What Happened Today: March 7, 2023
Perth Mint dilutes their bullion; Kidnapped citizens returned; Derelict nuclear soldiers
The Big Story
Australia’s Perth Mint, the largest producer of newly mined gold in the world, might have sold nearly $9 billion worth of diluted gold bullion to China after the Shanghai Gold Exchange discovered gold bars from the mint that contained too much silver. According to a new report from Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Perth Mint, which is owned by the Western Australian government, began a three-year campaign starting in 2018 to dilute its bullion with non-gold medals to increase annual profit margins by $620,000. Shanghai Gold Exchange eventually noticed the doped gold during audits, and Perth Mint replaced the faulty bars and shut down the doping program.
What Perth Mint officials failed to share with Shanghai, however, was that their internal investigation estimated that as much as 100 tons of gold delivered to China might have also been below standard, an omission they made out of fear that sharing the internal assessment could damage the company’s reputation.
Opposition lawmakers are now calling for a royal commission to probe the mint; the Shanghai exchange and the Western Australia minister who oversees the mint have not yet commented publicly on the investigation. It’s the latest in a string of scandals for the world-famous mine, though the cost of both repatriating the gold and the damage to its public image makes this the most expensive. “Potentially you’ll get gold buyers in the market going, ‘Can we trust anything coming out of the Perth Mint? Including coins, bullion, anything?’” one gold-mining insider told ABC.
Read More: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-06/perth-mint-gold-doping-china-cover-up-four-corners/102048622
In The Back Pages: ‘In the Basement,’ a Short Story by Isaac Babel
The Rest
→ Two of the four Americans who were abducted after crossing the Mexican border on Friday for what had been a trip for a cosmetic surgery were ultimately killed during the shootout between rival cartel gangs that led to their kidnapping, officials said Tuesday. The remaining two survivors were escorted by the Mexican military and U.S. National Guard back onto U.S. soil, where they are now being treated for injuries. It remains unclear if the bodies of the deceased will be returned to the United States. “Those responsible will be found, and they are going to be punished,” Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said during a news conference, though he added that the American media was sensationalizing the incident. “It’s not like that when they kill Mexicans in the United States. They go quiet like mummies.”
→ Are we in the middle of a work-from-home baby boom? It’s possible, says researchers Lyman Stone and Adam Ozimek, whose new study found that 2022’s bump to the U.S. fertility rate could be attributed to the flexibility and reduced commutes of parents who worked from home. For decades, the U.S. fertility rate has declined, and while the 2021 total of 3.66 million births beat out the year prior by half a million, it’s still a far cry from the totals of 4 million or more a decade prior. Still, the survey of 3,000 American women found that those working remotely not only were more likely to be married in the next year compared to their in-office counterparts but also were having more babies—especially women who were wealthy or educated. The boom, the researchers said, wasn’t directly attributed to remote work but to the way it allowed mothers to “balance the competing demands of work and family.”
Read More: https://eig.org/remote-work-family-formation/
→ According to a new National Customer Rage Survey conducted with Arizona State University researchers, the number of buyers who take to social media to complain about a faulty or problematic product or service has doubled since 2020, with 32% of Americans now airing their grievances online. The number of consumers who take it one step further—repeatedly trying to publicly shame a company or company representative online because of a bad purchase—has tripled since 2020, with 9% of Americans now getting in on the online pestering. The uptick in online rage is driven in part by buyers having more problems with their purchases—74% had a problem over the past year compared to 32% when the study began in 1976—and in part because of how easy it is to badger companies on social media.
→ Homeland Security set May 11 as the expiration date for its border requirement that foreign visitors have a COVID-19 vaccine before entry. It seems that plan has no wiggle room, at least for world No. 1 men’s tennis player Novak Djokovic, who has withdrawn from the upcoming Indian Wells Masters tournament after the U.S. agency denied his request for a vaccine waiver. The U.S. Travel Association, a trade industry group, said Djokovic is one of millions of tourists and visitors ensnared in “America’s outdated vaccine policy for international visitors, [which] is an unforced error that is contributing to an $80 billion loss in foreign traveler spending.” Djokovic could miss an upcoming tournament in Miami as well but should be eligible to compete in August at the U.S. Open. The border policy kept him out of Flushing Meadows last year, opening the door for Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz’s breakthrough Grand Slam victory.
→ A new transformational gene therapy has for the first time cured the terminal condition known as metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD): A 19-month-old girl in England named Teddi Shaw received the treatment and now shows no sign of the disease.
The medication known as Libmeldy is the most expensive prescription in the world, at $3 million, which some critics say is too high given its unproven track record. The CEO of Orchard Therapeutics, the drug manufacturer, sees it as competitive given the research cost and how much a decade of typical MLD standard care can run per patient.
How does it work? Faulty genes in the patient’s stem cell are removed and made functional after they’re treated with the drug. The working genes are then inserted back into the patient’s bone marrow.
As MLD is fatal for almost all children who have it, the new drug “is a huge moment of hope for parents and their babies born with this devastating inherited disorder, that can now be treated with a single round of revolutionary treatment,” said Amanda Pritchard, CEO of NHS England.
→ Management at a North Dakota nuclear missile base has dismissed six Air Force officers, including two commanders from their critical command posts, after an inspection led to a loss of confidence in the officers’ abilities. Tasked with fuel, logistics, and infrastructure maintenance of the facilities, the officers were dismissed partly due to a recent hard turn toward stricter discipline for the Air Force after a spate of safety controversies, including a scandal of cheating on inspections at a base in Montana and an LSD drug ring operating on a base in Wyoming. “We have very deliberate and disciplined inspection protocols, and we expect 100% compliance,” Air Force Col. Brus Vidal said about the North Dakota inspection. “It’s that important to us, and anything below that threshold is unacceptable.”
→ Video of the Day:
The drivers might not like it, but among the hundreds of wild elephants in Thailand’s Khao Ang Rue Nai Wildlife Sanctuary, older elephants are teaching younger ones that trucks are required to stop for them and can sometimes be carrying treats like sugar cane. “The elephants know very well how to stop the passing cars to get food, even if they are not given permission from the drivers,” said ranger Amnouy Artchula.
→ Marianne Williamson, an early breakout star of the 2020 presidential debate cycle before low poll numbers crashed her campaign, has become the first Democratic candidate to enter the 2024 presidential race. But she was all but dismissed as a new-age nuisance by the White House on Monday after Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told a reporter the White House wasn’t “annoyed” or “frustrated” that a candidate came out before President Biden. “Just not tracking that,” she said, adding that if she just had “a crystal ball, a Magic 8 ball, whatever. If I could feel her aura,” she said to laughter, before telling the reporter she wasn’t going to comment further. Aiming to elevate concerns about the struggling working class in 2024, Williamson said she has “no interest in taking personal potshots” at the White House, even if it’s willing to speak “so derisively and in such mocking terms about someone who is running for president.”
→ You know the local media ecosystem is in bad shape when even lawmakers lament the lack of reporters holding them to account. After NJ Advance Media’s latest round of layoffs included the dismissal of Jonathan Salant, the last Washington, D.C., correspondent reporting in the nation’s capital for Newark’s The Star-Ledger, 12 New Jersey congressional delegates wrote a letter to the publisher that the decision will “leave millions of New Jerseyans with no firsthand access to the issues being debated in Congress.” NJ Advance Media says its readers can get the national coverage from other outlets while it focuses on the local stuff not in the Associated Press, furthering a trend that Pew first noted in 2014 when perennial media layoffs left 21 states with no local reporters on the ground of Capitol Hill.
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Flavors of Netivot by Dana Kessler
Once an absorption center for North African immigrants, this city in southern Israel has developed a culinary scene that draws on its past, but with the occasional new twist
How U.S. Ambassador Tom Nides Became Israel’s Arsonist-in-Chief by Michael Doran
The U.S.-backed anti-judicial reform protests in Israel are being shaped by the intersection of two crises, one in U.S. Iran policy and the other resulting from the rise to power of religious communities in Israel
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
‘In the Basement,’ a Short Story by Isaac Babel
A new English translation for Purim
By Maxim D. Shrayer
In my boyhood, I was prone to lying. This resulted from reading. My imagination was always inflamed. I read during lessons, on breaks, on the way home, at night—under the table, disguising myself behind a drooping table cloth. Over the book, I missed out on all the affairs of this world. I didn’t ditch lessons and run off to the seaport, or observe the start of the billiards game in the coffee houses of Greek Street, or go swimming at Langeron beach. I had no companions. Who would care to associate with such a person? ...
Once, in the hands of our top student, Mark Borgman, I saw a book about about Spinoza. He’d just finished reading it and couldn’t resist telling the boys who surrounded him about the Spanish Inquisition. It was all educated mumble, what he was saying. There was no poetry in Borgman’s words. I couldn’t help butting in. I told those who were willing to listen about old Amsterdam, dusk over the ghetto, and also about the philosophers—the polishers of diamonds. I added much to what I’d read in books; I just couldn’t do without embellishment. My imagination enhanced the dramatic scenes, rearranged the endings, tied the beginnings into knots of mystery. In my imagination, Spinoza’s death, his free, lonely death, appeared as a battle. The synedrion tried to coerce the dying Spinoza into repenting, but he didn’t give in. I also managed to weave Rubens into this fabrication. I imagined that Rubens stood at the head of Spinoza’s bed and executed his death mask.
Mouths agape, my classmates listened to this fantastical tale. I told it with a great deal of feeling. The bell rang, and we reluctantly scattered to our classrooms. At the next break, Borgman came up to me, threaded his arm through mine, and we started strolling together. Very soon we discovered lots to talk about. Borgman didn’t embody the vile variety of the top student. To his powerful brain, the scholastic wisdom of what we were taught was but chicken scratch in the margins of the real book. He thirstily sought after that book. Twelve-year-old halfwits, we knew already that Borgman was cut out for a life of learning, an extraordinary life. He actually never studied, but only listened to the lessons. This sober and reserved boy became attached to me because of my knack for transposing all things in the world, even things so simple that they just couldn’t be made up.
That year we had finished sixth grade. My grade sheet was piled up with C-minuses. With all my gibberish I was so strange that the teachers, after some reflection, couldn’t find it in themselves to give me Ds. At the start of the summer, Borgman invited me to his villa. His father was the director of the Russian Bank for Foreign Trade. He was one of the people who were making Odessa into a Marseille or a Naples. With his vintage of a classic Odessan merchant, he belonged to the set of skeptical and courteous bon vivants. Borgman’s father avoided the use of the Russian language; he employed the rough-hewn, choppy language of the sea captains from Liverpool. When in April the Italian opera came to town, a dinner for the troupe was held at the Borgmans’ apartment. The bloated banker—this last of the grand Odessan merchants—got himself embroiled in a little affair of the heart with a chesty prima donna. She carried back memories that didn’t burden her conscience and a collar necklace that was chosen with taste yet didn’t cost too much.
The old man was engaged as the Argentinian consul and the president of the stock exchange committee. And I was now invited to visit his home. My aunt—her name was Bobka—had made sure our entire courtyard heard about it. She dressed me up the best she could. I took the steam tram to the 16th station of the Big Fountain. The villa stood atop a small red cliff by the shore. On the cliff there was also a cultivated garden with fuchsia and manicured balls of eastern arborvitae.
I came from a penniless and senseless family. The atmosphere of the Borgman villa affected me deeply. In the alleys, concealed by verdure, wicker armchairs showed white. The dinner table was covered in with flowers, the windows adorned with green shutters. A wooden colonnade, spacious and not too tall, stood in front of the house.
In the evening, the bank director arrived. After dinner he placed a wicker armchair by the edge of the cliff, facing the seething plain of the sea, put up his legs clad in white trousers, lit a cigar, and started reading The Manchester Guardian. The guests, Odessan ladies, played poker on the veranda. A samovar with ebony handles puffed in the corner of the table.
Card sharks and gourmands, untidy fashion plates and secret adulteresses with perfumed lingerie and pear-shaped bodies, these women flopped their black fans and bet five-ruble gold coins. Pushing through the fence of wild grapes, the sun clung to them. Its fiery nimbus was immense. Copper reflections weighed down the women’s black hair. Sparks of the sunset pierced their diamonds—the diamonds that were nestled everywhere: in the clefts of their outpouring breasts, in their touched-up ears, in their blueish, distended matronly fingers.
The evening came. A bat rustled by. The sea, turning blacker, rolled over the red cliff. My 12-year-old heart puffed up from the joy and lightness of other people’s wealth. Holding hands, my friend and I sauntered in a distant alley. Borgman told me he was going to be an aviation engineer. It was rumored that his father was to be sent to London as the envoy of the Russian Bank for Foreign Trade, and Mark would get an education in England.
In our house, the house of Aunt Bobka, no one talked about such things. I had nothing with which to repay Mark for all that unending splendor. It was then I told him, that even though things were very different in our house, both my grandfather Levi-Yitzchok and my uncle had circled the whole world and experienced thousands of adventures. I described those adventures in order. The sense of the impossible instantly deserted me, and I led Uncle Wolf through the Russo-Turkish War—all the way to Alexandria, to Egypt …
The night straightened the backs of poplars; the stars leaned heavily on bending branches. I spoke as I flailed my arms. The fingers of the future aviation engineer fluttered in my hand. With difficulty he awakened from the hallucinations, and then he promised to visit me the following Sunday. Having secured this promise, I took the little steam tram back home to Bobka.
For the whole week that followed I had visions of myself as a bank director. I transacted millions with Singapore and Port Said. I acquired a yacht and traveled in it all by myself. On Saturday it was time to awaken. The following day little Borgman was coming over for a visit. None of what I had told him ever existed. And that which existed was so much more wondrous than what I had made up, but at the age of 12 I had no idea what to do with the truth in this world. To our neighbors and local street urchins, Grandfather Levi-Yitzchok, a rabbi who had been expelled from his shtetl because he had forged the signature of Count Branicki on IOUs, was a madman. And I couldn’t stand Uncle Simon-Wolf for his shenanigans chock-full of pointless fire, screaming, and abuse. Only with Bobka could I get along. Bobka was very proud that the son of a bank director was friendly with me. She regarded this acquaintance as the start of a career and baked a strudel with jam and a poppy seed cake for our guest. The whole heart of our tribe, a heart so good at powering through times of struggle, lived in those desserts. We put away Grandfather—torn top hat and rags on swollen feet—at the house of our neighbors the Apelchots, and I begged him not to show his face until the guest had already left. Things also worked out with Simon-Wolf. In the company of his horse-trading pals he went to drink tea at The Bear. In this tavern they guzzled down vodka with tea, and one could expect Simon-Wolf to stay there for a while. Here I must add that the family I come from was unlike other Jewish families. We had drunks in our lineage, and also those who seduced the daughters of generals and then abandoned them before having reached the state border, and our own grandfather forged signatures and composed blackmail commissioned by abandoned wives.
All my efforts went into deflecting Simon-Wolf for the entire day. I gave him three rubles I had saved. To spend three rubles … this takes some time, and so Simon-Wolf wouldn’t be back until late, and the son of the bank director would never know that the tale about my uncle’s kindness and prowess was full of lies. To be very honest, if I only thought with my heart, it was actually all true and not a lie, yet at the first glance at the dirty and loud Simon-Wolf, one just couldn’t figure out this incomprehensible truth.
On Sunday morning Bobka put on her brown satin dress. Her fat, benevolent breasts were hanging all over the place. She put on a headscarf with black incised flowers, of the sort they wear to synagogue on Atonement Day and Rosh Hashanah. Bobka set the table with the cakes, jam, and pretzels and started waiting. We lived in the basement. Borgman raised his eyebrows as he traipsed on the corridor’s hunchbacked floor. In the entryway, there was a wooden tub with water. As soon as Borgman came in, I bombarded him with a display of all sorts of curious objects. There was an alarm clock Grandfather had made by hand, down to its last little screw. Attached to the alarm clock was a lamp; when the alarm clock counted off the half hour or the hour, the lamp light came on. I also demonstrated a little vat with blacking. The formula for the blacking was Levi-Yitzchok’s invention, and he didn’t reveal it to anybody. Later Borgman and I read a few pages from Grandfather’s manuscript. He wrote in Jewish, on yellow square sheets each the size of a geographical map. The manuscript was called A Man Without a Head. Described in it were all of Levi-Yitzchok’s neighbors from the 70 years of his life—first in Skver and Belaya Tserkov, then in Odessa. Coffin makers, cantors, Jewish drunks, women who cooked for bris ceremonies and fraudsters who performed the ritual circumcision—all of them were among Levi-Yitzchok’s heroes. They were cantankerous folks, tongue-tied, with bulbous noses, pimples on the crowns of their heads, and slanted behinds.
As we were reading, Bobka made her appearance in the brown dress. Padded on all sides with her fat, benevolent breasts, she sailed in with a samovar on the tray. I introduced them. Bobka said: “Nice to meet you,” extended her perspiring, immobile fingers and clicked both her heels. Everything was going well, exceptionally well. The Apelchots weren’t releasing Grandfather. One by one, I hauled out his treasures: grammars of all sorts of languages and 66 volumes of the Talmud. The vat of blacking, the miraculous alarm clock, and the mountain of Talmud dazzled Mark; one couldn’t have seen all of these things in any other home.
Each of us drank two glasses of tea with the strudel, and Bobka, nodding her head, disappeared. Overcome by an elation of spirit, I struck a pose and began to recite the stanzas I loved more than anything in the world. Anthony, bowing before Caesar’s corpse, addresses the people of Rome:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.
Thus Anthony begins his game. I lost my breath and pressed my arms to my chest.
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man …
Before my eyes—amid the smoke of the universe—hovered the face of Brutus. It became whiter than chalk. Brooding, the people of Rome charged at me. I raised my arm—Borgman’s pliant eyes followed it—my clenched fist trembled … I raised my arm and saw in the window that Uncle Simon-Wolf was traversing the courtyard in the company of the trader Lekach. They were dragging a coat hanger made of deer antlers and a redwood trunk chest with padlocks that looked like lion heads. Bobka also saw them through the window. Forgetting all about our guest, she flew into the room and grabbed me with her shaking hands.
“O dear heart, he bought furniture again ...”
Borgman, dressed in his neat school uniform, jumped up in his chair and bowed to Bobka in bewilderment.
They were noisily opening the door. The roar of jackboots and the rumble of the trunk chest resounded through the corridor. The voices of Simon-Wolf and red-headed Lekach drowned out everything. Both of them were merrily under the influence.
“Bobka,” screamed Simon-Wolf. “Try to guess how much I paid for these antlers?”
He screamed like a giant trumpet, and yet there was fragility in his voice. Drunk though he was, Simon-Wolf knew how much we hated red-headed Lekach, who incited him to all sorts of purchases and deluged us with needless, purposeless furniture.
Bobka was silent. Lekach squeaked something to Simon-Wolf. To mute his snakelike hissing, I now screamed in the words of Anthony:
But yesterday the word of Caesar might
Have stood against the world; now lies he there.
And none so poor to do him reverence.
O masters, if I were disposed to stir
Your hearts and minds to mutiny and rage,
I should do Brutus wrong, and Cassius wrong,
Who, you all know, are honourable men …
At this point we heard a thud. That was Bobka who fell, knocked off her feet by her husband. She probably made some kind of a bitter comment about the deer antlers. The daily performance began. Simon-Wolf’s copper voice was plugging up all the crevices of the universe.
“All of you here pull glue out of me,” my uncle thundered. “You pull glue out of me to stuff your dog mouths shut … Work has beat the soul out of me. I have nothing to work with, I have no hands, I have no legs … You’ve put a stone around my neck, a stone hangs on my neck …”
Cursing me and Bobka with Jewish curses, he promised us that our eyes would leak out, that still inside the maternal womb our children would start to rot and decompose, that we would be racing to bury one another and they would drag us by the hair into a pauper’s grave.
Little Borgman got up from his seat. He was pale and kept turning around. He couldn’t comprehend the twists and turns of the Jewish blasphemies, nor was he acquainted with the mat of the Russian obscenities, which Simon-Wolf wasn’t too squeamish to use. The son of the bank director mashed his little peaked cap. He kept doubling in my eyes, and I ventured to scream louder than all the evil in the world. My near-death despair and the carried-out murder of Caesar have merged into one. I was dead, and I screamed. Wheezing ascended from the very bottom of my being:
If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.
You all do know this mantle: I remember
The first time ever Caesar put it on;
’Twas on a summer’s evening, in his tent,
That day he overcame the Nervii:
Look, in this place ran Cassius’ dagger through:
See what a rent the envious Casca made:
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabb’d;
And as he pluck’d his cursed steel away,
Mark how the blood of Caesar follow’d it,
As rushing out of doors …
Yet nothing in the world could drown out Simon-Wolf. Sitting on the floor, Bobka kept whimpering and blowing out her nose. Behind the partition, unperturbed, Lekach kept moving the chest trunk. At this point, my madcap grandfather decided to come to my rescue. He released himself from the Apelchots, crawled up to the window and started sawing on the violin, perhaps so the passersby wouldn’t be able to hear Simon-Wolf’s swearing. Turning his gaze to the window that was cut out at the ground level, Borgman retreated in horror. My poor grandfather’s blue ossified mouth made grimaces. He was clad in a bent-up top hat, a black cotton mantle with shell buttons, and ragged cuff-off boots on his elephant feet. His tobacco-stained beard hung in shreds, fluttering in the wind. Mark was making his escape. “That’s nothing,” he muttered, breaking free, “nothing at all…” His neat little uniform and peaked cap with a folded-up brim flashed across the courtyard.
My anxiety subsided after Mark’s departure. I was waiting for the evening to come. After Grandfather, having filled an entire square sheet with the Jewish hooklets (he described the Apelchots, with whom he had spent the entire day), stretched out on his cot and fell asleep, I emerged into the corridor. The floor was earthen. I moved in the darkness, barefoot, in a long and patched-up night shirt. Through the chinks in the boards, cobblestones flickered with pointy flares of light. As usual, a wooden tub of water stood in the corner. I lowered myself into it. The water cut me in half. I submerged my head, choked, popped up. From the shelf above, a cat looked at me with sleepy eyes. The second time I was able to stay longer; the water squelched around me, my moans disappearing into it. I opened my eyes, and at the bottom of the tub I saw the sail of my long night shirt and my legs pressed tight to one another. Again I ran out of strength and popped up. Beside the tub stood my grandfather in a robe. His only tooth vibrated.
“Grandson mine,” he articulated his words with contempt and clarity. “I’m going to take castor oil, so I would have something to bring to your grave …”
I screamed with abandon and threw myself into the water. Grandfather’s feeble hand pulled me out. It was then I cried for the first time since the start of the day, and the world of tears was so immense and beautiful that everything except the tears disappeared from my eyes.
I came to already in bed, wrapped in blankets. Grandfather paced the room and whistled. Fat Bobka warmed my hands on her chest.
“How he trembles, our little fool,” Bobka said. “And where does the child find the strength to tremble so? …”
Grandfather tugged on his beard, whistled and continued shuffling. Behind the wall, Simon-Wolf snored, exhaling up a torment. After fighting his fill during the day, he never woke up during the night.
–1929.