What Happened Today: August 15, 2022
Surprise Taiwan visit by U.S. lawmakers spurs more Chinese war games; oil prices tumble on rumors of final Iran nuclear deal; The Great Book Giveaway
The Big Story
Chinese government officials condemned an unannounced trip five U.S. lawmakers made to Taiwan on Sunday, with the Chinese Defense Ministry saying in a statement that the visit infringed on China’s sovereignty and “fully exposes the true face of the United States as a spoiler and spoiler of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.” Though Taiwan is a self-governed island nation, China considers it a part of its own territory and retaliated against U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent visit to the island with a series of military war games that effectively simulated an armed blockade in the Taiwan Strait. The weekend visit by the U.S. delegation, which was led by Sen. Ed Markey, a Democrat, kicked off a new round of Chinese military drills by land, air, and sea around Taiwan.
The Chinese military said the war games were “a stern deterrent to the United States and Taiwan continuing to play political tricks and undermine peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.” Unlike the high-profile lead-up to Speaker Pelosi’s arrival to Taipei, the lawmakers’ visit and meeting with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen was not live-streamed by the Taiwan government’s office, and official photos of the visit were only released after the lawmakers left the island on Monday. The ratcheting up of tensions around Taiwan coincides with both the United States and China conducting their separate war games over the past week in the Southeast Asian region. In November, Indonesia will host the Group of 20 Summit, where the diplomatic strain with Taiwan will be front and center as both China leader Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden are expected to be in attendance.
In the Back Pages: The Great Book Giveaway
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While installing solar panels in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Marshall Heights on Wednesday, 25-year-old Aryeh Wolf was shot and killed by an assailant who had “walked up, produced a handgun, and shot multiple times,” according to Kevin Kentish, the D.C. homicide unit captain who had reviewed surveillance footage of the murder. The suspect remains at large, and Kentish said “it does not appear that anything was taken from the decedent.” Media coverage of the murder has largely avoided any mention of Wolf’s Jewish identity, though the killing has shaken the D.C. Jewish community. More than 1,500 viewers watched the live-stream of Wolf’s funeral, which was officiated by the same rabbi who had buried Wolf’s great grandparents. The Marshall Heights neighborhood has endured a rapid uptick in gun violence in recent years, with homicides up 12% this year compared to the year prior. Wolf leaves behind a wife and an infant daughter.
→ The market responded to media reports that the United States was close to completing a revival of the nuclear deal with Iran on Monday by sending oil prices tumbling, on the prospect that Iranian oil exports of as many as 2.5 million barrels per day would relieve the intense pressure on energy supply chains caused by the disruptions related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Oil prices fell as much as 5% on Monday as Iran’s foreign minister said Iran leaders were set to deliver a “final” proposal to U.S. counterparts in the ongoing negotiations with the White House to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement.
→ So far this year there have been 149 hate crimes perpetrated against Jews in New York City and 51 hate crimes perpetrated against Asians, according to the NYPD, making these the two most targeted minority groups in the city. The uptick in violence has prompted Jews and Asians to come together in a joint defense effort, with the Flatbush Shomrim (Hebrew for “watchers”), a Jewish neighborhood patrol group founded in Brooklyn in 1991, helping to launch the Asian Community Watch. The Flatbush Shomrim, which has 50 members, is guiding the Asian Community Watch in fundraising and recruitment as well as in how to equip team members. “I want to say thank you to the Jewish community because they have a very successful model,” Lina Chen, an Asian American Brooklynite, told CBS news, after starting to work with the Shomrim.
→ In one of its first major moves against the cryptocurrency industry, and following the example of countries like Canada, which have taken similar measures, the Biden administration shut down the website of popular Ethereum mixer Tornado Cash and blacklisted 50 associated accounts suspected of using the site for money laundering. OFAC, the branch of the Treasury that delivered the sanctions, has historically been used to target hostile foreign governments and terrorist organizations—not software.
This is funny because mixers are a tool for avoiding exactly what the Canadian government was able to do in February—that is, track the individual coins donated to the truckers of the Freedom Convoy and punish public exchanges for cashing them out into Canadian dollars. Mixers shuffle a pool of coins until it’s impossible to trace the history of any given coin.
While terms like shut down and blacklist project the necessary image of the government as robust and decisive, many in the cryptocurrency ecosystem find the move to be an assertion of government control over a space designed against just this possibility.
Despite the early efforts of Microsoft-owned hosting service GitHub to erase the source code, copies of the algorithm have gotten out, so anyone who wants to can, in theory, start the mixer website right back up again.
The psychological effect of the shutdown is not inconsiderable and has served to highlight a number of fault lines in the community at large. Some cryptocurrency advocates have smeared mixers as “useless” and “criminal,” while others, including Ethereum Foundation founder Vitalik Buterin, have argued for the virtues of their total anonymity. - Ben Samuels
→ The River Po, which typically runs 400 miles across Italy and which Virgil christened the “king of rivers,” is completely dry, as the country faces unprecedented heat waves and droughts. Munitions from World War II are being found along the Po’s exposed bottom, and boats sit stuck in the dry sand. A third of the country’s crops, officials say, are grown along the river, causing consternation about what this year’s harvest will bring—a worry not reserved to Italy as countries across Europe are seeing similar patterns this summer, with dry rivers now baking in the hot sun.
→ Judge Bruce Reinhart, who approved the FBI search warrant to raid the Mar-a-Lago home of Donald Trump, is now receiving antisemitic death threats, seeing his religious faith questioned on social media by baseball legend Lenny Dykstra, and having his head photoshopped onto the body of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein—an image that was then shared by Brian Kilmeade, a Fox News anchor with almost 700,000 followers. His synagogue was forced to move its Shabbat services to Zoom, and Trump supporters on 4chan are writing, “That is a kike. And a pedophile. He should be tried for treason and executed.” Fueling the conspiracy theories now circulating on 4chan, however, is that, according to The Forward, Reinhart “has had his own history of controversy,” having represented defendants with ties to Epstein soon after he left the U.S. attorney’s office.
→ Tweet of the Day:
Joyce Karam, a senior correspondent for The National, live-tweeted a hostage situation at a bank in Beirut, Lebanon, where a customer came with a gun and cans of gasoline and insisted that the teller give him his money: some $210,000 he had deposited with the bank and then needed to put toward an emergency surgery for his father. Since 2019, Lebanon has been facing a liquidity crisis caused by the country’s long Civil War (1975-1990), its untenable public debt, and a slumping tourism industry and financial sector. This has led banks to limit the withdrawals that clients can make of their own money—a move that has made some customers desperate and angry, including the man Karam describes in her tweet. What followed the armed takeover of the bank, however, played like a Lebanese adaptation of Dog Day Afternoon, with protestors coming to show their support for the man demanding his own life savings, and restaurants sending food to feed him. In the end, the customer got some of his funds out of the bank, but not all he needed for his father’s surgery.
→ Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the United States, reported a $54 million loss for the quarter on Friday—a 7% decrease compared to last year—before announcing a huge round of layoffs that are gutting the company’s more than 200 newspapers. The “necessary but painful reductions to staffing,” as Gannett’s president put it, included the discharge of journalists from dozens of papers nationwide. With veteran journalists—as well as support staff who have worked for the company for decades—getting laid off, the NewsGuild Union argued that “frivolous spending” and CEO compensation should be cut before employees. Last year, the company’s CEO raked in $7.7 million while the median salary was $48,419. The company also just had a $100 million stock buyback program in February—a move that uses revenue from the company to drive up the value of its own stocks, enriching board members and executives.
→ A former guard at Israel’s Gilboa Prison has accused an incarcerated terror suspect of raping her repeatedly and is alleging that prison guards were complicit in the crimes, substantiating rumors that had been circulating since 2018, as well as 2021 testimony from the prison’s warden, that female guards were “pimped out” at Gilboa Prison to keep terror suspects in line. Since the former guard made the accusation last month, more people at Gilboa Prison have come forward with similar accusations. Under police watch on Sunday, the former guard finally confronted the accused and demanded that he reveal which staff at the prison helped him. He denied the accusation and mocked the guard, saying she had initiated sex with him because she was jealous of the attention he gave the other guards. The accuser’s lawyer, meanwhile, who is also representing other women who worked at the prison, claimed the accused “ruled Gilboa Prison, its commanders, officers, and guards, with a firm and unquestionable hand.”
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
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The Great Book Giveaway
By Stu Halpern
The $65 Akkadian dictionary, in hindsight, was a mistake. It was an impulse buy at the Yeshiva University annual book sale 13 years ago, and I ended up using it as many times as you’ve bumped into a Sumerian. So I flipped it into the giveaway pile. The Great Aliyah Book Purge had begun.
Selling our house in New Jersey and sorting through which of our thousands of books would make the cut to be shipped to the Holy Land alongside mattresses, dishes, bikes, baseball bats, and lots and lots of Starbucks Instant Via Iced Coffee packets proved to be an unexpected emotional blender. A librarian’s version of This Is Your Life: Modern Orthodox Edition, the experience led to revisiting prayer books received as bar mitzvah presents as well as a copy of my PhD dissertation. Here were my old Spidey comics and a Chihuly coffee-table book my wife and I picked up after seeing an exhibition of the artist’s work during our honeymoon. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s learned opus on the nature of family found its way next to Leslie Knope’s Parks and Recreation guide to running an efficient bureaucracy. Ian McEwan’s Atonement landed next to Yom Kippur machzorim. Adam Grant’s encouragement to Think Again, Abraham Joshua Heschel’s lyrical meditations on wonder, and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ musings on morality all beckoned for revisiting.
But the shippers were coming, and heartrending choices needed to be made. It quickly became clear that, like the ancient Israelites in the desert, not all would merit safe passage to the Promised Land.
“I’m really proud of you,” my wife said one Friday afternoon while we were packing. “You seem to be doing okay.”
I’d already spent hours and hours trimming a collection that had taken decades to build, and she was eager to ride the momentum. As I piled a collection of academic tomes on the Dead Sea Scrolls on top of The Archive Thief and Marilynne Robinson’s The Death of Adam, she posted to social media that, in that generous spirit of the Passover Haggadah, all who are hungry could come and partake. We would be giving hundreds and hundreds of books away (though not any haggadot—we would actually be taking those).
The dwellers of the Twitterverse, usually found inhabiting a Gotham-like cesspool of put-downs and polarization, united in eagerness to assist. Immediately, there were knocks on the door.
The People of the Book appeared, Elijah-like, out of the whirlwind. They offered the oh-so-somber and serious messages of support usually found in a shiva house, while salivating like kids in a candy store.
“This must be so hard for you. I hope you are holding up okay. By the way, do you have any empty boxes?”
Read the rest here.