What Happened Today: April 28, 2022
New era in cyber warfare; San Francisco grifting; FDA delay on baby-formula warning
The Big Story
Did the Russian invasion of Ukraine begin as early as March of 2021—nearly a full year before Russian armed forces launched their assault on the ground? That’s the indication from a new study Microsoft released yesterday, documenting previously unreported attacks by Russian hackers, including Russian cyber strikes against Ukrainian supply chains and “pre-positioning for conflict” as Russian troops grew their ranks last year along the Ukrainian border. The report also detailed cyber and military attacks that appear to have been coordinated against essential Ukrainian infrastructure, including strikes by hackers across Kyiv the same day a Russian missile struck a TV tower in the city, as well as likely Russian hackers present on critical infrastructure systems in Sumy, Ukraine, two weeks before that city suffered widespread electrical outages and Russian military attacks on its power stations.
The significant role of cyberattacks in the Russian military operation contradicts the “academics and analysts [who] have said Russia appeared to be less active in the cyber domain against Ukraine than expected,” as Reuters noted in its coverage of the Microsoft report, and further underscores the increasing prominence of cyber espionage and hacking operations by adversarial governments and actors worldwide. Two weeks ago, the National Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Energy, and other security agencies released a joint cybersecurity advisory on the discovery of a cyber weapon called Pipedream, a piece of software that could simultaneously undermine power grids, water and electrical utilities, and energy production facilities by allowing hackers to either hinder or fully take over the operation of these systems. “This is the most expansive industrial control system attack tool that anyone has ever documented,” a research adviser on the joint advisory report told Wired magazine. In recent years, hackers have increased their software attacks on industrial control systems, but previous software toolkits were much less sophisticated than the recently discovered Pipedream. In 2016, Russian hackers used a toolkit called Sandworm that caused a blackout in Kyiv in 2016.
In The Back Pages: A Review of Hatchie’s Giving the World Away
The Rest
→ A $160 million San Francisco program that relies on a bevy of nonprofit groups to help homeless people transition through hotels and into permanent housing has failed to provide much help, and according to an extensive report by the San Francisco Chronicle, the 6,000 or so residents of the 70 single-room-occupancy hotels have been subject to “a pattern of chaos, crime, and death.” Based on tens of thousands of public records and interviews with more than 150 sources, the report is a scathing indictment of a city program overtaken with unregulated nonprofit organizations that lease the SRO hotels from private owners to the homeless, taking the money but doing little to manage the hotels. Of the 515 tenants the city tracked after they left the program in 2020, 21% went back on the streets, 27% left for an “unknown destination,” and a quarter of those reported as having “exited the program” in fact died while living in the units. Some residents reported being assaulted with “golf clubs, hammers, and other weapons,” while others had their rooms ransacked by thieves. The hotels—which suffer from infestations of mice and roaches, broken elevators, mold, and broken plumbing and appliances—also accounted for 14% of all the confirmed overdose deaths in San Francisco in 2020 and 2021, even though the hotels only housed 1% of the total city population.
Read more: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/san-francisco-sros/
→ With the midterms fast approaching, Democratic lawmakers are pushing forward with one last attempt to galvanize the party behind a smaller, pared-down version of President Biden’s signature Build Back Better (BBB) agenda that failed to previously sway Sen. Joe Manchin to cast his decisive vote of support. On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer sat down with Manchin to negotiate a new BBB-lite package that included increased domestic energy production, budget reduction, and higher taxes, with a focus on tools to help legislators tackle inflation. If Manchin comes on board, the Democrats could then pass something quickly and use the legislative victory on the campaign trail, which will soon begin in earnest.
→ In Seattle, the city’s prosecutor says the criminals who keep committing serious crimes should face charges in a courtroom rather than be funneled through an alternate criminal processing system that prioritizes their release before offering them voluntary aid services. That system was first put into play in 2019 by the predecessor of current City Attorney Ann Davison, who announced last night that she’s made a formal request that chronic offenders and those who commit serious crimes should bypass the release-first community court model because the “voluntary referrals to services, and limited accountability mechanisms are the wrong interventions for individuals committing repeat, high-impact criminal activity,” Davison wrote in a statement. Those who’d fall under Davison’s proposed High Utilizer group include 118 people who over the past five years were responsible for 2,400 criminal cases in the city.
→ Millions of children could become infected because of widespread measles outbreaks: The World Health Organization and United Nations issued a report yesterday showing that the number of cases had skyrocketed to 17,338—a 79% increase compared to 2021. The jump was driven by 21 large-scale outbreaks largely occurring in African and the Eastern Mediterranean region, a surge in the preventable disease that the report attributed to resources diverted to thwart the pandemic and other pandemic-related distractions, which significantly decreased the access children previously had to measles vaccinations. Dozens of vaccine campaigns that would have reached 73 million children at risk for measles were postponed.
→ Months before two infants were killed by bacteria infections after consuming Abbott Nutrition baby formula, a former employee of the manufacturer had tried to warn officials at the Food and Drug Administration about food safety issues at an Abbott formula plant. The whistleblower Fedex’ed to several top FDA officials a 34-page report that “outlined allegations of lax cleaning practices, purposely falsified records and efforts by plant officials to keep FDA from learning about serious issues related to the plant’s own system for checking for bacteria in formula,” according to Politico. In February, five months after the first known hospitalization of an infant who consumed the tainted formula, Abbott issued a major recall of its products. The whistleblower’s report was made public this morning by Rep. Rosa DeLauro during a House Appropriations meeting. “I am deeply concerned about the practices at this Abbott facility and their apparent failure to implement and enforce internal controls at this facility,” DeLauro said. “I am equally concerned that the FDA reacted far too slowly to this report.”
Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/28/whistleblower-fda-baby-formula-00028569
→ Though Catholicism remains deeply ingrained in the culture of Latin American nations, the religion is losing its grip across the region, with 70% of those who identified as Catholic in 2010 down to 57% as of 2020, according to the most recent report from one of the region’s leading population studies. With secularism on the rise, trust in the Catholic Church on the decline, and more spiritual options now available to a younger generation, the numbers of those in Latin America turning to Protestantism and several new-age religious movements has chipped away at Catholicism’s dominance.
→ The body of an FBI informant who passed hundreds of documents to journalists and federal officials related to President Trump’s ties to Deutsche Bank (and the bank’s to Russia) was discovered by groundskeeping staff on a California high school campus on Monday morning. Valentin Broeksmit, a self-described “comically terrible spy” was the son of a Deutsche Bank executive who committed suicide in 2014; Broeksmit provided journalists and Feds troves of his late father’s files, which helped shed light on some of Deutsche Bank’s more shadowy dealings, including criminally lax anti-corruption and anti-money laundering policies for which the bank has been fined numerous times in recent years. Fancying himself something of an American hero—a whistleblower working to bring down the world’s dark forces and struggling with dark forces of his own, including an opioid addiction and the trauma of his father’s death—Broeksmit met with reporters and investigators repeatedly before disappearing in Los Angeles in April 2021. Officials believe that Broeksmit might have been homeless since then, and don’t know when or how he arrived at the high school campus. The cause of death has not yet been announced.
→ A McKinsey partner appeared before Congress on Wednesday to deflect claims that the company violated federal laws by working to help opioid producers “turbocharge” sales, as a congressional report put it, while being paid to help the Food and Drug Administration fight an opioid epidemic that has claimed the lives of half a million Americans. “McKinsey was advising both the fox and the hen house,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney. “And getting paid by both.” Appearing before the Congressional Committee on Oversight and Reform, Bob Sternfels admitted that McKinsey had not lived up to “the high standards” it sets for itself, but charged that the committee had taken “speculative leaps” in reaching its conclusions. The committee’s report found that at least 22 McKinsey consultants had worked for the FDA while helping Big Pharma develop its “wildfire” strategy to sell more opioids, and that since 2008, the company has made $140 million from the FDA and $86 million from Purdue without disclosing the potential conflict of interest.
→ The head of investment firm Archegos, Bill Hwang, lied to banks as he amassed a $36 billion portfolio before defaulting on his debt and causing a $20 billion sell-off on Wall Street. A former hedge fund manager, Hwang used his considerable fortune to buy up vast sums of stocks in a select few companies—ViacomCBS, Discovery Inc.—thereby driving up the value of that stock and thus the value of his own shares. Hwang then used those profits to borrow more money from investment banks to repeat the exercise: buy up shares in bulk, drive up value. The obvious risk of such a scheme is that one of Hwang’s juiced-up stocks could collapse, leaving him overleveraged and unable to pay the banks he borrowed from, which is precisely what happened.“I don’t understand it because it is so obvious,” Matt Levine noted in Bloomberg. “How did [Hwang] think the story would end?” On Tuesday, the story ended with the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors charging Hwang with fraud, racketeering, and market manipulation.
A Review of Hatchie’s Giving the World Away
After all the anger and angularity of the sonic terrain of the 1980s, shoegaze felt like a relief to many. Coming out of the fraught Thatcher-era United Kingdom, shoegaze didn’t express the sneering disgust of Sex Pistols or the focused political goals of The Clash. Rather, bands like Ride, Lush, and My Bloody Valentine created heavy, swirling riffs, spinning into an oblivion that could feel like an escape hatch. Or, to some, like conflict avoidance.
The shoegazers—named for their tendency to focus on their guitar pedals while playing—offered a sound as compelling and all-encompassing as Ronnie Spector’s wall of sound. Another term emerged, dream pop, which hinted toward the blissful nature of a song like Cocteau Twins’ “Heaven or Las Vegas.”
Harriette Pilbeam, a 28-year old from Brisbane, Australia, is the latest millennial to take on the dream pop mantle. Performing under the name Hatchie, she released a new album, Giving the World Away, which follows acts like Beach House and Carly Rae Jepsen in transforming the original dream sound into something that the modern listener can get lost in. That means more synths and less guitar shredding, but the effect is the same.
The opening track, “Lights On,” starts in a way that will feel familiar to any shoegazer: the strumming of a guitar, letting each sound reverberate into a warm ether. The lyrics reveal a protagonist trying to find their sense of self even as they get lost within a relationship. “I never felt so good with the lights on / I never understood you were the right one,” goes the chorus. In the hands of a different artist, this would be flirtatious, a come-on. But for Hatchie, the sound feels expansive and insular, laden with the joy of self-discovery.
That confidence is also found on the album’s second track, “This Enchanted,” which when heard can easily be mistaken for “disenchantment.” Whatever you hear, it sounds like bliss. And on the fourth track, “Take My Hand,” she sends a message of encouragement out into the world: “You don’t have to change,” goes the triumphant closing.
It’s a dreamy, happy album at a time when things don’t feel particularly dreamy or happy (although the weather is getting nicer). What keeps Hatchie grounded, perhaps, is her double life. Speaking to The Guardian earlier this year, she noted that “I don’t think people realize how difficult it is to be that kind of artist who can quit their job and spend months on end in a studio.” Rather, her experience of work is one with remarkable variation: “I did tours with Kylie Minogue but then went home and worked a random café job.”
Hatchie’s dream pop may not express a loud political message. But it does get across the hopes and dreams of a working person in a particularly gorgeous fashion. Its kindness is overwhelming. It’s an album to play in the background while you’re working, it’s an album to play when friends are over, it’s an album for good times. And that’s worth celebrating.
David Grossman is a freelance writer based out of Brooklyn, and is on Twitter at @davidgross_man.
Also on the verge of a liquidity crisis:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2022-04-25/yellen-just-soaked-record-levels-liquidity