Washington Post: Woodward book: Trump says he knew coronavirus was ‘deadly’ and worse than the flu while intentionally misleading Americans by Robert Costa and Philip Rucker
President Trump’s head popped up during his top-secret intelligence briefing in the Oval Office on Jan. 28 when the discussion turned to the coronavirus outbreak in China.
Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, agreed. He told the president that after reaching contacts in China, it was evident that the world faced a health emergency on par with the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.
Ten days later, Trump called Woodward and revealed that he thought the situation was far more dire than what he had been saying publicly.
Chicago Sun-Times: Attorney General William Barr praises Operation Legend as political tensions flare by Jon Seidel
Attorney General William Barr made a rare appearance in Chicago on Wednesday, claiming a new federal crime-fighting initiative had already succeeded in substantially reducing violence in the city.
But political tensions inevitably flared. His visit occurred two months before President Donald Trump hopes to be re-elected on a “law-and-order” message. His victory lap could be premature if numbers trend back up. And it all was juxtaposed against a holiday weekend that saw 51 people shot and 10 people killed — including an 8-year-old girl.
Not only that, but Barr’s visit seemed to threaten the delicate local alliance of federal and city officials who have been working together to solve Chicago’s crime problem, despite the nation’s divisive politics.
Barr appeared at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse with U.S. Attorney John Lausch and other top federal officials to tout Operation Legend, an initiative that sent hundreds of additional federal agents to Chicago in recent weeks. Since then, Barr said 124 defendants have faced federal criminal charges here, including 90 facing gun charges and 30 charged with drug trafficking. Crucially, Barr said many of them have been detained pending trial.
Sacramento Bee: Wildfires have burned record acreage in California. Here’s where the biggest fires are
Wildfires raged unchecked in California and other western states on Wednesday, with gusty winds forecast to drive flames into new ferocity.
Diablo winds in Northern California and Santa Ana winds in the south state were stoking unprecedented numbers of fires that have already grown explosively.
“Yesterday, and overnight, wind conditions allowed many fires to grow significantly with extreme fire behavior,” said Cal Fire spokesman Daniel Berlant in a Wednesday morning statewide update. “While containment on many of last month’s lightning fires grows closer, several new wildfires ignited and were fanned by strong gusty winds.”
On the coast near Big Sur, more than a dozen firefighters trying to protect a mountain station were overrun by flames Tuesday, with several being hurt. In the mountains above Fresno, military helicopters continued to rescue campers trapped by the Creek Fire.
New York Daily News: ‘It was disgusting’: Teachers at NYC schools for children with severe disabilities blast poor conditions inside by Brittany Kriegstein and Michael Elsen-Rooney
A long-awaited return to school for some teachers was anything but a welcome sight.
Educators at a building for children with severe disabilities walked into dirty conditions, missing protective gear, and incomplete ventilation checks, teachers and union officials said Tuesday.
“It was disgusting,” said Mark John, a teacher and union chapter leader at K368C, a District 75 program for kids with intensive special needs.
"There were bugs, no PPE, the rooms weren’t clean, just a lack of priority in terms of getting the building up and running for students and staff to be in — to the point where we had to come out of the building.”
The building never got a required ventilation inspection, according to union officials, and will be temporarily shut down.
Detroit Free Press: Joe Biden calls Trump's COVID-19 remarks 'beyond despicable,' says he is unfit to serve by Dave Boucher and Todd Spangler
Democratic nominee Joe Biden called new evidence that President Donald Trump publicly downplayed the severity of coronavirus early this year while admitting to a journalist he knew the risks "beyond despicable" in remarks made at a UAW hall in Warren on Wednesday.
"His failure (to respond appropriately) has not only cost lives, it sent our economy into a tailspin," said Biden, the former vice president, who was making his first in-person visit to Michigan as the nominee. "It's a dereliction of duty. It's a disgrace."
Biden's remarks at the UAW Region 1 headquarters in Warren came a short time after media reports of a new book by journalist Bob Woodward, "Rage," and recordings released by Woodward in which Trump acknowledged early this year the deadly seriousness of coronavirus even at a time when he was publicly downplaying the risks it posed.
Biden noted in his remarks — which concentrated on his plan to use the tax code to punish businesses that move jobs overseas and give tax credits to those that create jobs in the U.S. — that the nation was expected to top 190,000 dead from the virus on Wednesday.
Dallas Morning News: Hypnosis helped put this Texan on death row, his lawyers say. The Supreme Court could soon decide his fate by Lauren McGaughy
The witness remembered the Volkswagen Beetle, its psychedelic flames visible in the twilight, and the white man with long hair who parked the garish thing on her quiet street that January morning in 1998.
But, when Farmers Branch police showed her a lineup, she couldn’t pick out the passenger.
She wanted to remember what he looked like to help catch her neighbor’s killers, the men who slithered under the garage door, shot the 64-year-old grandmother dead and ransacked her home. So a local policeman did something he’d never done before and would never do again.
The officer hypnotized her.
Buzzfeed: A White Professor Who Admitted To Pretending To Be Black During Her Career Has Resigned From GWU by Salvador Hernandez
A white professor who posed as Black during the entirety of her career at George Washington University has resigned, according to a letter sent to students from the university provost on Wednesday.
Jessica A. Krug confessed growing up in Kansas City as a white Jewish child in a Medium post published last week, sparking an investigation inside the university where she was a professor in the history department, specializing in Africa, Latin America, colonialism, and imperialism.
"Dr. Krug has resigned her position, effective immediately," M. Brian Blake, provost for the university, wrote in a short email to students.
In her written confession, Krug wrote that she pretended to be Black "as a youth" and continued to do so as an adult. She attributed her decision to "severe trauma that marked [her] early childhood and teen years."
Throughout the years, she wrote, she created different backgrounds to her pretended ethnicity, including lying about having North African and Caribbean roots, calling herself at one point "a culture leech."
Politico: Emails show HHS official trying to muzzle Fauci by Sarah Owermohle
A Trump administration appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services is trying to prevent Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, from speaking about the risks that coronavirus poses to children.
Emails obtained by POLITICO show Paul Alexander — a senior adviser to Michael Caputo, HHS’s assistant secretary for public affairs — instructing press officers and others at the National Institutes of Health about what Fauci should say during media interviews. The Trump adviser weighed in on Fauci’s planned responses to outlets including Bloomberg News, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post and the science journal Cell.
Alexander’s lengthy messages, some sent as recently as this week, are couched as scientific arguments. But they often contradict mainstream science while promoting political positions taken by the Trump administration on hot-button issues ranging from the use of convalescent plasma to school reopening.
The emails add to evidence that the White House, and Trump appointees within HHS, are pushing health agencies to promote a political message instead of a scientific one.
ProPublica: The Climate Crisis Is Happening Right Now. Just Look at California’s Weekend. By Elizabeth Weil
Two weeks ago, after freak lightning strikes torched Northern California but before the inferno of Labor Day weekend had begun, a friend called to talk, like you do when the world is turning to crap and nothing is stable or makes sense. In the past six months she’d fled New York for rural West Marin (due to the pandemic), and West Marin for San Francisco (due to smoke). Now she was planning to leave San Francisco for Los Angeles, as the gross air had descended here. We joked, as I’d joked with every friend this summer, that we should all just drop out and start a commune on a lake in Maine. “Every commune needs lesbians!” she said. “I’ll be our lesbian! California is going to become unlivable!”
Two weeks ago, this was a funny conversation. By Sunday, it was not.
This was the weekend that climate change, in California, stopped being about the future. The weekend that the idea that COVID-19 was worse than climate change, or fascism was worse than climate change, disappeared. The experts, of course, had known this for some time. But by the point August turned into September, the drumbeat of California’s environmental anomalies had grown so horrid and relentless that not even the professionals could stay detached. Way back, a lifetime ago, on Sept. 3, Daniel Swain, UCLA’s extreme-weather climate scientist who’s made a name from himself by tweeting, in plain language, just what the hell is going on, wrote, “This *gesturing wildly and in every direction* is utterly exhausting.”
Washington Post: Senior DHS official alleges in whistleblower complaint that he was told to stop providing intelligence analysis on threat of Russian interference by Shane Harris, Nick Miroff, and Ellen Nakashima
A senior Department of Homeland Security official alleges that he was told to stop providing intelligence reports on the threat of Russian interference in the 2020 election, in part because it “made the President look bad,” an instruction he believed would jeopardize national security.
The official, Brian Murphy, who until recently was in charge of intelligence and analysis at DHS, said in a
whistleblower complaint that on two occasions he was told to stand down on reporting about the Russian threat and alleged that senior officials told him to modify other intelligence reports, including about white supremacists, to bring them in line with President Trump’s public comments, directions he said he refused.
On July 8, Murphy said in the complaint, acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf told him that an “intelligence notification” regarding Russian disinformation efforts should be “held” because it was unflattering to Trump, who has long derided the Kremlin’s interference as a “hoax” that was concocted by his opponents to delegitimize his victory in 2016.
DW: Fresh fires burn at Greece's largest refugee camp Moria
A new fire broke out on Wednesday night at Greece's largest refugee camp just a day after blazes forced thousands of refugees to flee the facility. The fires erupted in parts of the camp that had not caught fire on Tuesday night.
Greek authorities have launched an investigation to determine who started the blazes after local media reports suggested migrants had done so to protest lockdown measures enacted to contain a coronavirus outbreak at the camp.
Greek Migration Minister Notis Mitarachi backed those allegations, saying that although the initial cause of the blazes remain unknown, "what is certain is that the fire was started because of the quarantine by asylum seekers in the facility."
"Instances of unlawful behavior such as the ones we experienced yesterday will not be left unpunished," said Mitarachi. "Such behavior is not acceptable, and also respect for law and order is a necessary precondition for the asylum process."
BBC News: Wildlife in 'catastrophic decline' due to human destruction, scientists warn by Helen Briggs
Wildlife populations have fallen by more than two-thirds in less than 50 years, according to a major report by the conservation group WWF.
The report says this "catastrophic decline" shows no sign of slowing.
And it warns that nature is being destroyed by humans at a rate never seen before.
Wildlife is "in freefall" as we burn forests, over-fish our seas and destroy wild areas, says Tanya Steele, chief executive at WWF.
"We are wrecking our world - the one place we call home - risking our health, security and survival here on Earth. Now nature is sending us a desperate SOS and time is running out."
The report looked at thousands of different wildlife species monitored by conservation scientists in habitats across the world.
They recorded an average 68% fall in more than 20,000 populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish since 1970.
Guardian: Boris Johnson pinning hopes on £100bn 'moonshot' to avoid second lockdown by Robert Booth and Sarah Boseley
Boris Johnson believes a mass testing programme is “our only hope for avoiding a second national lockdown before a vaccine”, according to leaked official documents setting out plans for “Operation Moonshot”.
The prime minister is said to be pinning his hopes on a project that would deliver up to 10m tests a day – even though the current testing regime is struggling to deliver a fraction of that number and is beset by problems.
The documents say the “Mass Population Testing Plan” could cost £100bn – the equivalent to the UK’s entire education budget.
If delivered, the moonshot programme would be unprecedented in scale and, as reflected by its name, is considered by some officials to be at the outer level of possibility.
Some of the technology it would require does not yet exist.
Reuters: Israel's Netanyahu demands probe of investigators in his corruption trial by Rami Ayyub
Amid a surge in coronavirus cases, Israel’s attorney general has accused Netanyahu of trying to discredit the country’s criminal justice system while he is on trial for bribery, fraud and breach of trust. He denies any wrongdoing.
Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party and allies voiced anger this week after Israel’s Channel 12 news reported that police and prosecutors had failed to disclose alleged conflicts of interest by an investigator who the report said was involved in the cases against him.
“It is clear that the police and prosecution are making political decisions against justice and law in order to topple a right-wing prime minister,” Netanyahu said at the start of a Likud meeting on Wednesday evening.
“This conduct must be investigated,” said Netanyahu, who has consistently accused police and prosecutors of bias against him.
Well, well...look at what we have here; Meteor Blades with a Wednesday night owls thread...good to see him back in the slot!
Everyone have a good evening and I will see you this coming Saturday for...science!