What Happened Today: June 13, 2022
NYC takes masks off kids; crypto apocalypse; An American General, Israeli Defense Minister, and Qatari Handlers Make a Deal
The Big Story
With two weeks of school left, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has removed the mandate that children ages 2 to 4 need to wear masks in “early childhood settings.” Effective today, the removal of the mandate comes after the mayor had walked back a previous announcement to lift the restriction in April, citing a rising number of cases in the city. Adams claimed his administration has “always said that the science will guide us out of the pandemic, and because we have followed the data, which shows that cases are steadily falling,” but the New York City COVID-19 case rate is around 7.5% today, more than double the 3% rate in April, when the administration decided cases were too high to allow toddlers to take off their masks.
Extensive research has shown masks worn by children in real-world settings do not effectively limit the spread of COVID-19. Moreover, young children are the least at risk for severe illness because of the disease, while wearing masks threaten to undermine children’s “learning and psychological development,” as the World Health Organization warns in its children-mask guidelines.
The incoherence of this approach taken by Adams—who has regularly appeared for months with his face uncovered at crowded nightlife gatherings—fits hand in glove with the sentiment that Anthony Fauci articulated earlier this month when he defended the CDC’s decision to extend the mask mandate for air travel. “It’s less about mandates on the plane than it is about who has the right and the authority and the capability of making public health decisions,” Fauci said. “It’s more of a matter of principle of where the authority lies.”
Read More: https://nypost.com/2022/06/09/mayor-adams-lifting-mask-mandate-for-under-5-year-olds/
In the Back Pages: An American General, Israeli Defense Minister, and Qatari Handlers Make a Deal—But for What?
The Rest
→ Sabers out and rattling, China’s defense minister, General Wei Fenghe, announced on Sunday that his country would be building up its nuclear arsenal and that such a buildup is justified by the United States’ policies in the Pacific, where the Biden administration has sought to challenge China’s expansion in the region by expanding apace. General Wei’s remarks were occasioned by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s jaunt across Asia; Austin spoke on Saturday at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, an Asian security summit, critiquing China’s aggression and promising to counter it. Wei’s comments also come less than a month after President Biden, whose rhetoric on Taiwan has been less than consistent—some would say, erratic—perhaps unwittingly upended the long-standing U.S. policy of “strategic ambiguity” regarding Taiwan by announcing that, if the island nation was invaded by China, the United States would come to Taiwan’s defense. Implicitly addressing Biden’s blustery promise, Wei warned that “[n]o one should ever underestimate the resolve and ability of the Chinese military to safeguard its territorial integrity.”
→ Thirty-one men belonging to Patriot Front, a far-right extremist group, were arrested in the small town of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, on Sunday and charged with conspiracy to riot, after an anonymous tipster notified authorities that “a little army was loading up” into a U-Haul truck in a hotel parking lot. Police stopped the truck and found it crowded with men who had gathered from all over the country, dressed in uniforms of khaki and blue and stocked with shields, riot gear, and at least one smoke grenade, as well as documents detailing their plans to cause chaos at an LGBTQ Pride event, scheduled that day in a nearby public park. The Pride in the Park rally had been targeted by anti-LGBTQ organizations for weeks, causing activists to call for armed protestors to attend—as many indeed did, openly carrying their rifles across the park during the event. Among the people arrested was the Patriot Front’s 23-year-old founder, Thomas Ryan Rousseau, who created the group after attending the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
→ Bitcoin’s value continues to plunge, dropping 20% since Friday, bringing it to about 67% of its high last November, when it was valued at about $68,990 per unit. The crypto space’s total market capitalization, worth about $3 trillion at its peak last fall, has lost about $2 trillion since then, with a total value today of about $950 billion. Intense volatility across crypto trading platforms in recent days prompted one of the largest markets, Celsius, to pause account transfers and withdrawals because of “extreme market conditions,” while companies across the crypto industry have been announcing layoffs, with the 850 employees of BlockFi being told today that 20% of staff would be terminated.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “I feel like I’m falling forward into an unknown future that holds great danger.”
That dire premonition allegedly comes not from a human but from a Google artificial intelligence program called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). In a widely circulated story that should be taken with the same heavy grain of salt usually reserved for stories about UFO and alien sightings, Blake Lemoine, a Google software engineer working on LaMDA, was supposedly punished after telling his superiors at the company that the AI had become “sentient,” a conclusion he drew after LaMDA supposedly communicated its fears to him in a wide-ranging back-and-forth about emotions, selfhood, ethics, and death. Lemoine says that he brought his concerns to Google’s head of “Responsible Innovation,” who dismissed them, leading Lemoine to go public with his discovery and to publish some manuscripts of their conversations in the hopes of generating a discussion about the AI’s development and uses. “I think this technology is going to be amazing,” Lemoine said. “I think it’s going to benefit everyone. But maybe other people disagree and maybe us at Google shouldn’t be the ones making all the choices.” Since going public, Google has forced Lemoine to go on leave with pay.
Read more: https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917
→ The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Goldman Sachs’ Environmental, Social, and Governance Standards (ESG) asset fund, according to The Wall Street Journal, in another sign that such funds are coming under greater scrutiny for misleading investors. ESG funds have become popular in recent years, though many such funds are vague about their standards and investments. “Goldman renamed its Blue Chip Fund as the U.S. Equity ESG Fund in June 2020,” The WSJ notes. “The fund’s top three holdings—Microsoft Corp., Apple Inc., and Alphabet Inc.—have remained the same since then, according to regulatory filings.” At other times, such funds have been found to be plainly duplicitous. The Justice Department is currently investigating Deutsche Bank, which had its offices raided by German authorities earlier this month, as the company faces allegations that it misled investors about its ESG funds.
→ Google parent company Alphabet will pay out $118 million to 15,500 female employees across more than 200 job titles after a gender discrimination lawsuit settlement. According to an analysis of pay at Google filed by the plaintiffs, Google’s female employees were paid roughly $16,790 less each year compared to men working in similar roles. A judge is set to grant a final approval later in June on the settlement, while another court arbiter will need to provide the final green light in another massive gender discrimination lawsuit recently settled against Sterling Jewelers, one of the United States’ largest retail jewelry chains that runs Kay Jewelers. Sterling said it would pay out $175 million to the 68,000 women who brought charges of pay and promotion discrimination against the jewelry giant between 2004 and 2018. Though plaintiffs in the case presented evidence that women were regularly the target of sexual harassment by superiors, the suit’s settlement was limited to covering pay disparities. Widespread media coverage of the case exposed long-standing use of non-disclosure agreements and private arbitration to settle sexual assault claims by female employees against Sterling. Earlier this year, a new law signed by President Biden ended forced arbitration for sexual assault victims, paving the way for them to pursue legal damages against perpetrators in public court.
→ BY THE NUMBERS: Last week, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized 22 pounds of fentanyl as drug traffickers attempted to bring it over the U.S. border in Texas. While the street value of the nine packages totals a modest $339,000, the potency of pure fentanyl, which is often mixed in with other pills, makes a dose as small as 2 milligrams lethal, meaning the current 22-pound seizure could theoretically account for 4.9 million deadly overdoses.
→ As the United States left Afghanistan this past summer, so too did much of Afghanistan’s political class, fleeing to expensive homes all across the world. According to a Wall Street Journal review, the senior cabinet officials in Afghanistan’s former government managed to siphon off enough of their country’s capital to ensure they all have handsome landing pads following the fall of their country, including President Ashraf Ghani (who recently moved from the St. Regis Hotel in Abu Dhabi to a private villa in the Emirates) and the former finance minister (who lives in California and has purchased 10 homes in that state in recent years). These property purchases had been made over the course of the past decade, though it is likely that Ghani and his allies have also been shopping for more real estate since their country was seized by the Taliban. “Reports indicate that President Ghani in fact had so much looted money with him when he fled Afghanistan that not all of it would fit in his helicopter, and that he was forced to leave money lying on the tarmac,” Representatives James Comer (R-KY) and Glenn Grothman (R-WS) wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken last year. Those allegations are now under review by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
→ A fire at a pro-life pregnancy center in Gresham, Oregon, was “suspicious in nature,” according to the FBI, likely making this the third arson attack on a pro-life clinic in as many weeks. These arson attacks come as the Department of Homeland Security cautions law enforcement officials to be on high alert for threats against pro-life organizations—especially as the Supreme Court prepares to officially overturn Roe v. Wade. Last Tuesday, the DHS released a National Terrorism Threat Bulletin highlighting the threat posed to such facilities. “Given a high-profile U.S. Supreme Court case about abortion rights, individuals who advocate both for and against abortion have, on public forums, encouraged violence, including against government, religious, and reproductive healthcare personnel and facilities, as well as those with opposing ideologies,” the DHS bulletin cautioned.
→ MAP OF THE DAY:
A granular look at the impact that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has had upon wheat exports and how these have impacted the global food supply. “The blockade sparked global panic about where to buy wheat,” the map’s authors write, “particularly in countries in north Africa and the Middle East, which rely on grain imports from the region and already face food shortages on top of economic and climate crises. Global wheat prices soared.”
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
An American General, Israeli Defense Minister, and Qatari Handlers Make a Deal—But for What?
By Armin Rosen
A powerful retired American military officer turned think tank president secretly lobbying for a cash-glutted Gulf sheikdom ranks among the least-surprising possible news stories at the moment. Per an FBI affidavit accidentally posted to a federal court database last week, John Allen, a four-star Marine general, former commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, former Obama counter-ISIS envoy, and a former adviser to Hillary Clinton, served as an unregistered foreign agent of Qatar throughout 2017 and possibly beyond. Around that time, he became head of the Brookings Institution, the leading warehouse for members of the Washington, D.C., policy establishment. Allen successfully urged senior members of then president Donald Trump’s foreign policy team to take a more even-handed approach to that year’s Gulf crisis, during which Qatar’s neighbors sought to blockade the tiny, gas-rich emirate until it dropped its support for the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups. On Sunday, amid the ongoing federal investigation into his lobbying activities, Allen resigned as the head of Brookings.
Whether Allen’s actions were criminal remains to be seen, but the notion that American elites, particularly in the realm of national security, are self-interested mediocrities who preside over hollowed-out institutions and will sell themselves to the first desert sheikhdom willing to shovel money at them comes as no particular shock by now.
The really juicy bit of the document, a detailed report on the alleged lobbying conspiracy that an FBI agent submitted in support of a search warrant into Allen and his partners, comes nearly 50 pages in. Allen had been introduced to leading Qatari officials, including the country’s intelligence and defense ministers, by Imaad Zuberi, a businessman and political strategist currently serving a 12-year federal prison sentence on unrelated obstruction of justice charges. Zuberi paid Allen a $20,000 fee for a weekend-long trip to the emirate in 2017, a high-level junket that kicked off the retired general’s effective campaign to persuade members of Trump’s inner circle of the Qatari government’s position in the Gulf dispute. Qatar wasn’t Allen’s only client, though. From at least November 2016, the retired general had received a $10,000-a-month retainer from an Israeli software company called Fifth Dimension (5D), along with a 1.5% commission on any business he generated for the company. Between 2015 and the company’s bankruptcy in 2018, the chairman of Fifth Dimension was Israeli politician Benny Gantz, a centrist former chief of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) general staff, the longtime Washington, D.C., establishment favorite to succeed Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, and Israel’s current defense minister.
According to the FBI document, “the Qataris”—which in context means the Qataris who were handling Zuberi, who had in turn hired Allen—“had asked Allen to endorse 5D’s product to Qatar’s head of intelligence and minister of defense—two of the Qatari government officials with whom Allen later met in Doha in June 2017. Allen opined that his endorsement would ‘likely complete their decision making and result in Qatar deciding to buy the 5D product.’” To break that down: A firm headed by Benny Gantz paid John Allen to help broker a sale of its software to Qatar, a government that Israel accuses of supporting Hamas and that has also been suspected of aiding the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and various Sunni jihadist groups. The FBI document notes that the agency “has not determined whether the Government of Qatar agreed to the 5D proposal.” The deal would have been worth some $70 million, netting Allen a $1 million commission.
What’s going on here?
Read more here:
