogy, Family Trees & Family History Records". ^ "USGenWeb Archives: Allen Parish, Schools". External links [ edit ] Gilmer, Jason A., Selected Works Free People in a Slave Country,[1], March, 2010.Melungeon Heritage AssociationDeMarce, Virginia. National Genealogical Society Quarterly, March 1992.Marler, D. C. Louisiana Redbones, presented at the First Union, a meeting of Melungeons, at Clinch Valley College in Wise, Virginia, July 1997. (anecdotal history)Marler, D. C. Redbones of Louisiana, Dogwood Press.Crawford, Webster Talma. Redbones in the Neutral Strip or No Man's Land Between Calcasieu and Sabine Rivers, and the Westport Fight Between Whites and Redbones for Possession of this Strip on Christmas Eve, 1882

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Virginia anti-miscegenation law

Racial Integrity Act of 1924In 1924, the Virginia General Assembly enacted the Racial Integrity Act.[1] The act reinforced racial segregation by prohibiting interracial marriage and classifying as "white" a person "who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian".[2] The act, an outgrowth of eugenicist and scientific racist propaganda, was pushed by Walter Plecker, a white supremacist and eugenicist who held the post of registrar of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics.[3]

The Racial Integrity Act required that all birth certificates and marriage certificates in Virginia to include the person's race as either "white" or "colored". The Act classified all non-whites, including Native Americans, as "colored".[2] The act was part of a series of "racial integrity laws" enacted in Virginia to reinforce racial hierarchies and prohibit the mixing of races; other statutes included the Public Assemblages Act of 1926 (which required the racial segregation of all public meeting areas) and a 1930 act that defined any person with even a trace of sub-Saharan African ancestry as black (thus codifying the so-called "one-drop rule").[2]

In 1967, both the Racial Integrity Act and the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 were officially overturned by the United States Supreme Court in their ruling Loving v. Virginia. In 2001, the Virginia General Assembly passed a resolution that condemned the Racial Integrity Act for its "use as a respectable, 'scientific' veneer to cover the activities of those who held blatantly racist views".[2]

History leading to the laws' passage: 1859''1924 [ edit ] In the 1920s, Virginia's registrar of statistics, Walter Ashby Plecker, was allied with the newly founded Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America in persuading the Virginia General Assembly to pass the Racial Integrity Law of 1924.[4] The club was founded in Virginia by John Powell of Richmond in the fall of 1922; within a year the club for white males had more than 400 members and 31 posts in the state.[5]

In 1923, the Anglo-Saxon Club founded two posts in Charlottesville, one for the town and one for students at the University of Virginia. A major goal was to end "amalgamation" by interracial marriage. Members also claimed to support Anglo-Saxon ideas of fair play. Later that fall, a state convention of club members was to be held in Richmond.[6]

The Virginia assembly's 21st-century explanation for the laws summarizes their development:

The now-discredited pseudoscience of eugenics was based on theories first propounded in England by Francis Galton, the cousin and disciple of famed biologist Charles Darwin. The goal of the "science" of eugenics was to improve the human race by eliminating what the movement's supporters considered hereditary disorders or flaws through selective breeding and social engineering. The eugenics movement proved popular in the United States, with Indiana enacting the nation's first eugenics-based sterilization law in 1907.[7]

In the following five decades, other states followed Indiana's example by implementing the eugenic laws. Wisconsin was the first state to enact legislation that required the medical certification of persons who applied for marriage licenses. The law that was enacted in 1913 generated attempts at similar legislation in other states.

Anti-miscegenation laws, banning interracial marriage between whites and non-whites, had existed long before the emergence of eugenics. First enacted during the colonial era when slavery had become essentially a racial caste, such laws were in effect in Virginia and in much of the United States until the 1960s.

The first law banning all marriage between whites and blacks was enacted in the colony of Virginia in 1691. This example was followed by Maryland (in 1692) and several of the other Thirteen Colonies. By 1913, 30 out of the then 48 states (including all Southern states) enforced such laws.[citation needed ]

The Pocahontas exception [ edit ] 1890 U.S. census report on Virginia IndiansThe Racial Integrity Act was subject to the Pocahontas Clause (or Pocahontas Exception), which allowed people with claims of less than 1/16 American Indian ancestry to still be considered white, despite the otherwise unyielding climate of one-drop rule politics.[8][9] The exception regarding Native blood quantum was included as an amendment to the original Act in response to concerns of Virginia elites, including many of the First Families of Virginia, who had always claimed descent from Pocahontas with pride, but now worried that the new legislation would jeopardize their status.[10][11] The exception stated:

It shall thereafter be unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian. For the purpose of this act, the term "white person" shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian; but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons.[8]

While definitions of "Indian", "colored", and variations of these were established and altered throughout the 18th and 19th centuries,[12][13][14] this was the first direct case of whiteness itself being defined officially.[10]

Enforcement [ edit ] Once these laws were passed, Plecker was in the position to enforce them. Governor E. Lee Trinkle, a year after signing the act, asked Plecker to ease up on the Indians and not "embarrass them any more than possible." Plecker responded, "I am unable to see how it is working any injustice upon them or humiliation for our office to take a firm stand against their intermarriage with white people, or to the preliminary steps of recognition as Indians with permission to attend white schools and to ride in white coaches."[15]

Unsatisfied with the "Pocahontas Exception", eugenicists introduced an amendment to narrow loopholes to the Racial Integrity Act. This was considered by the Virginia General Assembly in February 1926, but it failed to pass.[16][citation not found ] If adopted, the amendment would have reclassified thousands of "white" people as "colored" by more strictly implementing the "one-drop rule" of ancestry as applied to American Indian ancestry.[17][citation not found ]

Plecker reacted strongly to the Pocahontas Clause with fierce concerns of the white race being "swallowed up by the quagmire of mongrelization",[18] particularly after marriage cases like that of the Johns and Sorrels, in which the women of these couples argued that the family members listed as "colored" had actually been Native American because of historically unclear categorizing.[citation needed ]

Implementation and consequences: 1924''1979 [ edit ] The combined effect of these two laws adversely affected the continuity of Virginia's American Indian tribes. The Racial Integrity Act called for only two racial categories to be recorded on birth certificates, rather than the traditional six: "white" and "colored" (which now included Indian and all discernible mixed-race persons).[19] The effects were quickly seen. In 1930, the U.S. census for Virginia recorded 779 Indians; by 1940, that number had been reduced to 198. In effect, Indians were being erased as a group from official records.[4]

In addition, as Plecker admitted, he enforced the Racial Integrity Act extending far beyond his jurisdiction in the segregated society.[20] For instance, he pressured school superintendents to exclude mixed-race (then called mulatto) children from white schools. Plecker ordered the exhumation of dead people of "questionable ancestry" from white cemeteries to be reinterred elsewhere.[19]

Indians reclassified as colored [ edit ] As registrar, Plecker directed the reclassification of nearly all Virginia Indians as colored on their birth and marriage certificates, because he was convinced that most Indians had African heritage and were trying to "pass" as Indian to evade segregation. Consequently, two or three generations of Virginia Indians had their ethnic identity altered on these public documents. Fiske reported that Plecker's tampering with the vital records of the Virginia Indian tribes made it impossible for descendants of six of the eight tribes recognized by the state to gain federal recognition, because they could no longer prove their American Indian ancestry by documented historical continuity.[20]

Involuntary sterilization [ edit ] Historians have not estimated the impact of the miscegenation laws. There are records, however, of the number of people who were involuntarily sterilized during the years these two laws were in effect. Of the involuntary sterilizations reported in the United States prior to 1957, Virginia was second, having sterilized a total of 6,683 persons (California was first, having sterilized 19,985 people without their consent). Many more women than men were sterilized: 4,043 to 2,640. Of those, 2,095 women were sterilized under the category of "Mentally Ill"; and 1,875 under the category "Mentally Deficient". The remainder were for "Other" reasons. Other states reported involuntary sterilizations of similar numbers of people as Virginia.[21]

Leaders target persons of color [ edit ] The intention to control or reduce ethnic minorities, especially Negroes, can be seen in writings by some leaders in the eugenics movement:

In an 1893 "open letter" published in the Virginia Medical Monthly, Hunter Holmes McGuire, a Richmond physician and president of the American Medical Association, asked for "some scientific explanation of the sexual perversion in the Negro of the present day." McGuire's correspondent, Chicago physician G. Frank Lydston, replied that African-American men raped white women because of "[h]ereditary influences descending from the uncivilized ancestors of our Negroes." Lydston suggested as a solution to perform surgical castration, which "prevents the criminal from perpetuating his kind.[22]

In 1935, a decade after the passage of Virginia's eugenics laws, Plecker wrote to Walter Gross, director of Nazi Germany's Bureau of Human Betterment and Eugenics. Plecker described Virginia's racial purity laws and requested to be put on Gross' mailing list. Plecker commented upon the Third Reich's sterilization of 600 children in the Rhineland (the so-called Rhineland Bastards, who were born of German women by black French colonial fathers): "I hope this work is complete and not one has been missed. I sometimes regret that we have not the authority to put some measures in practice in Virginia."[23]

Despite lacking the statutory authority to sterilize black, mulatto, and American Indian children simply because they were "colored", a small number of Virginia eugenicists in key positions found other ways to achieve that goal. The Sterilization Act gave State institutions, including hospitals, psychiatric institutions and prisons, the statutory authority to sterilize persons deemed to be "feebleminded" '-- a highly subjective criterion.

Joseph DeJarnette, director of the Western State Hospital in Staunton, Virginia, was a leading advocate of eugenics. DeJarnette was unsatisfied with the pace of America's eugenics sterilization programs. In 1938, he wrote:

Germany in six years has sterilized about 80,000 of her unfit while the United States '-- with approximately twice the population '-- has only sterilized about 27,869 in the past 20 years. ... The fact that there are 12,000,000 defectives in the U.S. should arouse our best endeavors to push this procedure to the maximum ... The Germans are beating us at our own game.[24]

By "12 million defectives" (a tenth of the population), DeJarnette was almost certainly referring to ethnic minorities,[citation needed ] as there have never been 12 million mental patients in the United States.

According to historian Gregory M. Dorr, the University of Virginia School of Medicine (UVA) became "an epicenter of eugenical thought" that was "closely linked with the national movement." One of UVA's leading eugenicists, Harvey Ernest Jordan, Ph.D. was promoted to dean of medicine in 1939 and served until 1949.[25] He was in a position to shape the opinion and practice of Virginia physicians for several decades. This excerpt from a 1934 UVA student paper indicates one student's thoughts: "In Germany, Hitler has decreed that about 400,000 persons be sterilized. This is a great step in eliminating the racial deficients."[26]

The racial effects of the program in Virginia can be seen by the disproportionately high number of black and American Indian women who were given forced sterilizations after coming to a hospital for other reasons, such as childbirth. Doctors sometimes sterilized the women without their knowledge or consent in the course of other surgery.[27]

Responses to the Racial Integrity Act [ edit ] In the early 20th century, persons of color in everyday southern society feared to voice their opinions due to severe oppression. Magazines such as the Richmond Planet offered the black community a voice and the opportunity to have their concerns heard. The Richmond Planet made a difference in society by openly expressing the opinions of persons of color in society.[citation needed ] After the passing of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 the Richmond Planet published the article "Race Amalgamation Bill Being Passed in Va. Legislature. Much Discussion Here on race Integrity and Mongrelization ... Bill Would Prohibit Marriage of Whites and Non-whites ..."Skull of Bones" Discusses race question."[28] The journalist opened the article with Racial Integrity Act and gave a brief synopsis of the act. Then followed statements from the creators of the Racial Integrity Act, John Powell and Earnest S. Cox. Mr. Powell believed that the Racial Integrity Act was needed as "maintenance of the integrity of the white race to preserve its superior blood" and Cox believed in what he called "the great man concept" which means that if the races were to intersect that it would lower the rate of great white men in the world. He defended his position by saying that non-whites would agree with his ideology:

The sane and educated Negro does not want social equality ... They do not want intermarriage or social mingling any more than does the average American white man wants it. They have race pride as well as we. They want racial purity as much as we want it. There are both sides to the question and to form an unbiased opinion either way requires a thorough study of the matter on both sides.

Carrie Buck and the Supreme Court [ edit ] Racial minorities were not the only people affected by these laws. About 4,000 poor white Virginians were involuntarily sterilized by government order. When Laughlin testified before the Virginia assembly in support of the Sterilization Act in 1924, he argued that the "shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South", created social problems for "normal" people. He said, "The multiplication of these 'defective delinquents' could only be controlled by restricting their procreation".[29]Carrie Buck was the most widely known white victim of Virginia's eugenics laws. She was born in Charlottesville to Emma Buck. After her birth, Carrie was placed with foster parents, John and Alice Dobbs. She attended public school until the sixth grade. After that, she continued to live with the Dobbses, and did domestic work in the home.

Carrie became pregnant when she was 17, as a result of being raped by the nephew of her foster parents. To hide the act, on January 23, 1924, Carrie's foster parents committed the girl to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded on the grounds of feeblemindedness, incorrigible behavior, and promiscuity. They did not tell the court the true cause of her pregnancy. On March 28, 1924, Buck gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Vivian. Since Carrie had been declared mentally incompetent to raise her child, her former foster parents adopted the baby.

On September 10, 1924, Albert Sidney Priddy, superintendent of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded and a eugenicist, filed a petition with his board of directors to sterilize Carrie Buck, an 18-year-old patient. He claimed she had a mental age of 9. Priddy said that Buck represented a genetic threat to society. While the litigation was making its way through the court system, Priddy died and his successor, James Hendren Bell, came on the case.When the directors issued an order for the sterilization of Buck, her guardian appealed the case to the Circuit Court of Amherst County. It sustained the decision of the board. The case then moved to the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, where it was upheld. It was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell, which upheld the order.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the ruling. He argued the interest of "public welfare" outweighed the interest of individuals in bodily integrity:[30]

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.

Holmes concluded his argument with the phrase: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough".

Carrie Buck was paroled from the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded shortly after she was sterilized. Under the same statute, her mother and three-year-old daughter were also sterilized without their consent. In 1932, her daughter Vivian Buck died of "enteric colitis".

When hospitalized for appendicitis, Doris Buck, Carrie's younger sister, was sterilized without her knowledge or consent. Never told that the operation had been performed, Doris Buck married and with her husband tried to have children. It was not until 1980 that she was told the reason for her inability to get pregnant.[31][citation needed ]

Carrie Buck went on to marry William Eagle. They were married for 25 years until his death. Scholars and reporters who visited Buck in the aftermath of the Supreme Court case reported that she appeared to be a woman of normal intelligence.

The effect of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Buck v. Bell was to legitimize eugenic sterilization laws in the country While many states already had sterilization laws on their books, most except for California had used them erratically and infrequently. After Buck v. Bell, dozens of states added new sterilization statutes, or updated their laws. They passed statutes that more closely followed the Virginia statute upheld by the Court.

Supreme Court, repeals and apology: 1967''2002 [ edit ] In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that the portion of the Racial Integrity Act that criminalized marriages between "whites" and "nonwhites" was found to be contrary to the guarantees of equal protection of citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In 1975, the Virginia General Assembly repealed the remainder of the Racial Integrity Act. In 1979, it repealed the Sterilization Act. In 2001, the General Assembly overwhelmingly passed a bill (HJ607ER[32]) to express the assembly's profound regret for its role in the eugenics movement. On May 2, 2002, Governor Mark R. Warner issued a statement also expressing "profound regret for the commonwealth's role in the eugenics movement," specifically naming Virginia's 1924 compulsory sterilization legislation.[33]

See also [ edit ] United States portal Anti-miscegenation laws in the United StatesBuck v. Bell (1927)Eugenics in the United StatesImmorality ActVirginia Sterilization Act of 1924References [ edit ] ^ Racial Integrity Act of 1924. State legislature of Virginia. ^ a b c d Brendan Wolfe, Racial Integrity Laws (1924''1930), Encyclopedia Virginia . ^ Michael Yudell, "A Short History of the Race Concept" in Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture (ed. Sheldon Krimsky & Kathleen Sloan: Columbia University Press, 1971). p. 19. ^ a b "Modern Indians A.D. 1800-Present", First People: The Early Indians of Virginia, Dept. of Historic Resources, State of Virginia, accessed 14 April 2010 ^ David E. Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region, Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983, pp. 240''242, accessed 14 April 2010 ^ "Anglo-Saxon Club Founds Two Posts in Community", The Cavalier Daily (UVA), 5 October 1923, accessed 14 April 2010 ^ HJ607ER, Paragraphs 1''3 ^ a b "Preservation of Racial Integrity (1924)". www.encyclopediavirginia.org . Retrieved 2018-10-11 . ^ Maillard, Kevin Noble (2005). "The Pocahontas Exception: The Exemption of American Indian Ancestry from Racial Purity Law". SSRN Working Paper Series. 12 (2): 351''386. doi:10.2139/ssrn.871096. ISSN 1556-5068. ^ a b "Racial Integrity Laws (1924''1930)". www.encyclopediavirginia.org . Retrieved 2018-10-11 . ^ Maillard, Kevin A. (2007). "The Pocahontas Exception: The Exemption of American Indian Ancestry from Racial Purity Law". Michigan Journal of Race and Law. 12: 370 '' via University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. ^ "General Provisions as to Slaves (1860)". www.encyclopediavirginia.org . Retrieved 2018-11-07 . ^ "An Act to amend and re-enact the 9th section of chapter 103 of the Code of Virginia for 1860 (1866)". www.encyclopediavirginia.org . Retrieved 2018-11-07 . ^ "Colored Persons and Indians Defined (1887)". www.encyclopediavirginia.org . Retrieved 2018-11-07 . ^ Warren Fiske, "The Black and White World of Ashby Plecker: Part 2", The Virginian-Pilot, 18 August 2004, on the Weyanoke Association Website ^ The Washington Post, February 9, 1926 ^ The Richmond News Leader, February 1926, ? ^ Sherman, Richard (1988). " "The Last Stand": The Fight for Racial Integrity in Virginia in the 1920s". The Journal of Southern History. 54 (1): 69''92. doi:10.2307/2208521. JSTOR 2208521. ^ a b Fiske, Part 1 ^ a b Fiske, Part 2 ^ "Men Behind Hitler '' Appendix 1". www.toolan.com . Retrieved 22 October 2017 . ^ Dorr, Gregory M. (October 2006). "Defective or Disabled?: Race, Medicine, and Eugenics in Progressive Era Virginia and Alabama". Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. 5 (4). Fremont, OH: Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: 359''92. doi:10.1017/S1537781400003224. ISSN 1943-3557. OCLC 54407091. S2CID 161688514. Archived from the original on 2008-10-11 . Retrieved 2008-07-26 . ^ Michael Plunkett, Editor, Afro-American Sources in Virginia: A Guide to Manuscripts, The John Powell Papers, University of Virginia Press, 1995 ^ DAVE MCNAIR, "Erasing history: Wrecking ball aiming for DeJarnette?", The Hook, Issue 0528, 2006-07-13 ^ "About the School '' University of Virginia School of Medicine". www.medicine.virginia.edu . Retrieved 22 October 2017 . ^ Gregory M. Dorr, Assuring America's Place in the Sun: Ivey Foreman Lewis and the Teaching of Eugenics at the University of Virginia ^ Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985) ^ T.J. Moppins and W.M. Trotter, "Race Amalgamation Bill Being Passed In Va. Legislature", (Richmond Planet, March 8, 1924) ^ Gregory Michael Dorr, "Defective or Disabled? Archived 2008-10-11 at the Wayback Machine: Race, Medicine, and Eugenics in Progressive Era Virginia and Alabama", History Cooperative, Vol 5, No. 4, October 2006 ^ Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (U.S. 1927). ^ Clare, Eli (2014). "Yearning Towards Carrie Buck" (PDF) . Journal of Literacy and Cultural Disability Studies. 8 (3): 335''344. doi:10.3828/jlcds.2014.26 '' via Project Muse. ^ "Bill Tracking '' 2001 session > Legislation". leg1.state.va.us . Retrieved 22 October 2017 . ^ Branigin, William (3 May 2002). "Warner Apologizes To Victims Of Eugenics" . Retrieved 22 October 2017 '' via www.washingtonpost.com. External links [ edit ] Wikisource has original text related to this article:

"Sterilization Act of 1924" by N. Antonios at the Embryo Project EncyclopediaModern Indians, Virginia's Indian PeopleEugenics archivePaul Lombardo, "Eugenic Laws Against Race Mixing""HOUSE JOINT RESOLUTION NO. 607, Expressing the General Assembly's regret for Virginia's experience with eugenics", Feb 14, 2001Racial Integrity Act of 1924, Original Text"Harry H. Laughlin", Model Eugenical Sterilization Law, Harvard University"Kaine and Warner push for federal recognition for 6 Virginia tribes" by Joe Heim, Washington Post March 20, 2017"How a long-dead white supremacist still threatens the future of Virginia's Indian tribes" by Joe Heim, Washington Post, July 1, 2015

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SEATTLE (AP) '-- The Federal Aviation Administration said Monday it has opened an investigation into Boeing after the beleaguered company reported that workers at a South Carolina plant falsified inspection records on certain 787 planes. Boeing said its engineers have determined that misconduct did not create ''an immediate safety of flight issue.''

In an email to Boeing's South Carolina employees on April 29, Scott Stocker, who leads the 787 program, said a worker observed an ''irregularity'' in a required test of the wing-to-body join and reported it to his manager.

''After receiving the report, we quickly reviewed the matter and learned that several people had been violating Company policies by not performing a required test, but recording the work as having been completed,'' Stocker wrote.

Boeing notified the FAA and is taking ''swift and serious corrective action with multiple teammates,'' Stocker said.

No planes have been taken out of service, but having to perform the test out of order on planes will slow the delivery of jets still being built at the final assembly plant in North Charleston, South Carolina.

Boeing must also create a plan to address planes that are already flying, the FAA said.

The 787 is a two-aisle plane that debuted in 2011 and is used mostly for long international flights.

''The company voluntarily informed us in April that it may not have completed required inspections to confirm adequate bonding and grounding where the wings join the fuselage on certain 787 Dreamliner airplanes,'' the agency said in a written statement. ''The FAA is investigating whether Boeing completed the inspections and whether company employees may have falsified aircraft records.''

The company has been under intense pressure since a door plug blew out of a Boeing 737 Max during an Alaska Airlines flight in January, leaving a gaping hole in the plane. The accident halted progress that Boeing seemed to be making while recovering from two deadly crashes of Max jets in 2018 and 2019.

Those crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia, which killed 346 people, are back in the spotlight, too. The families of some of the victims have pushed the Justice Department to revive a criminal fraud charge against the company by determining that Boeing's continued lapses violated the terms of a 2021 deferred prosecution agreement.

In April, a Boeing whistleblower, Sam Salehpour, testified at a congressional hearing that the company had taken manufacturing shortcuts to turn out 787s as quickly as possible; his allegations were not directly related to those the company disclosed to the FAA last month. The company rejected Salehpour's claims.

In his email, Stocker praised the worker who came forward to report what he saw: ''I wanted to personally thank and commend that teammate for doing the right thing. It's critical that every one of us speak up when we see something that may not look right, or that needs attention.''

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American electric car battery charging company

Better Place was a venture-backed international company that developed and sold battery charging and battery switching services for electric cars. It was formally based in Palo Alto, California, but the bulk of its planning and operations were steered from Israel, where both its founder Shai Agassi and its chief investors resided.

The company opened its first functional charging station the first week of December 2008 at Cinema City in Pi-Glilot near Tel Aviv, Israel.[1] The first customer deliveries of Renault Fluence Z.E. electric cars enabled with battery switching technology began in Israel in the second quarter of 2012,[2] and at peak in mid September 2012, there were 21 operational battery-swap stations open to the public in Israel.[3]

Better Place filed for bankruptcy in Israel in May 2013. The company's financial difficulties were caused by mismanagement, wasteful efforts to establish toeholds and run pilots in too many countries, the high investment required to develop the charging and swapping infrastructure, and a market penetration far lower than originally predicted by Shai Agassi.[4] Fewer than 1,000 Fluence Z.E. cars were deployed in Israel and around 400 units in Denmark, after spending about US$850 million in private capital.[4][5][6][7] After two failed post-bankruptcy acquisition attempts,[8][9][10] the bankruptcy receivers sold off the remaining assets in November 2013 to Gnrgy for only $450,000.[11]

History [ edit ] Launch [ edit ] The company was publicly launched on October 29, 2007, as Project Better Place, by Shai Agassi, the company's founder and CEO at the time.[4] According to Agassi, his vision was inspired by a question asked by Klaus Schwab at the 2005 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: "How do you make the world a better place by 2020?"[12] As of January 2011 it had raised $700 million, and about a third was spent in setting up the battery switch stations. Also, several countries and states had offered tax breaks.[13][14][15]

Better Place announced deployment of electric vehicle networks in Israel, Denmark and Hawaii in 2008 and 2009.[13][16] The company planned to deploy the infrastructure on a country-by-country basis, and said it was in talks with more than 25 additional regions around the world.[17] Australia,[18] Ontario,[19] Oregon,[20] and California[21] also announced deployment of Better Place electric car networks.

In January 2008, Better Place announced a memorandum of understanding with Renault-Nissan to build the world's first Electric Recharge Grid Operator (ERGO) model for Israel. Under the agreement, Better Place would build the electric recharge grid, and Renault-Nissan would provide the electric vehicles.

Bankruptcy [ edit ] A shut-down battery swap station in Katzrin, IsraelOn October 2, 2012, Agassi resigned from his role as worldwide Better Place CEO, and was replaced by Evan Thornley, CEO of Better Place-Australia. Agassi briefly remained on the company board, but a week later he resigned from that position as well. A few days after Thornley's appointment, Better Place asked its investors for a round of emergency funding, totalling about $100 million.[22][23] On October 29, 2012, Ynet reported that Better Place would that week lay off 150 to 200 of its 400-person staff in Israel as it sought financing to combat its cash-flow problems.[24]

In late January 2013, Thornley was fired by Chairman Idan Ofer, and Dan Cohen was named acting CEO by the board.[25] As a consequence of the financial problems, the Australian rollout was put on hold, as the company decided to concentrate on its two existing markets.[26]However, on 26 May 2013, Better Place filed for bankruptcy in Israel.[27] Following the decision of the board of directors of the global company, Better Place Danmark A/S also decided to initiate bankruptcy proceedings on the same date.[28][29]

The company's financial difficulties were caused by the high investment required to develop the charging and swapping infrastructure, about US$850 million in private capital, and market penetration significantly lower than originally predicted by Shai Agassi, who expected 100,000 cars on Israeli roads by 2010.[4] Fewer than 1,000 Fluence Z.E. cars were deployed in Israel and around 400 cars in Denmark.[6][7] Under Better Place's business model, the company owned the Fluence Z.E. batteries, so the court liquidator would have to decide what to do with customers who do not have ownership of the battery and risk being left with a useless car.[30]

Post-bankruptcy acquisition attempts and liquidation [ edit ] In July 2013, an attempt to acquire Better Place was made by the Sunrise group that comprised entrepreneur Yosef Abramowitz and the Association for the Advancement of Electric Transportation in Israel. Court filings showed that the acquisition would be worth 18 million Israeli shekels ( US$5 million ) for Better Place's assets in Israel, and 25 million Israeli shekels ( US$7 million ) for its intellectual property, held by Better Place Switzerland. The deal was canceled by the court after the Sunrise group failed to make the first agreed payment of 3.52 million shekels ( US$976,300 ), even after an extension.[9]

In August 2013, the Central District Court ruled that Better Place Israel would be sold to Success Assets Ltd., owned by Tsahi Merkur, for 11 million shekels ( US$3 million). To effect the acquisition, Merkur was to sign a personal guarantee within seven days for the full amount of the acquisition, and a personal guarantee for a letter of indemnification covering the guarantees made by Better Place Israel's subsidiaries to the Ministry of Transport. Within 21 days, Merkur was to deposit with the company's special managers an opinion on a property on which a commitment to register a lien of up to 5 million shekels would be placed. By 30 September 2013 he was to make a payment of 2 million shekels.[9] On 17 October 2013 the deal was canceled after Success Assets failed to make the required payments.

In November 2013, the court-appointed receivers decided to sell the remaining assets of Better Place in parts and liquidate the business.[31]

Business model [ edit ] History of the battery swap concept [ edit ] The steam car, the internal combustion engine automobile, and the electric car emerged as the main competing technologies in the late 1890s until the 1920s. The concept of exchangeable battery service was first proposed as early as 1896 in order to overcome the limited operating range of electric cars and trucks.[32]

The concept was first put into practice by Hartford Electric Light Company through the GeVeCo battery service and was initially available for electric trucks. The vehicle owner purchased the vehicle from General Vehicle Company (GeVeCo, a subsidiary of the General Electric Company) without a battery and the electricity was purchased from Hartford Electric through an exchangeable battery. The owner paid a variable per-mile charge and a monthly service fee to cover maintenance and storage of the truck. Both vehicles and batteries were modified to facilitate a fast battery exchange. The service was provided between 1910 and 1924 and during that period vehicles using it covered more than 6 million miles. Beginning in 1917 a similar service was operated in Chicago for owners of Milburn Light Electric cars who also could buy the vehicle without the batteries.[32]

Electric forklifts have used battery swapping since at least 1946[33][34] and a rapid battery replacement system was implemented to help maintain 50 electric buses at the 2008 Summer Olympics in China.[35]

Better Place business model [ edit ] Better Place implemented a business model wherein customers entered into subscriptions to purchase driving distance similar to the mobile telephone industry from which customers contract for minutes of airtime. The initial cost of an electric vehicle might also have been subsidized by the ongoing per-distance revenue contract just as mobile handset purchases are subsidized by per-minute mobile service contracts. Better Place's goal was to enable electric cars to sell for $5,000 less than the price of the average gasoline car sold in the United States,[36] or the impact of electric cars would be minimal. For example, the Prius hybrid had been sold for 13 years at a price of $4,000 more than other gasoline cars and had captured less than 2% of the worldwide car market.[37]

The Better Place approach was to enable manufacturing and sales of different electric cars separately from their standardized batteries[38] in the same way that petrol cars are sold separately from their fuel. Petrol is not purchased upfront, but is bought a few times a month when the fuel tank needs filling. Similarly, the Better Place monthly payment would cover electric "fuel" costs including battery, daily charging and battery swaps. Better Place was to allow customers to pay incrementally for battery costs including electric power, battery life, degradation, warranty problems, maintenance, capital cost, quality, technology advancement and anything else related to the battery. The per-distance fees would cover battery pack leasing, charging and swap infrastructure, purchasing sustainable electricity, profits, and the cost of investor capital.[39] All battery problems would be handled by Better Place which would then bundle the costs and bill their customers monthly for providing all the infrastructure.

The Better Place electric car charging infrastructure network was based on a smart grid software platform using Intel Atom processors and .NET Framework, or comparable vendors. This platform was first of its kind in the world and was to enable Better Place to manage the charging of hundreds of thousands of electric cars simultaneously by automatically time-shifting recharging away from peak demand hours of the day, preventing overload of the electrical grid of the host country.[40] According to Agassi, Better Place would be able to provide electricity for millions of electric cars without adding a single electricity generator or transmission line by using smart software that oversaw and managed the recharging of electric cars connected with Better Place.[41] A critique of the company's business model was later published.[42]

Better Place encouraged governments to mandate the use of international standards and open access to recharge across charging networks to facilitate competing networks.[43] Standardization efforts such as SAE J1772, however, had not yet yielded global consensus as of August 2009[update]. Better Place displayed Charge Spot charging stations that used a connector with the same pin layout as SAE J1772-2009 but housed in a non-standard, triangular plug.[44] They also displayed a wall mounted charging station using IEC 62196 Type 2 receptacle.[45][46] Battery pack switching outside of Better Place's network was not to be allowed. Better Place said it had pre-sold enough contracts to make its first deployed network in Israel profitable at launch.[47]

Energy sources [ edit ] Agassi stated that the company's plan was to have the network's electricity generated entirely by renewable energy from solar arrays and wind farms if necessary,[13][48] thus invalidating the "long-smokestack" accusation leveled against electric vehicles which rely on the nonrenewable sources of the electricity.[citation needed ] However, achieving the 100% renewable energy goal would have depended on the local electric grid's energy sources.

In Israel, where the first Better Place deployment took place, the electric grid is based mostly on fossil fuels, rendering the renewable energy vision practically impossible in the short term.[49][50]

Cars and batteries [ edit ] Prototype modified Renault Laguna EVs charging at the Better Place visitor centre in Ramat Hasharon, Israel, north of Tel Aviv.Nissan eRogue in Hawaii.The first prototype car was the Renault Laguna with a battery instead of a fuel tank and an electric motor instead of an internal combustion engine.[51] The battery for electric vehicles was a Lithium iron phosphate ion device.[52] The range of the car running on just one battery was from about 160 kilometres (99 mi)[53] to 190 kilometres (120 mi).[54] By replacing the battery at a battery switch station, the range between longer charging stops was to be limited only by the geographical distribution of the battery-swapping infrastructure.[51]

The second demo car was the Nissan eRogue, an electric car based on the Renault-Nissan Rogue, halfway between a sedan and an SUV in size.[55]

The Renault Fluence Z.E. was announced at the Frankfurt Motor Show on September 15, 2009, as the first electric car to be available on the Better Place network using a switchable battery.[56] Shai Agassi said that EVs had to be priced at $5,000 less than the price of the average gasoline car to be successful.[36] In April 2010 Renault announced that sales of the Fluence Z.E. were scheduled for 2011 in Israel, Denmark and the rest of Europe.[57] In August 2010 Better Place announced a non-binding order of 100,000 Renault Fluence ZE[58] and four months later Better Place claimed to have sold 70,000 cars from that order, a year away from the public launch of its network.[59]

The floor-mounted battery packs in these electric cars were designed to be changed out robotically in less than two minutes, which was quicker than the average petroleum refuel, allowing for battery-swap services like those proposed by Better Place and Tesla Motors.[60] Better Place expected battery packs to cost between US 4 and 5 per mile over their life,[61] provide the cars with a 160 km (99 mi) range per charge, perform for 2000 recharge cycles, and last for 8 years.[62]

Battery-swapping stations [ edit ] With areas around cities covered with battery switching stations, also called battery-swap stations, drivers would potentially have electric cars with an unlimited driving range for long-distance trips.[63] The QuickDrop battery switch system would enable Renault Fluence Z.E.'s battery, the only vehicle deployed in the Better Place network, to be swapped in approximately three minutes at dedicated battery exchange stations.[64] The actual robotic battery switching operation took about five minutes in the deployed stations.[65][66] While each exchange station would cost $500,000,[67] the then CEO of Better Place, Shai Agassi, said that cost would be half the price of a typical petroleum fuelling station.[68]

Better Place's battery switching Station in IsraelIn order to access the battery switch station, Better Place customers would have to swipe their membership card. The remaining process was fully automated, similar to going through a car wash, so the driver never had to leave the car. In Better Place's demonstration battery switch stations, a robotic arm removed the depleted battery and replaced it with a full one.[69]

During 2010, Better Place operated a demonstration battery switch station in Tokyo allowing three specially equipped cabs to exchange their car's depleted battery pack for a 100 miles (160 km) fully recharged one in 59.1 seconds on average.[70] Better Place used the same technology to swap batteries that F-16 jet fighter aircraft use to load their bombs.[71]

Better Place battery switch stations were claimed to support multiple battery types of all kinds of electric cars as long as the battery could be removed from under the car.[72] A battery switch station using only 15 batteries allegedly had the ability to swap batteries for 2,500 EV's.[73] Better Place claimed it had battery station installation teams who could install one battery switch station in just two days,[74] one every 25 miles in every route[75] and at the same cost of 7 days of oil in the United States, Better Place claimed it could cover all of the United States with battery switch stations and all the required infrastructure.[76]

Battery switching versus DC fast charging [ edit ] The main alternative technology to the battery switching technique promoted by Better Place is DC fast charging. A nationwide fast charging infrastructure is/was being deployed in the United States that by 2013 would cover the entire nation.[77] DC Fast Chargers are going to be installed at 45 BP and ARCO locations and will be made available to the public as early as March 2011.[78]

Better Place claimed that its subscription model had customers effectively paying only the prorated mileage cost without any battery ownership problems, whereas the fast charging model involves the customer bearing all the battery purchase, ownership, maintenance, and replacement costs, in addition to the cost of the electricity to recharge the battery.

Better Place claimed that far fewer fast charging and battery switch stations would be needed than the current number of petroleum fuel refill stations, because drivers would usually recharge ("refuel") electric cars at home, offices, shopping centers, commercial areas, and the like. Drivers would need alternatives only if they forgot to recharge, couldn't get to a charge spot, had insufficient time at a charge spot, or were driving non-stop in excess of 160-kilometre (99 mi), typical of long distance vacations and business trips.

DC fast charging was at the time considerably slower than Better Place's claimed 59-second battery switchover, but while Better Place battery switch stations would have cost around $500,000 each, DC fast chargers that the EV project is/was to deploy would cost only between $25,000 and $40,000.[79]

Demonstration projects [ edit ] Yokohama [ edit ] On May 13, 2009, Better Place premiered their battery switching station to the public in Yokohama where they had been invited by the Japanese Ministry of the Environment.[80] The battery switching station demonstrated was set up similarly to a gas station automatic car wash. The vehicle drove up on a ramp and was aligned on the swapping pad. The battery shuttle then engaged and rose up toward the bottom of the vehicle. It made contact with the battery, released it, lowered it, and moved the depleted battery pack away from the car. The charged battery pack was then inserted. The discharged battery was returned to the charging bay. The battery switch was complete in less than two minutes and the vehicle drove away.[81][82] The battery swap was designed to require less time than filling a tank of gas.[39][83] In order to keep electric vehicles in demand, Better Place was going to try to keep the vehicles competitive with the other cars on the market. By building infrastructure that made owning an electric car more practical, they hoped to increase demand.

The first prototype battery switch station opened in Yokohama, Japan on May 14, 2009, was designed by Yoav Heichal, chief engineer for Better Place research and development group.[84]

The company signed an agreement with Dor Alon Energy to install battery replacement points, which would run alongside the petroleum refueling station' normal business. Dor Alon CEO, Israel Yaniv, said, "Dor Alon is the first energy company that will enable owners of electric car owners of the future to obtain electric refueling services at its gas stations. We consider this agreement with Better Place to be a strategic partnership that will create real value and innovation for the company's activity."[85]

Tokyo [ edit ] In April 2010, a 90-day switchable-battery electric taxi demonstration project was launched in Tokyo, using three Nissan Rogue crossover utility vehicles, converted into electric cars with switchable batteries provided by A123 Systems. The battery switch station deployed in Tokyo was more advanced than the Yokohama switch system demonstrated in 2009.[86][87][88] During the three-month field test the EV taxis accumulated over 25,000 miles (40,000 km) and swapped batteries 2,122 times, with an average battery swap time of 59.1 seconds. Nissan decided to continue the trial until late November 2010.[89]

San Francisco [ edit ] In October 2010 Better Place announced its commitment to launch a three-year demonstration program with electric-powered taxis in the San Francisco Bay Area, in partnership with the cities of San Francisco and San Jose, California, taxi operators and carsharing programs, regional and state agencies, consumer and EV organizations, and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. The program would deploy and operate four battery switching stations in the San Francisco to San Jose corridor to support a fleet of switchable-battery EV taxis.[90] As of December 2011[update], Better Place had made no further statements of progress on this program.[91]

Netherlands [ edit ] A battery-powered 10-taxi demonstration project was launched at Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, in 2012.[92]

Investors [ edit ] As of 2010[update], the company had raised US$700 million from various sources including, VantagePoint Venture Partners, Israel Corporation (33% ownership),[93] Israel Cleantech Ventures, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, Acorns to Oaks II, Esarbee Investments Canada, GC Investments LLC, Musea Ventures, Ofer Group, Vyikra Partners, Wolfensohn & Co. and Maniv Energy Capital.[94][95] In late 2007, Agassi began raising US$111 million in Series-A funding for the project,[96] one of the largest and fastest seed rounds in history.[citation needed ] Investors included VantagePoint Venture Partners, Israel Corporation, Israel Cleantech Ventures, Morgan Stanley, and private investors led by Michael Granoff of Maniv Energy Capital.[97] In 2009, the company raised an additional US$135 million [citation needed ] for Better Place Denmark, including an investment from DONG Energy, the leading utility in Denmark. Following the announcement in Israel, Better Place said it had launched its network in Denmark, Australia and in two United States locations '' Hawaii and Northern California. The company said it was in talks with more than 25 countries around the world.

In Australia, Better Place announced agreements with AGL Energy and financial advisor Macquarie Capital Group to raise A$1,000,000,000 and begin deploying an electric vehicle (EV) network powered by renewable energy. According to Better Place, its model for sustainable mobility would help Australia move toward oil independence. With the world's seventh highest per capita rate of car ownership, the country had nearly 15 million cars on the road after adding over a million new cars in 2007.[98]

In January 2010, as Israel Corporation completed its investment of US$100 million in the company,[99] a consortium of investors signed a Series-B funding round to invest a further US$350 million [100] in Better Place, citing their confidence that "Better Place has the technical and commercial solutions to allow for the mass adoption of electric cars in the near term." The Series-B round was led by HSBC, which invested US$125 million , and included all Series-A investors plus Morgan Stanley Investment Management and Lazard Asset Management. The deal represented one of the largest financial investments of its kind by HSBC, which gained a seat on the Better Place board of directors and approximately 10% of the company's shares.[94]

From its early days, doubts were raised as to the effectiveness of Better Place's centralised model of providing charging infrastructure, with some anticipating that the model would not be widely adopted.[101]

Partners [ edit ] In May 2008, the company presented a prototype of its electric car at a press conference in Tel Aviv. Shai Agassi estimated that the company's partner, the Renault-Nissan alliance, would likely invest $500 million to $1 billion in developing the swappable-battery electric cars.[102]

Further partnerships with other manufacturers were not announced, and Peter Rawlinson, VP and Chief Engineer for Vehicle Engineering at Tesla was quoted as saying "Different batteries suit different cars. It's far too simplistic to look at batteries as isolation,"[103]

Better Place also announced plans to develop electric recharge grids in the city of San Francisco[104] and the state of Hawaii.[105]

Australian finance group Macquarie said it would work with Better Place to fund the construction of plug-in stations, and Australian utility AGL Energy committed to powering those stations with renewable electricity.[106]

Response [ edit ] In March 2008, Deutsche Bank analysts issued a glowing report on the company stating that its approach could be a "paradigm shift" that caused "massive disruption" to the auto industry, and which had "the potential to eliminate the gasoline engine altogether."[107] Three months later, the same institution issued a second report, finding "electric vehicles destined for much more growth than is widely perceived". The same report stated that "[i]mprovements in battery technology will allow for increased power, increased electrical propulsion, and bigger gains in fuel economy."[108]

On June 26, 2008, Shai Agassi testified before the United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. The hearing, titled "$4 Gasoline and Fuel Economy: Auto Industry at a Crossroads," dealt with the future role of the auto industry and the federal government in fighting gas prices and the fuel economy standards proposed in response to the enactment of the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007.[109]

In 2009, CBS Money Watch cast doubts on Better Place's business model, noting that it would cost up to $500,000 to construct a battery switching station[67][110]

Markets and pricing [ edit ] Australia [ edit ] A Better Place Mitsubishi i-MiEV company car in Melbourne.A public Better Place charging station in Canberra.In Australia a roll-out of 500 charge stations was planned to begin in the major eastern coast cities before expanding nationally. It was estimated that these would give comparable coverage to the existing 13,000 petrol stations then in operation.[citation needed ] The total cost of this roll out was claimed to be between $1 and $1.25 billion AUD.[111]

The first charge spot was installed in Canberra in late 2011,[90] but in January 2013, after fewer than 20 public charge spots had been installed [112] the rollout was halted and the board of Better Place decided to concentrate on its two existing markets, Israel and Denmark.[26]

Better Place was also to be the preferred provider of home and dealership charging stations for the Holden Volt, with the partnership announced in July 2012.[113]

China [ edit ] In 2011, Better Place announced an agreement with China Southern Power Grid Company, the world's eighth-largest utility company. Before the end of the year, Better Place was going to open a battery switch station and joint education center in the southern city of Guangzhou. Shai Agassi said that China Southern Grid was embracing battery switch as the primary means of range extension.[114][115] China Southern Grid Chairman Zhao Jianguo said that the battery-switch model might become mainstream in China and that the joint visitor center and battery switch demonstration project with Better Place would help promote electric-car adoption in China by allowing potential customers to experience this innovative solution.

China Southern Power Grid pilot projects and other joint activities were supposed to explore the benefits that switchable-battery electric cars and the networked infrastructure that supports them might deliver to the electric grid in CSG's service area, which spanned five provinces, one million square kilometers, and 230 million people in Southern China.[116]

Electric utility State Grid Corporation of China planned to build over 2,351 electric-charging and battery-swap stations by 2016. These would have had 220,000 charging poles, but they did not indicate how many, if any, of them would have been battery-swap stations. The director of the State Grid smart grid research center commented "The construction of a large-scale charging station costs 20 to 30 million yuan ($3.05''4.57 million) and a small-scale one costs less than 10 million yuan, but it costs more than 100 million yuan to build a battery-swap station."[117]

In April 2010, Better Place signed a memorandum of understanding with Chery Automobile, China's biggest independent car maker, to develop prototypes for electric vehicles to be used in regional state-sponsored pilot projects.[118]

Denmark [ edit ] The Renault Fluence Z.E. was the electric car available on the Better Place network in Israel and Denmark.A Better Place battery swap station in Denmark.Better Place partnered with Denmark's leading energy company, DONG Energy, in a '‚¬103 million Euro (770 million Danish Kroner) investment to introduce electric cars and infrastructure to Denmark. The country currently generates 20% of its electric power from wind energy, but much of it is exported because there is currently no way for utilities to store the excess power. Using the Better Place model, DONG hoped to take advantage of the existing electric grid and electric vehicle batteries to harness and store the abundance of wind-generated power, and distribute it appropriately for transportation consumption.[119][120]

The Renault Fluence Z.E. sold in Denmark at a price of 205,000 DKK ('‚¬27,496 or US$38,378 ) including VAT plus the monthly fee for the switchable-battery. Consumers paid a one-time fee of 9,995 DKK ('‚¬1,341) for a private charging station and customers were offered a choice of five fixed-price switchable-battery packages based on kilometers driven per year. For more than 40,000 km (25,000 mi) a year the monthly fee was 2,995 DKK ( '‚¬399 ) per month.[121][122] The network commercial launch was in late 2011.[90]

The first battery switch station in Denmark, out of 20 which were planned to be deployed across the country as part of the network of charging infrastructure, was unveiled in June 2011 at 55°44'²1.5'"N 12°27'²36'"E >> / >> 55.733750°N 12.46000°E >> / 55.733750; 12.46000 >> ( FirstChargingStationInDK ) in Gladsaxe, near Copenhagen.[69] Sales of the Fluence Z.E. began in late 2011, and198 units were sold in Denmark through December 2012. Cumulative sales through April 2013 reached 234 units.[123]

As of December 2012 there were 17 fully operational battery switch stations in the country, enabling Danish customers to drive anywhere across the country in an electric car.[124] On 26 May 2013, and following the decision of the Board of Directors of Better Place's global company, Better Place Danmark A/S decided to begin bankruptcy proceedings. Because the batteries are owned by Better Place, Renault announced it would honor the existing agreement to around 500 customers that bought their electric cars through Better Place.[28][29]

Hawaii [ edit ] Better Place deployed about 80 charging stations and 154 charge points in Oahu, Maui, Kauai and the Big Island, and had almost 700 customers. The operation of the charging stations was acquired in March 2013 by OpConnect.[125][126] No interruption of service was expected due to Better Place bankruptcy.[125]

Israel [ edit ] Parade of Renault Fluence Z.E. electric cars enabled with battery swapping technology to commemorate the first deliveries to Better Place employees in Israel in January 2012.[127][128]Renault Fluence Z.E. sold through Better Place in Israel.Better Place charging stations outside the Leonardo Club Hotel in Tiberias.Israel was the first nation in the world to partner with Better Place to build an electric car infrastructure. Shai Agassi, former Better Place CEO, claimed that by 2016, plus or minus a year, more than 50% of cars sold in Israel would be electric.[129]

Battery switch stations were supposedly opening to customers almost weekly in 2012.[citation needed ] That map indicates with "orange circles" the handful of battery switch stations available in June 2012, and shows with "grey circles" the full buildout of battery switch stations expected by year's end. The Baran Group signed an agreement with Better Place stating its intention to build 51 battery switch stations over the course of 2011 to cover all of Israel.[130] However progress was not nearly as rapid as was planned.

According to the Financial Times around 400 corporations in Israel signed letters of intent to begin switching their fleets to Better Place electric car network as soon as the service becomes available. This represented a potential of 80,000 electric cars.[131] Out of the 100,000 Renault Fluence Z.E. that Better Place agreed to buy from Renault, the company claimed to have already signed around 70,000 orders, most of them from commercial fleet customers.[132]

Better Place launched its first battery-swapping station in Israel, in Kiryat Ekron, near Rehovot in March 2011. The station was supposed to be the first of approximately 40 stations to begin operating in the near term. The battery exchange process took five minutes.[133] The company also erected over 1,000 functional charging spots for the cars and thousands more were supposed to be put in place by the end of 2011, according to the CEO of Better Place Israel.[133]

Orders for the Renault Fluence ZE in Israel began in July 2011.[134] According to Better Place, their customers regular maintenance costs would be about 40% less than for regular family cars, insurance also will be less at around NIS 3,700 a year, and its comprehensive solution of electric car and services would cut annual vehicle maintenance costs by 20%.[134]

The first deliveries of the Renault Fluence Z.E. took place on 22 January 2012 and around 100 electric cars were allocated to Better Place's employees.[127][128] Better Place planned a staged delivery process as the infrastructure across the country was completed. Retail customer deliveries began in the second quarter of 2012.[2] As of mid September 2012, there were 21 operational battery-swap stations open to the public in Israel.[3] Cumulative sales through July 2012 reached 300 cars,[135] and as of the end of October, just 490 cars had been sold, making the company's target of 4,000 customers by June 2013 a difficult goal to achieve.[136] In October 2012, Better Place signed a deal with Elco to supply 125 cars worth NIS 15m. The 125 Renault Fluence ZEs were to be delivered through 2012 and 2013.[137] As of December 2012[update], a total of 518 cars were sold in the country. In the first four months of 2013, a total 422 cars were sold, bringing the total to 940.[138][139] Alan Gelman, chief financial officer said in January 2013 that the company had turned a corner in recent weeks with large sales to fleets and that the days of not selling cars were over[140] Nevertheless, on 26 May 2013 the company filed for bankruptcy in Israel.[6]

Charging spot in IsraelCustomer qualifications [ edit ] Better Place wanted electric car customers who could make a successful transition from range anxiety to ordinary range awareness within the company's growing infrastructure. During the sales process, Better Place aimed to educate and assess each customer's electric car suitability. The company was going to exclude drivers frequently traveling irregular routes that span the country. Eventually, Israel was supposed to have enough battery switch stations and recharging spots at parking garages, shopping centers, hotels, commercial areas, and elsewhere, to cater for most drivers.

At minimum, customers needed dedicated off-road parking at home and, for higher mileage drivers, Better Place was going to install charging spots at people's workplace. The preferred high-mileage customer might commute 130-kilometre (81 mi) each way between home and office. Lower distance customers might only need their home charging spot, with battery switching being infrequent.

Israel electric grid [ edit ] Electric cars are not allowed by law to directly plug into ordinary Israeli electrical outlets. Better Place charging stations were to have smart grid interactivity that automatically time-shifted the charging process away from peak electrical demand hours. Most critics[who? ] claimed it was an attempt to monopolize the charging of car batteries, and had in fact the reverse effect, which discouraged many potential customers in Israel from buying Better Place's cars.[citation needed ]

Awards [ edit ] Edmunds.com selected battery-charging infrastructure developers Coulomb Technologies and Better Place as recipients of its first annual Green Car Breakthrough Award.[141] In 2010, Shai Agassi was included at number 28 in a list of the 100 Top Global Thinkers published by Foreign Policy magazine, for his efforts to make electric cars a mass-market success.[142]

Similar projects [ edit ] A number of companies have announced plans to install charging station networks. In France, ‰lectricit(C) de France (EDF) and Toyota announced plans to provide recharging points for PHEVs on roads, streets and parking lots.[143] EDF also announced a partnership with Elektromotive, Ltd.[144] to install 250 new charging points over six months from October 2007 in London and elsewhere in the UK.[145] Coulomb Technologies was aiming to deploy its ChargePoint charging station network throughout the USA.

In March 2009, Tesla Motors announced a partnership to deploy battery swap stations among their existing Supercharger network to service their Model S platform cars.[146][147] Tesla abandoned battery swapping citing low demand.

The Nation-E's Angel Car system is a portable unit, containing a lithium-ion battery, that stores energy and is used as an emergency charger for electric cars that run out of power. It designed to be a solution to "range anxiety" without the deployment of extensive new infrastructure, and provides fast-charging services for all known Evs equipped with a fast-charging socket, including hybrid cars.[148]

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"First series of Better Place cars hit roads". The Jerusalem Post . Retrieved 2012-01-22 . ^ "Promoter of electric cars sees global change". ynetnews.com . Retrieved 2008-11-19 . ^ "Baran to build 51 battery switch stations for electric cars". The Jerusalem Post . Retrieved 2011-01-02 . ^ Chris Nuttall. "Better Place's $200m round to expand electric car networks" . Retrieved 2012-01-27 . ^ Noelle Knox. "Better Place CEO: Biggest obstacle to electric cars is auto industry 'skepticism' ". Archived from the original on 2011-02-26 . Retrieved 2010-12-10 . ^ a b Udasin, Sharon (24 March 2011). "Better Place launches 1st Israeli battery-switching station". The Jerusalem Post . Retrieved 2011-03-25 . ^ a b Dubi Ben-Gedalyahu (15 May 2011). "Better Place unveils Israeli pricing policy". Archived from the original on 2012-10-05 . Retrieved 2011-05-15 . ^ Tara Todras-Whitehill (2012-08-21). "Don't Charge That Electric Car Battery; Just Change It". National Public Radio. ^ John Voelcker (2012-11-19). "Better Place Electric-Car Service: Few Users, More Turmoil". GreenCarReports. Archived from the original on 2012-11-21 . Retrieved 2012-11-21 . ^ "Better Place signs NIS 15m electric car deal with Elco '' Globes English". 16 October 2012. Archived from the original on 8 January 2013 . Retrieved 10 December 2016 . ^ "How's Better Place Doing In Israel These Days?". Green Car Reports. 2013-05-13 . Retrieved 2013-05-15 . ^ Globes (2013-04-04). "Better Place sales improve in first quarter". Globes. Archived from the original on 2013-05-03 . Retrieved 2013-04-21 . A total of 518 units were sold in 2012 and 297 cars during the first quarter of 2013 ^ "Better Place CEO leaves in electric car firm's latest shake-up". Reuters. Reuters. 2013-01-16. Archived from the original on 2013-01-21 . Retrieved 2013-01-16 . ^ "What's Hot". Blogs.edmunds.com. 2010-02-08. Archived from the original on 2010-04-29 . Retrieved 2013-09-04 . ^ "Foreign Policy's Second Annual List of the 100 Top Global Thinkers". Foreign Policy. Archived from the original on 2013-12-09 . Retrieved 2013-09-04 . ^ "EDF et Toyota annoncent un partenariat technologique en Europe relatif aux v(C)hicules hybrides rechargeables". ‰lectricit(C) de France. 2007-09-05 . Retrieved 2007-10-10 . ^ "Elektromotive: The ultimate zero-emission transport system". Elektromotive, Ltd. Archived from the original on 2007-11-02 . Retrieved 2007-10-26 . ^ Reynolds, L. (2007-10-11). "UK to install 250 new public charging stations by next spring". The Battery Vehicle Society . Retrieved 2006-10-26 . ^ Ramsey, Jonathon (2009-03-26). "Tesla Model S: $50,000 EV sedan seats seven, 300-mile range, 0-60 in 5.5s". autobloggreen . Retrieved 2009-04-12 . ^ "Clearing the Air on our DOE Loan" (Press release). Diarmuid OConnell, Vice President of Business Development, Tesla Motors. 2009-09-28 . Retrieved 2009-10-12 . ^ "Angel Car mobile charger rescues stranded electric cars". Cnet. Archived from the original on 2010-09-17 . Retrieved 2013-05-11 . External links [ edit ] Better Place official website.Renault Fluence Z.E. official website

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Wed, 08 May 2024 16:20

Watch US Marine's GoPro footage that challenges Pentagon's account of attack at Kabul airport

CNN '--

Eight Republican members of Congress have written to US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin urging him to explain discrepancies between CNN reporting last month about the ISIS-K attack that led to the deaths of 13 US servicemen and 170 Afghans outside Kabul airport in August 2021, and the conclusions of two Pentagon investigations into the incident.

The CNN report revealed that there were many more episodes of gunfire than the Pentagon has ever admitted, in the wake of the suicide attack in the final days of the American evacuation of Kabul. The reporting included a video obtained by CNN captured by a Marine's GoPro camera that had not been seen publicly in full before.

The letter was sent on Tuesday by congressmen on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and presented a series of pointed questions for the Pentagon about its investigations into what was the deadliest incident in Afghanistan for decades '' a brutal, bloody end point to America's longest war. The eight congressmen, five of whom are veterans with experience in Afghanistan, urged Austin ''in the strongest possible terms to account for the discrepancy between the results of the (US Central Command) CENTCOM investigation and this new reporting,'' by CNN.

Much of the controversy about the Pentagon's two investigations into the attack has focused on gunfire in the aftermath of the blast. Some Marines have told military investigators they felt they were being shot at or opened fire themselves, and 19 Afghan survivors told CNN in 2022 they were shot themselves or witnessed Afghans being shot. But the two Pentagon investigations '' released in February 2022 and last month '' concluded the only shooting in the aftermath came from US and UK troops in three bursts that were ''nearly simultaneous,'' and hit no one.

In their letter, the members of Congress said it is ''unclear what generated this CENTCOM data point of near-simultaneous gunfire'' in three bursts, which is ''directly contradicted by the video footage obtained by CNN, which shows 11 episodes of gunfire over nearly four minutes.'' They added that, after CNN published the GoPro footage, the Pentagon assured the House Foreign Affairs Committee that it had not seen the video prior to publication, but that the video did not contradict the findings of their investigations.

''While we appreciate CENTCOM's investigation into the Abbey Gate attack, nearly three years later we still have the same questions that the very US servicemembers captured in the CNN video had, including who was firing the rounds and whether it was the Taliban or another hostile force. We therefore ask you to clarify the volume, incidence, and sources of gunfire at the scene,'' the members of Congress wrote.

The Congressmen '' Mike Waltz, Darrell Issa, Tim Burchett, Brian Mast, Rich McCormick, Keith Self, Cory Mills and Chris Smith '' requested further action by investigators. CNN's most recent report included an interview with the former head of a major Kabul hospital, Dr. Sayed Ahmadi, who said he and his staff had pulled bullets out of patients from the incident and that over 70 of the dead at their hospital had gunshot wounds. The letter asks why the Pentagon's investigators did not speak to Dr. Ahmadi, or any other Afghans. The Pentagon has said all reports of gunshot wounds are mistaken, and that witnesses who recall extensive shooting '' either at Marines or Afghan civilians '' are suffering from the effects of blast concussion, or Traumatic Brain Injury.

''Lastly, why do journalists have this video footage and the Department does not? Is there any more footage in the Department's possession that has not yet been made public? If so, please release such footage immediately and confirm that no more video recordings exist of which the Department is aware,'' they added. ''The truth must come out.''

The Office of the Secretary of Defense told CNN in a statement that, as with all congressional correspondence, it would respond directly to the members who wrote the letter. ''We honor the service and sacrifice of our thirteen service members who were killed at Abbey Gate and remain fully committed to ensuring our Gold Star families have the support and information they need. This will always be a sacred obligation for the Department of Defense,'' James Adams, a department spokesman, said.

Growing Congressional scrutiny of the attack comes as the parents of seven Marines who died in the incident '' Jared Schmitz, Humberto Sanchez, Taylor Hoover, Nicole Gee, Kareem Nikoui, Hunter Lopez and Rylee McCollum '' accused the Pentagon of misleading them.

''As parents, we have always had the suspicion that we were not told the entire truth of how our children were murdered at the Abbey Gate on 8/26/21. The recent discovery of new video released by CNN directly contradicts and exposes outright lies from our recent briefing last month from CENTCOM officials,'' the Gold Star families said in a statement they sent to CNN.

''We are consumed with anger at the betrayal from the Biden Administration. This is only the beginning for us to expose the cover up that has and is still taking place. The Biden Administration wants us to go away silently, but we will not!'' they added.

The new CENTCOM commander, Gen. Erik Kurilla, ordered in September last year a supplemental review of the military's 2022 investigation into the incident, and the families of dead servicemen were briefed last month on its results. Its focus was mainly whether the ISIS-K suicide bomber could have been stopped and determined the attack ''could not have been preventable at the tactical level.'' The families have long maintained more could have been done to stop the ISIS-K suicide bomber.

The letter and statement emerged as CENTCOM released over a thousand pages of witness accounts and evidence from the supplemental review. The 1,214 pages offer a variety of accounts of the aftermath of the blast, some of which appear to support the supplemental review's conclusions. Yet others contain previously unseen witness testimony of gunfire in the aftermath which appears to jar with the two investigations' conclusions.

Two apparent Marine accounts of the blast aftermath provide similar descriptions of a US personnel member being calmed down as he tried to load a .50-caliber heavy machine gun in a sniper tower that overlooked the blast site, and then apparently not firing the weapon. Names of the US personnel were redacted.

One of the service members recalled: ''The Marines on the ground were shooting towards the blast location. But I didn't see anyone shoot at us.'' He added the gunfire continued for ''probably a few minutes,'' and then he recalled hearing: ''some Gy Sgt [Gunnery Sergeant] yelled up to the tower saying we were taking small arms fire and find them and f**king kill them. I'm not sure of his name.''

Another eyewitness said he was inside the sniper tower above the blast site when two rounds hit the window in front of him and a third round narrowly missed him.

The evidence also suggests the Pentagon may have more video footage than it has acknowledged in public. A service member tells the review there were nine drones operational over the airport in the immediate aftermath of the blast, and that he watched feed from these drones for three hours.

The Pentagon has released five edited minutes of footage from the aftermath. The account also says ''ISR'' '' likely a surveillance camera '' was available at the scene shortly after the blast. Not all of this footage has been released. In another account, a Marine appears to hand over a GoPro to the supplemental review team.

Army Lt. Col. Rob Lodewick, public affairs adviser to the supplemental review team, said the two investigations had maintained their ''utmost focus'' on a ''transparent, exhaustive and conclusive accounting'' to the families of the dead US personnel, US military and public. ''Any accusations of a deliberate attempt [by military officials] to mislead or deceive remain categorically false.''

Yet he added investigators ''recognize the potential for new information to emerge over time'' and that CENTCOM ''welcome any additional information and imagery available to help ensure a comprehensive understanding of the attack on Abbey Gate from as many perspectives as possible.''

Lodewick noted the review team compiled 4,000 pages of evidence and ''considered the totality of the information, provided by over 190 interviews, when concluding there was no complex attack.'' He added all ''imagery, including voluntarily provided personal GoPro footage, was thoroughly examined'' and handled in ''accordance with DoD and Service policies.''

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Wed, 08 May 2024 15:20

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AstraZeneca is withdrawing its Covid-19 vaccine worldwide, months after the pharma giant admitted the drug could cause very rare, but life-threatening, injuries.

The British-Swedish drugmaker has already withdrawn its EU marketing authorisation for the vaccine, branded Vaxzevria since 2021. The authorisation is the approval to market a drug in EU's member states. The withdrawal was due to a ''surplus of available updated vaccines'' against new variants of the novel coronavirus, the company said.

The application to withdraw the vaccine from the EU was made on 5 March and came into effect on 7 May.

''As multiple variant Covid-19 vaccines have since been developed there's a surplus of available updated vaccines," AstraZeneca said, adding that this led to a fall in demand for Vaxzevria, which is no longer manufactured or supplied.

AstraZeneca recently admitted that its vaccine, initially called Covishield, could cause very rare side effects like blood clots and low blood platelet counts, The Telegraph reported.

The admission came after the company was slapped with a class action lawsuit in the UK, which claimed that the vaccine had caused deaths and severe injuries and sought damages up to £100m for about 50 victims.

''It is admitted that the AZ vaccine can, in very rare cases, cause TTS. The causal mechanism is not known,'' AstraZeneca said in court documents in February, the newspaper reported.

TTS is thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, which is characterised by blood clots and low blood platelet counts in humans.

AstraZeneca's vaccine was developed in collaboration with Oxford University and produced by the Serum Institute of India. It was widely administered in over 150 countries, including Britain and India.

Some studies conducted during the pandemic found the vaccine was 60 to 80 per cent effective in protecting against the novel coronavirus.

But subsequent research found that it caused some people to develop potentially fatal blood clots.

AstraZeneca's admission that the vaccine could potentially prove lethal ran counter to its insistence in 2023 that it would ''not accept that TTS is caused by the vaccine at a generic level''.

In April 2021, the World Health Organisation also confirmed that the vaccine could have fatal side effects. ''A very rare adverse event called thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, involving unusual and severe blood clotting events associated with low platelet counts, has been reported after vaccination with this vaccine.''

In a statement, AstraZeneca said: ''We are incredibly proud of the role Vaxzevria played in ending the global pandemic. According to independent estimates, over 6.5 million lives were saved in the first year of use alone, and over three billion doses were supplied globally.

''Our efforts have been recognised by governments around the world and are widely regarded as being a critical component of ending the global pandemic.''

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Wed, 08 May 2024 14:21

Macquarie Bank to ditch cash at all branches Cheques and ATM access also to be slashed READ MORE: The entire Australian island that has gone cashless By Freddy Pawle and Peter Vincent For Daily Mail Australia

Published: 20:31 EDT, 1 May 2024 | Updated: 21:56 EDT, 1 May 2024

One of Australia's largest banks is ditching cash at all of its branches and shifting entirely to 'digital-only' services.

Macquarie Bank customers will no longer be able to access over-the-counter services or order new chequebooks from May 20.

The bank's automated telephone banking service and chequebooks for new cash management accounts have already been slashed.

All cash and cheque transactions are gone, and Macquarie customers' access to NAB ATMs will end by November 1.

The announcement is the latest hit for those who prefer to pay with cash, to avoid records being kept of all their transactions.

In April, thousands took part in a 'Cash Day Out' protest and rushed to withdraw money from ATMS to protest against Australia's slow but inexorable transition to a digital-only country.

Macquarie Bank will ditch all cash and cheque transactions throughout 2024 as it transitions into becoming 'completely digital' (stock image)

Macquarie cited a shift in customers' banking habits as the reason behind their change towards digital-only banking.

The bank said it is 'committed to transitioning to completely digital payments' as it's a 'safe, quick, and more convenient' way to transact.

Banks also claim that transporting and distributing cash for a diminishing amount of users was costly, despite the colossal profits made by major banks.

Finance expert Sarah Wells saying the move 'is the next step [towards] a cashless society.'

'My biggest concern is when one starts the rest will follow,' she told Daily Mail Australia at the time.

ANZ, Commonwealth Bank and NAB have already begun phasing out cheques while Bankwest prepares to shut down 45 branches in Western Australia by October.

Ms Wells said this is a move Macquarie 'may wish to reconsider'.

'For some businesses this may cause them to need to change banks,' she said.

Businesses bear the cost of having electronic payment machines, and must pass on a fraction of every transaction to the bank rather than keeping it all.

Banks refusing to use cash effectively force their business customers into the same, as there is nowhere to deposit cash payments.

That particularly hurts hospitality businesses who report a decline in tips when people pay by card.

Macquarie said the transition to totally-digital banking was due to a change in the banking habits of it's about 1.7million clients (stock image)

Those who want cash retained in the economy were urged to withdraw cash at ATMs across the country for 'Cash Out Day' last month to protest the nation's haste towards wholly cashless transactions, and show there is still demand for notes and coins.

The campaign was promoted on the Facebook page of Cash Welcome, a non-profit group campaigning against a cashless economy.

It saw customers lining up outside the big four banks - Commonwealth Bank, NAB, Westpac, and ANZ - to withdraw cash.

Campaign manager for Cash Welcome, Jason Bryce, told Daily Mail Australia the event was a 'huge success' and said banks need to listen to Aussies who don't want a cashless society.

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Tue, 07 May 2024 18:45

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Tue, 07 May 2024 13:29

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Individuals who took COVID-19 vaccines were found to have later suffered from psychosis, with Pfizer and AstraZeneca shots linked to most of the cases.

A 1-year-old child receives a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination in Seattle, Wash., on June 21, 2022. (David Ryder/Getty Images)The peer-reviewed systemic review, published in the Frontiers in Psychiatry journal on April 12, examined cases of new-onset psychosis among people who took the vaccines. Psychosis refers to symptoms that occur when an individual has difficulty differentiating between reality and fantasy, with hallucinations and delusions being two key types. The review looked at 21 articles describing 24 cases of psychosis symptoms following vaccination. The researchers concluded that ''data suggest a potential link between young age, mRNA, and viral vector vaccines with new-onset psychosis within 7 days post-vaccination.''

''Collecting data on vaccine-related psychiatric effects is crucial for prevention, and an algorithm for monitoring and treating mental health reactions post-vaccination is necessary for comprehensive management.''

Out of the 24 cases, 13 were female. The median age of participants was 36 years. Twenty-two patients (91.2 percent) had no specific history of somatic illness and comorbidities.

In 33.3 percent of the cases, administration of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine ''potentially induced adverse psychiatric events,'' the study said. The viral vector AstraZeneca vaccine was linked to psychotic symptoms in 25 percent of cases.

In 45.8 percent of incidences, psychotic symptoms were reported after the first shot and in fifty percent after the second dose.

''Almost all reviewed cases (95.8 percent) presented with psychotic symptoms, such as hallucinations (visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile) and delusions (mostly persecutory and delusions of reference).''

The most common form of hallucination was auditory, experienced in 54.2 percent of the cases, while visual hallucinations were experienced by 12.5 percent of patients.

''Motor disturbances, such as increased or decreased motor activity and bizarre behavior, were mentioned in 83.3 percent of cases. In 3 (12.5 percent) cases, a suicidal attempt was described.''

The psychotic symptoms mostly lasted for a period of one and two months.

The patients were treated using various methods including antipsychotics and steroids, but only 12 out of the 24 made a full recovery. The remaining suffered from ''residual symptoms such as decreased emotional expressions, low affect, or residual psychotic symptoms.''

In one case, the patient reported a positive COVID-19 test result. ''Previous studies have shown that individuals with documented comorbidities and a history of COVID-19 infection exhibit a statistically significant increase in adverse events following vaccination,'' the study noted.

Researchers speculated that inflammatory conditions following vaccination may be a reason behind the psychosis. The study found elevated C-reactive protein levels and mild to moderate leukocytosis'--high white blood cell count'--as the most common blood abnormalities. Both conditions have links with inflammation.

Another hypothesis suggested in the study was that post-vaccination psychosis could suggest a manifestation of autoimmune anti-NMDA encephalitis, a condition in which the immune system targets the brain neurons by mistake and causes inflammation.

Researchers noted that instances of anti-NMDA encephalitis have been repeatedly reported after vaccinations against infections like influenza, pertussis, yellow fever, and typhus.

''Considering the potential link between post-vaccination psychosis and autoimmune anti-NMDA encephalitis, it is advisable to consider immunological screening in individuals presenting psychiatric symptoms post-COVID-19 vaccination.''

A third possible reason suggested in the study is that the various speculations and uncertainties regarding the safety of COVID-19 vaccines could lead to people experiencing ''significant stress,'' which could end up triggering the development of psychiatric reactions.

The authors received financial support for the review, with the article-processing charge funded by Riga Stradins University, Latvia. Researchers declared no conflicts of interest in the study.

Post-Vax Psychosis CasesEpisodes of psychosis after taking COVID-19 shots have been detailed in several case studies. In one instance, a 15-year-old boy from Taiwan was sent to hospital two days after taking the second Pfizer shot. He was screaming and exhibiting agitation and uncontrollable limb stretching.

Other bizarre behaviors included sitting up and lying down frequently. The child was prescribed antipsychotics yet his behaviors continued to persist after being discharged for more than a month.

The doctors then put the boy under a steroid regimen, which is anti-inflammatory and helps calm down an overactive immune system. His symptoms then improved.

In another case from Brazil, a woman in her 30s, who was previously healthy, developed refractory psychosis within 24 hours of taking an mRNA COVID-19 shot. The woman had disorganized thoughts, was aggressive, and believed she was being persecuted at the hospital.

Even though she was treated with mood stabilizers and antipsychotics, her behavior showed improvements only after four months of hospitalization. However, her psychosis continued.

A May 2022 review described the case of an 18-year-old woman who developed psychotic symptoms on the same day she took the first dose of AstraZeneca vaccine.

''Symptoms started few hours after the vaccination with irrelevant talk. Over the next three days, it progressed to irritability, delusions of persecution and reference, and visual hallucinations.''

Another case study detailed the situation of a 45-year-old woman with no family history or personal history of mental disorders who ended up developing psychosis a month after she received a COVID vaccine. She quit her 18-year-old job abruptly and displayed erratic behaviors.

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Tue, 07 May 2024 03:47

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Tenet Media is a network of heterodox commentators that focus onWestern political and cultural issues. Ourgoal is to support creators who question institutions that believe themselves to be above questioning. In our view, all issues du jour merit rigorous and honest discussion if one wants to come closest to the truth. For those interested in authentic coverage of the topics that matter most, Tenet Media is your home for content : fearless voices live here.

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Southern has made appearances on Fox News in America, Sky News in Australia, and written for a wide variety of publications, including The Spectator, Spiked, and the IB Times.

In a world where political and societal discourse has become bogged down in a binary, team-choosing exercise, Southern's work seeks to uncover the hidden humanity at the heart of those conversations. She always finds the most interesting discussions onthe periphery of people's lived experiences. Southern is dedicated to the peaceful advocacy of exposing corruption and speaking up for the silent majority who deserve a voice."

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His latest series, "Culture War," hosts engaging debates and discussions on societal and cultural topics with guests from across the political spectrum.

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Tue, 07 May 2024 03:30

Proton Mail has come under scrutiny for its role in a legal request involving the Spanish authorities and a member of the Catalan independence organization, Democratic Tsunami.

Proton Mail is a secure email service based in Switzerland, renowned for its commitment to privacy through end-to-end encryption and a strict no-logs policy. In 2021, Proton Mail faced controversy when it complied with a legal request that led to the arrest of a French climate activist. Under Swiss law, Proton Mail was compelled to collect and provide information on the individual's IP address to Swiss authorities, who then shared it with French police.

The recent case involving the Spanish police this time, highlights privacy concerns and the limits of encrypted communication services under national security pretexts, and brings a long-debated subject to the forefront once again.

The core of the controversy stems from Proton Mail providing the Spanish police with the recovery email address associated with the Proton Mail account of an individual using the pseudonym 'Xuxo Rondinaire.' This individual is suspected of being a member of the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalonia's police force) and of using their internal knowledge to assist the Democratic Tsunami movement.

Upon receiving the recovery email from Proton Mail, Spanish authorities further requested Apple to provide additional details linked to that email, leading to the identification of the individual.

This case is particularly noteworthy because it involves a series of requests across different jurisdictions and companies, highlighting the complex interplay between technology firms, user privacy, and law enforcement. The requests were made under the guise of anti-terrorism laws, despite the primary activities of the Democratic Tsunami involving protests and roadblocks, which raises questions about the proportionality and justification of such measures.

Like before, Proton Mail's compliance with these requests is bound by Swiss law, which mandates cooperation with international legal demands that are formalized through proper channels (Swiss court system).

Last year, when we noted that Proton Mail complied with nearly 6,000 data requests in 2022, Proton provided us with an explanation that inbox contents remain secure.

Please note that in all cases email content, attachments, files etc are always encrypted and cannot be read.

Proton statement to RestorePrivacy last yearLooking at Proton's transparency report, we find that Proton Mail complied with 5,971 data requests last year alone, up slightly from the year before.

Proton Mail complied with 5,971 data requests in 2023.With so many data requests going on in the background, it is all the more important to safeguard the data you share with various services.

The importance of good OPSECThis situation serves as a critical reminder of the importance of maintaining stringent OPSEC (operational security). One should always be aware of the potential vulnerabilities that come with linking recovery information or secondary services (like Apple accounts) that may not have the same privacy safeguards as a primary encrypted email service.

For users concerned about privacy, particularly those involved in sensitive or political activities, OPSEC should be a top concern when using privacy tools. It's advisable to:

Avoid linking recovery emails or phone numbers that can directly tie back to personal identities or primary business activities.Consider using secondary, disposable emails or virtual phone numbers that offer an additional layer of anonymity.Use a good VPN service to hide your IP address whenever possible. (Failure to do this is what compromised a Proton Mail user in France who was arrested after after police obtained IP logs.)Consider purchasing services using an anonymous payment method.Stay informed about the legal obligations and policies of communication service providers, especially regarding their compliance with international law enforcement requests.While Proton Mail and similar services offer substantial protections and end-to-end encryption on their email platform, they are not immune to legal and governmental pressures. Users must navigate these waters carefully, balancing the need for security with the potential legal obligations of their service providers.

RestorePrivacy has reached out to Proton Mail for a comment on the case and their exact involvement, but a statement wasn't immediately available. We will update this article as soon as we hear back.

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Tue, 07 May 2024 00:07

After two years of debate in Congress and the broader world over forfeiting the frozen assets of the Russian Central Bank for the benefit of Ukraine, President Biden on April 24 signed into law the REPO Act, which bestows this authority on him. As Ingrid Brunk has written, the administration now has the option to take the money frozen in the United States and give it to Ukraine to pay for its recovery from Russia's manifestly illegal war.

But a number of legal and policy questions remain. There is a relatively small amount directly at stake'--less than two percent of the total amount frozen by our allies. How the United States acts, however, will influence those allies, set legal precedents, and shape future U.S. policy choices. The administration could structure the transaction in a way that comfortably fits within U.S. law, puts little or no pressure on the international legal regime, protects the role of the dollar as an international currency, and makes ending this terrible war more likely. Alternatively, it could structure the transaction in a way that gives rise to substantial Russian claims for compensation; stretches, if not undermines, the international legal order; harms the dollar; and makes peace harder to reach. We offer here a roadmap that would maximize the chance of the former outcome and minimize the risks of the latter.

Waiting for an International Mechanism

Section 105 of the REPO Act directs the president to take such actions as he deems appropriate to work with our allies to dispose of the frozen Russian funds, which may include setting up an ''international mechanism'' (the statute's phrase) to determine Ukraine's right to compensation from Russia and to satisfy those rights with funds drawn from the assets frozen by the United States and its allies. The statute does not compel the president to rely on this mechanism, the use of which necessarily would delay the delivery of money to Ukraine. Nevertheless, waiting for states to establish an international mechanism and for it to hand down its awards remains the best choice.

First, the delay need not be crippling. The stakeholders'--here the governments of the G7 (including the U.S. government), the EU, and Ukraine'--can move swiftly when needed. We do not think the administration would need to submit the agreement to another round of congressional approval. Nor need the mechanism take much time to establish what Russia owes. The Council of Europe already has begun registering claims. Moreover, the loan mechanism we describe below could make disbursements in advance of any claim determinations. This would put funds in Ukraine's hands quickly, although subject to restrictions to ensure the money is spent wisely and consistent with the purpose of reconstruction.

Second, if the international mechanism uses procedures of the sort typically found in international claims tribunals, working through an international mechanism puts to rest whatever due process or takings claims Russia otherwise might make. Section 104(k) of the REPO Act preserves Russia's right to seek compensation for any constitutional injury suffered from forfeiture of its money. A properly constituted international mechanism, however, would satisfy whatever procedural rights the Due Process Clause bestows on Russia and provide lawful grounds for refusing compensation for the confiscation of the property consistent with the Takings Clause.

Third, U.S. cooperation with a mechanism would blunt most international legal claims that Russia might have against the United States. To be sure, it is inconceivable that Russia will consent in advance to the use of this mechanism. Russia might argue that transfer of the assets to a mechanism that it does not accept violates whatever protection international law bestows on Russia and its assets. But from the perspective of the Biden administration considering how to exercise its new authorities, putting property under the control of an internationally legitimate mechanism, even one that lacks mandatory power over Russia, satisfies rule-of-law principles better than confiscating the money to advance U.S. interests'--even if those interests include helping Ukraine rebuild from the war that Russia brought on.

It also is true that even a legally solid strategy still might not satisfy Germany or Japan, whose support will be important for the mechanism's success. Their behavior in the first half of the twentieth century has left them with lingering reparations issues that make them nervous about creating new precedents. Yet, given their strong commitment to showing the world how completely they remade themselves in the second half of the twentieth century, we doubt that this obstacle is insurmountable.

Fourth, working with an international mechanism is fundamental to make a ''set off'' structure work. We turn to set off as a more legally secure means to tie the forfeited funds to Ukraine's legal claims below.

Tying Ukraine's Money to International Claims

This March, Hugo Dixon, Lee Buchheit, and Daleep Singh (DBS) produced a blueprint for using the hoary financial principle of set off to connect the frozen Russian assets to Ukraine's international reparation claims. The concept rapidly garnered interest among G7 policymakers. Buchheit's status as the authority on sovereign debt practice and the fact that Singh then was in the process of rejoining the National Security Council as deputy national security adviser for international economics gave extra credence to the idea.

At its heart, set off is a simple financial step. A debtor reduces or cancels its debt by offsetting an amount owed to it by that debt's creditor. Trillions of dollars of banking transactions clear daily through set off. Institutions such as the Federal Reserve and Belgium's Euroclear facility net out the day's interbank transactions to determine who owes whom what. There is nothing sinister or extraordinary about the procedure.

As DBS see it, the United States and its allies can establish a syndicated loan facility for Ukraine, with Ukraine's claims against Russia serving as collateral. They can make the loan nonrecourse, which means the lenders can recover only against the collateral in the event of nonpayment. This feature would limit Ukraine's obligation, in the event it does not repay the loan (as it surely will not), to turning over the collateral. The creditors, all states that currently hold frozen Russian state assets, at that point can set off the rights obtained from Ukraine against the legal duty to return the Russian assets they hold when the circumstances justifying the freeze end. Assume, for example, that the United States both held a claim for $4 billion against Russia as a result of obtaining its share of the loan collateral and held $4 billion of Russian assets through its freeze. As a result of set off, the U.S. claim would be satisfied while Russia would have lost all its retained rights in the assets. All this takes place through an accounting notation, with no judicial involvement needed. The lenders in turn would use the money freed up by the set off to satisfy the awards to Ukraine made by the international mechanism, net any disbursements from the facility already paid to Ukraine. Russia's interests in the frozen assets disappear.

This mechanism works, however, only if the rights used to set off the debt (here, the duty ultimately to return frozen funds) reflect rule-of-law principles. A single state's guess as to the amount Russia might owe in reparations for violating international law is problematic, while the judgment of a properly constituted international mechanism such as a claims tribunal is less so. Hence the creation of and reliance on the international mechanism envisioned in the REPO Act is critical.

As we argued before REPO's enactment, some residual legal problems remain. Now that the statute has arrived, it's worth discussing them in greater detail. The headline is that the set-off approach is not legally bulletproof, but it seems to be the best option available given geopolitical exigencies.

Would the loan be legal under U.S. law?

The Biden administration cannot lend money at will, but instead must rely on authority bestowed by Congress. Here the REPO Act is helpful, at least with regard to the (relatively small) sums under its control. Its Section 104(b)(1) expressly enables the president to ''transfer'' or ''vest'' the frozen assets to a Ukrainian Support Fund. That Fund, under Section 104(f), may in turn make contributions to the contemplated international mechanism to provide Ukraine with reparations. A loan transfers possession of the funds, and termination of the loan with retention of the collateral then vests their ownership in the former debtor. A fair reading of this language authorizes a loan up to the amount of the frozen assets.

Must the Treasury deliver the funds set off to the federal budget?

Until adoption of the REPO Act, an old but important law presented an additional obstacle to transferring additional funds to Ukraine. The Extraordinary Receipts Act, a pre-Civil War law now embedded in Title 31 of the U.S. Code, forbids federal agencies from eating what they kill. Absent express statutory authorization, an agency must turn over any ''money'' it receives ''from any source'' to the general resources of the Treasury. An outright forfeiture of frozen assets would have counted as a receipt of cash, triggering the duty to return the funds to the budget. On its face, this requirement applies only to a monetary receipt, and with a set off no money changes hands. Further, we have found no indication from the Office of Management and Budget, the responsible agency within the government, indicating that it would apply this statute to a set-off transaction. Now the issue has faded into the background, as the REPO Act specifically provides for an alternative disposition of the assets that would vest in the United States, creating an express exception to the Extraordinary Receipts Act's default rule.

What about sovereign immunity?

Sovereign immunity comes in two flavors, domestic and international. The United States, like most states that invite deposits from foreign central banks in their own banks, provides strong protection for those deposits under U.S. law. It bars enforcement of most judicial orders on behalf of creditors, including the beneficiaries of court judgments and arbitral awards, seeking satisfaction from these deposits. But most regard this law as addressing only acts by courts. It has nothing to say about government acts that do not require judicial assistance to execute. Several U.S. courts have indicated that set off does not trigger the protections provided by domestic sovereign immunity law for a foreign central bank's account.

International law is different. The United States belongs to no treaty on point, so any obligations in this area flow from customary international law. A customary rule exists if it reflects both general state practice and a widely held belief that compliance with the rule derives from a sense of legal obligation (opinio juris), rather than from convenience or self-interest.

Brunk's scholarship argues that the customary international law of sovereign immunity protects the deposits of central banks made in another country's banking system to a greater extent than the rule protecting the property of any other state-owned enterprise. She agrees that international law's immunity doctrine does not clearly go beyond shielding central banks from judicial actions. She worries, though, about drawing a line between executive and judicial acts that change ownership, as well as the possibility that a set off might violate some other international legal principle protecting alien property. Freezing the deposits, which interferes with the right to dispose of them but leaves ownership untouched, may pass muster. But, Brunk argues, customary international law probably bars the outright expropriation of these assets.

Brunk observes that even if confiscating central bank deposits under the REPO Act were seen as inconsistent with certain principles of international law, another part of international law, the doctrine of countermeasures, might allow it. This international law principle recognizes a state's right to respond to some international law violations with acts that otherwise might be illegal. Countermeasure principles would permit the United States to violate Russia's rights under international law, including those protecting the central bank deposits, to the extent the violation had the purpose of inducing Russia to stop breaching a legal duty owed to the United States. But, she argues, it is not obvious that the United States, rather than Ukraine, has the right to invoke this doctrine. The argument that any state can claim to have suffered a wrong with respect to a breach of the prohibition of aggressive war proves too much. Further, because the doctrine stipulates that states should undertake only countermeasures that are reversible, if possible, a permanent deprivation of Russia's ownership of the funds seems problematic. Brunk worries that defending forfeitures as a countermeasure would either exceed the limits of permitted countermeasures or convert the doctrine into an ''open-ended self-help device'' to the detriment of international law.

We share Brunk's concerns about the impact of a forfeiture on countermeasures doctrine. But we depart at the premise of her argument. We think the evidence supporting a customary international law rule protecting central bank deposits in foreign banks from set off is an inadequate foundation for potential Russian claims. In normal times, the rules governing interbank transactions, including those where central banks are parties, cause significant adjustments of the amounts in these accounts on a daily basis. This is how SWIFT and Euroclear manage interbank transactions, including those involving foreign central banks.

It is true that most states whose international banks compete for these deposits have adopted domestic laws providing enhanced legal security for central bank accounts. We are not aware, however, of instances where those laws go further than limiting the judicial function of attachment and execution. Moreover, even this additional protection does not apply to set off.

It is plausible that states adopt these laws to support their banking industries, not to add another brick to the temple of the international legal order. Instead of a general sense of legal obligation, we see a behavioral regularity based on state self-interest. We see no indication that any of the states providing greater security for foreign central bank deposits seek to create a supplementary doctrine of international law, rather than just help their own banks. Nor do we see how a widely used accounting principle raises any line-drawing issues. To the contrary, courts consistently refuse to interfere with the set-off transactions involving foreign central banks. Finally, application of a general rule of private law, pervasive in the banking industry, to an account held by a foreign central bank could hardly amount to impermissible discrimination against alien-held property.

On balance, then, the application of a normal accounting mechanism to reduce the amount of funds in a foreign central bank's accounts, done without any exercise of a state's judicial power, does not transgress customary international law. Without a violation, there is no need to strain countermeasures doctrine to privilege the state's act.

Piercing the Russian central bank's corporate veil?

A key feature of the limited liability corporate form, found in most legal systems in the world, is separation of the legal duties of a company and its owners. Normally a company cannot be held liable for the legal misdeeds of its owner, any more than the owner bears independent responsibility for the acts or omissions of the firm. Only in exceptional circumstances may a legal system pierce the corporate veil to assign joint liability to the company and its owner. This general legal principle is sufficiently pervasive to be regarded as relevant to international legal disputes.

In Certain Iranian Assets, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) held that the United States breached its international obligations to Iran when it used the funds of Bank Markazi, Iran's central bank, to satisfy a domestic court default judgment against Iran for sponsoring acts of terrorism. The Court relied on the principle of limited liability, along with the absence of evidence of the bank's involvement in Iran's bad behavior, to reach this result. Applying this reasoning to the Russian Central Bank, it would seem to be also improper to hold the Russian bank, a separate legal entity from the state as a matter of Russian law, liable for the state's legal obligations to Ukraine.

The ICJ decision, however, rested on the Treaty of Amity between Iran and the United States (since terminated by the United States), not on an independent rule of customary international law. No such treaty exists between Russia and the United States. Nor can one fairly argue that the court's decision gives birth to a customary rule, as it applied a particular treaty. Other factors might further distinguish the Iran and Russia cases. The U.S. judgment enforced against Bank Markazi's deposits came out of a domestic court proceeding in which Iran did not take part, and to which arguably Iran had a right under international law not to be subject. Any judgment realized against Russia's central bank deposits would be issued by an internationally recognized mechanism, a body arguably more impartial than any single domestic judicial body.

We are not sure that these distinctions would persuade the ICJ, which has a history of respecting the form of limited liability to a greater extent than do U.S. courts. But, as far as we know, Russia has no treaties with the putative lenders like the one that Iran had with the United States. Thus it has no pathway for bringing this question before that Court. Further, the views of the ICJ on customary international law are authoritative but not conclusive, and the lenders remain free to disagree with that body on this particular legal point in a matter over which the ICJ has no jurisdiction.

Congress's decision, implemented through the REPO Act, to allow the use of central bank assets to right Russia's wrongs, like Congress's earlier decision to make the Bank Markazi assets available to a specially designated class of Iran's judgment creditors, may depart from the general rule of separation of legal duties of a company and its owners. However, given the close ties between these state institutions and the ruling regime as well as the lack of the rule of law in those countries that might protect central bank independence domestically, the departure seems more pragmatic than outrageous. The U.S. Supreme Court reached a similar result regarding Cuba's central bank forty years ago. We do not think Congress should make a habit of doing this and hope it does not become a precedent. But neither does the veil-piercing it has authorized present a clear violation of international law.

Safeguarding the Dollar and the Prospects for Peace

Finally, we consider two policy questions that implementation of the REPO Act implicates. The United States derives value from the dollar's seigniorage'--that is, what users are willing to pay for the currency. Part of the demand that sustains this value depends on the international acceptance of the dollar as the unit of account for transnational transactions. Anything that discourages demand by making holding dollars less secure threatens that value.

Second, we must contemplate the possibility that the war in Ukraine may end not with Russia's unconditional surrender. Rather, the parties could see their way to some kind of negotiated settlement. In any such negotiation, Russia's rights in the frozen assets will be on the table. If Ukraine and Russia otherwise saw peace or an armistice within reach, it would be tragic to have this property dispute stand in the way.

The mechanism-and-set-off path does a better job of mitigating these concerns than would outright confiscation. Consider seigniorage first.

Any measure that puts central bank deposits under a cloud creates some risk for the dollar, if only because later lawmakers may invoke the precedent to adopt more sweeping measures. But as precedents go, a step that draws on an international legal process and an accepted financial practice in the face of a patent act of aggression looks more limited and legitimate than a naked expropriation. Keeping the genie of lost bank security in the bottle may be hard, but relying on the judgments of an international mechanism provides a better stopper than treating any central bank deposit as presumptively liable to seizure.

As for peace, either pathway, set off or unilateral confiscation, nullifies Russia's rights and invites a demand for restoration. Following the approach proposed by DBS, which we defend here, however, adds an additional layer of legitimacy to the nullification and spreads accountability for it. Deference to an international mechanism that limits Ukraine's rights to reparations is easier to justify than a self-judging determination. Assigning responsibility for the nullification to an international mechanism formed by many states makes it harder to isolate any single state as bearing a duty to compensate Russia. Russia won't readily swallow the loss of billions of dollars of assets. But greater legitimacy in the process of nullifying Russia's rights will subdue the intensity of its demand and reduce the likelihood that it will hold a peace deal hostage to restoration of the frozen funds.

The Way Forward

Now that the REPO Act is law, the table is set for implementing the DBS plan. As shown, the legal risks, including potential effects on international law, are tolerable. What if, instead, an impatient president used this authority simply to confiscate all the money in the Russian bank accounts right now and send the money to Ukraine?

The REPO Act permits this outcome, but it would be a blunder to proceed this way. First, it is critical to achieve collaboration among the states that have sanctioned Russia, in particular the members of the EU. They have most of the money; by comparison, the U.S. contribution would be a pittance. And those states will have to satisfy both the EU courts and their own sense of what international law requires. There are indications that the major players in the EU might accept the legality of the set-off structure. The same countries, however, might find a straightforward confiscation objectionable.

With an international mechanism, even one that Russia has not accepted, the United States and its allies can argue that their actions are based on normal legal process. Without such a mechanism, taking the money looks like a naked expropriation, with Ukraine's inchoate if substantial reparation claims seeming more a pretext than a sound legal basis. Respect for international legality serves to hold the EU together, much more so than the United States. A straight forfeiture, then, would not only raise the legal risk to the United States, but also likely make it harder to put together a coalition that can deliver real assistance to Ukraine through the provision of frozen assets.

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Tue, 07 May 2024 00:04

For years, I have written about the analogy of what is happening on our campuses to the French Revolution, including faculty enablers becoming the targets of radical groups. Many faculty were silent as conservatives and libertarians were purged from faculties. Some even supported cancel campaigns against professors and speakers with opposing views. Now the analogy has become even more poignant on my campus of George Washington University after protesters held mock tribunals and called for the heads of the President, Provost, and Board of Trustees to be cut off by guillotine.

A video has emerged over the weekend from the enactment outside of my office with students gleefully cheering for the beheading of faculty, administrators, and board members.They specifically ''convicted'' President Ellen Granberg, Provost Christopher Bracey, the Board of Trustees, @GWPolice, and others according to the poster of the video.I discussed earlier how the D.C. police refused to clear the street outside of the law school and next to the quad. In D.C., it often matters what you are protesting in determining whether action will be taken.

As for the guillotine video, the Post Millennial reported on the scene:

In the mock tribunal, the woman asks ''How do the people find you?''

The crowd shouts, ''Guilty!'' then ''Guillotine! Guillotine! Guillotine!''

''Bracey, Bracey, we see you! You assault students too. Off to the motherf*cking gallows with you,'' the woman chants, along with the gleeful activists.

Moving on to the Board of Trustees, she states ''On the charges of having a vested interest in the genocide of Palestinian people as they profit off Zionist weapons and purchases that you refuse to divest the apartheid as they line their pockets. The people find you.''

''Guilty!'' The crowd screams with a mix of mob rage and joy.

''To the Guillotine!'' the girl yells. ''Board of Trustees, we charge you with genocide. I hope all that money is gonna save you when you're rotting in jail.''

The crowd calls out President Grandberg, as well. ''On the charges of using our tuition dollars to fund genocide, and selling out students to Zionist interest, the people find you?''

''Guilty!'' The crowd yells.

''As you already know where I am sending her,'' she adds, referring to the guillotine. ''Her and her f*ck *ss bob.''

Fortunately, we got rid of shop in many schools years ago so the actual construction of a gallows may prove challenging. Amazon can deliver a guillotine but it is only five inches tall so it might be a bit of a Spinal Tap moment for the new Jacobins.

Few of us expect tumbrils to roll in Foggy Bottom. These students clearly thought that this was funny and no one believes that they are turning into little Robespierres. However, the rhetoric of these protests have displayed violent and unhinged elements '' fueled by radical activists from Antifa and other organizations.

The protesters have already succeeded in forcing concessions from universities like Brown, Northwestern, and Rutgers. The growing protests have also clearly spooked the White House, particularly with the chant ''Genocide Joe'' catching on across the country. At GW, that image was projected over the large flag hung by the school.

The protesters are likely to take solace in the fact that the Biden Administration just reportedly put a hold on an ammunition transfer to Israel. It is not clear if this will be a mere symbolic hold that will be lifted or something more significant. Israel is preparing the long-announced offensive in Rafah in southern Gaza where the remaining Hamas fighters are located.

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Mon, 06 May 2024 21:11

New Florida residents Jeff Bezos and his fianc(C)e Lauren Sanchez announced a $60 million initial investment into sustainable protein, including ''cultivated meats'' '-- just before Gov. Ron DeSantis barred the sale of lab-grown meat in the Sunshine State.

DeSantis signed the legislation, called SB 1084, into effect on May 1, casting it as a bid to stop the World Economic Forum's goal of forcing the world to eat lab-grown meat and insects, ''an overlooked source of protein,'' according to a news release.

Rather, ''Florida is increasing meat production, and encouraging residents to continue to consume and enjoy 100% real Florida beef,'' the governor's office added.

DeSantis previously has blasted ''the global elite's plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals.''

Jeff Bezos and his fianc(C)e Lauren Sanchez moved to Florida mere months before announcing a $60 million investment into lab-grown meats via the Amazon founder's Bezos Earth Fund. Shortly thereafter, Ron DeSantis barred the proteins from being sold in the state. Bezos Earth FundThe move comes about a month after the Bezos Earth Fund, chaired by the Amazon founder and Sanchez, announced a hefty investment into sustainable protein including plant-based, fermented, and cultivated meats '-- part of the organization's larger, $1 billion commitment to expanding food production, Fortune earlier reported.

''We need to feed 10 billion people with healthy, sustainable food throughout this century while protecting our planet. We can do it, and it will require a ton of innovation,'' Sanchez wrote in a statement announcing the $60 million investment.

Lab-grown meats differ from its slaughter-free counterparts like Impossible Foods in that they are grown from real animal cells that are replicated scientifically, eliminating the need to farm animals.

Impossible burgers and other vegan proteins such as Beyond Meat, meanwhile, are made using alternative protein sources like tempeh, tofu, seitan and beans, among other products.

According to science magazine Scientific American, the US Department of Agriculture granted its first-ever approval of cell-cultured meat produced by two companies, GOOD Meat and UPSIDE Foods, last June '-- less than a year after the Food and Drug Administration declared the companies' products safe to eat.

DeSantis SB 1084, into effect on May 1, to stop the World Economic Forum's goal of forcing the world to eat lab-grown meat and insects, ''an overlooked source of protein,'' according to a news release on the legislation. Jonah Hinebaugh/Naples Daily News/USA Today Network-Florida / USA TODAY NETWORK Bezos purchased his third mansion on Miami's ''Billionaire Bunker'' in April (pictured) in an off-market transaction reportedly worth $90 million. MEGAFlorida, for reference, ranks 13th in the US in overall cattle numbers with a total herd size of 886,000 among 15,000 beef producers with total sales of $546 million, according to Fortune, citing the Florida Beef Council.

Before garnering US approval, GOOD Meat had already been selling its cultivated chicken in Singapore. It made its debut in America in a dish curated by well-known chef Jos(C) Andr(C)s at his Washington, DC, restaurant, China Chilcano.

The nonprofit Good Food Institute reports that the cultivated meat industry has grown to include more than 150 companies backed by $2.6 billion in investments, Fortune cited '-- with Bezos among those funding the sector.

The US Department of Agriculture granted its first-ever approval of cell-cultured meat produced by two companies, GOOD Meat and UPSIDE Foods (pictured), last June. @upsidefoods / InstagramBezos and DeSantis's clashing opinions on the lab-grown meat industry are coming to light shortly after the 60-year-old tech billionaire moved from Seattle, near Amazon's headquarters, to Miami, closer to his space exploration firm Blue Origin's home base.

In October 2023, it was revealed that Bezos had purchased two mansions on Florida's exclusive ''Billionaire Bunker,'' the man-made island formally known as Indian Creek Island.

Last month, he added a third multimillion-dollar estate to his sprawling Miami portfolio in an off-market transaction reportedly worth $90 million.

Sources privy to the matter revealed to The Post that Bezos intends to take up residence in this new acquisition while orchestrating the demolition of his two previous island properties '-- which includes a $79 million abode, and its neighboring $68 million property.

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Mon, 06 May 2024 18:13

Bill Gates brugte mange ¥r p¥ at forme og lave Microsoft.

Men i 2008 ville han fokusere fuld tid p¥ noget andet. Derfor gik han helt og holdent ind i kampen mod fattigdom, sygdom og ulighed rundt om i verden med sin fond, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, som der st¥r p¥ fondens hjemmeside.

Den kamp vil den stenrige danske fond Novo Nordisk Fonden gerne v...re med til at bidrage endnu mere til.

Derfor indg¥r den nu et samarbejde med den rige amerikaner Bill Gates. Og if¸lge Novo Nordisk Fonden selv er det fondens st¸rste globale samarbejde nogensinde.

Sammen vil den og den engelske fond Wellcome Trust bruge mere end to milliarder kroner p¥ at s...tte fokus p¥ klimaforandringer og de problemer og sygdomme, som f¸lger med. Det kan v...re myg, der spreder denguefeber og malaria i omr¥der, vi ikke har set f¸r - for eksempel i Europa.

Til DR Nyheder fort...ller Bill Gates, at han ser meget frem til samarbejdet med den danske fond.

- Vi har hver vores ekspertise.

Amerikaneren l...gger is...r v...gt p¥ den store viden, Novo Nordisk har, n¥r det kommer til fedme og ern...ring.

Her ser Bill Gates, at der virkelig kan spilles videnskabelig ping-pong.

- En fantastisk ting er, at hele ern...ringscyklussen, tarmen og hjernen, som Novo Nordisk kender meget godt, ikke kun kan hj...lpe os med overern...ring, men ogs¥ med underern...ring og fejlern...ring.

- Og s¥ vil de v...re en partner, der bringer mange forst¥elser, som vi ikke har. S¥ at se tre v...rdidrevne fonde g¥ sammen p¥ denne m¥de, det g¸r mig meget sp...ndt, siger han.

'Man er n¸dt til at t...nke stort'

I forvejen giver Novo Nordisk fonden allerede penge til forskning og projekter, som fremmer menneskers sundhed.

Men hvor den har fokuseret meget p¥ diabetes, sv...r overv...gt og hjertekarsygdomme, har Bill Gates mest haft ¸jnene rettet mod infektionssygdomme.

Administrerende direkt¸r i Novo Nordisk Fonden, Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, ser derfor et regnestykke i plus, n¥r han omtaler samarbejdet.

- Vi ved jo, at der er en k...mpestor dobbeltbyrde af sygdomme rundt omkring i verden. S¥ vi kan spille hinanden gode, s¥ to plus to giver fem.

- S¥ tilsammen tror vi p¥, at der kan opst¥ en win-win situation.

Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen ser frem til samarbejdet med Bill Gates og Wellcome Trust. (Foto: (C) Omid Jafi, DR)

Hver smider de tre fonde cirka 700 millioner kroner ind i samarbejdet. Pengene skal g¥ til forskning og projekter, der tackler sundhedsskaderne fra klimaforandringer.

- Hvis du virkelig meningsfyldt vil g¸re noget ved hele sammenspillet mellem et forv...rret klima og et forv...rret sygdomsbillede i store dele af verden, s¥ er du n¸dt til at t...nke stort, og du er ogs¥ n¸dt til at t...nke sammenh...ngende.

- S¥ det er blevet et stort samarbejde, fordi det er store udfordringer, siger Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen.

P¥ sigt h¥ber direkt¸ren i Novo Nordisk Fonden, der sidder p¥ over 1.000 milliarder kroner, at de tre fondes samarbejde kan redde menneskeliv.

- Vi er jo i en verden, hvor vi st¥r med 60 millioner d¸dsfald om ¥ret. S¥ vi bilder os ind, at hvis man ser p¥ effekten af samarbejdet over tid, kan nogle af de d¸dsfald, enten p¥ grund af klima eller f¸devareknaphed, undg¥s. Hvis vi kan neds...tte de d¸dsfald med bare en br¸kdel, s¥ har vi udrettet noget, som er til fordel for kloden og dens beboere.

Roser til skyerne

I dag er Bill Gates i Danmark, fordi han skal deltage i et topm¸de hos Novo Nordisk Fonden i Helsing¸r.

Og roserne er store til den danske medicingigant.

- Novo Nordisk har denne 100-¥rige historie med at udf¸re fantastisk sundhedsarbejde, og det har v...ret f...nomenalt at se deres nylige succes med at hj...lpe med diabetes, men ogs¥ bredere med fedme og alle former for ting, som deres nuv...rende produkter viser.

Ligeledes g¥r roserne den anden vej ogs¥.

- Han har haft en meget stor betydning. Du kan t...lle det i det antal menneskeliv, han gennem fondens virke har reddet, og det er virkelig h¸jt.

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Mon, 06 May 2024 04:29

C artier jewellery, Louis Vuitton bags, Gucci tracksuits, private jets'--Olena Zelenska, Ukraine's first lady, has a taste for the good life and is using foreign aid money to fund it. Or so Ukraine's enemies would have you believe. As soon as Western governments started sending weapons and money to Ukraine, following Russia's invasion in February 2022, Russophiles and isolationists began pushing phoney claims about the extent of corruption in the country. Often Ms Zelenska and her husband, President Volodymyr Zelensky, are the focus of these lies. In 2023, for example, the Kremlin spread the fiction that Ukraine's first couple had bought a German villa formerly owned by Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist for the Nazis. That conveniently served the Kremlin's false narrative that Mr Zelensky is a Nazi sympathiser (never mind that he is Jewish).

The claim was salacious enough to catch people's attention while also speaking to legitimate worries about Ukraine's history of corruption and squandered aid money. News outlets and big accounts on X and TikTok amplified the story, lending it credibility. You may not have seen the story, but millions of people did.

To understand how this disinformation spread, Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, researchers at Clemson University in South Carolina, traced its origins. A successful online disinformation campaign involves three stages. First is ''placement'', or the initial posting of the lie. Then comes ''layering'', where the lie spreads among online accounts and dodgy news websites, obscuring its origin. The final stage is ''integration'': when credible sources, such as real news websites and social-media accounts pick it up. Here's how all that happened in the Olena Zelenska story.

Your browser does not support this video.In September, a woman claiming to be an intern at Cartier in New York shared her experience of serving Ms Zelenska'--and subsequently getting fired'--on her Instagram account.

She even had a receipt from Cartier to substantiate her claim. But it was doctored. An investigation by the BBC and Open Online, an Italian news site, later identified the woman using facial-recognition software. Far from being a Cartier employee in New York, she was probably a beautician in St Petersburg. In any case, Ms Zelenska was in Canada on the date listed on the receipt.

By the time the story was gaining traction, the woman's Instagram account had switched from public to private. But an anonymous YouTube account had already uploaded her story. This video was its only post.

At first glance, DC Weekly looks like any other news homepage, covering American politics and world affairs. Its stories lean anti-Western and peddle claims of corruption in Ukraine. As with the Cartier scandal, their evidence comes from videos planted on YouTube.

But a closer look reveals its true nature. The researchers identified that the website stole and republished thousands of articles and headlines from mainstream Western outlets. Then it pivoted to using generative artificial-intelligence (AI) models to produce stories. DC Weekly appears to be owned by John Mark Dougan, a former American police officer who defected to Russia in 2016 and now works as a pro-Russia journalist.

The website is one of many fake, AI-generated news sites pumping out stories like this. It offers a case study in the ways in which new technology is being used to help bad actors construct and build up false narratives faster than ever before, and across multiple platforms.

Ring of truth

Hourly mentions of Zelenska-Cartier

story on X (formerly Twitter)

Story appears in Russian media.

Re-posted by the Russian Embassy UK

1,000

''Cartier Intern'' video

posted on Youtube

Story appears

in DC Weekly

800

Story appears on

NetAfrique.ne

600

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Sep

Oct 2023

Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, X

Ring of truth

Hourly mentions of Zelenska-Cartier

story on X (formerly Twitter)

1,000

800

600

400

200

30

01

02

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Sep

Oct 2023

1 ''Cartier Intern'' video posted on Youtube

2 Story appears on NetAfrique.ne

3 Story appears in DC Weekly

4 Story appears in Russian media. Re-posted

by the Russian Embassy UK

Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, X

Ring of truth

Hourly mentions of Zelenska-Cartier

story on X (formerly Twitter)

Story appears in Russian media.

Re-posted by the Russian Embassy UK

1,000

''Cartier Intern'' video

posted on Youtube

Story appears

in DC Weekly

800

600

Story appears on

NetAfrique.ne

400

200

30

01

02

03

04

05

06

07

08

09

Sep

Oct 2023

Source: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, X

Once layering is complete, the final step is disseminating the disinformation widely. The researchers estimate that the lie about Ms Zelenska's shopping spree was shared in English at least 20,000 times on X. None of this happened by accident. First ''seeder'' social-media accounts strategically posted the lie, then ''spreader'' accounts disseminated it across different social networks.

One seeder was an account calling itself ''Woke Martin'', which used an image of Ryan Gosling as Ken from the film ''Barbie'' as a profile picture. Woke Martin shows several tell-tale signs of being a plant. The account only started posting in the week of October 3rd, 2023, and all of its roughly 300 followers were empty, shell accounts with no pictures or account details.

Woke Martin and other accounts, such as the unimaginatively named ''Russian Trol'' (who has since been blocked on X), began sharing links to the story in the Nation in replies to posts by politicians and right-leaning influencers.

Eventually, the Zelenska-Cartier rumour became old news. Some of those who saw the story may also have seen the various articles debunking it, but most probably did not. AI is making it easier both to create disinformation in the form of images, videos and text (see our story on the science of disinformation), and to spread it through fake websites, like DC Weekly, and social-media accounts. Campaigns like this are probably going to become more sophisticated and increasingly common.'–