It has been a strange couple of weeks here in Massachusetts. I don’t usually write much about local news; I hope you won’t mind me doing so today.
Last week we had a heat wave with temps in the high 90s and even hitting 100 last Wednesday. Hours later, intense thunderstorms blew through, taking down trees and knocking out power for thousands of households; and the temperatures dropped into the 60s. Rain has continued for days and yesterday and today temperatures have been in the 50s!
And it wasn’t just the weather. We had two apparent hate crimes
Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins, who identified the suspected gunman as 28-year-old Nathan Allen, said during a press conference on Sunday that investigators found “antisemitic and racist statements against Black individuals.”
“There was hate in this man’s heart,” she told reporters Monday.
Allen was killed by police officers on Saturday afternoon shortly after stealing a plumber’s truck, crashing it into a house and shooting two Black bystanders multiple times in Winthrop, just outside Boston, according to Winthrop Police Chief Terence Delehanty.
The slain bystanders, who were both Black, were identified as David Green, 58, a retired Massachusetts State Police officer; and Ramona Cooper, 60, an Air Force veteran who still worked with the military, according to Rollins. Allen shot Green four times in the head and three in the torso, and Cooper three times in the back.
“He walked by several people that were not Black and they are alive. They were not harmed,” she said. “They are alive and these two visible people of color are not.”
Rabbi Shlomo Noginski of the Shaloh House, who was stabbed in Boston’s Brighton neighborhood Thursday, used judo training to divert the violent attack out of sight from children, according to his colleague.
“The stabbing happened right here, where you stand,” said Rabbi Dan Rodkin, executive director of the Shaloh House, a Chabad center that runs a school, camp and more. He was speaking to a swath of elected officials, Jewish leaders and community members who gathered in a show of support Friday in Brighton Common, the scene of the stabbing.
Noginski was stabbed eight times in the arm and shoulder just outside of the Jewish Day School on Chestnut Hill Avenue Thursday afternoon. His accused attacker, Khaled Awad, appeared in court Friday, where prosecutors said that the incident began with Awad holding a gun and demanding that Noginski give him the keys to a van.
Police were investigating whether the attack was a hate crime, though many of the speakers at the vigil argued the stabbing was an act of hate.
Noginski’s wife told NBC10 Boston he remained very weak but was happy to be out of the hospital and was looking forward to getting back to work as soon as possible.
A black belt in judo, Noginski used his expertise to defend himself and save children from the traumatic event, Rodkin said. The school told parents that it went into lockdown, but all the children were safe.
“We are here to send a message to everyone — that we, Boston, are not going to sit back,” Rodkin said. “We will fight back. We will bring goodness to the world. We’ll make sure that we will become better people and we will send a strong message — that evil has no place in America.”
Today we saw another unusual event in our state. There was an armed standoff just north of me in Wakefield, MA early this morning. State police were forced to shut down a stretch of I-95 and people in the town were told to shelter in place. This story actually hit the top of Memeorandum this morning.
Massachusetts state police said nine suspects have been taken into custody following an hourslong standoff that prompted the partial closure of Interstate 95….
The standoff shut down a portion of I-95 for much of the morning, causing major traffic problems during the Fourth of July holiday weekend.
Authorities said the southbound interstate reopened, but northbound lanes remain closed.
In Massachusetts, Interstate 95 runs from the Rhode Island line, around Boston to the New Hampshire line. Wakefield is just east of where Interstate 95 and 93 meet north of Boston.
The standoff began around 2 a.m. when police noticed two cars pulled over on I-95 with hazard lights on after they had apparently run out of fuel, authorities said at a Saturday press briefing.
Between eight to 10 men were clad in military-style gear with long guns and pistols, Mass State Police Col. Christopher Mason said. He added that they were headed to Maine from Rhode Island for “training.”
The men refused to put down their weapons or comply with authorities’ orders, claiming to be from a group “that does not recognize our laws” before taking off into a wooded area, police said.
The bizarre incident played out Saturday morning after a state trooper saw a group of eight to 10 men in military-style uniforms refueling their vehicle on the side of 1-95 around 1:30 a.m. in Wakefield, about 10 miles north of Boston.
The men — who carried tactical gear like body cameras and helmets and had long guns slung over their shoulders — told the trooper they were on their way to Maine from Rhode Island for “training.”
During the traffic stop, two arrests were made. The rest of the group, identifying themselves as “Moorish American Arms,” fled into a wooded area. All were detained by 10:45 a.m. local time, police said….
Massachusetts officials said the group claimed it “does not recognize our laws.” ABC News is asking federal officials whether or not this group is known for extremism.
The Southern Poverty Law Center identifies the Moorish sovereign citizen movement as “collection of independent organizations and lone individuals” that “espouse an interpretation of sovereign doctrine that African Americans constitute an elite class within American society with special rights and privileges that convey on them a sovereign immunity placing them beyond federal and state authority.” [….]
“Members of the Moorish sovereigns, called Moors, have come into conflict with federal and state authorities over their refusal to obey laws and government regulations. Recently, Moorish sovereign citizens have engaged in violent confrontations with law enforcement,” according to the SPLC.
On Wednesday, two dozen House Republicans flocked to Texas to show their support for Donald Trump. They joined the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, in applauding the former president as he toured the border, denounced the U.S. government, and repeated the lie that he had been removed from office illegally. “Biden is destroying our country, and it all started with a fake election,” Trump declared as the lawmakers looked on in silence or approval. He accused the United States of “phony elections,” called it a “sick country,” and bragged that as president, he had seized military funds—against the will of Congress, and in defiance of the Constitution—to fund his border wall.
Two Cats Playing, by Tsuguharu Foujita
For many Americans, Trump’s disappearance from Facebook, Twitter, and the mainstream media has left the impression that he has gone away. That impression is false and dangerous. Trump has tightened his grip on the GOP, and he has escalated his campaign to undermine American institutions. His authoritarian movement is a direct challenge not just to President Joe Biden but to the larger alliance of democracies. The fundamental political conflict in our country is no longer between Democrats and Republicans. It’s between people who believe in a democratic republic and people who don’t….
The authoritarian menace extends into our country. In his inaugural address, Biden noted that he was taking office “just days after a riotous mob thought they could use violence to silence the will of the people, to stop the work of our democracy.” He described his inauguration, in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection, as “the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause: the cause of democracy.” A month later, in a conference with European allies, Biden implicitly connected Putin’s propaganda to Trump’s attacks on NATO and the American electoral system. “Russian leaders want people to think that our system is more corrupt or as corrupt as theirs,” said Biden.
Trump is working to spread that message of American corruption and to destabilize the U.S. government. In rallies, interviews, and emails to his supporters, the former president rejects the 2020 election as “fake,” a “hoax,” and a “crime.” He calls Biden’s government “illegitimate” and “unconstitutionally elected.” In May, he said his supporters were right to call him “the true President,” and he essentially demanded to be restored to office, arguing, “If a thief robs a jewelry store of all of its diamonds (the 2020 Presidential Election), the diamonds must be returned.” Republican leaders, far from repudiating Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack, blocked his conviction in a Senate trial, thwarted a proposed commission to investigate the attack, and reaffirmed their allegiance to him. On Thursday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was asked twice whether Trump was “accountable in some way” for “the events leading up to Jan. 6.” McCarthy refused to answer.
Please read the rest at the link. It’s frightening, but true. Yesterday the Arizona Republic broke the news (behind a paywall) that Trump tried to overturn election results in the state–like he did in Georgia. The New York Times: Trump Is Said to Have Called Arizona Official After Election Loss.
President Donald J. Trump twice sought to talk on the phone with the Republican leader of Arizona’s most populous county last winter as the Trump campaign and its allies tried unsuccessfully to reverse Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s narrow victory in the state’s presidential contest, according to the Republican official and records obtained by The Arizona Republic, a Phoenix newspaper.
Two Cats, by Wendy Webber
But the leader, Clint Hickman, then the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, said in an interview on Friday that he let the calls — made in late December and early January — go to voice mail and did not return them. “I told people, ‘Please don’t have the president call me,’” he said….
The Arizona Republic obtained the records of the phone calls from Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani after a Freedom of Information Act request.
The Arizona Republic reported that the calls came as the state Republican chairwoman, Kelli Ward, sought to connect Mr. Hickman and other county officials to Mr. Trump and his allies so they could discuss purported irregularities in the county’s election.
Ms. Ward first told Mr. Hickman on Nov. 13, the day after the Maricopa vote count sealed Mr. Biden’s victory in Arizona, that the president would probably call him. But the first call did not come until New Year’s Eve, when Mr. Hickman said the White House operator dialed him as he was dining with his wife.
Mr. Hickman said the switchboard operator left a voice mail message saying Mr. Trump wished to speak with him and asking him to call back. He didn’t….
Four nights later, the White House switchboard operator called Mr. Hickman again, he said. By then, Mr. Hickman recalled, he had read a transcript of Mr. Trump’s call with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state whom Mr. Trump pressured to “find more votes” to reverse his defeat in the state.
“I had seen what occurred in Georgia and I was like, ‘I want no part of this madness and the only way I enter into this is I call the president back,’” Mr. Hickman said.
If the facts alleged in yesterday’s indictment are true, the Trump Organization and its longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, have engaged in blatant tax evasion for more than a decade.
Early reports characterized the crime in question as involving “fringe benefits.” This gives entirely the wrong impression. The Trump Organization and Weisselberg aren’t being charged with tripping over some hyper-technical provision on the margins of the tax system. They are being charged with blatantly violating basic tax-law requirements—and bilking New York State and New York City out of hundreds of thousands of dollars along the way.
Two Cats, by Tony Woods
Probably the strongest allegation relates to an apartment on Riverside Boulevard in Manhattan where Weisselberg lives with his wife. According to the indictment, the Trump Corporation—one of the Trump Organization’s many business entities—paid roughly $100,000 a year in rent, utility bills, and garage expenses for this apartment starting in 2005. The Trump Corporation allegedly didn’t report those payments as compensation on Weisselberg’s W-2 forms, and Weisselberg allegedly didn’t include those amounts in income on his own tax returns.
But the Trump Organization did, according to the indictment, maintain a separate set of books that accounted for the payments as part of Weisselberg’s compensation. Notably, when the Trump Corporation paid Weisselberg’s rent, according to the indictment, the Trump Organization reduced Weisselberg’s salary by a corresponding amount. (Both Weisselberg and the Trump Organization pleaded not guilty yesterday.)
One can describe this as a “fringe benefit”—a tax-law term for any payment for services that is not part of stated compensation—but it’s also plain old tax fraud. Under federal and New York State tax law, lodging provided by an employer to an employee is part of the employee’s gross income. There are limited exceptions to this rule—for example, if the employee is required to live on the employer’s business premises as part of the job, or if the employer is a religious institution and the employee is a clergy member. But Weisselberg wasn’t living on Trump Organization premises because of some business need (and Trumpism is only metaphorically a religion). And if the Trump Organization was keeping a separate set of books recording compensation that it didn’t report to tax authorities, then this was no unintentional oversight.
Read more at The Atlantic. I don’t dare to get my hopes up at this point, but I’m watching and waiting. Maybe this time Trump will actually pay a real price for his behavior.
I hope you all are having a nice Fourth of July weekend. Remember the Delta variant is out there and fully vaccinated people have caught it–so stay safe and wear a mask if you’re around a lot of people indoors. I worry about all the folks who will crowded together even outdoors watching fireworks displays.
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This morning, Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg turned himself in to prosecutors in Manhattan.
Breaking News: Allen Weisselberg, a top executive at the Trump Organization, surrendered to the Manhattan district attorney’s office to face charges, officials said. https://t.co/7MmwhW22LE
Donald J. Trump’s long-serving chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, surrendered on Thursday to the Manhattan district attorney’s office as he and the Trump Organization prepared to face charges in connection with a tax investigation, people with knowledge of the matter said.
The exact charges were not yet known. Prosecutors were expected to unseal an indictment later in the day against Mr. Weisselberg and the Trump Organization, the real estate business that catapulted Mr. Trump to tabloid fame, television riches and ultimately, the White House.
Mr. Weisselberg, accompanied by his lawyer, Mary E. Mulligan, walked into the Lower Manhattan building that houses the criminal courts and the district attorney’s office about 6:20 a.m. He is expected to appear in court in the afternoon along with representatives of the Trump Organization.
The charges against the Trump Organization and Mr. Weisselberg — whom Mr. Trump once praised for doing “whatever was necessary to protect the bottom line” — emerged from the district attorney’s sweeping inquiry into the business practices of Mr. Trump and his company.
As part of that inquiry, the prosecutors in the office of the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., had been examining whether Mr. Weisselberg failed to pay taxes on valuable benefits he and his family received from Mr. Trump, including private school tuition for at least one of his grandchildren, free apartments and leased cars.
The prosecutors, who are also working with lawyers from the office of the New York State attorney general, Letitia James, have also investigated whether the Trump Organization failed to pay payroll taxes on what should have been taxable income.
The specific indictments will remain sealed until after 2PM today, when we will learn more about the charges against the company and Weisselberg. More information from The Washington Post:
Weisselberg arrived at the Manhattan criminal courthouse through an employee entrance at about 6:20 a.m., according to journalists who saw him arrive. His attorney, Mary E. Mulligan, confirmed the surrender in a text to The Washington Post.
“Mr. Weisselberg intends to plead not guilty and he will fight these charges in court,” Mulligan said in a statement sent on behalf of Weisselberg from herself and co-counsel Bryan C. Skarlatos….
Although the indictments could pose trouble for Trump, exposing his company to potential fines and intensifying pressure on Weisselberg, neither the former president nor anyone else in his firm is expected to face charges this week. Prosecutors hope Weisselberg will offer testimony against Trump in exchange for lessening his own legal risk, according to a person familiar with the case.
From left, Jennifer, Barry, Erica, Jack, Hilary and Allen Weisselberg are pictured at the inauguration of President Donald Trump in 2017.
Weisselberg, who has worked for Trump since the 1980s, is considered the most important figure in the Trump Organization apart from Trump family members. The Washington Post has previously reported that Weisselberg was a key figure in the investigations by Vance and James. Both have scrutinized whether Trump misled lenders or tax authorities, or evaded taxes on forgiven debts or fringe benefits for employees, according to court papers and people familiar with the cases.
In recent months, both sets of investigators have spoken to Jennifer Weisselberg, the chief financial officer’s former daughter-in-law, who said that Weisselberg’s son Barry had been given a free apartment and a hefty salary while he worked at the Trump Organization’s Central Park ice rink. Prosecutors were looking into whether taxes were paid on the benefits, people close to the investigation said.
The now-merged investigations of Trump’s company appear to be the longest-lasting and most extensive prosecutorial examination ever undertaken of the Trump Organization.
Interviews with 18 current and former associates of Mr. Weisselberg, as well as a review of legal filings, financial records and other documents, paint a portrait of a man whose unflinching devotion to Mr. Trump will now be put to the test.
“Allen is a soldier,” said John Burke, a former Trump executive who worked with Mr. Weisselberg in the early 1990s. “Allen was good at doing what Donald wanted him to do.”
A bookkeeper by training who grew up in Brooklyn, Mr. Weisselberg rose steadily within the Trump Organization to become perhaps the former president’s most trusted business adviser. Over decades, Mr. Weisselberg’s personal and family life became increasingly fused with the company and with Mr. Trump, who is just 14 months older.
After raising his sons on Long Island, Mr. Weisselberg and his wife moved into a Trump-branded building on Manhattan’s West Side, where they lived rent-free for years. He bought a home in South Florida, not far from Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, and traveled there and back on weekends on Mr. Trump’s jet. His older son, Barry, went to work for the company managing Wollman Rink in Central Park and acted as the D.J. for Mr. Trump’s Christmas parties, where Allen Weisselberg let loose on the dance floor, according to people who attended. In 2004, Mr. Weisselberg appeared in an episode of “The Apprentice,” Mr. Trump’s reality television show.
“They are like Batman and Robin,” said Barry Weisselberg’s ex-wife, Jennifer, who has aided Mr. Vance’s investigation after a contentious divorce. “They’re a team. They’re not best friends. They don’t spend all their time together, but the world became so insular for Allen that he did not know anything else.”
Mr. Weisselberg had become so woven into the fabric of the Trump Organization that when Mr. Trump moved into the White House in 2017, he entrusted Mr. Weisselberg, along with the former president’s adult sons, with running his company. His earnings reflected his importance: Between 2007 and 2017, his total pay averaged nearly $800,000 a year; in 2018, he earned more than $977,000 in salary and deferred compensation, according to tax return data obtained by The Times as part of an investigation published last year.
In other news, yesterday the House voted to form a committee to investigate the January 6 Capitol attack.
JUST IN: House approves the formation of a select committee to investigate the January 6 Capitol insurrection https://t.co/pAVEg1bwSS
The House voted Wednesday to create a new select committee that will investigate the deadly January 6 attack on the US Capitol, in a vote falling mostly along party lines that signals the political fight to come over the panel’s examination of the insurrection.
The House voted 222-190 to formally create the select panel. Just two Republicans joined with Democrats to support its formation — Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois.
Ahead of the vote, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on the floor that she was “heartbroken” Congress could not establish a bipartisan commission. Even though the speaker said she was still “hopeful” that a bipartisan commission could happen in the future, Congress had to move forward with the select committee.
“We cannot wait,” Pelosi said Wednesday. “We believe that Congress must in the spirit of bipartisanship and patriotism establish this commission. And it will be conducted with dignity, with patriotism, with respect for the American people, so that they can know the truth.”
Pelosi made the move to establish the committee after Senate Republicans blocked the formation of a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 attack.
“Our bipartisan, good-faith proposal was met with a filibuster. Now that Senate Republicans have chosen to block the formation of an independent commission, it falls to the House to stay the course and get the answers they deserve,” said House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson, who is one of the potential candidates to chair the select committee.
Also yesterday The New York Times published a stunning in-depth video investigation of the Capitol attack. If you haven’t watched it already, I hope you’ll do it today.
From the article:
Congressional committees have looked into police and intelligence failures. The Justice Department has launched a nationwide investigation that has now resulted in more than 500 arrests. And while Republicans in Congress blocked the formation of a blue-ribbon bipartisan committee, House Democrats are poised to appoint a smaller select committee.
Even now, however, Republican politicians and their allies in the media are still playing down the most brazen attack on a seat of power in modern American history. Some have sought to paint the assault as the work of mere tourists. Others, going further, have accused the F.B.I. of planning the attack in what they have described — wildly — as a false-flag operation.
The work of understanding Jan. 6 has been hard enough without this barrage of disinformation and, hoping to get to the bottom of the riot, The Times’s Visual Investigations team spent several months reviewing thousands of videos, many filmed by the rioters themselves and since deleted from social media. We filed motions to unseal police body-camera footage, scoured law enforcement radio communications, and synchronized and mapped the visual evidence.
What we have come up with is a 40-minute panoramic take on Jan. 6, the most complete visual depiction of the Capitol riot to date. In putting it together, we gained critical insights into the character and motivation of rioters by experiencing the events of the day often through their own words and video recordings. We found evidence of members of extremist groups inciting others to riot and assault police officers. And we learned how Donald J. Trump’s own words resonated with the mob in real time as they staged the attack.
I can't stop watching this. If anything at all went differently, there would have been incalculable horror.
The evidence of planning in here by the Proud Boys is staggering.
It's a national shame we don't know more about who was aware of it beforehand.https://t.co/3LZUjIMaOs
Department of Homeland Security officials are warning that the same sort of rhetoric and false narratives that fueled the January 6 attack on the US Capitol could lead to more violence this summer by right-wing extremists.
A growing belief among some Donald Trump supporters that the former President will be reinstated in August, coupled with relaxed Covid-19 restrictions, has DHS officials concerned that online rhetoric and threats could translate into actual violence in the coming months as more people are out and in public places.
The August theory is essentially a recycled version of other false narratives pushed by Trump and his allies leading up to and after January 6, prompting familiar rhetoric from those who remain in denial about his 2020 election loss. But the concern is significant enough that DHS issued two warnings in the past week about the potential for violence this summer.
In a closed-door meeting last Wednesday, DHS officials briefed lawmakers on the role that misinformation and disinformation play in creating circumstances for people to act violently, according to a congressional source familiar with the briefing.
On Monday, DHS issued an intelligence bulletin to state and local law enforcement partners about the increasing opportunities for violent extremist attacks this summer, including concerns that QAnon conspiracy theorists continue to promote the idea that Trump will return to power in August, according to a source familiar.
Stay tuned. I’m sure there are multiple legal experts salivating to get their hands on and analyze the indictments this afternoon. It should be interesting.
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We’re having another heatwave here in the Boston area–four days of 90 degrees or more–with a high temperature today of 99 degrees. Thunderstorms are expected to break the heat tomorrow night, with temperatures in the 80s on Thursday. But that is nothing compared to what is happening in the Pacific Northwest. I talked to my sister in Portland, OR, yesterday, and she said the temperature was supposed to hit 115 degrees! She said her garden is dying even though she is soaking her plants every morning.
Heat waves and the “heat domes” that can cause them aren’t rare, but the recent weather that’s been smothering the Pacific Northwest has little precedent in at least four decades of record-keeping….
The heat has been not only widespread, but also intense, in some places surpassing previous records by double digits.
In Vancouver, British Columbia, this past weekend’s temperatures were far above norms for this time of year, and a town in British Columbia reached nearly 116 degrees, the highest recorded temperature for any place in Canada in its history. In Seattle, there have been only two other days in the last 50 years with temperatures in the triple digits: in 2009 and 1994.
The heat has resulted from a wide and deep mass of high-pressure air that, because of a wavy jet stream, parked itself over much of the region. Also known as a heat dome, such an enormous high-pressure zone acts like a lid on a pot, trapping heat so that it accumulates. And with the West beset by drought, there’s been plenty of heat to trap.
In Seattle, Portland and other areas west of the Cascades, hot air blowing from the east was further warmed as it descended the mountains, raising temperatures even more.
Beach Scene by Martha Walter, American impressionist painter
Climate is naturally variable, so periods of high heat are to be expected. But in this episode scientists see the fingerprints of climate change, brought on by human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
Karin Bumbaco, Washington’s assistant state climatologist, said that any definitive climate-change link could be demonstrated only by a type of analysis called an attribution study. “But it’s a safe assumption, in my view, to blame increasing greenhouse gases for at least some portion of this event,” she said.
On a global average, the world has warmed about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900. “When you have that warmer baseline, when you do get these extreme events it’s just going to get that much warmer,” she said.
This heat wave is also unusual because it occurred earlier than most. Those two previous triple-digits days in Seattle, for example, happened in late July, about 30 days later.
This one occurred just a few days after the summer solstice, which may have contributed to the extreme conditions. “The days are longer, and we’re not getting that cool-off at night,” she said.
Read more details at the NYT, with maps and charts.
More than three decades ago, in his seminal study predicting the course of human-caused climate change, NASA scientist Jim Hansen wrote that “temperature changes within several decades will become large enough to have major effects on the quality of life for mankind in many regions.”
Hansen used the analogy of “loaded dice” to describe how climate change would increase the likelihood of extremely hot weather in a given year while decreasing the chance of unusually cold weather.
Even before that, in 1979, the National Research Council published a study led by the late meteorologist Jule Charney that predicted serious global warming would evolve. “It appears that the warming will eventually occur, and the associated regional climatic changes so important to the assessment of socioeconomic consequences may well be significant,” the report said.
Since those prescient projections 30-to-40-plus years ago, heat waves all over the world have intensified. Heat domes, the sprawling zones of high pressure at high altitudes that essentially bake the air underneath them, have strengthened.
Claude Monet, The Beach at Sainte-Adresse
During the European heat wave in 2003, blamed for 70,000 deaths, the average temperature was higher than any year since at least 1851. A study published in 2004 found human influence “at least doubled the risk” of a heat wave of that magnitude.
By 2010, when a historically intense heat wave killed 50,000 people in Russia, the risk of such an event was tripled due to climate change, according to a study published in 2012.
In 2016, a report from the National Academies of Sciences concluded that of the connections between human-caused climate change and extreme weather events, heat waves had among the most straightforward ties.
In other news, Axios analyzed traffic at “partisan” news sites and discovered big drops in clicks since Trump was ejected from the White House: Boring news cycle deals blow to partisan media.
In the months since former President Donald Trump left office, media companies’ readership numbers are plunging — and publishers that rely on partisan, ideological warfare have taken an especially big hit.
Why it matters: Outlets most dependent on controversy to stir up resentments have struggled to find a foothold in the Biden era, according to an Axios analysis of publishers’ readership and engagement trends.
By the numbers: Web traffic, social media engagement and app user sessions suggest that while the entire news industry is experiencing a slump, right-wing outlets are seeing some of the biggest plunges.
A group of far-right outlets, including Newsmax and The Federalist, saw aggregate traffic drop 44% from February through May compared to the previous six months, according to Comscore data.
Lefty outlets including Mother Jones and Raw Story saw a 27% drop.
Mainstream publishers including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Reuters dropped 18%.
App visits tell a similar story. Both right-leaning (including Fox News, Daily Caller) and left-leaning (including Buzzfeed News, The Atlantic) saw considerable average drops in app user sessions over this time period at 31% and 26%, respectively, according to Apptopia data.
Data from Sensor Tower shows that downloads of fringe-right social networking apps like MeWe, Rumble, Parler and CloutHub have also plummeted.
Engagement on social media has taken the biggest dive, according to data from NewsWhip.
Left-leaning and right-leaning publishers have seen social interactions on stories drop by more than 50%, while mainstream publishers have experienced a slightly more modest drop of 42%.
The big picture: Opposition media traditionally relies on traffic booms when a new party takes office, but right-wing outlets have seen some of the most precipitous declines in readership since a Democratic president took office.
Attorneys for the Trump Organization met with New York prosecutors on Monday to argue that former president Donald Trump’s company should not be criminally charged over its business dealings, according to three people familiar with the meeting.
Previously, the prosecutors — working for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. (D) and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) — had set Monday as the last day for the organization’s lawyers to make their case.
After Monday’s session, spokespeople for both Vance and James declined to comment. No charges were announced on Monday. Vance has convened a grand jury in Manhattan to vote on potential indictments in the investigation, but so far, no person or entity connected to Trump has been charged. It remains possible that none will be. Those familiar with the investigation spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private meetings.
Trump issued a lengthy written statement Monday denouncing the prosecutors, saying they were seeking to punish him because of his politics. Trump did not specify what practices prosecutors were focused on, but said they were “things that are standard practice throughout the U.S. business community, and in no way a crime.” [….]
In interviews with Politico and the Associated Press on Monday, Trump’s attorney Ron Fischetti said he believed the charges would focus on whether the proper taxes were paid on benefits that the Trump Organization gave to its executives, such as free apartments or company cars. In a brief call with The Washington Post, Fischetti said he did not attend Monday’s meeting with prosecutors.
The Post previously reported that prosecutors view Weisselberg as a key potential witness in the ongoing investigations, but that they have become frustrated with what they view as a lack of cooperation from him. If Weisselberg was charged with crimes, he could face new pressure to offer testimony against his boss in exchange for a reduction in his legal risk.
I’ll end with two stories on the tragic building collapse in Florida.
John Singer Sargent, En Route pour la peche (Setting Out to Fish), 1878
A correspondence from the board president of Champlain Towers South, part of which unexpectedly crashed to the ground last week in Surfside, Florida, describes the progression of decay at the building since 2018 saying, “the observable damage such as in the garage has gotten significantly worse since the initial inspection.”
Board President Jean Wodnicki addressed the letter to neighbors April 9
“The concrete deterioration is accelerating. The roof situation got much worse, so extensive roof repairs had to be incorporated,” says the letter, acquired by CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront.”
Wodnicki further describes issues facing the building saying, “When you can visually see the concrete spalling (cracking), that means that the rebar holding it together is rusting and deteriorating beneath the surface.” [….]
The letter confirms what Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett has been saying all along, he said: “There was something very, very wrong at this building.
“Buildings in America just don’t fall down like this. This is a third-world phenomenon, not a first-world phenomenon. … I think from the perspective of a condominium association, which is just like a homeowner except bigger, they probably don’t grasp the intensity of the issue and probably just thought it was a pro forma sort of operation we have to get around to doing. Obviously, that was a fatal mistake.”
There was nothing unusual about the lobby and pool area at Champlain Towers South condo, which looked clean and well maintained to a commercial pool contractor who visited the building last Tuesday, just 36 hours before half of the building unexpectedly collapsed. Then, he saw the basement-level garage.
At The Beach by Edward Henry Potthast
“There was standing water all over the parking garage,” the contractor, who asked not to be named, told the Miami Herald. He noted cracking concrete and severely corroded rebar under the pool.
He also took photos, which he shared with the Herald.
The contractor visited the condo building last week to put together a bid for a cosmetic restoration of the pool as well as to price out new pool equipment — a small piece of the multimillion-dollar restoration project that just was getting underway at the 40-year-old building.
While he had worked in the industry for decades and had “gone in some scary places,” he said he was struck by the lack of maintenance in the lower level. The amount of water at Champlain Towers seemed so unusual that the contractor mentioned it to a building staff member, Jose, who was showing him around.
“He thought it was waterproofing issues,” the contractor said of the staff member. “I thought to myself, that’s not normal.” He said Jose told him they pumped the pool equipment room so frequently that the building had to replace pump motors every two years, but he never mentioned anything about structural damage or cracks in the concrete above.
There’s much more at the link.
That’s it for me today. Please take care if you’re in one of the areas experiencing extreme heat.
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Today is a pretty busy news day for a Saturday. The building collapse in Florida is looking worse the more we learn about it. The Delta variant is still in the news and looking more dangerous by the day. Trump will begin holding his revenge rallies tonight in Ohio and then continue his pity party in Florida over the Fourth of July Weekend. The Trump Organization may be criminally charged in New York next week. But the scariest news was broken last night in The New York Times by Trump whisperers Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman: Trump Aides Prepared Insurrection Act Order During Debate Over Protests
Responding to interest from President Donald J. Trump, White House aides drafted a proclamation last year to invoke the Insurrection Act in case Mr. Trump moved to take the extraordinary step of deploying active-duty troops in Washington to quell the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd, two senior Trump administration officials said.
The aides drafted the proclamation on June 1, 2020, during a heated debate inside the administration over how to respond to the protests. Mr. Trump, enraged by the demonstrations, had told the attorney general, William P. Barr, the defense secretary, Mark T. Esper, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, that he wanted thousands of active-duty troops on the streets of the nation’s capital, one of the officials said.
Mr. Trump was talked out of the plan by the three officials. But a separate group of White House staff members wanted to leave open the option for Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to call in the military to patrol the streets of the capital.
They decided it would be prudent to have the necessary document vetted and ready in case the unrest in Washington worsened or the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, declined to take measures such as a citywide curfew, which she ultimately put in place….
the new details about internal White House deliberations on a pivotal day in his presidency underscore the intensity of Mr. Trump’s instinct to call on the active-duty military to deal with a domestic issue. And they help to flesh out the sequence of events that would culminate later in the day with Mr. Trump’s walk across Lafayette Park to St. John’s Church so he could pose in front of it holding a Bible, a move that coincided with a spasm of violence between law enforcement and protesters camped near the White House.
Dragon’s Lair Comics and Fantasy, Austin, TX
More details from the story:
…invoking the Insurrection Act, a rarely used authority allowing presidents to use active duty military for law-enforcement purposes, would have been a dramatic escalation. The act has only been invoked twice in the past 40 years — once to quell unrest after Hurricane Hugo in 1989, and once during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
“We look weak,” Mr. Trump said, according to one of the officials. He complained about having been taken to the bunker below the White House on the night of May 29 when the barricade outside the Treasury Department was pierced. The New York Times had reported the bunker visit a day earlier, infuriating Mr. Trump….
Mr. Trump’s meeting with Mr. Barr, Mr. Esper and Mr. Milley was marked by his rage at being embarrassed on the world stage, according to two of the officials.
Mr. Trump grudgingly went along with their counsel not to deploy active-duty troops, according to the officials. Immediately after the meeting, Mr. Trump joined a call with governors around the country, some of whom were seeing protests increase in their states. Mr. Trump urged them to “dominate” the protesters, as he said the National Guard in Minnesota had.
Mr. Esper told associates that he was so concerned that Mr. Trump would deploy active-duty troops that he echoed the need for them to get control of their states, hoping he could encourage governors to deploy the National Guard to head off federal action. Using Pentagon terminology that he later told associates he regretted, Mr. Esper told the governors to “dominate the battle space,” a sentiment stemming from concern about Mr. Trump’s intentions.
Early this month, as Donald Trump delivered his keynote address to the North Carolina Republican Party’s annual convention, the former U.S. president noticed something: His greatest crowd-pleaser of the night didn’t come when he attacked President Joe Biden, trashed Dr. Anthony Fauci, or repeated his lies about the 2020 election being stolen from him. It came when he railed against critical race theory, declaring that it should be banned from being taught to schoolchildren and government staff….
Clementine’s Books and Coffee, Halifax, Nova Scotia, where you can adopt a kitten
The coming days and months should prove no different, with Trump planning on delivering yet another red-meat-hurling speech on Saturday evening, with plenty of time devoted to dumping accelerant on the flames of the culture wars and asserting his continued, solidified sway over the GOP.
But his return to the rally circuit also serves another purpose: scaring off potential competition for holding dominant power over the Republican Party, and keeping himself positioned as the 2024 GOP frontrunner.
“In [recent] conversations that I’ve had with him, he has said that he wants to be everywhere to remind people, not just Republicans, that he’s still in charge,” a person close to the former president said, paraphrasing Trump. “The message is a pretty straightforward one: I am still leading this party, and if you want to try to challenge me for that, it will get ugly.”
After an initial two rescues, only bodies had been recovered, three of them overnight. The number of people unaccounted for rose to more than 150 — dozens more than officials had estimated a day earlier — and their families were losing their last threads of hope.
Family members of the missing were asked to provide DNA swabs in case they were needed to identify remains. President Biden said federal mortuary services would be available if needed.
Underneath the parking garage of the exposed building at 8777 Collins Ave., search-and-rescue teams drilled through concrete and inserted probes with cameras to peer through the rubble. Specialized hearing devices alerted them to any sounds that could indicate a person was waiting for help — tapping, scratching, falling debris, twisting metal.
On Thursday, crews briefly heard the voice of a woman trapped somewhere under the wreckage, but it went silent before they could find anyone. On Friday, crews were still using dogs trained to sniff out the scent of a living person; the dogs that come later find cadavers.
From the outside, in the stifling humidity and amid intermittent thunderstorms, little of the tunneling work going on below could be seen. Heavy machinery arrived at the site on Thursday night, but some of the families of the missing wondered why they could not see more action atop the mountain of rubble.
“We’re frustrated because we feel as if they are alive,” said Toby Fried, a family friend of Harry Rosenberg, a man missing from Unit 212. “We offered to bring more manpower — professional searchers. There’s nobody to talk to. We are waiting. We want to help out.”
The Manhattan district attorney’s office has informed lawyers for the Trump Organization that it could face criminal charges in connection with benefits it has provided to company employees, a Trump attorney confirmed Friday.
The charges, which could come as soon as next week, would likely involve allegations of a company effort to avoid paying payroll taxes on compensation it provided to employees, including rent-free apartments, cars and other benefits, a person familiar with the matter said….
Prosecutors are also likely to announce charges against Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization chief financial officer, as soon as next week, people familiar with the matter said.
Weisselberg’s lawyers recently informed prosecutors that he would not cooperate in the investigation, the people said, although that could change in the future.
Weisselberg is under scrutiny for benefits he received, including a company-funded apartment and car. Prosecutors are also looking into similar benefits given to Matthew Calamari, the chief operating officer of the company. One source familiar with the matter said it’s possible he could also face charges.
The World Health Organization on Friday urged fully vaccinated people to continue to wear masks, social distance and practice other Covid-19 pandemic safety measures as the highly contagious delta variant spreads rapidly across the globe.
“People cannot feel safe just because they had the two doses. They still need to protect themselves,” Dr. Mariangela Simao, WHO assistant director-general for access to medicines and health products, said during a news briefing from the agency’s Geneva headquarters.
“Vaccine alone won’t stop community transmission,” Simao added. “People need to continue to use masks consistently, be in ventilated spaces, hand hygiene … the physical distance, avoid crowding. This still continues to be extremely important, even if you’re vaccinated when you have a community transmission ongoing.”
The health organization’s comments come as some countries, including the United States, have largely done away with masks and pandemic-related restrictions as the Covid vaccines have helped drive down the number of new infections and deaths.
Laurette’s head with a coffee cup, by Henri Matisse
Good Morning!!
I live in a 10th floor apartment that looks out at a busy street. Over the last year, I’ve looked out to see very little traffic, even in the rush hour. Now that Massachusetts has opened up again, the view of the street is nearly back to normal, with cars slowly moving slowly bumper to bumper in the hours when people are commuting to and from work. But is the pandemic really over? How much of a threat is the Delta variant of Covid-19? And what about the new variant, Delta Plus?
Lineage B.1.617.2, now known as the Delta variant, was first detected in India, in December, 2020. An evolved version of sars-CoV-2, Delta has at least a dozen mutations, including several on its spike protein that make it vastly more contagious and possibly more lethal and vaccine-resistant than other strains. In India, the Delta variant contributed to the most devastating coronavirus wave the world has seen so far; now, it has been detected in dozens of countries, including the United States. In the U.S., it accounts for a minority of cases—but it is rapidly outcompeting other variants, and will likely soon become our dominant lineage.
Much of what we know about Delta is preliminary, and based on reports from India and, more recently, the U.K., where it now accounts for more than ninety per cent of new cases. Four-fifths of British adults have received at least one shot of a covid-19 vaccine, and more than half are fully vaccinated—but the variant has spread widely enough among those who remain vulnerable to fuel a quadrupling of cases and a doubling of hospitalizations in the past month. The vast majority of Delta-variant cases seem to have occurred in adults under fifty, whose rates of vaccination remain lower than those of older people. Last week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the U.K.’s full reopening, originally scheduled for June 21st, would be postponed.
Earlier this year, scientists estimated that lineage B.1.1.7—the Alpha variant, first isolated in England—could be some sixty per cent more transmissible than the original version of sars-CoV-2. Now, experts believe that the Delta variant is sixty per cent more transmissible than Alpha—making it far more contagious than the virus that tore through the world in 2020. It hasn’t yet been conclusively shown that Delta is more lethal, but early evidence from the U.K. suggests that, compared to Alpha, it doubles the risk of a person’s being hospitalized. Even if the variant turns out to be no deadlier within any one person, its greater transmissibility means that it can inflict far more damage across a population, depending on how many people remain unvaccinated when it strikes.
It’s a long article, so check it out if you’re interested. Here’s the conclusion:
In a sense, Delta is the first post-vaccination variant. Pockets of the human race—perhaps five hundred million people out of 7.6 billion—are protected against it, despite its transmissibility; for them, the pandemic’s newest chapter is something of an epilogue, since the main story has, in effect, already concluded. But, for those who remain unvaccinated, by choice or by chance, Delta represents the latest installment in an ongoing series of horrors. It’s a threat more sinister than any other—one that imperils whatever precarious equilibrium has taken root. In a partially vaccinated world, Delta exposes the duality in which we now live and die.
India has classified a new variant #DeltaPlus as a "variant of concern". 🇮🇳 health ministry says studies show #DeltaPlus—aka AY.1–spreads more easily, binds more easily to lung cells & more resistant to some monoclonal antibody therapy. Unclear risks.🧵https://t.co/0GnuZs9ckp
India’s health ministry says studies showed that the so-called Delta plus variant – also known as AY.1 – spreads more easily, binds more easily to lung cells and is potentially resistant to monoclonal antibody therapy, a potent intravenous infusion of antibodies to neutralise the virus.
The variant is related to the Delta, an existing variant of concern, which was first identified in India last year and is thought to have driven the deadly second wave of infections this summer in India.\The health ministry says the Delta plus variant, first found in India in April, has been detected in around 40 samples from six districts in three states – Maharashtra, Kerala and Madhya Pradesh. At least 16 of these samples were found in Maharashtra, one of the states hardest hit by the pandemic.
Delta plus has also been found in nine other countries – USA, UK, Portugal, Switzerland, Japan, Poland, Nepal, Russia and China – compared to the original highly contagious Delta strain, which has now spread to 80 countries.
The Cup of Tea, Mary Cassatt
It’s still not clear how serious the thread of Delta Plus is.
“You need biological and clinical information in order to consider whether it is truly a variant of concern.”
This means India needs more data to determine whether the variant is neutralised by antibodies generated by available vaccines or infection by another variant of the coronavirus.
Also, extensive data is needed about the increase in transmissibility, diagnostic failures – routine tests not picking up the variant – and whether the variant is causing more severe disease.
“You need to study a few hundred patients who are sick with this condition and variant and find out whether they are at greater risk of greater disease than the ancestral variant,” Dr Kang said.
Still, in places in the U.S. where many people are unvaccinated, it seems that these variants are nothing to fool around with. There’s much more information at the BBC link.
When the coronavirus variant now called Delta first appeared in December 2020, in the Indian state of Maharashtra, it did not seem all that remarkable. But when it descended on New Delhi a few months later, its impact was devastating, with almost 30,000 cases reported daily in late April. “Suddenly … it is dominant and completely sweeps away Alpha,” which until then was most prevalent in the city, says Anurag Agrawal, who leads the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology in New Delhi.
New Delhi seemed unlikely to suffer a big new outbreak because so many of its residents had already been infected or vaccinated, Agrawal says. But those protections seemed to barely slow Delta, which is more transmissible and may evade immunity, he says: “It went from a 10-foot wall around the city to a 2-foot wall you could just walk over.”
From New Delhi, the variant has quickly spread, and it now looks set to sweep the globe in what could be a devastating new wave. In the United Kingdom, Delta already makes up more than 90% of all infections; it has driven COVID-19 case numbers up again after a dramatic decline and led the government last week to postpone the final stage of its reopening plan. A Delta-driven resurgence in Lisbon prompted the Portuguese government to enact a 3-day travel ban between the city and the rest of the country. The variant may account for 90% of all COVID-19 cases in the European Union by the end of August, Andrea Ammon, the head of the European Centre for Disease
Prevention and Control, warned today. “It is very likely that the Delta variant will circulate extensively during the summer, particularly among younger individuals that are not targeted for vaccination,” she said. “This could cause a risk for the more vulnerable individuals to be infected and experience severe illness and death if they are not fully vaccinated.“
Melinda L. Cootsona, Black Coffee Ode to RD
Delta also appears also to be causing surges in Russia, Indonesia, and many other countries. In the United States, where its prevalence is now estimated to be at least 14%, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared Delta a “variant of concern” on 15 June.
As the U.S. pushes ahead with its reopening, easing mask mandates and lifting public health restrictions, much of the rest of the world is seeing an alarming surge in the number of Covid-19 infections and deaths.
The stark contrast underscores how unevenly the coronavirus pandemic has spread, now hitting low-income nations harder as they struggle with access to vaccines, the rapid spread of new variants and heavily burdened health-care systems.
It also shows why, even with nations such as the U.S., China and the U.K. recording relatively low Covid infections and fatalities thanks to a mass vaccination drive, the global health crisis is still far from over.
To be sure, more people have died from Covid this year than in all of 2020, according to data compiled by the World Health Organization. The official global death toll stood at 1,813,188 at the end of 2020. More than 2 million people have died as a result of Covid so far this year.
There’s much more at the link. I’m very glad I’m fully vaccinated, but I’m still not going to keep taking precautions.
In other news, we’re learning more about the Trump gang’s efforts to use the justice department to attack their political enemies.
Top Democrats in the House are investigating whether Trump justice department officials ran an unlawful shadow operation to target political enemies of the former president to hunt down leaks of classified information, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The House judiciary committee chairman, Jerry Nadler, is centering his investigation on the apparent violation of internal policies by the justice department, when it issued subpoenas against Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell in 2018.
Simon Quadrat, Man Drinking Tea
The use of subpoenas to secretly seize data from the two Democrats on the House intelligence committee – and fierce critics of Donald Trump – would ordinarily require authorization from the highest levels of the justice department and notably, the attorney general.
But with the former Trump attorneys general Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions denying any knowledge of the subpoenas, Democrats are focused on whether rogue officials abused the vast power of the federal government to target Trump’s perceived political opponents, the source said.
That kind of shadow operation – reminiscent of the shadow foreign policy in Ukraine that led to Trump’s first impeachment – would be significant because it could render the subpoenas unlawful, the source said.
And if the subpoenas were issued without proper authorization from the attorney general level, it could also leave the officials involved in the effort open to prosecution for false operating with the imprimatur of law enforcement.
The sharpening contours of the House judiciary committee’s investigation into the Trump justice department reflects Democrats’ determination to uncover potential politicization at the department.
The ongoing release of materials on former President Donald Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 election has shown the extent to which the White House pushed for the Department of Justice to investigate far-out conspiracy theories linked to the QAnon movement. And the latest example might also show that false stories circulated in far-right media made their way to Trump himself.
The Detroit News reported last week on emails recently released by the House oversight committee showing some of the Trump administration’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. On December 14 — the same day when the members of the Electoral College met across the country to formalize Joe Biden’s victory — White House aide Molly Michael sent an email to acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen with the subject “From POTUS.”
Peasant Girl drinking her coffee, Camille Pissarro
The email contained a PDF file of a report from a right-wing investigator on an election counting error in the small locale of Antrim County, Michigan, and a set of talking points apparently written by the report’s author declaring that “Michigan cannot certify for Biden” due to a “seditious conspiracy to undermine the election process and the will of the American people.”
Two minutes after that email was sent to Rosen, another unnamed person in the attorney general’s office forwarded the documents to the U.S. attorneys in Michigan, asking them to “see attachments per Rich Donoghue,” Trump’s newly appointed deputy attorney general….
According to The New York Times, the private group that conducted this report, Allied Security Operations Group, is a sponsor and financial backer of the website Everylegalvote.com, which had also “posted content from a source with links to” the QAnon conspiracy theory. The author of the report was also a former Republican candidate for Congress from Texas, having lost in a primary in 2016.
Republicans widely support Donald Trump and believe his claims about a stolen election. While Republicans support all elements of the ‘Stop the Steal’ narrative in high numbers, the overall electorate largely rejects these claims and propositions.
Among Republicans, 85 percent believe it was appropriate for Trump to file lawsuits challenging election results in several states, and the same proportion believe that vote-by-mail increases vote fraud; 46 percent of Republicans believe it was appropriate for legislators in states won by Joe Biden to try to assign their state’s electoral votes to Trump.
Republicans most committed to both Trump and the narrative of election fraud share a few other views in common: extreme antipathy toward Democrats and immigrants, belief that racism is not a problem, support for nationalism, belief in traditional family values and gender roles, and preference for a very limited role for government in the economy.
While a voter’s willingness to reject an election without evidence of fraud might suggest an embrace of authoritarianism, a key measure of authoritarian leanings — support for a “strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections” — is only weakly correlated to support for Trump and for the stolen election narrative.
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
“People cannot feel safe just because they had the two doses. They still need to protect themselves,” Dr. Mariangela Simao, WHO assistant director-general for access to medicines and health products, said during a news briefing from the agency’s Geneva headquarters.
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